• As the Laureate’s poetry in Korean translation makes debut
Poet Laureate and Emeritus Distinguished Professor Niyi Osundare has just had some of his poems translated into Korean. The 240-page anthology is a collaboration between the multiple literary award winner and Joon- Hwan Kim, a Korean university professor with extensive literary experience in translation. In this interview with YINKA FABOWALE, the National Merit Award winner who is billed for two international meetings in Korea in October, one of them taking place in Paju, also called The Book City of Korea, speaks on the project and related issues.
Your thought on literature, especially poetry with social accountability and social commitment.
My literary writings and my mass media interventions enjoyed a remarkable symbiosis in those years when progressive forces in Nigeria deployed all their resources in the anti-military, pro-democracy struggle. I was there in the country, and like other Nigerians, I felt the steel accent of the military decree; I heard the clanging staccato of the gates of media houses as they were banged shut by soldiers; I knew what it meant to be interrogated ad nauseam at the airport on my way out of the country or back to it; I knew what it meant to have my mails seized or opened on “orders from above”. What about those sleepless nights in my incommodious flats on the university campus where the military had marked me down as one of those “undue radicals” whose every move had to be monitored, and whose speaking engagements had to be disrupted? Then, the resilience of our people, and at times, my feeling of unease about their helpless accommodation of suffering. And the need to say that in spite of all these circumstances, or because of them, the torch of Hope must not be extinguished…….. For me, the response to this situation brought literature and politics even closer together. This was the situation that led me to the creation of Songs of the Season, the weekly poetry column in the Sunday Tribune, the first (I’m told) column of this kind in Nigeria, and one that gave me the title “Bard of the Tabloid Platform”. Songs of the Seasons took on a new name, Lifelines, when it was moved to The Nation , another thriving Nigerian newspaper, in Feb. 2007, and has been there since then.
There is no way I could have done all this if I lived miles and miles, oceans, and deserts away from the site of the bleeding wound. Echoes heard in exile may sound neat and sometimes titillating, but they can never rival the raw, throbbing blast of the original voice.
We lie, therefore, and the truth is not in us when we rationalize from the distant comfort of exile that diaspora displacement does little or no damage to our literary/cultural productions. And by this I means the very creation of the works and the theoretical formations and critical practices that emanate from them.
There is also the aesthetic issue to consider. The fact that different parts of the world have different methods of evaluation and different protocols of judgement and grounds for acceptance. At times, what is considered ‘beautiful’ in one place is deemed ‘ugly’ in others. Take poetry as an example. Our world is not only full of different poems; it is also ruled and regulated by what I call differential poetics. At times, Chinese poetry is judged as being too transparent by English readers who accost it in its English translation, without any knowledge of its grandeur in its original Chenese and its niche in the long history of Chinese poetic tradition. A poem praised as ‘really superior’ in a US writing workshop may be criticized for being too narrational and over-confessional by a Nigerian audience. On the other hand, some members of my audience sometimes tell me how much they love my poetry and performance, then wonder if there isn’t too much music in my poetry. Others are somewhat bothered by the ‘political’ bent of some of the poems. But how many times have I declared that the poems they are talking about are strongly influenced by my Yoruba language and culture, and that in that language people do not waste their sweat trying desperately to find a solid, indisputable difference between the poem and the song; that in Yoruba tradition, the performer will ‘ke’ (chant. utter) the ‘ewi’ (poem), rather than ‘ka’ (read) it. With regard to the second issue, how many times have I told my American audience that the Yoruba audience is not put off by reference to social, political matters in a poem; that, as a matter of fact, they consider the work ‘empty’ without them?
Differential situations, differential poetics, differential aesthetics. A well fed citizen in America may not like to hear the word ‘hunger’ mentioned in a poem; but a Nigerian/African audience will praise you not only for mentioning ‘hunger’ in the poem, but also for excoriating the thieving politicians that are responsible for our hunger epidemic.
