Bayonets and the carnage of tongues: The contemporary Nigerian poet speaking truth to power

The poet and the tyrant: Mortal antagonists

In his essay “Mahatma Gandhi Today”, André Brink cites the poet Van Wyk Louw’s parable in “Heerser en Humanis” (Tyrant and Humanist) on the mutual antagonism between the poet and the tyrant to privilege the power of writing. A condemned writer is visited in jail on the eve of his execution by the head of state who promises him a reprieve if only he recants. However, being certain that he will “win in the end”, the writer refuses. Intrigued, the tyrant asks the writer why he is so confident about eventual victory. The writer gives two reasons: first, that the executioner will see him die; second, that the tyrant has found it necessary to visit him (Brink, 1983: 56). The parable is about the paradoxical triumph of apparent powerlessness over brute physical strength or political power; for the ostensible powerlessness of the writer gives him a paradoxical potential for heroism in the face of persecution (Coetzee, 1990: 60). The writer’s power is thus recognized and feared by the state despite his seeming weakness, and his triumph is assured “[b]ecause his voice continues to speak long after the members of the relevant government […] have been laid to rest” (Brink, in Coetzee, 1990: 60).

Brink postulates that the writer is indeed an organ developed by society to respond to its need for meaning: “His domain is that of meaning, not of healing. But unless he performs his function well, and unless his diagnosis is heeded, healing will not be possible” (1983: 235). The writer’s explorations are danger-fraught both for himself and for society. This is because he may discover things unknown or only partly known, or even exhume things deliberately ignored or concealed at his own peril, things about society or those in power whose positions such revelations may threaten. Moreover, with no official mandate beyond his own subjective allegiance to truth and liberty, the writer “knows only too agonizingly well that his vision may be defective, that some error may have entered his analysis, that the meaning extrapolated from his probing may be distorted in the formulation of his findings” (Brink, 1983: 235–6). The paradox is that a healthy state takes the risk of granting the artist some space for his explorations and diagnosis, with the hope of obtaining some vision of itself in the artist’s work. On the other hand, a sick one “may dread the vision of itself offered by [the writer]. In this case a mortal sickness would remain undiagnosed”, as the state may have recourse to institutions established to serve as “protective mechanisms and processes of the social organism in a state of excessive, cancerous development” (Brink, 1983: 236).

In this scheme, the inability of the state to coexist with its own best agencies is insightful. With the basic assumption that the singular object of power is power itself, Brink identifies power as “narcissist by nature, striving constantly to perpetuate itself through cloning, approaching more and more a state of utter homogeneity by casting out what seems foreign or deviant” (1983: 173). Achille Mbebe reiterates this fact when he remarks that the tyrannous state does not only strive to create a master code that governs “the logics that underlie all other meanings” within a society but also to “institutionalize this world of meanings as a ‘socio-historical world’ and to make that world real” by turning it both into a “part of people’s ‘common sense’” and “the period’s consciousness” (Mbebe, 2001: 103). The censor, the mental asylum, the force, the court, the prison, the guillotine, or the cup of hemlock, are representative institutions or procedures for checking the rival discourse and extorting conformity. As in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault’s signal insight is the evolution of the prison as a conglomerate, all-embracing and interlocking “carceral network” of modern institutions including even churches and schools aimed at the social conditioning of the individual in society towards compliance and orthodoxy (Foucault, 1991). However, in its bid to recreate Nigeria in the image of a model postcolony, the military actually exacerbated the state of antagonism between it and the poet. A diagnostic organ, in its incarnation as poet, heretic, rebel, or philosopher, for example, interrogates the compulsion for homogeneity and conformity and, therefore, excites the state to repression. The irony is that though the poet often epitomized resistance, in the counter-discursive violence of his/her writing back to military despotism, he or she demonstrated the epidemic of the military scourge.

Reflecting on the state’s mortal envy of the writer, Coetzee points in the direction of paranoia. Coetzee’s striking insight is that the writer and the state are rivals in love for the affection of the public/people and that the mortal hatred of love rivals ultimately derives from admiration and envy:

It is, I suggest, a certain power exercised in the very medium of the law — words — to unlock and direct the desire of what the author calls a public and the state calls the people. Metonymically, through books signed by his name and adorned with his picture, he enters heart(h) and home, finding his way there not by force but by courtship. He has an art of commanding the heart of the public; he knows the secret of its desire. Designed for private and separate consumption, print builds upon a collusion of two intimacies: in hundreds or thousands of individual private acts, the author’s intimate presence is projected into the reader’s privacy. […]. When the state fantasizes about the spread of the rival word, it thinks of the spread of disease: it imagines the spread of the rival word or influence (It. influenza) as a plague on the land. (Coetzee, 1990: 69–70)

Coetzee’s passage above is saturated with obvious sensual, even sexual, imagery and innuendos but he primarily aims to contrast the writer’s consummation of his consensual love relationship with the reading public with the state’s forceful rape of the people. The state’s projection of the writer’s relationship with the public as a disease is not only a painful acknowledgement of its dis-ease at its failure in love; it is also a revelation of the pathology of envy as well as a morbid sense of inferiority complex that it recurrently seeks to exorcise by inflicting pain on a dreaded rival.

Coetzee also finds it revealing that the author cannot ignore the state in spite of his access to fame and immortality made possible by the power of printing, which enables him to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries. Coetzee does not seek an explanation for this in patriotism or altruism; he points instead in the direction of desire and envy:

In the self-sufficiency of authority that goes by the name of majesty, the author sees the ultimate embodiment of sway. Majesty provides the model of a desire desiring only itself. The narcissism of majesty is a source of universal envy: the closer one approaches it, the stronger its attraction becomes. As desire at last independent of any object of desire, majesty performs the contradictory motion of commanding envy (a desire to be like it) while forbidding imitation under pain of death. (Coetzee, 1990: 70)

Coetzee’s suggestion is that writing, like tyranny, is ultimately driven by a yearning for power. The author is no less fascinated by authority than the politician and his/her megalomaniac fantasies, not a selfless interest in public welfare and freedom, are his/her true sources of motivation. It would seem then that the sense of incompleteness which impels the writer to beget the beautiful in the form of an artefact endures beyond even the completion of the work, thus making the ostensible self-sufficiency of political power irresistible to the writer. But how could this probably have applied to Coetzee himself, Brink, and their colleague South African writers who robustly participated in the cultural struggle against apartheid? How can it possibly apply to Nigerian writers pitted against ruthless (military) regimes? Are humankind’s deepest motivations invariably and necessarily compulsions beyond human consciousness even when humans strive towards demonstrably selfless ideals?

