Essays

Sule Emmanuel Egya

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Osundare’s argument, well put in “Poetry Is”, centres on what constitutes a genuine, accessible poetry, the techniques and protocols of that poetry, and its meaning and usefulness to the audience. The move is to remove poetry from an abstract realm and situate it in society, among a people whose organic connection with poetry would form the most useful factor in the realisation and import of a poem. The shift in paradigm sought is to place poetry, whose idiom and purpose have hitherto been privatist, at the core of the human enterprise in the context of nature and the universe:

Poetry is
the hawker’s ditty
the eloquence of the gong
the lyric of the marketplace
the luminous ray
of the grass’s morning dew

Poetry is
what the soft wind
musics to the dancing leaf
what the sole tells the dusty path
what the bee hums to the alluring nectar
what rainfall croons to the lowering eaves.5

Between the lines, we discern human beings such as the hawkers in a marketplace and the farmers who walk the dusty paths to their farms. We also discern natural phenomena such as the dew, the wind, and the sun. Osundare’s poetic vision, as is made quite clear from this first poem, and as has been demonstrated in volume after volume, recognises the existence of man, woman, boy, girl; it perceives these humans in a natural environment in which they struggle to live. The vision is firmly centred on the generic man. This informs the poem’s conclusion that “Poetry / is / man / meaning / to / man.”

In line with Osundare’s poetic vision the remaining poems in Songs of the Marketplace thematise various issues that affect the lives of the common people in society. In poems such as “Excursions i-iv” (influenced by Osundare’s reading of Michael Harrington’s The Other America), “Sule Chase”, “The Nigerian Railway”, “Udoji”, “Siren”, Osundare demonstrates a keen knowledge of the goings-on in Nigeria, and gives a sense of poetic intervention in the daily affairs of society. In other poems, such as “On Seeing a Benin Mask in a British Museum”, “Soweto”, “Namibia Talks”, “Zimbabwe”, and “For Hiroshima”, Osundare left no one in doubt that he was not only a keen watcher of world affairs, he also thought it was imperative for him as a poet to lend his voice to the articulation of the plight of other humans in other parts of the world. Unlike his predecessors, notably Okibgo and Soyinka, Osundare did not consider it worthy to inscribe himself, either in the form of mythopoeic association with a god/goddess or of personal odyssey, in his poetry. The volume’s tenor is totally social, and Osundare’s sense of detachment, of socialist realism, distinguishes the poems.

To reiterate. Osundare’s volume would not be the first to exemplify this shift in paradigm. In fact, Osundare’s poetic or artistic gospel is part of a larger design to interrogate the existing literary tradition in Nigeria. And as Biodun Jeyifo points out in his 1987 introduction to Songs of the Marketplace, Osundare’s poetic debut coincided with a period seen by many as a time of poetic revolution in Nigeria. The revolution was not just in the size of the poetic production but also in the thematic dimension that poetry had taken. The Nigerian civil war hurt people into writing poetry. Like Ofeimun (as expressed in his The Poet Lied), most of the poets were worried that poetry was not duly deployed to the service of the common people. Hence the demotic dimension of poetic art that saw poets and writers with unprecedented social messages. But critics, such as Jeyifo, were quick to notice the peculiar voice of Osundare. For Jeyifo, “[Osundare’s] poetry constitutes a distinct revolution within the new poetic ‘revolution.’”6 The peculiarity is rooted in Osundare’s technique. With a PhD in Applied Linguistics, and now gaining ground as a teacher of Literary Stylistics, Osundare came to poetry with, as it were, a more word-sensitive mind. That is to say, Stylistics all the more reinforced the wisdom handed to him by his parents that words were objects of seamless aesthetic possibilities. His training in stylistics had a far-reaching effect on him in the sense that his greatest artistic promise, conspicuous in his debut volume, was and is still his intimate understanding and clever, witty deployment of words for the expression of abstract, poetic concepts. Added to that was his aesthetic choice of retaining local and Yoruba traditional concepts in his poetic expression, with the yearning to render his poetry with an authentically Yoruba flavour. Because of Osundare’s almost romantic intimacy with words, and the reasoned option to swathe explicitly social issues in balanced, orality-inclined craft, Jeyifo predicted in 1987 that “it is probable that in due course Osundare will attract attention or achieve recognition as much for his meticulous, consummate deftness in the craft, the technique, the logistics of poetic expression as for his radical utopian views”.7 That prediction would soon come to pass as Osundare, volume after volume, inscribed his dazzling poetics on the Nigerian literary terrain.

