Odia Ofeimun is in his element when theatre and poetry are on the table, but you might not know that political science and economics were his original forte. At various times, he has served as a personal assistant to Chief Obafemi Awolowo before joining the editorial board of The Guardian newspaper. He was to serve as general secretary and later president of the Association of Nigerian Authors. But it was the appearance of his poems in Poems of Black Africa (1975), edited by Wole Soyinka, that he first wormed his way to the hearts of literary aficionados. His first collection of verse, The Poet Lied, which condemned the platitudinous attitudes of established Nigerian writers, created hoopla in Nigeria and beyond. In 1989, he left Nigeria to work with Adzido, the leading African dance company in Britain. His poetry is characterized by a fusion of emotional commitment and political intensity. Ofeimun, a prolific poet, spoke to OBU UDEOZO of Sun Newspaper in this interview.
What’s your composition technique from inspiration to output in your own practice?
I do not really know what you call inspiration in this respect. All I know is that there are some poems I carry in my head in a wooly form; I do not have words to them; they just have a mood. And I am looking for the words. And the words never come. But one morning, as you wake up, one line occurs to me. And that one line, if you forget it, God help you. But if the one line succeeds and enters paper, you will realize later that some three lines just become twenty until the poem will virtually write itself. There are poems that work like that.
But, as for the more difficult ones, you virtually know what you want to say, but you cannot find the poetry to carry it. I can tell you that my Saro-Wiwa poem took me about two years to write. It refused to come. I knew what I wanted to say, but it just wouldn’t come. And part of the reason was that I had carried in my head the angst of so many people who died during that period –Saro-Wiwa, Rewane, Kudirat –and it was joined very recently by Bola Ige. These were people that I interacted with at a very close level. And writing about them is like writing about yourself without your knowing it. It was like trying to reach the deeper recesses of yourself; to fish it out what was most significant about these people. In the end, I found that I resolved this poem – all of them not in favour of my relationship with them, but in favour of a public obligation. And I had to take this angle, because of the arguments that were being peddled around us. And it included those who were members of The Association of Nigerian Authors: that Saro-Wiwa did not die because he was a writer; that he died, because he was fighting a local and ethnic agenda. Therefore, the attempt to split the man between the writer and the citizen was definitely not pleasant to me at all. So, that I had to make sure that, if that Saro-Wiwa poem ever came out at all, it had to deal with that question. And I must say that it is probably not the poem I would have written in the end if I was not overreacting to the political environment. But it was the poem that came out eventually. There is something the West Indians say, when you begin to quarrel too much with a thing, they respond with: I like it so. I like the poem the way it is.
One feels a good poem once you come across it; it’s like electricity. What’s your take on a good poem?
I do not know and, largely because I do not know, I take a very personal view of the way a poem affects me. It depends, first of all, on the language –I do expect the poet to use language in a manner that is very different from the common man. I mean, you can say it like everybody, but it will not sound like everybody. Those who argue that poets use the language of everyday speech, from Wordsworth till the moment, have always had a very good point. But the language of everyday speech changes from period to period. And when that language has changed, it is important that you recognize the role that poets have played in changing it, because, these days, people do not read poetry enough; they do not realize that the few who read poetry influence them. And when I come across a work of art in that sense, I look at the newness of the use of language, which prepares consciousness in directions it may not have known. The language is not the language of the bureaucracy. Even when it deliberately borrows the language of the bureaucracy, it disorders it –defamiliarizes it –in ways that show fresh ways of looking at that experience, which the poet is dealing with.