The poet and the truth

The Nigerian poet David Odinaka Nwamadi writes in his collection, The Age of Maggots: “A poet is the ripest person | To tongue the dreadful | Questions of a dying century” (2001: 11). His evaluation of the truth underscores its utterance as obligatory in spite of mortal impediments:

If a statement is true, only an

Incapacity arising from a dozen

Ripe boils on this very mouth

Can stop me from uttering it. (Nwamadi, 2001: 11)

By the truth, the poet envisages sober realities about his society which poetry can access but that authority would frown at, as it considers this view of reality an indictment. The contest ultimately is in part one for the authority to represent reality. It is a constant in the nature of authoritarianism not only to seek to consolidate and perpetuate political power; to be self-sufficient, it also strives towards self-validation as the singular and inviolable source and custodian of the authorized version of truth. In other words, to usurp the poet’s power of representation or fault the poet’s claim to a higher category of truth is basic in the nature of power. But how does the poet come by his/her version of the truth? And is the vision of truth, if it is granted to the poet, translatable into language in spite of all the limitations of language? Or does the hankering after the chimera of truth lead the poet to other delusions and temptations?

Ancient venerable accounts of the divine origin of the poet’s word have been interrogated by a sceptical modern world whose irreverent and relentless gaze has driven the Muses deeper and deeper into the ethereal and otherworldly light of myth. Plato’s conception of the poet as a winged creature who creates only when he is out of his mind is now appreciated metonymically, as is Shakespeare’s famous Midsummer Night’s Dream expostulation on the lunatic’s hallucinations, the lover’s delusions, and the poet’s virtual entrancement as expressions of imagination. The critical emphasis has turned to the focal moment in which the poet’s eyes, in a fine frenzy rolling, actually glance on the earth, rather than heaven. ¹ The increasing politicization of literature necessitated by writers’ self-conscious assumption of social responsibilities for their communities, and consequently of the critical apparatus especially in the postcolonial world, entrenches this canonization of the artist’s earth-bound gaze over the heavenward glance by foregrounding the poet’s location in time and place as well as the worldliness of the poet’s word. Edward Said’s significant influence derives from his privileging this insight, which has played a fundamental role in shaping the critical tool to highlight the bond between the word and the world:

My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted. (Said, 1983: 4)

History is the essential province of the Nigerian writer and to transform the texture of the common life by his/her text is a crucial aim of his/her endeavour as an artist. The voice that the contemporary (Nigerian) poet heeds is invariably the voice of the people, that is, the downtrodden and pauperized masses, a class that transcends ethnic boundaries and is held together by the condition of historical deprivations which are shared beyond regions. This makes the badge of the contemporary (Nigerian) poet’s truth not heaven’s revelation but the beneficence of the earth. At the risk of formulaic oversimplification, the contemporary Nigerian poet’s sober truth is that the masses are the light of the earth, the rulers its vermin. The Nigerian history of the writer’s assumption of responsibility for society and his/her deployment of varied tropes to nurture it depending on the varying countenances of power, ranging from apathy through the carnage of the tongue to even death, is fairly well documented. The country’s recent history of military despotism rather than the unheroic present moment easily furnishes more telling examples of the conflict between power and the poet’s truth.

The 1960s in Nigeria was not only a period of transition but also one of soul-making. The emergent Western-educated elite, of whom writers of the period have been considered representatives and mouthpieces, recognized their privileged status as both a boon and a burden. This is in the sense of their chastened awareness of their responsibility for a cultural resurgence even while acknowledging the fundamental role that English, which had become the official national language, played in the new syncretic culture of which they also were the makers. Writing on this history, Dan Izevbaye considers Okigbo a representative writer of this period, and observes that the guilt-ridden return of Okigbo’s prodigal at the beginning of Heavensgate (1962) epitomizes the situation of that elite (Izevbaye, 2011: 15). This acceptance of social responsibility deepened as the political crises of the 1960s assumed graver dimensions and completely transformed the poetics of Okigbo and his contemporaries. Ben Obumselu highlights the political upheavals that transformed Okigbo’s poetry, and in the smithy of which the emergent postcolonial Nigerian literature actually took shape:

By the time Okigbo arrived in Ibadan in 1962, the city was in political turmoil. The contest for power in the Nigerian Federation had come to a head in a federal siege of Western Nigeria. A state of emergency was declared in the region in May 1962. Later that same year, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the leader of the majority party in the region, was charged with the offence of treason and subsequently jailed with eighteen of his closest lieutenants. For two years, interethnic hostilities smoldered. Then following turbulent elections in 1964 and 1965, the smoldering fire ignited into street riots, jail breaks, assassinations, and the setting ablaze of political opponents in the streets. Wole Soyinka, who all the while had been active underground, was in 1965 arrested on the capital charge of armed robbery […] [T]he turbulent events of this period […] changed not only Wole Soyinka and Okigbo, but Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Kenule Tsaro-Wiwa, Okogbule Wonodi, and Elechi Amadi from mandarins into militants. (2010: 3)

The events preceding the Civil War and the experience of the war itself were to hone that art further in the service of the public.

