•IkeoguOke, Nigeria’s award-winning poet transits
He wrote his own epitaph about two months before he died: “Here lies a man who loved virtue and art. And gave to both his fortunes and his heart.” His death on November 24 at the National Hospital in Abuja suggested that he had felt the end was near. He was 51.
IkeoguOke won the 2017 Nigeria Prize for Literature sponsored by the NLNG for his poetry volume, The Heresiad. Wining the prestigious prize and the huge prize money, $100,000, made a statement about the poet’s quality. The judges described his entry as “a bold and wonderful experiment whose great strength also could have been its great weakness.”
How long it took him to produce the work reflected his pursuit of perfection. He said: ”Well, I worked on it for 27 years. This is how I calculate the duration.” In his NLNG acceptance speech, Oke described poetry as “healthy narcotics.”
The title of his winning work reflected his poetic skill. “Actually, Heresiad is coined from heresy,” he explained. A description of the style of the prize-winning work and its theme: “The poet employs the epic form in questioning power and freedom and probes metaphorically the inner workings of societies and those who shape them. The book speaks to an intense commitment to innovation, tenacity, joyful experimentation and social commentary in a way that provokes delight and engagement.”
By his own account, he became interested in writing after he left secondary school in 1984. He earned a first degree in English and Literary Studies from University of Calabar and a master’s degree in Literature from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Oke worked as a journalist. A high point of his time in journalism was his stint at the ambitious NEXT newspaper, which was launched in 2008. An interesting tribute by GbemigaOgunleye, who was the newspaper’s Chief Standards Editor, showed Oke’s perfectionism: ”One complaint against Ikeogu then was that he was too meticulous! He spent too much time cleaning out copies than our production time would allow. Each time I raised my voice to complain, he would disarm me with his smile and a genuine apology. For him, any story that passed through him must be completely error-free. He, therefore, took his time fumigating every story passed to him.”
Before he won the grand NLNG Prize, Oke had produced other poetry volumes: When I was Born (2002), Salute without Guns (2009) and In the Wings of Waiting (2012). He also wrote Children’s literature: The Lion and the Monkey (2014) and The Tortoise and the Princess (2015).
Oke moved from text to performance, which took his creativity to another level. In a tribute, writer Betty Abah captured the performance aspect of his work: ”In recent years Ikeogu’s poetic ingenuity became more visible and more alluring with the additional feathers of performance poetry he brought into his practice and through which he promoted the Igbo culture on local and international platforms while also creatively breathing life into his thoughts on universal themes, his trademark animal skin dress, traditional cap and other paraphernalia to boot.”
He projected culture with passion. “We cannot all watch our society devolve into crass philistinism. And I think this prize is a genuine intervention against such cultural degeneration,” he said when he won Nigeria’s biggest literary prize.
His last Facebook post on November 7 illustrated his social consciousness and activism. It was a short verse he composed when he was hospitalised at the National Hospital, Abuja. The poem:
Strange Taste?
A butterfly
Drinking urine
On a toilet floor
Of the National Hospital.
The quatrain highlights the irony of an unsanitary hospital, and paints a picture of deterioration that hints at the state of Nigeria’s health sector.
It is sad that Oke died not long after he won a big prize that celebrated his poetic talent. Though the promise may have been cut short, the legacy remains.
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