Now, language is not definable by language in the sense that, at the end of the day, the only way that you can respond to language as a proper critic of language is to look at the experience that language is carrying, the experience freighted by language. When language produces an experience and that experience looks implausible, then you must worry, because there must be something wrong with the way the language has been used. Therefore, a poem which seeks to yield a particular experience but ends up literarily abusing it, because of the way the words have been put together, begins to make you worry. So, first of all, for me, at the level of language, the poem must work! There are many poets who, after some time, believe that because the language they have used so far have become so vandalized, they need to refashion and reorder it. And so, they do violence to the normal ordering that words should appear in. Sometimes, it works; sometimes, it doesn’t. But I always prefer the more traditional mode of using language. I believe that the dislocations that are normally brought into them are good for form and fun. But you will find that, in order to understand it, you have to bring in the more traditional ways of using language so that the interpreter, who has disrupted the normal functioning of language, now has to properly re-interpret it in the language of everyday use.
Can you easily tell us a poem or two that have so transported you that you can say waooh, this is a treasure!
It is always difficult to put it that way. It is not a question of one poem or two. It is simply that, across the board, when I started reading poetry, the poems that hit me were singsong in nature. Poems that were almost in the language of the hymnal companion: they give it to you straight. But that was because I started by reading “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in my primary school days. For me, it was a wonderful poem, and I simply could not get over it for a long time –whether I understood it or not. Or, in reading “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, you read these poems with a “waooh”. But the first time I must confess that poems hit me in a way that I have not gotten over was by Martin Carter. He is from British Guyana. He wrote those poems from prison. Actually, they were called poems of resistance.
What excited me about the range of poems was the directness of the language in relation to what was happening then. Recall that you read Wordsworth because of what happened somewhere at sometime – over there. But, reading Martin Carter stopped being an issue of events and experiences that happened elsewhere; it was not an interiority business, it was about life and the way it hits you. I mean, a man who was not just writing from prison but was writing from prison about the ongoing anti-colonial struggle about resistance to slavery and colonial oppression. I never got over it. And for a very long time, when I thought of poetry, I thought of poetry from the standpoint of a resistance. Shelley was always the more exciting poet for me, not so much because he used a language that was very accessible, but because you could see behind everything that Shelley wrote the wish to resist oppression and the wish to make things better. For instance that line that says “The rich should exceed the grasp or what is heaven for…” summarized poetry for me. Poetry should always aim to look beyond what your hands can touch. And as long as poetry continues to do such things, it would always raise language above the ordinary.
Is great poetry a cross-culturally universal experience, or are there slants and flavours in the appreciation and acceptance of the best across nation boundaries?
The question is the oldest question in literature; therefore, the answer does not even have to change from age to age. The answer can be as it was when Homer wrote his poems. The first duty a poet owes his or her culture is to develop the language for presenting experience. So, at the end of the day, it does not matter what kind of experience one has had. A poet should be able to present it in a manner that is unforgettable! And trying to make it unforgettable implies using the right kinds of words –words that actually convey as close to the bone as possible. No matter how proficient you are in the use of language, certain experiences appear elusive and indescribable – but the duty of the poet is to try to register such impressions permanently. Let your language freely carry and transport that experience so that, at the end of the day, even the person who was not there, would say, “I have got it”. That is the way it was.
You do not have to worry about the way it was said before; but, if you do not even know how it was said before, you might actually be under-representing the reality, because how it was said before has a lot of ways of informing you on how to say it better. Therefore, the cross-cultural thing is always there; you sometimes see, that it is by the use of a foreign word that you clinch the proper description of an experience. You look for a word from your own language, and you cannot make it; but one day you hit on a word that is not of your own language and you just realize that you got it. That word will have to be part of your own language thereafter. Therefore, as for the cross cultural element, there is no quarrel between cultures in this sense. Because what you are trying to project is an experience that is possible in a specific culture context; thankfully, all our brains were structured the same way. Biology has not told us that the distance between the Asian’s brains is different from mine. Even on the subject of blood products, it has been discovered that my own blood can be transfused in such a way to be acceptable to an Indian in a way that may not be possible for a person in my village. In terms of the blood in my veins might be closer to that Indian than the man in my village.