Speaking at the Afro-Scandinavian Writer’s Conference in Stockholm, Sweden in 1967, Soyinka had sternly condemned the divorce between the artistic preoccupations of many African writers and the realities of their societies. Acknowledging the peculiarities of the struggle against colonialism, which often constrained the writer to be an integral part of the establishment, and a concern with history which finally degenerated to the fabrication of unfelt abstractions, Soyinka argued:

The test of the narrowness or the breadth of his vision, however, is whether it is his accidental situations which he tries to stretch to embrace his society and race or the fundamental truths of his community which inform his vision and enable him to acquire even a prophetic insight into the evolution of that society. (Soyinka, 1993: 17)

He further stressed the preeminent role of the African writer “as the voice of vision” and the conscience of the society: “When the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience, he must recognize that his choice lies between denying himself totally or withdrawing to the position of chronicler and post-mortem surgeon” (Soyinka, 1993: 20).

If Soyinka’s metaphor for imagining the writer’s responsibility to society is ethical and Brink’s clinical, Chinua Achebe’s own notion typically draws on the African culture itself. Invited to give a talk at Makerere University College in Kamapala, Uganda in 1968 with the Nigeria–Biafra war already on, Achebe had given his talk the title “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause” to foreground his partisanship. Achebe’s pronouncement is the utter proverbial irrelevance of so-called African literature divorced from crucial political issues:

It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant — like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames. (Achebe, 1977: 78) ²

Okigbo’s contribution to this signal enunciation of the cannons of the Nigerian writer’s vocation at its formative stage is mainly by demonstration, as his reflections on the writer’s role in society in interviews often entailed denials. ³

To note that in Okigbo’s last sequence of poems, “Path of Thunder”, he self-consciously cultivates a lucid and accessible idiom which contrasts with much of his previous poetry has virtually become a cliché in Okigbo scholarship.

O wind, swell my sails; and may my banner run

The course of wider waters. (Okigbo, 1971: 65)

“Path of Thunder” is a poet’s soul-searching reflection on the sober challenges of assuming responsibility for his country. In the logical first poem of the sequence “Elegy of the Wind”, Okigbo recreates Senghor’s puberty rites in “Elegie des circosis” as metaphors of the daunting challenges of adulthood. Okigbo perceived clearly that speaking truth to power could have mortal consequences:

If I don’t learn to shut my mouth I’ll soon go to hell,

I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell. (Okigbo, 1971: 67)

He chose on the contrary not to shut his mouth and even had the generosity of heroic self-giving, and in the process bequeathed to generations of Nigerian poets after him a creed of rebellion consecrated by his blood, and a poetics of dissidence with the form and language carefully thought out. These continue to reverberate in Nigerian poetry, even if the commitment to truth unto death is often mere posturing. Writing on Nigerian poetry of the 1980s, Funso Aiyejina, who characterizes pre-Civil War Nigerian poetry of English expression as marked by “private esotericism”, appraises Okigbo’s influence as decisive in its transformation:

There was a physical, spiritual, and psychological brutalization of the nation on an incomprehensibly large scale. In such a “season of anomy,” the poets no longer could afford to speak in inaccessible riddles and occult tongues. […] The prophetic and lucid example in Okigbo’s “Path of Thunder” became a model for the younger poets at Nsukka who now matured to become the legitimate heirs of the Okigbo mantle. (Aiyejina, 1988: 113–14)

The core of Nigerian literature is the lived experience of the people as landmark historical national experiences constitute the subject matter of that literature. The kind of literature developed around each important historical moment is determined by what I could refer to as the heroic resonance of such a moment. The Civil War undoubtedly has been the epicentre of Nigerian history. It raises fundamental questions about human freedom that are of political, philosophical, and even aesthetic consequence and has resonances that have epic, tragic, and mythic dimensions. Continuing debates and recent writing on the Civil War evidently demonstrate its enduring grip on the national imagination and consciousness. Military despotism for similar reasons caught the imagination of the Nigerian writer. Indeed, the militarization of the psyche of the Nigerian public and even of the Nigerian artist may well be one of the greatest exploits of the Nigerian army. Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, and Femi Osofisan, regarded as some of the most distinguished voices of the “second generation” of Nigerian poets, are all renowned for the talent with which they have consistently spoken truth to power even when it also required great courage. But like the first generation poets, this generation lacks no commentators. I have chosen therefore to focus on the generation after them, the “third generation” of Nigerian poets — but not without paying fleeting attention to Osundare’s Waiting Laughters (1990a), as it seems to me to stand out by virtue of the philosophical depth and resonance of its political theme.

Examining Osundare’s poetry, together with that of the group after him, which he himself categorizes as a different generation, is also a way of drawing attention to current complications in the as yet speculative but necessary attempts at the genealogical reconstruction of the development of Nigerian literature. Harry Garuba has been among the most vocal in criticizing the use of “generation” as a marker of the positioning of writers in time, given its ambiguity, instability, and covert deployment as a definitive marker of literary periodization. He submits: “The ambiguity heightens when writers said to belong to one generation are still active and producing work two or three generations after the one to which they are said to belong” (Garuba, 2005: 52). Biodun Jeyifo’s rather pejorative equation of “generation” with “age-grades in a patrilineal village community” deliberately exaggerates the element of age for the purpose of caricature (Jeyifo, 2012: 175). Indeed, there may well be a discernible African accentuation of the term that does not, however, have to assume a negative connotation as it actually illuminates the use of the term as a signpost in mapping the terrain of Nigerian literature. Typically, driven by a common purpose in their participation in the political and social life of their communities, age-grades are makers of history; equally, providing cultural leadership, for example, by forming influential art groups, they are also markers of historical milestones in oral cultures. By the innovations they introduce, the trends and philosophies they espouse and embody, by the very names they assume or are given, which often proclaim the key historical circumstances of their birth or times, age-grades remain key for the reconstruction of oral history. There is surely a sense in which Soyinka’s generation differs from that of the group of writers born mainly after 1960, even if the Nobel laureate is still active in writing and producing literary works. Categorization of writers in generations enhances their location in time and equally sets in relief, at least provisionally, a kinship of aesthetic principles and trends. Periodization invariably requires the wisdom of hindsight and literary periods typically cut across several generations. But as a temporary road sign, perhaps no word embodies the idea of provisionality more provocatively than “generation” itself, which highlights not only human mortality but even more crucially human transience. Garuba’s objection to the use of the term is ultimately a criticism only of its misuse. The continuities between the poetry of Osundare and that of the generation after him foreground correspondences that justify categorization across generations, even while also highlighting discrepancies in generational temperament and aesthetic principles.