The audience factor, yes, the audience factor. There is hardly any perfect, immutable universality in the tastes of audiences across the world. This is one of the so many things that are not known by the young Nigerian warrior whose dream is to rise, hit the plane, land with incredible splash, and conquer America with his irresistible poetry. America may not recognize the fares you have so proudly brought all the way from Africa; and there is no guarantee she will fall for those fares. Your only viable solution? Adapt or die. Dump your African mumbo jumbo into your weather-beaten knapsack. Say ‘o digbere’ (sing an elegiac farewell) to your oriki, ijala, iremoje, esa egungun, alamo, ogede, ayajo, ofo, afoje, afose, ekun’yawo, orin aro, orin efe, orin reso, orin more etc .Dop your drum, your drum, your drum; distance your newfound verse from the drum……. Brace up for an encounter with the Western sonnet, the ode, the lyric, the ballad, the elegy, the epic, the villanelle, etc . Get ‘metrically literate’ and prosodically profound. Purge your verse of its political content. Embrace the show-don’t-tell golden rule. Tune your strings to the rule of rhyme .
Schooling, workshopping over, with an MFA or its equivalent in your kit. Time to go on the job hunt; time to teach what you have learnt or what you have been taught. After over a hundred applications or more, you land in the creative writing section of the English department of a university or community college where what is required is the teaching of the poetics and literary tradition your new MFA has equipped you with, where people know little and care less about the mumbo jumbo of your “African poetics”. You ply your trade as an enthusiastic token in the periphery of an immutably English department and its Classical (that is, Greek and Roman) antecedents and paradigms. To keep yourself steady on the academic ladder, you have to ‘publish or perish’. Then you discover that what the publishing outlets want is a replica of what the university writing workshops had taught and drilled. Rejection slips begin to land with mortifying frequency, with some journals and magazines actually going the whole hog by dictating (or is it suggesting?) to you what to do or undo to make it to their hallowed pages – especially how to purge your writing of its quaint/exotic (meaning ‘African’) idiom and preoccupation with social and political issues. So, you review your journey from the drilling writing workshop to the patronizing publishing establishment, and what you see is a straight line between two deracinating and degrading points. Unless great care is taken, your breaking point will be as loud as an exclamation mark!
Look at your self in the mirror two or three seasons after these ordeals, and examine what you see. A broken but mendable figure? An original maestro now turned a mimic versifier? Apply the Before-and-After Test: what was your poetry like before the great crossing; what is it like now after the Atlantic embrace? What kind of attitudinal changes have resulted from your new status; what kind of evaluative-comparative intelligence?. I once told a poet-compatriot about the dramatic change I had noticed between the supple lyricism, bardic bravura, and passionate, unapologetic social message in his pre-japa poetry, and the tame, overcautious, formally correct versification since his crossing. I alerted him to the following observations about his new works: the indigenous proverbs had disappeared, so had the idiomatic turns of phrase, the astounding wordplay, tonal dexterity, and ideophonic signification so indigenous to his mothertongue, the ubiquitous music so central to its magic of meaning, the raucous, disarming humou; the partially coded witticisms and jokes tucked in between the lines to tease the audience into conspiratorial participation; above all, the feeling by the poet-performer that they are in a cultural, artistic, epistemic, and social community in which they and their works really matter, and that there is weight to their words and consequence to their presence. His response was frank. almost plaintive: “My broda, you are right. To survive, .I have been trying to give them over here what they want . Some of the change was deliberate at the beginning, but now, it is becoming more and more unconscious. You know, as they say, when in Rome, do like Romans . . . .” Loaded response, no doubt. Says so much about our “New-Roman” mentality – or syndrome. Even more unnerving is the psychological progression this poet had gone through in his own Before-and-After situation……
But does it have to be so drastic, this transition from what you were and what you have become? What about the essentially pluralist, accommodating nature of most African cultures – or specifically, Yoruba culture, the one I know intimately and can talk about with a measure of authoritativeness? The one whose philosophical and epistemological practice is additive rather than replacive. The one which insists that the sky is wide enough for a thousand birds to fly without clashing – well, that is, if they do it wisely, tolerantly, equitably. The one which teaches us that you cannot walk in perfect balance unless the two hands you swing on both sides of your body are equal and purposively coordinated.