It becomes true when it comes to the interpretation of experience for a Chinese to understand me more than it is for a Nigerian, because there are those elements in nature which prepare you to meet the experience that is awaiting you. For instance, when J.P. Clark wrote “Night Rain”, he may also have been describing the experience of a Chinese, an Indian or a Scott, who has lived in a similar circumstance. But the fact that he was doing it around us, made a lot of difference. Even when Okigbo was using the densest pro-Greek language, he was still speaking to us.
There is this quarrel we have had with Chinweizu in respect of those he called Afro-modernists –what has not really occurred to anybody is to try to translate Okigbo back into Igbo or J.P. Clark back into Ijaw or Soyinka back into Yoruba as has just been happening. When you read Death and the King’s Horseman in Yoruba, you are in a different world. You realize that it is not just the Yoruba that you know. I mean, it is like giving you Shakespeare in your own language. Suddenly, you discover that, although you had been speaking Yoruba, that it is not this strain of Yoruba that you knew. At the end of the day, these are the real issues in literature. The cross cultural arguments pose the basic challenge of how to handle what is around me. How do I understand them? But you may not understand the things around you; that is what everybody has to be told. In fact, it is a mystery to you; and poetry should just be doing nothing more than saying that this is a mystery. And if that is all poetry manages to do, it has also done a good job.
In a gala held in honour of Professor Wole Soyinka by Global Communications Corporation in Lagos years back, he responded to the fractious generation question by saying: “I do not see any gap; there is no shortage of talent. The exposure they enjoy may not be as much as what it used to be; but I do not think there is a gap.” From your own perspective, what might have accounted for that shortfall in terms of international exposure and appreciation?
First, let me agree with Soyinka. I have always resisted the attempt to draw lines between the generations. I have, therefore, tried very hard to get into prominence any young writer that I felt deserved the limelight. And when you match the poetry of the earlier generation with the poetry that came after, you will find that from a book-oriented approach to poetry those earlier poets often moved to a life-oriented approach. They faced experience, with more than just wanting to reproduce it in the way poems are supposed to be written. They first went in the direction of what Wordsworth criticized as poetic diction, that is, writing poetry the way poetry was supposed to be written and now moved on to allow life to help them interpret. I must confess that it was at the time they arrived at that point, that very many of us came into the picture. We were not doing things that were radically different from what they did, because we were all coasting together. The civil war blacked out all the difference.
You realize that by the time Christopher Okigbo wrote Come Thunder, he had become a town crier proper. And you will recall that in almost all the poems written by almost all the generations after, they just had to respond to the way things were happening around them. So, you really had poetry around us that was new and matching with the times’ vibrant poetry. I want to add that what makes it look as if there is a gap is because we always talk about literature as a life-saver for society; literature as a builder of consciousness; literature as a liberalizing and liberating force. But we never gave as much credence to the role a society plays in determining the ways in which that literature does its work. Our society began to die, to go downhill and it dragged the poetry and the literature with it. Not necessarily in the way we thought or in the way we wrote; but in the way it destroyed the entire infrastructure that made the writing of poetry something of value. For instance, schools were destroyed, and the access to literature was provided by the access to education. And if you damaged the educational edifice, you smashed the basis for the receptivity of literature itself. You had publishing houses that ministered to those schools, and even those publishing houses were going down hill. As we attempted to indigenize, the multinational publishing houses also began to retrench to leave the Nigerian environment. It would not have hurt us. What really hurt us was not the fact that they left –it was the fact that those who managed the Nigerian economy began to manage the economy in favour of those who were retrenching, rather than in favour of the society in which they were living.That was the beginning of the crisis.
If Heinemann had to live Nigeria and leaves Heinemann Nigeria Limited behind, it would not have hurt us. But you decided that the national currency should be devalued thereby creating a huge hiatus or gulf that you could not fill. Instead of working for one year to achieve a particular goal, you had to work for about five or six years to achieve that same goal. Because once your currency is devalued, it means your labour, your consciousness, and your being is devalued. Many people do not see it that way, but that is the way it is. It means that a lecturer, who attended the same university with a Briton, will be earning about a sixth of what that Briton earns. Yet they still have to buy books from the same market – they buy all the paraphernalia for knowledge-acquisition from the same market. But, you have disempowered one without necessarily empowering the other. Because our society began to be run on the basis that devalued the average Nigerian, devalued the labour of the average Nigerian, it also had consequences on the way that our literature was being produced.
