It is through this process of sustained critical ‘discoursing’, which French criticism invented after the era of the Philosophes and called “analyse de texte”, that a poem gains the necessary visibility that ultimately transforms it into what I have referred to elsewhere as an “anthem-poem.” The critic, Harry Garuba, has coined the term “manifesto poem” for the same phenomenon. The fame of some of Europe’s most formidable modernists derives equally from their anthem-poems and their oeuvre. The so-called Les Décadents in France offer viable examples: each of the poems in Charles Baudelaire’s black venus series (Poems 22 to 39) is almost as famous as The Flowers of Evil, the collection in which they appear; Stéphane Mallarmé’s “A Throw of the Dice” and Paul Verlaine’s “Amour” are anthem-poems as famous as any of the respective authors’ collections.
Africa has given the world a respectable number of anthem-poems, most of which were produced by the ferment of Négritude, cultural nationalism, and anticolonialism in the first half of the Twentieth century. Indeed, some of the first and second generation poets of that period are known more for their anthem-poems than for their collections. More than any collection, “The Meaning of Africa” is Abioseh Nicol’s claim to fame. David Rubadiri has hardly any presence beyond his classic anthem-poem, “Stanley Meets Mutesa”. Wole Soyinka’s “Abiku” and “Telephone Conversation” dwarf Idanre and Other Poems in audience reach and appeal. Niyi Osundare’s “Poetry Is” has become a mantra. The rare Anglophone African literary mind in my generation, who overcomes characteristic Anglophonic provincialism and bothers about what is available in translation from the Francophone side of the literary divide, may readily identify “Naked woman, black woman” and “Africa, my Africa” as lines from Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “Black Woman” and David Diop’s “Africa” respectively but may be completely ignorant of the title of the respective collections in which the poems feature. Lusophone poets like Agostinho Neto are hardly known beyond their anthem-poems in the rest of the continent.
Consequently, what Africa’s anthem-poems lack is the rigorous and sustained analyse de texte atmosphere in which their Western counterparts thrive. The criticism of African poetry in the academy – and informed discussions of it outside of the academy – is seemingly entrapped in a panoramic ontology. A Brodsky may devote entire essays to a single anthem-poem by an author, a Jean-Paul Sartre, an André Breton or a Guillaume Appollinaire may offer penetrating dissertations on a single poem in such prestigious sites as Les Temps Modernes or L’Esprit, it is difficult to imagine an eminent African intellectual who would propose a sustained reading of Odia Ofeimun’s beautiful poem, “Giagbone”, to the editors of Research in African Literatures. At their most generous, blind peer reviewers would advise such an intrepid critic to “add more materials from the poet and resubmit for consideration.” In Africa, we either read an oeuvre or at least a collection, parsing and citing poems randomly and chaotically along the line. If one forgives its needlessly abstruse, unsuccessful, and insipid Lacanian/Freudian theoreticism, Obiwu’s recent reading of Chinua Achebe’s poetry is timely. But even that exercise offers a great deal of panoramic glossing of Achebe’s poems. Domestic newspaper reviewers of poetry in Nigeria – Uduma Kalu, Toni Kan, Layiwola Adeniji, Nduka Otiono, Chux Ohai, Maxim Uzoatu, and Mike Jimoh are especially guilty of this panoramic methodology – I have never encountered a sustained reading of a single poem in their pages: they review only collections. Thus, a pantheon of anthem-poems lies fallow, awaiting a Brodsky-like critical engagement. Third generation anthem-poems like Olu Oguibe’s “I am Bound to this Land by Blood”, Ogaga Ifowodo’s “Homeland”, Amatoristero Ede’s “Not in Love” and “Globetrotter”, Nduka Otiono’s “Rhapsody of a Lunatic”, Lola Shoneyin’s “Song of the River Bird” and Chiedu Ezeanah’s “Endsong” cycle are loud victims of the lack of a viable critical tradition on anthem-poems.
One anthem-poem that recommends itself as a compulsory point of departure for any modest attempt at overcoming this limitation is Esiaba Irobi’s “The Battle of Harlem”. Any poetic evocation of Harlem deserves more than a passing glance because of the imbrication of that time-space in the motif of early twentieth century Black artistic, cultural, political, and ideological internationalism. The praxes of this internationalism included the various Pan-Africanist congresses, the Black Paris of Surrealism, Négritude, and Présence Africaine, and the Congresses of Black Writers and Artists in Paris and Rome. Although Brent Hayes Edwards’s fine book, The Practice of Diaspora, focuses mainly on Black Paris, the attention he pays to Harlem as the inflatus of Black Internationalism further underscores the significance and topicality of Irobi’s poetic intervention. The very nature of Harlem as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory)–to borrow Pierre Nora’s felicitous expression–makes it impossible to read “The Battle of Harlem” as an isolated text. Irobi himself makes this clear by successfully weaving into the poem a self-conscious armada of Black intertexts and cultural-historical figures: Houston Baker, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew.
However, it is in two intertexts of the Francophonic Harlemite tradition that one finds the beginnings of the historical tensions and contradictions which reach an unnerving bathos in Irobi’s “The Battle of Harlem”. Négritude’s debt to the Harlem Renaissance is common knowledge. Most Négritude poets made the inescapable trans-Atlantic voyage and Harlem became a veritable Muse for poetry written in the tongue of Molière. Senghor’s “New York” and the Haitian, Jean Brierre’s “I’ve Come Back, Harlem” are easily the best in this tradition. Written in a free flowing verse reminiscent of Aimé Césaire’s style in the Notebook of a Return to the Nativeland, Brierre’s poem is an historical canvass in which an ostensibly Haitian poet-persona addresses an African American brother, taking him down memory lane to the Middle Passage, the arrival in the Americas, the parting of ways and, most painfully, the tragedy of Babel:
Pius Adesanmi is a a poet and Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, where he is also Director of the Project on New African Literatures, PONAL.
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