Osudare’s Waiting Laughters is apocalyptic in its anticipation of a turning point in the nation’s history. The different guises of the waiting posture; the subjectivity of the perception of time conditioned by the nature of one’s experiences and expectations; the possible uses of laughter as a palliative if not an elixir as well as an evasion; the ineluctability of time’s transformative impact; the transitory nature of all human delusions of the power and the glory: these are among the central concerns of the volume. But the political dimension is also set in relief by the constant evocation of the frightful spectre of the military and the palpable horror that trails in its wake:

Waiting,

still waiting,

like the strident summon of hasty edicts,

bellowed by the smoking lips of vulgar guns,

signed in blood, unleashed in the crimson spine

of trembling streets

And the winds return,

laden with adamantine thou-shalt-nots

Of green gods;

a jointless Fear goosesteps the compound of our minds

with epaulettes of night, belts of fuming cobras;

purple swaggers manacle our days

and trees swap their fruits for stony orders. (Osundare, 1990a: 49)

The poet’s fascination with the military is manifest in his withering gaze that apprehends the various aspects of the soldier’s uniform just like his weapons as sources of the emanation of horror and death, and consequently a threat not only to humans but also streets that tremble and the natural order that experiences perversion. The promulgation of draconian laws and their ruthless implementation was certainly the staple of military regimes in Nigeria to check dissidence and especially to entrench a disabling mental state of terror that blighted the thought of resistance at source. Ironically, the mind-forged manacles aimed at self-perpetuation were mythologized as patriotic yarns meant to hold the nation together. However, military-spun myths on the soldier’s obligation to maintain law and order, and of a progressive nation state whose territories had to remain inviolable, and especially of their messianic credentials, were too highly consumable not to be seen as obvious official lies. Osundare does not merely debunk the myth of military messianism but inscribes the institution in its Nigerian incarnation as hypocritical: “But are these the messiahs | who came four seasons ago | with joyful drums and retinues of chanted pledges? | Where now the aura, | where, the anointed covenant of eloquent knights” (Osundare, 1990a: 50). Like Okigbo, the poet is apprehensive of personal danger:

These are seasons of barking guns

These are seasons of barking guns

They whose ears are close to the earth

Let them take cover in the bunker of their wits. (Osundare, 1990a: 49)

Like Okigbo too, he ignores the caution he himself recommends. Osundare’s truth forbidden by the state is the necessity of a revolution:

New chicks breaking the fragile tyranny

Of hallowed shells

A million fists, up,

In the glaring face of complacent skies

A matchet, waiting

In the whetting shadows of stubborn shrubs

A boil, time-tempered,

About to burst. (Osundare, 1990a: 96–7)

Osundare nonetheless is a poet, rather than a propagandist, wooing language for memorable and compelling images of transformation. He scours varying realms of experience ranging from poultry to disease in search of antithetical images of birth, rebirth, and regeneration, on the one hand, and decay, dissolution, and death, on the other. Osundare also reverses the binaries, power and weakness, highlighting the power of the masses and the fragility of political power. Waiting Laughters is ultimately a compelling and evocative statement on the healing processes and redemptive powers of the passage of time. Many of Osundare’s successors would seek to shoot bullets through their poetry.

Osundare is not only a distinguished poet; he is also an astute scholar and critic whose early critical comments on the writers now generally regarded as constituting Nigeria’s third generation became prescient in his characterization of them as “the poets’ generation”, given their proclivity for that genre, his clinical diagnosis of their temperament as ranging from anger through desperation to despondency, and even his identification of the demon that hounds them: “… born around Nigeria’s independence (1960), [they are] Nigeria’s midnight children, as it were, who have spent the first three decades of their lives confronting the nightmare that the country has become” (Osundare, in Adagboyin, 1996: 20). Titi Adepitan’s evaluation of the temperament and work of writers in this group extends Osundare’s insights and highlights the impact on their work of their social background:

The 1980s and 1990s heralded the arrival of a new breed of African writers who in ordinary circumstances would be described as constituting a new generation. But they came labouring under too many anxieties. The political landscape was becoming more and more desperate; before they learned to write many were co-opted into the vanguard of literature as an instrument of protest, and that was all they wrote. (Adepitan, 2006: 25; emphasis added)

Joseph Ushie’s (2005) list of the important voices among this generation of writers includes: Olu Oguibe, Afam Akeh, Ogaga Ifowodo, Esiaba Irobi, Onookome Okome, Uche Nduka, Chiedu Ezeanah, Usman Shehu, Idzia Ahmad, Sesan Ajayi, Remi Raji, Sola Osofisan, Nnimo Bassey, Toyin Adewale-Nduka, Obu Udeozo, Joe Ushie, Maik Nwosu, Obi Nwakanma, Isidore Diala, and Ogechi Ironmantu. ⁴

Remi Raji, a leading voice in this generation of poets, articulates the pathology of his generation with an insider’s depth and awareness of its enduring legacy: the concern with the military, with its associated implications for this generation, is an obsession, and is symptomatic of a deep malaise that expresses itself both as a deep revulsion and an intense fascination:

And we the children of the gun

Children of wrath

Ever abandoned to the odour of shame

We who cut our teeth

on the function of bayonets and bombs

We learn new ways of dying.

The wine we brew is a cocktail

of arsenic, ammonia and hemlock

The air we breathe is a bellow

of fire, lava and other suicides long suppressed.

We who munch violence like water-yams

What certainties now lie before us? (Raji, 2005: 37)

Even after the retreat of the military, its legacy of mindless violence and obsession with inventing newer forms of death for its discontents survives. Equally, its lust for battle remains a cardinal attribute of the work of this traumatized generation, and the monster against which they often contend is the tyrant in a soldier’s uniform.