First of all, those who could have access to literature in the school, no longer did so. They no longer bought books in class; they just photocopied your work. If a novel could not be photocopied, one novel could go round the class. A lot of management came into the picture which still could not manage to get to a desirable and positive outcome. And once literature started following the downward drift of the society, it had a way of negative reverberation on the writer. A writer who realizes he or she no longer has an audience, actually no longer writes with the same confidence. You write as if ‘it is not for these people now, because they will not read it’. Many writers will not realize that that is what they are doing; but you are impeaching your self in advance. And that also has a way of disrupting the literary process in society.
How can that profound cleavage between the literary productions of that generation – Okigbo, Clark, Okogbulie Wonodi and Okara –which you have savoured be remedied? The next question which you can also take in the same breadth is: what concrete steps can the current wave of Nigerian writers take to attain greater visibility in this country and abroad?
I have talked so much about these things over the years that it now seems as if I was parroting banal things to myself. One way of solving the problem is that every writer must continue to write, no matter what happens. Okigbo says that being a writer is like being a priest –that calling takes you over. And you submit yourself to that calling such that, even at the point of death, you should let the commitment to that calling determine what you do next. But the issue is what you do after you have produced your work.
I remember saying that if there are no publishers for you, that self publishing is allowed. Some of the best authors in the world allowed themselves the leverage of self publishing until they were noticed. It is a fortunate scenario that there is a publishing house around you when there is a material to be published. Even if it is just for the benefit of your friends, self publishing is allowed and beneficial. Certainly, that is not enough –what we are talking about is the centrality of a work of art in public discourse; how a work of art enters that public space.
Because we have centrally vibrant newspapers culture, one ought to expect that the newspapers will do it. Over the past three decades, through blackmail, and all manner of coups in newspaper houses, we have managed to put literature somewhere, so that almost every newspaper feels obliged to do business with us. We have not quite succeeded because editors are natural philistines. They will yank off your page, not only for an advert but for any other reason on earth. But from the day Kole Omotosho became literary editor for The Afriscope Magazine (Chukwumerije’s Afriscope –that was when Chukwumerije was a radical socialist) From that time, there has been a sense in which the literary pages have burgeoned into the more acceptable platforms for creative writing. But the time I got to The Guardian, it had become an established thing that literature should have that kind of hearing.
How would you respond to an innocent seeker who wants to know the value of poetry in human society? Make your answer as comprehensive as possible or give us an optimum response on the subject.
What is the value of poetry that I write? I want to make a decision between that and the other question, what is the value of poetry. I think we often over-generalize in such matters, because there is a great difference between what is the value of the poetry that I write and what is the value of poetry in general. Again, it is not right; however, to distinguish what does not look like something of value from the group that it belongs to, for it is not so much because of what one writer does but what all of them together do that accounts for a culture. Therefore, at the end of the day, even before we make the distinction, we must agree that what I do as a poet, if added to what others do as poets, can make a difference from what I alone do. That is to say, that taken together, it can have more impact and make more meaning – than it would from what one individual alone does.
There is an importance of putting it in such a frame. Many of the issues I have taken up in my poetry, the things that have interested me, may not necessarily interest some other persons. But you can read the poetry not for the subject matter, but for the language that has been deployed. It is actually about expanding our consciousness by using words to open up areas in the mind, in such ways that other symbolic manipulations may not achieve. I am particular about two things in the poetry I write: I want people to develop a capacity to say ‘no’ to things that they do not like. Simply being able to develop the spine to reject things that you do not like; it does not matter what they are. Whether it is politics or personal relationship, for me, does not matter. When you do not like it, you should have the will to say no. The second point is that I am excited by how the little box inside you relates to the little box inside me. What makes it possible for us to share a common meaning about anything at all? Therefore, I am interested about how human minds are linked together so that when I am bringing concepts together, I am simply seeing those concepts in terms of different entities and different human beings being brought together to make a common meaning. Usually, these days, I transfer it into the political realm and say that all that I want my literature to do is to help create a sense of common morality between people. I believe that, at the end, if literature achieves that, it is achieving the very cement that holds society together. Because, without that sense of common morality, which usually comes from having a common sensibility, you cannot live a good life. And poetry frankly should be concerned about the good life.