So my usual advice: allow, or strive to achieve an equitable mutual ‘contamination’ between the two worlds at your disposal. It is now left for you to master, even domesticate, the Western forms and techniques you have been taught, without forgetting, without denigrating, the indigenous ones that shaped your voice and vision, your soul and style before your “diaspora repositioning”, to quote a memorable phrase by E.E, Sule. A successful marriage, nay mastery, of the two traditions would yield an ideational versatility and literary competence that are unique and admirable. But you have to work relentlessly hard at it, because . success in this new task is rare and far between. You will need to know that not every shout produces a good poem, even as you struggle to learn how to talk above and beyond the whisper.. When Bob Marley told the oppressed and the voiceless: “You got to c-r-y to be heard”, he reminded me of a Yoruba saying I have been hearing since my youth: “Ebi npa mi ko see f;ife wi” (“I am starving” is not the kind of thing you say in a leisurely whistle). Hardly any room for ‘cool’ dawdling in the Poetry of Pain. As Edward Kamau Brathwaite has so inimitably put it, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameter” . A creative writing tradition ruled by a show-don’t-tell diktat surely sounds like a loud gag order for the conscientious African writer. The questions that keep rearing for an answer are: who is afraid of and/or offended by the ‘telling’? Why? Whose aesthetic/ideological nerve is rattled by the telling? Whose judgemental paradigm/preference is being challenged by it? In every great, consequential artist there is something that harks ineluctably back to the original and the indigenous; to that soft, affective dawn in time and space, that tender and fertile space between the heart and the mind, between Being and the politics of Belonging. For the poet, that is the home of the song whose echoes embrace the universe; the root of the tree whose branches traverse the world. Ask Okigbo, Clark, Soyinka, Kunene, Neruda, Ojaide, Brathwaite, (Langston) Hughes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Heaney, Transtromer, Preseren. Elytis Ask Whitman whose ‘largeness’ finds its root in his American soil, or Joseph Bruchac, the deeply touching Abenaki poet/storyteller.
Can you speak to complaints about the attitude of our publishers with regards to perceived dishonesty and lack of adequate promotion of authors and their works?
I am being very candid here and I am not judging those complaining. They have a right to complain because of the environment that we are in. But what I am telling you is that they should not throw away the baby with the bath water. The way the situation is today in Nigeria, you have to be careful not to allow cynicism and the attendant pessimism to smother the lingering sun in our sky. Yes, we have Nigerians who live abroad and have made it in the literary field, but they are still few, far too few, considering our population of 250 million people (Or how many did they say we were?!)
Yes, they have won recognition because they are abroad (and good) , and they have earned their laurels . Look, that is good for our literature. But the point I am making is that Nigeria is not the wasteland, the hell to flee at all cost, as some people have been making it out to be. I’m also saying that the few stars that have made it abroad do not total up to the entire Nigerian galaxy. As I mentioned above, there are many, many that have faded away with their dreams. Botched dreams, false hopes: the real consequences of japa/janun (bolt away/bolt in vain). America is not waiting there, Europe is not waiting there for you to ride in and pluck the prize.
Also worth considering is the price you pay to get your book published abroad: the pressure by literary agents, brand-makers, image curators, and salespersons; the editorial impasse that often occurs when the foreign publisher and the African writer do not know how to reach a compromise regarding the retention or otherwise of ‘exotic’ African contents in the work; the privileging of the taste and preference of the foreign audience in the resolution of this and other challenges, the problems of publicity of the published work and politics of visibility of the author. To put it bluntly and honestly, there are certain truths about the African condition that prompt the rejection slip from the foreign publisher with a close eye on the bottom line always dictated by the book-buying public and the so-called market forces. More so in this age of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) phobia, book banning, and resurgent illiberalism. As an African writer, you are in endless search for that foreign publisher that would publish your work without de-Africanizing its content, and who would not get the book remaindered soon after its publication. A friend of mine spent seven years on the writing of a novel, and about the same period looking for the right publisher. Virtually all the assessors praised the manuscript to the high heavens, but the book took so long to find a publisher because of the author’s insistence on keeping some parts the publisher would rather throw away. This author is one of Africa’s best writers.