Raji is unarguably one of the most reflective of the poets of his generation. In Lovesong for My Wasteland, he is the archetypal artist inconsolable at his perception of the apparent limitations of the evocative powers of poetry: “What is poetry then if it cannot raise a flood […] What’s the use of metaphor | if it cannot be the madness of earthquakes?” (Raji, 2005: 45). However, with his transcendence of anger (“But I have learnt the reward of patience | When anger failed. My refuge is in songs | laced with the laughter of blades | (Some say we better make melodies with bullets); Raji, 2005: 51; emphasis in original), Raji, who in the poem “Silence” in his first collection A Harvest of Laughters, apprehends with horror how military censorship “mangles the mere mumbles | of hungry throats” (Raji, 1997: 48), cannot but exult in the transformative powers of discourse and so takes a vow of courage to speak sober truths to “the elephant | tetrarch and mighty | [that] tramples truth | with a blind foot”(Raji, 1997: 63). In Webs of Remembrance, Raji’s poet whose “first duty is to make love | To language, to land, and to liberty” justifies his “promiscuity” by invoking critical social responsibilities that dwell on conscientization and mobilization: “To conjure, confound and arrest Power | To cause the conscience to cry”, “to evoke a geography of bleeding images”, “to mine the mind | And make fires in bushels of ignorance” (Raji, 2000: 1–2).

However, Raji is hardly representative in his urbanity of his generation of poets. Many of his contemporaries find the substance of poetry in the distillation of pain and locate the writer in the battlefield where it is the enemy’s skull that is the ultimate laurel. For Abubukar Othman, it is not the poet’s craft even under the tempest of pain that counts; it is instead the use of words as weapons and the inscription of pain that defines poetry:

When words drop from your pen

Like arrows from the quiver

Does it matter how they fall on paper

It is the pain they paint

That creates the emotion for poetry. (Othman, 2002: 8)

Egya (2011b) discerns commitment in the metaphor of the poet’s words as arrows and sees a link between the poet’s art and his society. But surely one can counter by citing the opinion of another writer with much greater experience and, moreover, with a personal history of state persecution: “A book cannot begin to fight against a sword on a battlefield. If the book does indeed in the end win, it is precisely because [the writer] refuses to take up the same weapons as his opponent […] Even anger can be distilled to something lasting” (Brink, 1983: 117). Moreover, going by Othman’s metaphor, the archer who does not merely let his arrows drop, but is painstaking in taking an aim (as the careful poet devotedly sifts through the dross of language for pearls), is likelier to hit his target.

The greatest predilection of dissidence writing is indeed the high probability of the escalation of the dynamic of paranoid rage. Posturing quite apart, the paradox of the activist–artist’s situation is that to the extent that he desires to intervene in history through poetry rather than suicide bombing. For instance, he is dependent on words, and that is both a boon and a limitation; a boon given the discursive powers of words, their capacity to create and recreate the world, to outpace and outlast the bullet; but a limitation, nonetheless, as words often typically fail even to convey the mysterious untranslatable reality of experience or phenomenon let alone become action itself. A presiding sub-theme in some of the world’s greatest literature is the anguish of the poet in search of the word. Image-making and name-calling illustrate both the strength and the predicament of the poet in his/her gesture towards a mysterious ineffable reality that may ultimately be unnamable. For the dissident writer recourse to the use of excessive language to respond to the state’s use of excessive power is only too often the irresistible temptation. Okigbo had called the offending military and politicians names and had drawn on the African bestiary to create appropriate images for their arrogant display of brute power. His descendants, however, will invent a new poetic form of invectives and ransack the jungle and dredge the deeps for fitting images. Perhaps Esiaba Irobi’s poem “Horizon, Horizon”, a colourful recreation of his encounter with security agents after a production of his play Hangmen Also Die, deserves the laurel for performance in this genre:

“ARE YOU THE MINSTREL?” “Yes!” “And did you write this fucking play:

“Hangmen Also Die? […]

“Calling us: The Beast of Sandhurst.” Silence. “The Spotted

Scavengers of the Sahel Savannah.” “Computerized Human beings.”

“Zombies.” “The Sweepings of our society.” “Little Vapid Minds

who have no vision for themselves or the nation.” “Disembodied

Godheads.” Pause. With menacing and threatening gestures now:

“Bastards” “Baboons” “Uniformed Apes?” Stanzas of hot urine

trickle down my thighs… “Fuhrers” “Hannibal’s illegitimate children.”

“Bastards.” “A government of demons by demons and for demons”. (Irobi, 2005: 86)

The poet is at a loss how best to evoke the definitive truth about the military monster in one revelatory epithet; failing in the search, he takes refuge in a legion of modifiers on the off chance that together they enable the reader to grope his/her way to truth. The deployment of images to complement the invectives replicates this trajectory.

Among the most heinous crimes associated with the military was the promulgation of Decree No. 4 of 1984 and Decree 35 of 1993 which infringed on freedom of speech. Dubbed “Public Officers (Protection Against False Accusation) Decree 1984”, Decree No. 4 is curiously worded to have a latent capacity for subjective interpretation specifically aimed at insulating public officers from any form of scrutiny or interrogation whatsoever:

Any person who publishes in any form, whether written or otherwise, any message, rumour, report or statement, being a message, rumour, report or statement which is false in any material particular or which brings or is calculated to bring the Federal Military Government or the Government of a State or a public officer to ridicule or disrepute, shall be guilty of an offence under this Decree. (Public Officers, 1984: A53)

Although the Decree was primarily aimed at the press, Nigerian writers regarded it as a personal affront. Osundare, who locates the power of the poet in his tongue, recognizes the carnage of the poet’s tongue as emblematic of the terror the truth holds for power and, moreover, of power’s paranoid striving to silence the rival discourse. In “A Tongue in the Crypt”, he invites his compatriots to see the criminalization of free speech as symbolic imprisonment, diminishing the human scope and impeding patriotism and creative thinking:

  Countrymen

Behold your tongue

Sealed up in this iron cage

For public safety

And the national interest

For permission to use,

Apply to:

