Tag: Niyi Osundare

There are many things, many achievements to celebrate in the life and career of my friend, comrade and brother, Niyi Osundare, especially on the occasion of his attaining the age of 70 in a country whose official statistic for life expectancy at birth is only 52 years. I give only a few of these: Osundare is one of the African continent’s and the world’s foremost poets; he is a scholar and literary and art critic of great discernment and eloquence; he is a courageous, passionate and unrelenting fighter for social justice in our country, our continent and our world; and he is a man, a human being of great decency and sensitivity. Personally, I can report that he is numbered among the few friends with whom I have had and continue to have the most rewarding conversations on the state of things in our country and the world and from these I can also report that Osundare’s sense of humour is razor sharp, its keenness reflected in the unique ring of his laughter. Of course, he is not without flaws – who amongst us is? But lucky is the woman or man like Osundare whose flaws are dwarfed by the towering example of his strength of character!

If these opening words indicate that a worthy tribute to Osundare on the occasion of his 70th birthday anniversary would have to be quite long if it is to do justice to the subject, I hasten to confirm the sound basis of that idea. The problem of course is that this is a newspaper column with fixed or set limits of length and scope. And so, bearing this in mind, I have chosen in this context to celebrate Osundare on only one of his many achievements, especially as this has never, as far as I am aware, been properly acknowledged and extensively discussed. I write here of the fact that it was Osundare’s great fortune and a turning point in our literary history in postcolonial Africa, to have been the person to finally and decisively lay to rest the longstanding antagonism between versification and poetry. It is perhaps necessary to briefly explain what this antagonism, this needless contradiction means before going on to relate it to Osundare’s career as a poet, theorist and critic of uncommon power, breadth and originality.

In the best of circumstances, verse is to poetry what a beautiful, well-wrought bottle is to the excellent winethat it contains: you are grateful for the wine but your pleasure, your gratification is tremendously enhanced by the fact that the wine came in the best bottle ever manufactured so that long after you have drunk the wine, you keep the bottle to remind you of the experience of drinking that particular wine. Alternatively, one could think of poetry as the fruit that one eats or the sweet nectar that one imbibes when the skin of “versification” has been peeled away; there is no way in the world that the fruit or the nectar could have been preserved for your delectation without that outer skin. Best of all, think of poetry, compatriots, as life itself with verse as the lines or borders around it giving it a particular form, shape or identity. We shall come back to this particular metaphor later in this piece.

Unfortunately, as we go through life and experience, only rarely are we blessed with the best of circumstances. For most of the time it may not exactly be the worst of circumstances, but quite often, things are close to this. While this is true for all of us, it is truer for the majority of people at the bottom of the social order. A square peg in a round hole; an old, rancid wine in a new bottle; or life boxed in by all kinds of avoidable constrictions that cause pain or unhappiness. That’s where things stand between verse and poetry, especially in periods of literary and cultural history when verse becomes more important, more valued than poetry, so much so that in some cases, only through verse is poetry recognized and celebrated. The colonial experience in every region of the world is the most notorious of this conflation of poetry with versification. Let me add that here, I speak from experience, an experience that was both personal and generational.

I do not know about the experience of the present generation of primary and secondary school pupils but in the time of my generation in late colonial West Africa,what one read and heard of as poetry proper was always in the form of verse. And not just verse in general, but verse with very strong and clearly defined patterns of stanzas, meters and rhymes, together with the appropriate diction to go with the verse. Even when,as undergraduates in advanced classes in poetry and literary criticism my colleagues and Ieventually encountered modern, unrhymed free verse, we continued to hold on tenaciously to that complete identification of poetry with verse that we had been taught in the early, formative stages of our education. Moreover, it was not only the case that we could not imagine that poetry could exist outside of versification, there was also the fact that virtually all the verse forms that we were taught were from the Western heritage of poetry, especially of the written, canonical currents. In the last year of my undergraduate education at UI in the late Sixties, lectures on oral African poetry began to be given in an optionalcourse on African Literature. But at the time,it was not a popular course at all. Indeed, only about a fifth of my set of about sixty students took that course. I regret to say that I was not one of them. In effect, it was to take at least another decade before the idea of oral poetry, the idea of vital and sustaining connections between orality, poetry and indigenous and local African sources began to take rootand grow among teachers, criticsand, especially, poets themselves.