Appropriating the Precursor’s Landscape

For Osundare, the interrogation of the existing literary tradition in Nigeria must be total. In the poetic medium as well as in scholarly and critical forums, he insisted on poetry, all forms of art, being a domain for the articulation of the strengths and weaknesses, aspirations and struggles, of all peoples. A notable scholarly piece that captured his theoretical thoughts in those years was the 1986 monograph The Writer as Righter: the African Literary Artist and His Social Obligations, first written as an invited chapter for a book by Mbye Cham, the Gambian scholar. To date, there is yet no essay by Osundare that better articulates the belief in the connection between art and society, the compulsive prescription that the artist, the poet, must set his/her vision on the welfare of society, on the plight of the common people in their daily struggle for survival. The essay itself is a manifestation of Osundare’s wide-ranging reading in socialist aesthetics, in the sociology of arts, and his understanding of Marxist exertions on artistic creation. It also manifested Osundare’s knowledge, at that time, of the received literary tradition in Africa, its growth and evolution in the hands of the first few African writers, its inevitable intersection with African traditional aesthetics. He was fired up by the radical existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, by the Africanist, liberationist rhetoric of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, of Ayi Kwei Armah, of Agostinho Neto, of Frantz Fanon; and by the inspirations he got from radical socialist and communist thinkers such as the Caribbean CLR James and Martin Carter, Patrick Wilmot and the African American W. E. B. Du Bois. Osundare was aware too, and used this to buttress his argument, of great English writers who, beyond thematising the fate of the ordinary people in their writings, theorised the undeniable relevance of writing to the society. He ratchets up the humanism of Sidney, of Shelley, of Arnold, of Neruda, of Brecht; he dissects the realism of Dickens, of Balzac, and of the Russian novelists who, in his view, “prepared people’s minds” for the Bolshevik revolution.

Osundare took his time down the lane of world literary canons to prove a point to his precursors, most notably Soyinka and Okigbo whom he most revered, that literature, from time immemorial, had been in the service of humanity. Obviously influenced by the criticisms he read about his precursors, but more importantly by his own critical reading of what they wrote, he had become convinced, along with many others, that the first generation of Anglophone Nigerian writers, especially the poets (Okigbo, Soyinka, Clark), focused their poetics on mythopoeic rendition of personal gods and cults. It does seem that Osundare felt that, for these poets and other writers who had become so Eurocentric in their artistic bearing (for this was what most critics of the trio felt), the proper way to call their attention was to remind them that even the English literary tradition, the entire world literary tradition, was suffused with art for society’s sake. Osundare argues at length in The Writer as Righter that every literary tradition in the world has writers who have visions that embrace the downtrodden.

Not uncommon with such theoretic rhetoric, Osundare is uncompromising in his heavy-handed, prescriptive statements. He declares that “the existence of temporal and spiritual oppression which manifests itself in socio-economic and cultural subjugation does not only make the writer’s mission necessary, it makes it inevitable”.8 For Osundare, a writer who looks on without denouncing the oppression in the society, without taking a position in favour of the ordinary people, is one that has “moved from the corridors of power to its bed-chamber”.9 With such writers upholding the literary heritage of Africa, Osundare believes, the project of education for emancipation has failed: “the colonial education of the African has resulted in his domestication rather than liberation, has moulded him into a hapless petit-bourgeois with unconscionable love for foreign values and aristocratic disdain for the common people”.10  In the fashion of Chinweizu et al, Osundare comes hard on Soyinka, Okigbo, Clark and Emmanuel Echeruo. He identifies what he calls the Kabiyesi (Yoruba for king) syndrome in the burgeoning Nigerian drama and theatre. The heroes in the dramas of Soyinka and other playwrights of his kind “are either super men or supernatural men”, thus leaving no room for the elevation of the common person. He sees nothing socialist in Soyinka’s Idanre and Other Poems. He faults Chinua Achebe’s novels, especially the first three, for not boldly presenting a “powerful dialectics between past, present and future”. He dismisses Michael Echeruo’s Mortality for being silent on the social and political events of the 1960s. In his view,   “[Clark] graduated from the socially weightless, childishly imitative poems of A Reed in the Tide to the fresh mellifluity of Casualties, a collection whose questionable political vision is reinforced by indiscreet explanatory notes evincing embarrassing political hero-worship”.11 The acerbity of Osundare’s tone is unmistakable.

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