In sum, Nigerian publishers are not known for their efficiency or honesty, but it is NOT ALL of them. Dark as the sky my look, there are silver linings in the clouds. About two months ago, one of these publishers sent me his new books on Micere Mugo, Soyinka, Irele. Before then he had published a really ground-breaking book, edited by dele Jegede and Aderonke Adesamya, on Akinola Lasekan, a truly remarkable Nigerian painter, graphic artist, cartoonist, and cultural activist. I was so moved by the quality of his work that I was glad to send him a note of appreciation and gratitude. There are a few other Nigerian publishers whose products would hold their own anywhere in the world.
One very important point people forget or decide not to remember is the problem of accessibility of African books published abroad, far, far from the sources of their inspiration and relevance of their contents. The problem of accessibility is further compounded by that of affordability. With the crippling devaluation of African currencies and the atrociously unfavourable exchange rates between African currencies and those of the dominant players of global economy and finance, book-buying in Africa is in the zone of zero necessity. Right now, in Nigeria, with the recent tumbling of the national currency, it will take the entire monthly salary of a low-wage worker to buy an imported novel or collection of poems. That is if the books are available at all. Not even Nigerian university libraries or high research institutes can stock their shelves with books from foreign sources at the present time. . To bail themselves out of this terrible situation, some people have taken to pirating or massive photocopying. I was a personal victim-witness of this in Nigeria in late July this year when a postgraduate student working on my poetry was in desperate need for one of my books published in the US.
He approached me for assistance, but I couldn’t help because I had exhausted all the 12 copies I brought from the US on my flight to Nigeria. The very painful ‘solution’ is that this student had to borrow the copy I had gifted one of my colleagues at the university of Ibadan, and photocopy the entire book! You see how desperate situations force people to violate the rule of “fair use”? When I mentioned this situation to another colleague with pain in my voice, he just shrugged it off as one of those things……
This is why I keep saying that getting published abroad can only solve a few of our publishing problems, while creating others. The prevalence of illiteracy in Nigeria/Africa is caused by this kind of situation. And therein lies the root of our recalcitrant underdevelopment.
You have always been unsparing of African political leadership whose ineptitude and corruption you blame for the ‘Japa’ syndrome that has continued to drain and impoverish the continent of quality human resources needed for its growth.
Seek ye the political kingdom and other things shall be added unto thee. We have no countries yet in Africa and that is why we have no literary culture in the real sense of the word. How many African rulers, yes, rulers, for I do not call them leaders; how many African rulers read? And what kind of stuff do they read? Time there was when the African leadership cadre comprised some men and women who were not hostile to ideas, and who were not afraid of the book. Remember people like Nwalimu Julius Nyerere and the impact he made in Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the young Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso often spoke like a philosopher king whose mind was tempered by music and ideas. Agostinho Neto, the founding president of Angola, was himself a poet. Of course, we remember Nelson Mandela, leader, lawyer and humanist thinker. These are leaders who know and cherish the value of education People you can really argue with and talk with; people who love books because they read book and they write books themselves. So, intellectually, they are one with us.
What are you going to tell Bokassa about books, or Mobutu, or Sani Abacha, or Samuel Doe? When last did President Buhari read a book?
The point I am making is that African rulers have not made Africa habitable. This is why people are running away, in search of the so-called greener pastures. You will remember the title of my keynote at the Teju Olaniyan Foundation ceremony, “Japa/Janu” I added the word, ‘Janu’ which means “to fall out and get lost” because I really want to open our eyes and minds to the other side of the diaspora story; to tell us that the grass is not always greener on the other side . Brain drain is what we call it here in Nigeria, brain gain is what they call it in Europe and America. I’m sure these two places wonder all the time: why does Africa come so cheap?!
Here is a cutting from The Punch Monday July 10 2023 on cost of living. Because of our terrible economic situation more Nigerians are joining the Japa train as our hardship worsens.. Yes, I am quoting from page 2 of The Punch of July 10 2023:. from 2017-2022, 57,000 Nigerian professionals japa’ed from Nigeria to the UK. And from 2015-2021, 28,350 Nigerians left here for Canada. Now, from 2015 -2022, 128,770 students left Nigeria for the UK. And you can be sure that not one of them will be willing to come back. Simply incalculable, the loss in all this to Nigeria. From 2015-2022, Nigeria lost 6,068 doctors to emigration. This is one country that has one of the lowest doctor -to- citizen, ratios in the world. Right now resident doctors are on strike, they have been on strike for so long, but nobody is attending to their grievances.
