IN “Instrument of Immortality,” the opening Dante’s type long poem, in Umar Yogiza Jr’s first collection, Instrument of Immortality, the author-like narrator asserts:
“I am the hidden; the unseen throat /in the voice, invoiced in life’s edge.” He’s a poetry in a grave of glass / and the gray tool of immortality, “i am the timeless timekeeper/ of life; and when i am long gone/ i’ll leave with you a living testament/ like a trail of worlds that outlive me,”.
The road lead down to a capricious cliff: death is the peak of life’s immortal poem, a ghost editor that proofreads the breath that leaves to outlive eternity; there’s no friend or foe in the grave when I was a child I envied grown-ups I thought to grow up was to know everything,” & he noticed that reasons are less sufficient.
“Sometimes love is an eye devoid of passion/ it looks at no one yet focuses on everyone”.
In 2,216 lines, 247 stanzas of a single poem– ‘Instrument of Immortality’, the young uncelebrated poet pours everything worth writing out: Yogiza Jr. sculpted his immortality perfectly in the world literary museum: “what is there to write that has not been written? what is there to come that has not come?9
He said, he writes without patronage/ or laid down tradition/ who is he to satisfy your reading tastes? /if his book bore your wit/ pass his book onto the wit of another/ it would be more alluring in their trust / he had no reputation to risk / no past to expose/ and your best or worst can no longer claim him.11
Like the poet Umar Yogiza Jr, the narrator of ‘Instrument of Immortality’ also stayed in Mpape; a suburb of Abuja, Nigeria, where: he swears to spray you his whole: purified, petrified and absolutehatred / falsehood strapped to his passion, illusion and blissful / endless obsession.18 “Instrument of Immortality” aloft Yogiza’s genius for articulating potpourri vulnerable handiwork of fate’s ups and downs: daily bitterness, anxiety, strives, etc. into a poem, mindless of the poetic ethics.
The emotions opened and closed the ‘Instrument of Immortality’ interrogates mortality and immortality: What are the dispossessed cheapest, commonest and easiest tool of carrying their immortality across generations without falling for numerous pits of history? What’s the cost of unburning one’s condemned fate without a scar?
After thinking that Yogiza Jr. has exhausted his ideas in the single long poem: instrument of immortality, that spans into 70 pages, 2,216 lines and 247 stanzas, he cowed every piece of sense in you, every piece of understanding in you in the second part of the collection: “singing in a bonfire”. Here is the narrator who resembles the poet interrogates what he meets and what he’ll be leaving: his flesh and memories, not in careless and angry tone like in the poem instrument of immortality,
He watches “slow as night & day pass one another” what becomes of him pilling unredeeming, like patches of clouds, fate does not care about his faith nor holiness
nor what his eyes, ears, emotions took in, he interrogates further, “can this infinite world be ordinary mazes?” Everyone “coming with worries, and going with worries” “oh sweet death,” he said, “the only real unclaimed”“certain,” he’s hers he concludes “waiting”.
Emotions after emotions, Yogiza shoulders his brokenness and all that of people who cannot speak with sincerity. His iron courted interrogation penetrates his sister’s age he mounts to the grave gate of North where the doorkeepers: soldiers and terrorists recites poetry of blood, from a sordid Kuje prison where a poet emerged to where he stands and the Sunday morning where he can feel the cold hug of loneliness and the cowed songs of bitterness, from lost on arrival in the lost the brother whom death finally broken to the bad of good intention and the calm and silent road that has seen it all where Yogiza feels the hope, fear, sorrows, and weakness of the road.
In the world’s events that according to Yogiza’s plain English coexists, he’s the language of the story in-between (born in the mine town of Baking Ayini, Central Nigeria) the poet’s tone intercedes between the rocks and trenches that helps nurture him. He articulates globally: animism, mythicism spirituality, Abrahamism, paganism, thoughts, nature, artificial etc., all have a stage in their performance.
And Yogiza’s prose like poetry of not using Capitals pillared this collection. He sincerely pulled down the regalia of his faith and suspended the tenet of his origin in each poem, “i have no place for me in my thoughts” he attests. We understand that the poet comes from a disadvantageous side of the Nigeria, a place with less or worse opportunity to be anything useful. He said, “my kind don’t come this far” often “ends as military recruits or fancy place cleaner” and “grave is the only tomorrow that’s closer and cheaper to them. Each poem is extensively sculpted with different emotions. In “Revelation of Wilderness” – Yogiza think:
in his mind he’s once lived he thinks in his mind i once died his hello, only grave answers
he lives, in a country where religion corrupts everyone’s minds.
The tasks of writing your unsayable is conscience tasks that every venture. From “these budding minds”: have you not killed with your eyes when Boko Haram killed with bombs schooling your sight into shrines on the oceans of self-acclaimed deities have you any peace in your swim when the water has lost its serenity have you not sipped from the pains of those who lost their loved ones even the returnees with artless babies of terrorists are below our conditions through these doors of new transition our remission is dying with poisons?
Between the crimes of the past and forgiveness, Umar Yogiza built his tent of poetry with the fire of razed homeland. In “reoccurring mistakes,” when forgotten relics are meant for us we invest all our hard work and knowledge into correcting the selfish mistakes of wasted past who gamble our present with their immortal fame.
While the poet tries to unfasten the hell from his head, one is fastening from his feet” “one way wanderer,”: the angry clouds dart north with heaving heart when rain was smiting the egos between them.
Depiction of burning memories of a poet jammed between past, present, and the future of a country and continent he cares so much about, Yogiza carries the weight of every sufferer in his country: born as faith bond-slave I broadcast my pain afraid to give myself to fate’s have-not delights I broadcast my freedom to you I free myself of the sordid pains of heaven paradise hell-fire I am a sanctuary I am a cloister.
Like the pilled of earth rolling to the strength of a bulldozer, Yogiza’s poem juxtaposed between the physical and supernatural, mindless of age-long faith and tradition without remorse. I still recall names but can’t recall my childhood memories, so he closes his instrument of immortality with a poem of where he grows up, “Giza here he came tattered on his knees / how can he leave you the best part of him? / he remembers her soft torso / & hope his tardiness to make a poem of/ her is forgiven / he’s aloft in her odyssey / he goes far; but every beauty he sees is her / he comes before Giza’s pagan gods: agyekadamoga / akpalla, ankuri, jukwei/ egbaa, kesa & akuki; the vision his time. Ogu the tree in Giza that has seen so many generations is gone, he can’t fight further, his chuckleshas surrendered his rotten bitterness.