The Minister of Whispering Affairs,

Dept. Of Patriotic Silence,

53 Graveyard Avenue,

DUMBERIA. (Osundare, 1990b: 127)

Beyond Osundare’s humour is a damning parody of the tyrant’s imposition of restrictions on freedom of speech. The poet recreates it as the total and sterile silence of the dead or the graveyard, and consequently renames Nigeria “Dumberia”, a veritable country of the dumb. Significantly, the poet’s apparently intriguing location of the country at “53 Graveyard Avenue” is a probable precise reference to the pagination of the Decree in the official gazette. In the same vein, the medical doctor–poet Sam Madugba (2005) is certainly more figurative than clinical when he suggests in the poem “The Loud Silence” in Nigeria: Buhari’s Boots, Babangida’s Boots, that silence is capable of detonating itself to escape from victims rendered dumb by draconian laws like the focal Decree. In reality, the poet’s caricature is commensurate with the tyrant’s own fantasies of freedom of speech as necessarily anarchy and mayhem. The myths, though diametrically opposed, are paradoxically woven of the same material: the hyperbole. Coetzee (1990) notes that in paranoid discourse, the other’s intentions are necessarily apprehended as hostile since they are in reality constituted by one’s own projections. The attempt to express the other’s hostility is invariably in excessive language.

Egya (2011a) highlights the odious crimes associated with the Buhari, Babangida, and Abacha regimes — the notorious Decrees forbidding freedom of speech which led to many journalists being imprisoned without trial; the killing of renowned journalist Dele Giwa by parcel bomb; the assassination of prodemocracy activists Kudirat Abiola and Chief Alfred Rewane among others; the hanging of the writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa; the imposition of the IMF-directed Structural Adjustment Programme that further pauperized already suffering Nigerian masses; the truncation of the 12 June 1993 general elections believed to have been won by the late Chief M. K. O. Abiola, who was later to die in detention in circumstances believed to have incriminated the government, and so forth. Against this backdrop, Egya’s discussion of the responses of Nigerian poets highlights their recourse to invectives and imagery to match and interrogate military monstrosity. Central in the poets’ scheme of imagery to construct the oppressor figure as a monster and as anti-human is the evocation of a sustained collocation of predatory animal images to “emblematize the irrational, anti-human, cruel military dictators that oppressed Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s” (Egya, 2011a: 345) . Okunoye (2011: 73) appropriately discerns as the aim of such image-making “demonizing the soldier” with the obvious implication of fantasy in the interpretation of history. Excessive military brutality typically elicits the use of excessive language by the poet in terms of the recourse to invectives and images. To have imagined Buhari, Babangida, and especially the dreaded Abacha as beasts was undoubtedly an act of courage but it was also a self-congratulatory gesture. The writer fantasizes on the colossus of the state against which he/she is pitted in all his/her mortal littleness as a monster. Image-making, like name-calling, is of course a species of myth-making and as Coetzee notes with regard to accusations about madness, its deployment infirms the response of the antagonist in “advance by situating it outside the rational [locating it instead in the beastly or monstrous]. To the extent that they close off the antagonist’s entry into discourse, they predict and indeed invite his violence, which then in turn becomes a confirmation of their diagnostic truth” (Coetzee, 1990: 65–6). Intriguingly, in discussing the response of the poet to the military monster, Egya, who is also himself a third generation Nigerian poet, repeatedly uses the word “howl”, a word so basically dog-like or wolf-like it inscribes the poets themselves in the animal symbolism they created to indict the military. At the climax of that dynamic, we invariably approach the eerie situation in which the hunter and the hunted ineluctably become indistinguishable. C. E. O. Egwuda’s poem “The Bullet and the Venom”, in which the hunted writer is caged by the Junta, is a parable of warring morally identical twins narrowly bent on conquest:

Unknown to the Junta

Who transformed into a hunter

The writer too is a viper

And when he thrusts his fangs

The venom can be deadly

And so for the battle

Each has his weapon

The bullet for the hunter

The venom for the viper. (Egwuda, 1999: 23)

Unbothered by basic questions of rhythm, rhyme, and stanzaic form, Egwuda surely hardly considered the full implications of his deployment of symbols.

In contrast, Esiaba Irobi’s more assured poetry sets in relief the abiding subtle paradox: the poet’s paradoxical horror for and enthralment with the camouflage, the soldier’s garb. Irobi will haunt the national consciousness and imagination for a long time for manifold reasons. Born on the day of Nigeria’s independence from British colonization, 1 October 1960, Irobi appropriated that coincidence in mythic terms to project his special incarnation of the national fate. Prodigiously endowed like the country of his birth, and showing early promise and brilliance, Irobi at 50, at the sunset of his life and perhaps also much like Nigeria, had deep regrets about potentials that had not been fulfilled. His three published poetry collections Inflorescence (1989), Cotyledons (1988), and Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems (2005) document the tragic trajectory of his life and of his country. He epitomizes his generation’s deepest sense of frustration and deepest craving for peace and creative space.

Irobi’s poetics is a conflation of the poetic and the theatrical on the model of the performative heritage of the typically sung oral African poem. ⁵

 we set darkness ablaze

with our crickets’ voices trying to rescue poetry from

the rusting library racks, where it was read on the printed

page by cockroaches and rodents, unto the blazing stage

where we let it prance and prowl like an unshackled tiger. (Irobi, 2005: 84)

He sought to redefine the craft of poetry as practised by his predecessors by making it more accessible, lyrical, and dramatic. The same zeal accounted both for the popularity of poetry in Nigerian pidgin and of the newspaper as a medium for publishing poetry to reach out to the masses. Reinvented as a popular art, poetry drew large audiences to itself and became the artistic form par excellence for Irobi’s generation, especially as its typically concise form seemed a boon to many budding writers. Full of patriotism and fight, many of them lacked the patience and perhaps the skill to manage the characteristically larger canvas of the novel and drama, and equally lacked the means for the enormous costs and logistics associated with theatre rehearsals and productions. In the hands of Irobi and some of his most competent colleagues, though, poetry, especially in performance, became a dangerous literary weapon, capable of detonation with palpable consequences on its audience. Ironically, Irobi’s “Handgrenades” is a poem on poetry’s envy of the deadly efficiency of weapons of war; it is invariably a poet’s magnificent tribute to the soldier.

