The debate would rage on. Osundare’s poetic praxis played itself into the centre of this debate, as now and then critics and scholars would quote his poetry to buttress their views on the side of Marxism. In many ways, this debate that in fact pre-dated his poetry offered Osundare the latitude to fashion a poetics with a solid base not only in materialism but also in the kind of “technical excellence” advocated by the formalist camp. His knowledge of Stylistics proved vital not only for his work as a teacher but also in his capacity as poet highly sensitive to the inner working of words, to the chemistry of sound. Critics and scholars of all persuasions would recognise the “poetic revolution” of Osundare rooted in a stylistic bravado and a liberationist gospel. Songs of the Marketplace turned out to be just a step in this direction, as subsequent volumes presented the Osundare phenomenon in greater depth and degree. In retrospect, Osundare believes, the emergence of the Positive Review Group and their journal of the same name and their influence on contemporary thought and ideas, especially the pivotal motivational roles of scholar-activists like Biodun Jeyifo and Omafume Onoge, deserves more attention by scholars interested in the study of the development of literature, politics, and ideas in Nigeria in the decade between 1975 and 1985.17 Osundare and his wife were blessed with another baby girl, as his last child Bayonle was born on 22 March 1983. She would grow up to be an intelligent, quiet girl. A crucial engagement for Osundare in 1984 was the public lecture he delivered at his alma mater, Amoye Grammar School when it marked its silver jubilee.
But this Book Knows Me
1984 saw Village Voices as a successor to Songs of the Marketplace. If the latter, with its theoretic, quasi-polemic insight, announced a poet who boasted of the knowledge of the world, of his continent, of his country, and of his fervent dream of transforming the society through poetry, the latter locates and localises his aesthetics in a source-base that would come to encompass and define the entire range of his poetic output to date. It is also useful to see Village Voices as a true praxis of the theory which “Poetry Is” propounds. In this vein, the volume is indeed the first uniquely Osundarean creation that launches orality as the most distinctive premise for the appreciation of Osundare’s poetry. Nobody talks about Osundare’s poetry without mentioning its reliance on Yoruba orality; Osundare himself repeatedly gives people the impression that the strength of his poetry is its dependence on orality. It is in Village Voices, as the title suggests, that Osundare begins that conscious aestheticisation of Yoruba orality. Village Voices is also seminal in its conspicuously thematic unity – from now on, Osundare would design each of his collections around a central idea with all poems having something to say about the idea. The volume is dedicated to Osundare’s father and this, as we have seen in chapters One and Two, speak volume of his poetic inspiration.
The volume derives its strength from a steady concentration on the folkways of a bucolic community – certainly Ikere-Ekiti – that is symbolic of rural life in Africa. Poem after poem, Osundare realises a relentless tenor of a dialectic that seeks to stage rural mores as a needed foundation for a worthwhile existence. The volume’s central message is hinged on Osundare’s conviction that good artistry, a salutary concomitance to good life, can only be found in pastoral societies; that western civilisation, scientific and technological advancement, as well as a sickened sense of urbanisation, have blinded people and they can hardly see the traditional values that can positively enhance their lives. This romanticism permeates the entire volume, and bursts onto Osundare’s finer volumes yet to come.
As though the poems are arranged to portray the details of the activities of a typical day in a village, the volume opens with the title “I wake up this morning”. It becomes immediately obvious that it is not the time of waking up that matters in this poem, but the place where the persona wakes up – a rural community. The volume is interested in pointing out that such activities are different from the one the civilised, educated readers already know:
I wake up this morning
with a song in my throat
a youthful breeze harps the leaves
rising feet drum the road
to meet the upland sun
my sole treads the dew
rousing my body
to the virgin cool of earth.18
The poem asserts all through the lines that where the persona wakes up is a place where the best of life can be got. It goes on to tell of the healthy activities that take place in this community. Osundare relates activities which he grew up seeing at Ikere-Ekiti, such as spinning and weaving and farming which he witnessed from childhood. But this poem, besides relating the daily activities of the village, also presents the poet Osundare – his aesthetics and humanism. Coming as a prologue, under the subheading of “rising voice…”, it becomes a base for the poet’s self-fashioning, as it operationalises the doctrine encapsulated in “Poetry Is”. Here is a poet that emerges straight and uncontaminated, as it were, from the village; a poet whose voice is one of the many voices of wisdom the volume claims to have collected. In line with his subversive, anti-establishment tendency announced in Songs of the Marketplace, this village poet is set to tell kings that their “fart / chokes the village nose”. Further, in his words,
My words will not lie like a eunuch wind
fluttering leaves in a barren forest
my words will climb the tree of wisdom
feed multitudes with fruits of thought
and plant the earth with potent seeds.19
But the words can only be this potent, the volume implies, when they are situated within a sturdy traditional poetics. In “A Dialogue of the Drum”, this poetics is fully fleshed out, as Osundare draws our attention to the aesthetics begotten of traditional drums in Ikere-Ekiti such as bata, omele, gangan, gbedu, ibembe, reso, ogbele and adan. Osundare had known all these drums from childhood, had watched his own father perform with some of them (especially bata), had himself belonged to a band group that used some of the drums, and had known the languages of these drums before he ever thought of becoming a poet. The poem, in short the entire
volume, is a celebration of the rich craft and profound artistry that Osundare grew up witnessing, knowing, and partaking in before the quest for higher education took him away from his native town and cultural base.
Village Voices, therefore, alerts us to one vital fact: Osundare is a man, a poet, whose subject, poetic vision, and aesthetics are overwhelmingly influenced by orality. He has consistently pointed out at different forums that there is just no way he could have avoided orality when he grew up in a society with such rich and viable oral culture; when he was an oral artist (a traditional musician) before he became a modern poet; when his parents were oral artists (singer, drummer, story teller, conversationalist) who first exposed him to the literary nuances of words. It was therefore not really a matter of choice for Osundare to deploy Yoruba orality; what is more a choice for him was/has been his resolve to stretch this orality in the direction of consummate political and humanistic thematics. What Osundare has really done in Village Voices is to enfold his usual political theme in Yoruba traditional lore, using Yoruba proverbs and speech pattern to condemn bad leaders, to awaken the people’s collective sensibility towards their self-emancipation, and to call attention, through a pastoral perspective, to the evils that go on in a society. Vivid in Village Voices is Osundare’s intention to give voice to the villagers who are voiceless in a culturally and socio-politically warped post-colonial nation. This is the impression one gets from reading poems such as “The new farmer’s bank”, “A villager’s protest” and all the poems collected under the subtitle “Voices of anger and indictment”. Some poems express Osundare’s personal experience; one of such is “A reunion” in which he recounts the experience of meeting his former primary school classmate as a cleaner at the university guest house where he, Osundare, now a university lecturer, to his absolute surprise, had called for room service and it was this old classmate who came to run the errand.
Like Songs of the Marketplace, Village Voices stirred the literary scene especially at Ibadan where Osundare and his contemporaries were engaging in extra-literary, intellectual activities to disrupt what they saw as the complacency of the literati and the intellectual class. It was at this time that the Marxist ferment was strong across Nigeria. The ideas of the left had been widely disseminated by Positive Review, the radical journal run by Biodun Jeyifo, Omafume Onoge, Kole Omotoso, Femi Osofisan, John Ohierhenuan, G. G. Darah, among others. As I pointed out earlier, Osundare was not only heavily influenced by the ideas of these Marxists who were mostly his colleagues, he saw himself as one of them. At this time, he had proved his mettle in the academia with a number of journal publications, appearing in such notable journals as African Literature Today, and Ufahamu.
