Category: Arts & Life

Title: Whispers in a Junkyard

Author: Thomas Peretu

Reviewer: James Tar Tsaaior, PhD

Every literary text represents an artistic endeavour or project to project and mediate individual and corporate concerns as well as their meaning formations. In conformity with this ideation, Thomas Peretu’s maiden poetic outing, Whispers in a Junkyard executes a range of aesthetic accomplishments which resonate at the individual and corporate levels. First, the volume definitively functions as a veritable rite of self-initiation and self-incision into the cult of poetic craft. It also announces the poet to the republic of letters, and to the world, as a citizen with a promising quill feather which serves as a creative armature to etch powerful statements and probing questions on the poetic parchment with bold, visible strokes. In a fundamental sense too, the volume also registers him as a new, substantial voice on the Nigerian poetic rostrum worthy of studied attention by the literary community.

It is indubitable that Whispers in a Junkyard is a significant and symbolic title. It is, as such, heavily nuanced and excessively layered. As a trope, junkyard operates at various grids and frames a network of significations or meanings. It is a metaphor which bears tenebrous testimony to the imperative of chaos, the possibility of crisis and the propensity to anomie. To begin with, its metaphoricity implicates a sane, transcendental spatial configuration which has been overtaken by absurdities and oddities. It has, as a necessary consequence, assumed the ignoble status of a junkyard. Implicitly, this space once enjoyed healthy freedom but is now under siege. There is, therefore, the existence of an occupying force which has imposed its dominant will on the space thereby turning it into a junkyard, even a battlefield or war zone. 

At a microcosmic or sub-national level, this chaotic situation is reminiscent of the poet’s native Niger Delta. The Delta was once an Arcadian, peaceful ecosystem where humanity lived in harmony and delicate balance with the natural environment and other life-forms comprising animals, plants, paranormal beings, streams, rivers, and aquatic creatures. Regrettably, however, this paradisiacal enclave has been turned into a junkyard of monumental magnitude or proportions where chaos has become normalized, even weaponized and violence commodified as a strategy for survival in a Hobessian state.

Thus the Delta as a space has been perennially raped and abandoned to its forlorn fate as a junkyard. The once fertile alluvial land suitable for agricultural production has been rendered arsenic and severely impoverished. In the same vein, the water bodies that supported marine life and fishing activities have been polluted and systematically subjected to rhythms of oil exploration and exploitation activities by oil conglomerates or cartels engaged in big business. The creeks, estuaries, rivers, and streams which empty their vassal waters into the majestic Atlantic Ocean have been incredibly polluted. The mangrove forests and other botanical resources have been depleted and zoological life endangered.

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These unwholesome, destructive practices inescapably have grave implications on the flora and fauna of the area with has haemorrhaged over the years.  They have caused massive despoliation and degradation of the environment and precipitated untold catastrophic consequences on the Delta. Leakages from broken oil pipes, gas flaring, pollution of waterways and other sharp practices inconsistent with international best standards have all conspired to make the Delta a junkyard. The political economy of oil which first began with the exploitation of oil palm by European merchants gradually got transformed to crude oil, the black gold which has been turned from a blessing to a curse, boom to gloom and prosperity to adversity. 

At the macrocosmic level, Nigeria, the poet’s homeland, is also a vast junkyard. This is an apt metaphor for a country which has legitimized and glamourized disorder and violence at a grand scale and even systemic level. The metaphorisation of Nigeria as a junkyard congeals in the fact that it is a nation-state in a state of perpetual chaos and dystopia. At independence in 1960, Nigeria inspired great hope and optimism as a nation with a manifest destiny to take on the world as the leading Black nation with its huge demography and geography. But with the intervention of time this goodwill was squandered through an atrocious lack of visionary leadership, crass corruption, social morass, economic injustice, religious bigotry and rabid ethnicity.

To aggravate the parlous national condition, Nigeria operates a fraudulent federation and a corrupt political system where wealth is inequitably distributed and much of the national commonwealth or patrimony is shared by the elite in a feudal fashion thereby impoverishing the chunk of the distressed and pauperized population. Thus the Nigerian ship has been run aground. Indeed, it has suffered wreckage and ended up pathetically in a junkyard.

In this agonistic and despondent situation, the voices of poets have been muffled. All that the poet can deploy to articulate the national conundrum and predicament is mere whispers. It is apparent that having been subjected to a plurality of trials and tribulations and having been condemned to a catalogue of privations after a brutal encounter in a war of attrition with his nation, the poet has been shell-shocked and all that he can utter which is short of absolute, utter silence is mere whispers. “Oloibiri” is one poem that is generously illustrative of this purgatorial reality as the poet intones despicably: “I once had a purple/name/… I am the aged rag/a graveyard of silence/watched by vultures/…I am the genital/that gave birth to your name/you sucked the milk/ of my virgin breasts/to construct the barbarian sky/you left me a woeful dream/on your dusty shelf” (pp.158-159). Oloibiri is the locality where oil was first discovered in Nigeria in 1957. This speaks of the devastation and desolation that oil exploration has left behind in much of the Niger Delta.

No doubt, poets and other artists have appropriated a variety of strategies to communicate their private thoughts and reflect on issues of public concern. One of such strategies is to utter utter silence. However, the eloquence of silence sometimes communicates even more powerfully and trenchantly.

In the present volume, Peretu mobilizes the visceral power of whispers to speak to the junkyard of the malaised Nigerian condition, a malady that has continued to defy the logic of sustained therapeutic care and attention. In the title poem, the poet declaims with sepulchral fixity: “my head is a graveyard/of doted stars/picked by missiles/my heart is a wrought iron/ bent to bandage the wounds/on the lips of a widow/and there was noise/and the noise is the silence/that wrote the history of junkyards” (p.30). Thus silence paradoxically becomes an agent for the writing of history in a violated nation-state like Nigeria.

There is sense in which Peretu’s poetry intersects with and overlays those of his Delta and Nigerian compatriots. This engagement with other voices in the poetic tradition has long been quintessential of the call and response pattern between the old and new voices that defines literary histories and traditions. It is also reminiscent of the idea of tradition and individual talent enunciated by T. S. Eliot in which succeeding generations of poets and writers draw from the pool created by preceding generations but also contribute to it while maintaining their distinct individualities. Peretu benefits from this schema where the individual poet draws from the wellspring of tradition.

This interaction between the old and the new institutes a unique intertextual conversation, a trajectory which unveils a tapestry of poetic voices in harmonious communion. In this case,the voices range from the patriarchs such as Gabriel Okara, JP Clark (Bekederomo), Christopher Okigbo and Christian Otobotekere. The intertextual conversation is consummated through the invocations and evocations of these older poets by dedicating specific poems to their memory, the appropriation of their iconic titles and lines, and the sheer allusiveness to their poetic art. “The Voice” (p.46) is an obvious allusion to Gabriel Okara, an accomplished, prze-winning poet who suckled the nipples of the Delta. Fascinatingly, one of Okara’s novels is titled The Voice. It is the same voice that Peretu wields like an arrow and sends on an errand like a whisper to indict Nigeria of its many crimes, perfidies or treacheries declaring that “the voice is alive/the voice is/the bridge and the spring” (p.47).

Also in “The Sculptor”, obviously dedicated to Okara, there are deafening echoes of Christopher Okigbo, the iconic Nigerian poet who perished tragically in 1967 in the Biafran-Nigerian War of 1967 – 1970. The poet declares: “flutes sing/your name at convocations/like the pristine mother idoto/who held the candle light on christopher/so do piano and drums/speak of the many songs/speak on the tongues of a riverbird/…okara the oak/teach me to know you/by paragraphs” (pp.44-45). Indeed one of Okara’s poems is titled “Piano and Drums”, a synecdochal representation of Western and African civilisations and cultures. There is also Okigbo’s invocation to Mother Idoto, a river goddess in his community which he has abandoned as a prodigal but has returned to with votive thanksgiving and devotion.

This intertextality is stretched further to web in other celebrated poetic and literary voices as diverse and variegated as Tanure Ojaide, Kenule Saro-Wiwa, Odia Ofeimun, Harry Garuba, Nengi Josef Ilagha (Pope Pen) and other younger Delta minstrels including Ebi Yeibo, Ogaga Ifowodo, Ibiwari Ikiriko, Nnimmo Bassey, among several others who have borne the burden of the cumbersome yoke placed on their tired necks by a delinquent, reckless and rascally oligarchy in a nation which has taken from the Delta with one hand and severely scourged it with the other. For instance, “I Am the Book” (.31) is crafted in the fashion of Tanure Ojaide, a garlanded Nigerian poet from the Delta whom the poet professes as an inspiration. In “Apples & Angels”, Peretu invokes Nengi Ilagha, the poet of Mantids, one of the best versifiers from the Delta whose maiden poetry book won the Association of Nigeria Authors’ prize in 2000. As the poet testifies, “I courted her/heartfully/I courted mantids/like a love-struck romeo” (p.56).These poets are united in their unanimous denunciatory verdict that Nigeria has failed and has turned the Niger Delta into a miniature junkyard while it remains an ever-expanding junkyard on its own.