And that is also what the aspiration of the Church is about…
In fact, what makes literature particularly exciting is the fact that it manages to reach into certain recesses of the mind that neither religion, nor science nor whatever can reach. There is a sense in which you need the power of poetry to bring religion alive. You need the power of poetry; the power of words; of what words can do, to take science from one consciousness to another. You need language, what language can do; people often say “I think, therefore, I am”. No, it is not enough. It is actually because you narrate, you tell; that people know that you think. If you have not narrated, if you do not tell, nobody will ever know that you think. Therefore, teaching and helping people to use words, and providing a basis for language to carry experience is perhaps one of the most important things in life. For me, the little that I can contribute to this is enough in the struggle of a life time. It does not matter how small that contribution may seem; I believe that fighting to ensure that one gets to know himself better and to promote solidarity between diverse groups through a common understanding of the way the world is and works; I believe it is a significant achievement. How one can secure from the disparate and diverse consciousnesses, so to say, among several peoples through the written or spoken word is my ideal aspiration in life.
On wrestling with the imperatives of quality control, John Ciardi stated that “the poet needs an enemy to show him the badness of his art, and ultimately, he himself must be that enemy”. The negation of this ethic thrives in our society at the moment. As Ebereonwu observed, “My generation is most hostile to honest criticism that does not paint a glowing picture. The critic of my generation is supposed to do the work of a praise singer, or engage in unnecessary enmity if he wants to be honest to himself. This has given rise to the paddy-paddy reviews that glut our papers.” Dissect the dangers in this state of affairs and offer prescriptions for overcoming the malaise?
I happen to agree with Ebereonwu, but my emphasis will not be his own. Look, every literature in the world needs “paddy-paddy” reviews. Every one needs it, because, you see, you are trying to convince a public that may be naturally hostile to anything that is new. And because literature is new, it needs to be sold, sold in a public relations sense. You need to present literature to the public. So, “paddy-paddy” review has its role in the entrenchment of literature as a thing of value. What, however, is not always there is the concern for literature in itself, the necessity to look at the different parts of a poem and see how they hold together. How a particular poem fits within a tradition which it almost proclaims by itself, because, when you read a poem, you know where that poem itself wants to be. What it wishes to belong to, within a tradition that is already established. So, a poem already announces where it belongs but you need a critic to situate that poem within the tradition that it proclaims. And these are not always forthcoming in much of the criticism that you get. But this is also largely what has happened to our literature. When you destroy the theory class, or you force them to repatriate to greater comfort zones, the tendency is that you no longer have the people to do that job. The few who are left are like people battling for their lives. They are not in a position to do the job that we expect of them, because if they do it well, they will be out of business. In any case, where do they get published in Nigeria today? If a critic is really good, where does he get published? Almost all the journals are Volume 1 Number 1. When the man who edited it has acquired his senior lectureship or professorship, the magazine is dead. Maybe some one who was an assistant editor, later also wishes to be a professor; so he, too, organizes Volume 1 Number 2; and when he gets his own, that is it. With that kind of tradition, you are not likely to get a consistent run of critical appraisal that will make literature grow. And what bothers me in that kind of situation is that you do not have an entrepreneurial class in this country that can look at it from the stand point of just business. “We are producing these books for this particular class”. It may not bring them money, but it will bring certain respectability to the publishers that they can benefit from. In Nigeria, that does not happen.