“Handgrenades” is a monologue addressed to the speaker’s second-year teacher of poetry. It reappraises and interrogates all that the speaker (in the course of the poem identified as Irobi himself) has learnt about poetry, beginning from the Greeks, in the context of the urgent challenges of his chosen activism. Rejecting the “rusty theories” and “mossy touchstones” associated with elitist poetry, the poet chooses as kindred artists the blacksmith, the carpenter, and the carver, in a symbolic demolition of delusions of poetic grandeur that apparently separated the poet from the grey realities of the common life and so inhibited the social relevance of his productions. Ironically, though, the perfect poem is in the image of a bayonet or hand grenade:

See how,

Like a blacksmith pummelling upon his anvil,

I sharpen my similes into shrapnels

On the jagged edges of my mind…

To slash the heads of heady Heads of State.

Watch how, like a careful carpenter,

I chisel at my images until they glint

Like bayonets planted between the ribs of tyrants.

How, like a cunning carver, I polish my symbols

Until they are as handsome as handgrenades. (Irobi, 1989: 21)

Yet the poet does not mean to replicate the procedures of the military against whom he polemicizes. He is only “a soldier of diction” and invokes his identification with the downtrodden to justify the military inordinacy of his discursive strategies:

Poetry is this child crying in my hands

Crying only as a child would cry, shovelling

Everything into its starving mouth, including

Bread, ballots, bullets, bayonets and blood. (Irobi, 1989: 21)

It is the utilitarian value of poetry that Irobi exalts, especially the annexation of art as a weapon of the revolution advocated.

For Irobi, the implications of his choices are daunting, but in “Manacles” he is sustained in his heroic resolution by his vision of the poet’s ultimate triumph:

Sometimes the tyrant’s toe

Is hard upon the poet

Sometimes the torn mouth

Sings on oblivious of the bleeding tongue,

But whether Time, time that wounds all heels

Heals his wound or not,

The poet’s evil eye over the cities’ rusting roofs

Will, forever, conquer and endure,

Beyond the tremor and terror

Of the sceptre trembling in the Prince’s paws. (Irobi, 1989: 47)

The contingency of political regimes is an eternal symbol of the temporality of power, just as the carnage of the poet’s tongue, in spite of which he sings, is emblematic of the entire considerable state machinery aimed at silencing the poet. Irobi’s crucial insight is the abiding physical pain and persecution which, like ultimate triumph, is in the lot of the poet. But the battering of the poet’s tongue resonates with Okigbo’s “Guernica, | On whose canvas of blood, | The slits of his tongue | cling to glue” (Okigbo, 1971: 35). In this scheme, given the allusion to Pablo Picasso’s epic painting, the “military caste” becomes emblematic of the constellation of evil forces threatening freedom, and which the human spirit must conquer to soar to its destined glory. Indeed, in drawing a presiding symbol of the poet’s tenacity from the natural regenerative vegetative cycle, Irobi looks beyond death unto the myth of renewal and the eternal return as the buried seed rises above all odds to new life:

The crust cracks. And defiantly

Like a flag of triumph, it thrusts

A naked plumule and a pair of cotyledons

Into the face of the squinting sun. (Irobi, 1989: 43)

The metaphor of cotyledons as an emblem of new life is again, of course, an allusion to Okigbo’s great poem, “Elegy of the Wind”, in which the vegetative cycle, the human cycle of life, death and resurrection, and their ritual enactment in African puberty rites are invoked to affirm the great mystery of transfigurations (Obumselu, 2010). In Cotyledons, Irobi cites three lines of “Elegy of the Wind” as the epigram to the final section of the collection, significantly also titled “Cotyledons”. The mystery of change in human life and in the vegetative cycle of nature is easily amenable to political interpretation to shed light on the contingency of all political regimes. But the consoling and saving mystery of cosmic renewal is equally a conceivable and even apt metaphor of the eternity of the poet’s truth which not even death can destroy.

Regarding “Elegy of the Wind” as Okigbo’s last major poem, Obumselu considers it rather ironical that poems like “Hurrah for Thunder” and “Thunder Can Break” are often cited as models of Okigbo’s newly achieved lucidity and public commitment and are reputed to have been influential in the development of Nigerian poetry. In such poems, Obumselu contends, Okigbo was merely engaged in “verse pamphleteering”, given that the level of his imaginative engagement with the linguistic medium is rather slight. Typically, even in his final sequence of poetry, Okigbo’s “mode is not the simple mode of the town crier or oriki chanteur. His conception of poetry is still the bodying forth of the immediacies of imaginative experience” (Obumselu, 2010: 17). In the best of Okigbo’s politically committed poetry, as in Nigerian poetry generally, it is the imaginative engagement with history that is the anchor of the sublimation of experience and which distinguishes art from mere propaganda. The utilitarian value of the blacksmith’s production is undeniable, and life will be the poorer without him; but the deft delicate touches and finesse of the goldsmith are our eternal exultation. The pity is the fixation with the enemy’s scalp at the peak of the lust for battle in the work of many dissident Nigerian poets.