The intertextual conversation Peretu is exuberantly engaged in is not localized within the Nigeria and African literary sphere. It is extended to a global dimension where the poet invokes a commonwealth of literary souls and filters their cascading poetic voices to construct lines that speak to local issues and global concerns in glocal contexts. Poets of diverse social, cultural and ideological hues or persuasions like Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, and W. B. Yeats are all drawn into the poetic conversation that Peretu has convoked, an illustrious gathering at the public square or marketplace of ideas to cross-pollinate poetic knowledge for the rehumanization of our world which has for long been brutalized and dehumanized.    

One unique feature of Peretu’s effort in Whispers in a Junkyard is in the experimentation with language. The poetry thrives on lexical items drawn from punctuation marks, parts of speech and figures of speech. In poem after poem there is the recurrence of words like commas, full stops, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, metaphors, proverbs. The volume is richly nuanced with a language that is angst-ridden, sardonic but also lightsome and effervescent sometimes verging on the haunting and incantatory. This is tellingly self-testifying about the poet and his craft. To Peretu, therefore, poetry is a rite. As a rite, poetry represents a sacrifice in which libations are poured as prerequisites for its efficacy in purging the infected or diseased souls of the individual and society. This ritualistic quality endows his language with a bucolic élan and measure of earthiness that suggests the poetry’s closeness to the ordinary folk.

Much of the language also benefits from sacred scriptural epistemology and hermeneutics where the Christian Bible is used as an invaluable resource text for the distillation of poetic imagery. The Bible has been a textual body which has constituted itself as fertile humus soil for literary production. For instance titles of literary works ranging from Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, Devil on the Cross, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Sembebe Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood among several others attest to the inexhaustible treasure trough that the Bible is to creative writing. There are, for instance, allusions to “the garden of eden” (p.40), the primal place of creation and creativity; and “the floods” (p.48) referring to the deluge which for forty days destroyed the earth and all of creation ending climactically in rebirth and renewal. In this poem “Untitled” the poet states that “I am a book of musings” and announces that he is an archetypal figure who represents regeneration and newness through his creativity and artistic enterprise.

Following this schema of linguistic experimentation, much of the language is tinged and enriched by the poet’s aquatic milieu which leverages on an idiom that is peculiarly evocative of a social and cultural ecosystem that is sustained by enlightened folk values and mores. In a way, this predilection to the folk validates the postulation that all art is folk in nature and character because the real creators of art are the folk. Art, therefore, is necessarily folkloric as it proceeds from the folk and goes back to the folk in a dialectical process that spirals and sustains society.

Another experimental quality of Peretu’s poetry is that he is one minstrel who has chosen to render his verse in lower cases throughout the volume. This is a unique style and technique which is not very common. However, he is not alone in the creative appropriation of this technique. Other writers before him like e. e. cummings and bell hooks, the African American writer have also employed this technique in their writings. In Nigeria, one notable exponent of this technique is amu nnadi, a poet who appears to have influenced Peretu in this regard. This technique is not without creative purpose or intentionality. The lower case, when used throughout a literary text, constitutes an act of resistance to grammatical and linguistic orthodoxy. It also offers a definitive statement in power relations among letters and words in their constituent linguistic environment. It is, therefore, a technique that is not innocent but politically engaged and espouses to certain power currents and ideological sympathies.

For one, it constructs a liberal, non-hierarchic habitus where no letter or word superimposes itself on the others. It democratizes the literary space and makes it an even and co-eval landscape where letters of the alphabet and words have an equal expressive power and leverage. This gives them the capacity operate in absolute freedom and to enact their energies without any undue exercise of putative power or superiority. In mobilizing the lower case, Peretu espouses to this democratization of literary spaces or landscapes which spills over textual boundaries into human spaces where official and dominant voices and their controlling regimes, archaeologies of knowledge and meaning protocols do not have to terrorise and oppress subaltern and suppressed voices on the margins of society. 

Whispers in a Junkyard is a volume with a poetic mission to accomplish. In it, Peretu rankles the weeping wounds of a nation which have been allowed to degenerate and graduate into malodorous gangrenes threatening the Nigerian nation-state with imminent amputation. These poems speak with the ferocity of barbed arrows, even guided missiles or rockets, which journey fearlessly and recklessly to meet their marks or targets with precision. This is poetry that is circumcised and civilized in its mobilization of language, lucid and lyrical in temperament, picturesque in its deployment of images and undisguised in its forging of themes in an effort to save society from itself and midwife a new dawn and fashion a new more and value system.