Nigerian rulers, like their counterparts in many other parts of Africa, place no value on human welfare. That is why they steal and squander funds meant for development and throw us all into medieval darkness. How do we explain the fact that even in this second half of the 21st century, we are still beleaguered by power and internet outages, lack of water for basic needs, lack of adequate shelter, poor or non-existent medicare, death-trap roads, and abject poverty in a country ruled by bloated billionaires. Add to these the chronic insecurity of life and property, and a phenomenally low life expectancy. How would any one not seek every possible – or impossible – way to escape from this hell?
You differentiated the diaspora as being of various kinds – the Jews, the Asians, the African, etc, is ours profitable or negative as some others?
Two Thursdays ago, we had what they called Nigeria in Diaspora Gala Night. I could not believe it. The Nigerian government brought people from Europe, America, from whatever foreign land they were. and titillated them with a grand gala! I said to myself: well, at least our government realizes the quality of these diasporeans . But who drove them away from this country in the first instance? Whose foul policies made it impossible for them to put their vast and varied talents and expertise to the service of their needy motherland? Who/where are the perpetrators of the countless acts of frustration and disablememt that drove these worthy Nigerians into the hands of foreign employers?
For goodness sake, consider that medical miracle performed by Dr. Oluleye on account of his own personal genius and the phenomenal instrumentality of Ameica’s medical science.
By now he would have been able to carry out that feat at the University Teaching Hospital, UCH, Ibadan if that hospital had been allowed to continue on the scale of development it had achieved in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when it was in the happy league of the best of its kind in the Commonwealth, and one of the most respected in the world. But Nigeria’s rulers arrested the UCH dream, stunted its growth, and thwarted its soar for excellence. Yes, the same rulers who squander our money on medical tourism in every advanced corner of the world.
Now, with regard to diaspora movement, the rhetorical question now is: why do Nigerian diasporeans go and never return? As I said in the Olaniyan lecture, diaspora movement is, generally, a tipodal phenomenon: Departure, Arrival, and Return. (The work of Professor MJC Echeruo, the renowned scholar and teacher, on this categorization is more than worth reading). Of all the other diaspora groups I know, Jewish, Irish, Asian, the one that violates the third leg (Return) most flagrantly is the African. And the reasons are all over this interview – and my studies on the Nigerian diaspora.
Time there was when the homecall was urgent and persistent. As students in the US and Canada in those days, you spoke with patriotic confidence about our ‘native land’, to damned people who thought or said you were there because you had nowhere else to go. You were always in a hurry to complete your education in good time and dash back to Nigeria with a precious diploma that guaranteed you a decent job and respect the moment you landed in Nigeria. And straight on, you were able to serve Nigeria with the valuable education you had brought home plus so many other aspects of your North American experience. But that was a time when the Nigerian economy was strong, the naira was impregnable, and when Nigeria spoke, the world listened.
That was when home was haven; now it is hell. Or, to put it in the Tutuolan way, home has become an “unreturnable land” of pain.
When European slave traders came here across the Atlantic four centuries ago, they had to force millions of Africans on to their ships on voyages of hell that led them to the eternal slavery which took away their human dignity. Today, thousands of Africans are dying to get onboard the current equivalent of those ships in a desperate bid to escape the hell the African home has become. Those not bound for the Atlantic crossing are swarming across the Sahara Passage where many of them perish on their way to Libya, then on to the Mediterranean Sea where hundreds have drowned, some of them women with babies strapped to their backs. All in their desperate bid to get to Europe by any means necessary – and unnecessary.
And then you ask: how can a country/continent hope to develop when some of its best brains are being forced into exile? The japa syndrome is one of Africa’s current malignant afflictions. Are African rulers thinking about what to do about it? For goodness sake, what do our rulers talk about when they gather together as the African Union?
Right now, in many African countries, the past is better than the present. We must all strive to make sure that this horrible present is not better than our future.
