By Sanchitagi Ndakitabu Qasim
When a book became an ageless window on to a lively, transgenerational view point of intellectuals, creators and the ordinary people, the audience of writers, intellectuals, poets, critics, journalists, book lovers etc must only but give-in all their delicate attention to the inspiring author. Adams Page Bookstore at Machima Plaza, Wuse Zone 2, Abuja, was filled-up to its bookish capacity, for a book bustling with wits to peers, muse, wannabes and enablers – Yogiza Jr’s poetic perspective is always keen to unravel the myth of individual dreams and aspirations.
In his vivid, acclaimed debut renaissance collection, Umar Yogiza Jr breathes life into wane beauties and plucks meaning from our boring everyday mundane ordinaries: failures, fears, traumas, love, rejects, yearns, hatred, grief etc. Umar Yogiza investigates as both behold and beholder throughout his book “Instrument of Immorality”, exploring personal and untouched sacred themes, such as religion, ethnicity, child-education, depression, teen marriage, domestic abuse, and the multiply neglected forms of violence that goes on unnoticed.
Inside my head the fire is everywhere, the flood is everywhere, the running is everywhere, the grief, the happiness, the fear and the war is everywhere and expanding and only verses was for me, said, Umar Yogiza Jr, a Devine contribution. I am from a small village of not more than five thousand persons, where everyone knows another to his great grandfather, and I am not from a rich family, poetry is the only commonest, cheapest and the easiest weapon in my kind’s hands for liberation against so multiple face slavery.
One Friday morning in 2012, Umar Yogiza said, I was buying a half ‘mudu’ of beans in Mpape market when I noticed, four people’s excessively beating up a boy of my age, dragging his heavy body through his ears towards an opened car, in the name of arrest. No one intervened, unless me with my mouth and a young man with his Samsung camera phone. Presumably they were plainclothes police officers, whose government uniforms had maybe erased all wrongdoing in their acts. I asked he camera, I asked he camera. In their retaliation, the police plainclothes officers arrested me and the boy into the car with the accused to the police station, they said we were a hostile witness. It would take a day and half before we were acquitted of the charges leveled against us. This is my country, he said, and this is nothing compared to what others had gone through. Only poetry can console me at such a moment.
Umar Yogiza’s voice is as gentle as the wind voices and the way they touch one‘s skin, in his title poem– Instrumental of Immortality, listen to him read it and you will fall in love not only with poetry but Umar Yogiza Jr a little bit too. To be sincere, he griped every one in the audience with the title Instrument of Immortality, a poetry of rare ingredients and old lyrical pleasure. he says. “As a poet the fortune of the society is in our wits, write even if you think you are terrible at it, write if you‘re good at it, and no one is ever good, a poet he said, should always try to be the best he can before he become dust. Behind him, beside him, above him, beneath his and on the table, all-brand-new in their glistening leather jackets are book of Adams Page New , as true as the author doing their very best to distract us from the seriousness of Yogiza’s eloquent poetry rendition.
Two years ago the poet lost his mother, I remember I read this poem to my mother and I remember how she laughed and laughed and thought no one would take the poem seriously judging by the way I expressed myself. Yogiza read with love and grief, he says. It takes a lot of courage to distance oneself from grief as poet after a painful loss, you have to at times let the words be their writer and let the objects speak for themselves. looking back he realised he‘s not the only one dealing with grief and loss and in points of fact, he have been grieving for so many things for most of his life, he said, being it friends, family, work, etc. grief is collective phenomena. I think we grieve everyday it depends on what. I believed Yogiza said, the poetry becomes a meeting point where we can meet each other at that moment of our lives.
There are potent anecdotes, buried deep in Yogiza JR’S Instrument of Immortality for every reading, he prosaically braids together his life and poetry in a simple modern way.
In the audience that includes the awards winning poet and dramatist Mallam Denja Abdullahi, the poet and critic Paul Liam, Poet, Reviewer, and book promoter Salamatu Sule, Poet, writer and literary promoter Hussain Zaguru Abdull’Qadir, award-winning poet and short story writer Su’eddie Agema Vershima, Poet, dramatist, and performer Owi Ocho Africa, Poets and veteran Journalists Thomas Peretu, Award-winning poet Kabura Zakama, Award-winning spoken words poets Peter Benjamin Peter, Hadar Otaki, Esther Emenike, Chief Eddie, Mohammad Obida, Barista Faith Akatiki, Liman Abdullahi, Akatiki, ANA Abuja Chairman Taiwo Akerele, Social media influencer Dr. Nana Hauwa, writers like Vine Paul, Sani Oji, Attah De Titan, Hauwa Jids, etc. when the whole of Abuja literary fraternity gathered in one place, I’ll only be for the selfless poet and literary promoter Umar Yogiza Jr.