An ocean of songs

Even while demonstrating a continuing dialogic relationship with history, current Nigerian poetry shows a marked shift from the discursive practices that characterized the poetry that wrote back to military despotism, especially that by poets of Nigeria’s third generation. There is an obvious striving to come to terms with a new sense of liberation and its aesthetic and ideological implications. In his most recent collection, Sea of My Mind, Raji writes of an exhilarating sense of freedom and yearning “to burst into an ocean of songs” (2013: 15). However, his acknowledgement of anxieties about negotiating that new-found freedom is insightful:

I am seated, training my voice,

Silenced once, wiser now

a gurgling warmth, a cavity full of tiny sensations

what will the first word be, what will my first be? (Raji, 2013: 15)

In Raji’s Sea of My Mind and many other post-military collections, the audacity of freedom expresses itself in the exploration of themes which a decade ago would have been regarded as socially irrelevant. The concern with the nation state nonetheless remains vital. In Tayo Olafioye’s (2000) A Carnival of Looters, the poet asks the question explicitly: “How do we carve a new nation?” and his answer is that “Poetry must whittle new alternatives” (Olafioye, 2000: 30) as he privileges the role of moral rearmament; Hope Eghagha’s (2004) The Governor’s Lodge and Other Poems highlights the greed and ostentation of Nigerian rulers as the limiting factor; in the poem “Blind Men” in Nwachukwu-Agbada’s (2005) Prayer Beads of the Silent Supplicant attention is again drawn to the covetousness of Nigerian rulers with the led, however, indicted also for conceding leadership to the morally blind. In Ikeogu Oke’s (2012) collection In the Wings of Waiting, the failure of leadership is explored in the poem “Why Do You Kiss Me”, in terms of the cynical denial of the people of the basic amenities of life. The poets’ probing of the national consciousness and demand for a transformation of sensibility certainly still justify Stewart Brown’s contention that “the defining characteristic of Nigerian poetry in English has been its confrontational attitude to authority” (1995: 58). Yet in all these, the tension that characterized the poetry of the military era is lacking. Ironically, it is the prohibition of the truth that makes its utterance an uncompromising heroic necessity. Brink argues that where

the writer is allowed only the freedom to pronounce the letters from A to M, his word immediately acquires peculiar weight if he risks not only his comfort but his personal security in choosing to say N, or V, or Z. Because of the risk involved, his word acquires a new resonance: it ceases, in fact, to be “merely” a word and enters the world as an act in its own right. (1983: 164–5)

Appraising current Nigerian writing, Dan Izevbaye (2012) observes that it is hewn out of less momentous subjects, unlike the work of preceding generations located at historical and cultural turning points and so with resonances beyond the nation. Fraud, power failure, impeachment, and loose morals among the youths, which are staple subjects for current writing, are more suited for satire, as they lack the immediate tragic dimensions of the more spectacular historical issues of earlier generations. On the other hand, Izevbaye considers the unrest in the Niger Delta the only potentially epic-scale subject grappled with by contemporary Nigerian writers. Ebi Yeibo, G ‘Ebinyo Ogbowei, Ibiwari Ikiriko, Uche Peter Umez, and many other Nigerian poets, especially from the Niger Delta, explore the despoliation of the environment and the expected sacrifices and criminalities at the heart of a struggle for both survival and the redistribution of wealth (Diala, 2011). Pitted against government interests and that of capitalist international conglomerates, their art requires courage too and so resonates with the poetry on military despotism. In their very recent volumes, Echoes of Neglect and marsh boy and other poems, Humphrey Ogu (2014) and Ogbowei (2013) respectively, affirm the continuing despoliation of the Niger Delta. In the poem “The Kingfisher and Us”, Ogu discerns in the politician and the soldier one of a kind: “The address may have changed from dodan to aso | the dress may have changed from khaki to agbada | babariga or etibo | but the fishing has not” (2014: 43). In marsh boy and other poems, Ogbowei’s (2013) vision, though anchored on the Niger Delta, typically transcends the nation. In the poem “perpetual paranoia”, he dismisses Nigeria’s so called democracy as “this power play | trading ballots in bleeding streets | this cut-throat politics | that leaves us all cut up | shifting patterns on corleone’s chessboard” (2013: 27). The title poem is sombre, not only because the poet’s diagnosis of the nation’s ailment is terminal, but also as it presages mere anarchy:

i see the sick state crumble like a kicked-in sand castle

a presidential palace strewn across a screaming street

starving criminals scavenging for supplies

dance around the dead and dying

rush into promising stores and warehouses

haul home stereo systems sacks of sugar and flour. (Ogbowei, 2013: 24)

We are again at the close of Osundare’s Waiting Laughters, with the resolute pauperized masses in a mortal struggle against the oppressor, except that expectedly for the younger poet the prophetic element of poetry assumes the immediacy of present action. Even more crucial is that in Ogbowei’s poem, we are left with only a parody of the great revolution foretold, given the fixation of the downtrodden with creature comforts in the closing lines.

Coetzee’s (1990) signal insight is that caught up in the dynamic of blaming, the bond between the tyrannous state and the writer committed to truth is virtually one of indissoluble fatal fascination. The final paradox of this paranoid dynamic is that the writer unable to do without the state in the eventuality of its demise is both exultant and despondent, slayer and bereaved. The acknowledgement of the third generation Nigerian writer, Helon Habila, of the use of the dictatorship to literature is a reaffirmation of Coetzee’s position:

[I]n a way, the dictatorship was good for literature because it supplied some of us our subject matter, and also while it lasted, gave us an education in politics that we couldn’t have acquired at school or anywhere else. We saw pro-democracy activists being killed or arrested or exiled — unfortunate for the victims but great stuff for writing. (Habila, 2007: 55)

The contemporary Nigerian poet’s contestation of the excesses of state power demonstrably reproduces some of the pathologies that mark the antagonism between the writer and the tyrannous state in the Brink–Coetzee model, derived basically from the apartheid South African situation but self-consciously phrased in transhistorical terms (as foregrounded especially by Coetzee’s use of all-embracing Freudian terms). The model especially powerfully illuminates the processes of reciprocal projections and of dynamic blaming even in its culmination in demonization. However, the invaluable contribution of contemporary Nigerian poets to the cultural onslaught against despotism, especially in its military guise, can hardly be implicated in a paranoid envy of majesty. We may well be dealing instead with questions of proper dispositions, and interventionist strategies. And in the best of that poetry, the consistent reaffirmation is that even when great poetry has its feet firmly in the soil of social and political realities, it transcends the great temptation to imprison all its considerable powers and far-ranging truth in the comparatively restricted sphere of politics; it constantly bursts its political seams and rises beyond the wreckage of time and place.