At the eighth African International Film Festival (AFFIRIF), a documentary on the growth of two West African poets, Syl Cheney-Coker and Niyi Osundare, was presented by Chivas DeVinck, an American filmmaker. Chinyere Elizabeth Okoroafor reports.
Like the novel, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the artist as a young man, Director Chivas DeVinck’s The Poets explores two literary icons; formative years and eventual coming to maturity.
The camera follows the two poets as they return to their childhood homes, their schools and their universities, describing with clinical precision what have shaped their art.
The Poet is a beautifully shot, spontaneous and lyrical journey down memory lane in the most literal sense possible. Along the way, impactful political traumas are also explored with short bursts of archival footage. The Sierra Leonean civil war, military rule in Nigeria and Hurricane Katrina are some of the examples. Not to be forgotten is the true protagonist of this documentary: poetry. Ever so frequently, both poets read evocatively as the camera pans across various related and unrelated imagery. The poems are simultaneously inscribed in the poets’ own handwritings onto the screen, thus making this documentary a richly layered and inter-medial experience.
Running for one hour 40minutes, the documentary brings the duo together and sends them off on nostalgic trips in their countries; Freetown for Cheney-Coker and Ikere-Ekiti and Ibadan for Osundare. Also, DeVinck’s The Poet structure is subtly straight-forward. It is divided into two parts with the first half of the journey unfolding in Sierra-Leone with Cheney-Coker as the interlocutor and then the second half with Osundare taking us through several parts of southwest Nigeria, The Poets make very particular decisive stops.
The film begins in a car as it navigates the busy Freetown streets. Cheney-Coker is the dynamic, informative guide and Osundare is a teasing, affectionate and curious tourist. The tone is immediately jolly and infectious: here are two good-humoured men brimming with anecdotes ranging from serious to facile, needling each other but also learning from each other. As they make their way through the city, Cheney-Coker points out how the war in Sierra Leone has marked everything.Wide, panoramic shots of the densely- populated and hilly city along with Cheney-Coker’s intimate memories of the space allow Osundare and the viewer to have an affective experience of the geography.
We see Cheney-Coker’s childhood home built in 1936, which he has reclaimed since the end of the war. Old books abound in the modest, crumbling interiors and soon, a visit to his school rounds out the importance of a truly literary education. The camera eventually turns its attention upon the sea. With the views of the Atlantic Ocean, comes slavery’s omnipresent haunting. “If there was no ocean, there would be no Syl Cheney-Coker’s poetry,” Cheney-Coker explains. DeVinck gives us our first beautifully choreographed poem sequence as Cheney-Coker reads one of his well-known poems called “The Breast of the Sea” as a boat glides over gentle, sun-sparkled waves. The music sets the tone for a grim memorialising of “our bloody century” and the orphans, pain, tears and suffering it has left behind.
The documentary successfully seals the connection between place and poetry, and it is through reciting particular poems in carefully chosen public and intimate spaces that allow for evocations about history and humanity to emerge. The history of slavery in West Africa, the history of war, the centrality of the sea as ethos and identity as well as personal reflections on marriage and love are folded into the fabric of these sequences. An incisive montage also takes the audience through Sierra Leone’s brutal history of diamond mining.
“Shameless stone, bloodletting woman, I could have loved you, but I give you up for the feverish lust of the world!” Integral to several of these poems is the politics of Africa’s colonial history and its resounding, almost incalculable impact upon the present,” Cheney-Coker reads.
The duo is suddenly in the car again, this time in a traffic jam in Lagos. Osundare becomes the poet-guide taking us through Yoruba states. Familiar tropes and themes come and go, visits to schools and universities, the formative years in childhood homes and the profound importance of education. But Osundare’s Nigeria is more ceremonial and bustling. Several friends and family members crowd around into the camera. The welcome rituals are grander and longer. There is an international poetry festival where Osundare is shown as a revered and honoured member of the community. We learn that just like the Sierra Leone war for Cheney-Coker, Hurricane Katrina figures as the psychic wound in Osundare’s life.
In the second half of the documentary, there is a real deepening around the conversations about poetic form and political poetry, the debate on African languages, the literary canon inherited from colonialism and the many problems that plague their beloved continent. We are in Nigeria, so the poets are predictably perturbed by how to combat corruption and also poor governance in several African countries.
The Poets is an impressive homage to storytelling. Tales weave and wind through the documentary, always engaging, delightful, and emotionally and intellectually rich. It is evident that poets are committed to and deeply steeped in traditions of oral and the act of recounting stories and reciting poems.
The poets also engage with the fraught relationship between poetic form and political engagement, a tension that remains at the core of Western understandings of poetry and literature, and one that they have inherited from years of being marinated in what passes as canonical and classical.
“All literature is protest literature, in some form or another,” declares Osundare. “The most sublime form of art is the protest against silence. The real issue is what or whose politics. You know, I’ve been called a political poet. There was a time I used to be concerned about it. Now I claim it as Christians say, “and I embrace this.” Oh yes, it’s political! Why not political? My very presence on this earth is political. My existence as a black person is political. The language I use itself is political. The choice is political.” These declarations aside, it is the documentary itself that becomes evidence of the ways that the poetic and the political are fundamentally interwoven. Not only are the poets imbricated in a complex and demanding socio-political sphere, but their poetic practice also draws from it and simultaneously nourishes it.
Films about poets are not necessarily commonplace but the poetry documentary is a fairly established minor genre, especially in the past decade or so with the rise in popularity of the spoken word. Within that, any engagement with African poetry is, particularly, rare, if not non-existent. In fact, several generations of African poetry have not gotten the attention it deserves in academic and literary spheres, and The Poets reclaims and revives that space, and makes it pulse with life and potential.
With their backs to the viewer, Cheney-Coker and Niyi Osundare sit on a balcony at Osundare’s home in Ibadan, with a glass of wine in their hands. They toast to poetry, to their dynamic past and their futures, to their friendship. They look out ahead as the pouring rain beats down upon a half-constructed building but keep turning around to recount something or the other. This retrospective positioning, looking ahead but simultaneously gazing back is the precise mode of this literary documentary.
At the end of the documentary, the toast soon turns into a conversation with the film’s director and Osundare asks the question that the audience has been wondering about for the past hour and a half. “Why did he choose us out of the pantheon of African literature?” It is certainly a curious choice but manages to whet the appetite for a series-like project. Perhaps two East African poets will be the subject of DeVinck’s next project. The documentary fades to credits and the questions, hopes and poems continue to hang in the air.