I admit it: from the vast conceptual and expressive spaces of the confrontation of modern African poetry with Western forms and traditions, I am deliberately narrowing the field of discourse here to the special case or “front” of poetry versus versification. Typically, when the subject of Africa and poetry in the historic contexts of colonialism and modernity is raised by scholars and poets, the emphasis is on the African heritage of poetry as a match for the imposed Western heritage and its forms, especially with regards to the fact that colonialism could not and did not wipe out the traditions of poetry in our indigenous languages. We read of the stillsurviving and vibrant traditions of heroic, oracular, sacred, secular and satirical forms and traditions of poetry in our continent. We read of the Zulu izibongo; of Yoruba ewi and ijala; of Urhoboudje; of the Swahili utendi. But hardly ever do we read of poetry in relation to verse. If that is the case, why am I deliberately narrowing the field of discourse in this tribute to Niyi Osundareto the focused issue of the confrontation of poetry with versification?

The answer to this question is both simple and complex, both uncomplicated and incredibly challenging in its implications and ramifications. The simple part is this: it seems to me that of nearly all our poets, the question is most productively raised in relation to Osundare’s poetry because, in fact, it is a question, a challenge to which he returns again and again, almost more than any other African poet. For the complicated part, we will have to grapple with the fact that Osundare did not set out to produce poetry that would eventually help to resolve the inherited, colonially imposed antagonism between poetry and versification in modern African literature; rather, he was/is only following where poetry would take him and that was/is nearly everywhere. What do I have in mind in making this observation or claim?

Long, long before Osundare and other poets of his generational cohort like Kofi Ayindoho, Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan, Tanure Ojaide and Syl Cheney-Coker, many African poets had engaged this issue of poetry’s confrontation with the imposed verse forms of the Western poetic heritage. As a matter of fact, beyond an early imitative or apprenticeship phase, extraordinarily powerful and eloquent poets like Leopold Sedar Senghor, Agostino Neto, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark Tchicaya U Tam’siand Kofi Awoonor had broken free of the imposed Western versification models, ranging freely and wonderfully between and around Western verse patterns and African matrices of poetic creation in all its richness and diversity. As a matter of fact, Senghor, Okigbo, Soyinka and Clark weremasterful in the syntheses that they brokered between the colonially inherited verse forms and indigenous, local African expressions of poetry. In the best of their poetry, they went beyond and broke completely free of the colonial overdetermination of their generation. In other words, it came to pass that in the best output of these poets, it was no longer possible to separate Western verse forms from African poetic sources.

With Osundare and the poets of his (our) generation, the colonial overdetermination had vanished. In plain and simple terms, schoolchildren were no longer taught to recognize poetry only – or even primarily – in the form of verse – as we had been taught. Poetry, we now knew, is not restricted to verse forms and patterns but could be found everywhere – since it was/is coincident with Life itself. Let me put this in very blunt terms: in my undergraduate literary education at UI – which was as sound as one could get at that time in the best universities in the English-speaking world – there was not a single African poet in the syllabus for Poetry, one of the six compulsory courses in the English honours program examined in our final year examinations. Okigbo, Soyinka and Clark had already produced some of their best poetry, but no, they did not make it to our syllabus for Poetry! Meanwhile, they faced another nemesis of far greater ferocity since, despite their achievements, critics like Chinweizu and his partners in the so-called “bolekaja” criticism railed tirelessly against Soyinka and the poets of his generation for not being “African” enough in their poetry.

Free of the colonial overdetermination, Osundare and the poets of his generation, together with younger poets like Harry Garuba, Ogaga Ifowodo and Esiaba Irobi, could look anywhere and everywhere for inspiration. And based on this experience, they have discovered that the poetry-verse tension or antagonism is not restricted to only the colonial condition or experience since, as a matter of fact, it is a perennial, never-ending dialectic of literary history in general and the fate of poetry at all times in particular. I may be wrong, but I think that more than any other poet in his generation, Osundare has taken this truism to heart. He looks for “poetry” everywhere – and he usually finds it, sometimes in the most unusual of places: the street; the marketplace; the farmland; the legislative houses of our “politrickians” (apologies to Harry Garuba); the town or village square; other poets; books, newspapers and the social media; and the innermost recesses of the heart. This is my favorite of all: in the relentless struggles for justice in our country, our continent and our world. Osundare is indeed, the ultimate walkabout or, in Nigerian Pidgin, “waka-waka” poet of his generation.

This is not, indeed cannot be a long tribute. I have not spoken of the actual contents of his poetry, a subject that has been universally adjudged to make Osundare the “people’s poet” parexcellence of this period of our history. And neither have I spoken of the incredible range of verse forms and techniques in his output, a subject that would perhaps qualify Osundare as, after Okigbo, “the poets’ poet” extraordinaire.  There will be a time and a place for all these and more. So, let me bring this to a close. In case you do miss the point about my using good wine as a metaphor for poetry in this tribute, let me point it out to you, Niyi: boo fe, boo ko, you will treat us to excellent, priceless wine to celebrate your attainment of this milestone, my friend. Welcome to the club, okunrin ogun!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu