Book review
Book title: Silver Lining: An Anthology of Nigerian Literature Poems, Drama, Short Story and Critical Essay edited by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Folu Agoi
Publisher: University Press Plc, Ibadan, 2019.
Number of pages: 166
Reviewer: Ezekiel Segun Ajose
Silver Lining is a gripping bouquet of the finest works by the nation’s accomplished writers and it is just as well that it was published under the auspices of PEN Nigeria. To start with, its publication attests to a blend of burst of creative energy, of new, impetuous voices craving audience, of impatient wails lamenting a nation’s descent into the abyss of decadence. Edited by PEN Nigeria’s long-time members and writers, Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Folu Agoi, the anthology is quite impressive in the depth of its themes articulated in what Osundare called “grave social purpose” and the eclecticism of its affirmations. I make bold to state that it is not fortuitous that the publication of Silver Lining at this moment of depressing socio-economic and political system coincided both with PEN Nigeria’s visibility in Nigeria’s literary firmament and with a burgeoning of literary effluorescence given further impetus by proliferation of new publishing outfits. Confronted with a barrage of postcolonial pathologies in different guise and forms, a burden of enormous proportion is imposed on writers to denounce tyranny in pursuit of the ideals of an open society.
The works featured in Silver Lining, not excepting few that explore the writers’ private reflections, run the gamut of vexing issues that touch on the postcolonial condition. The title comes with a hint of optimum, anchored on the incipient signs of congenial ambience for literary fecundity or an expectation of redemption from the intractable menaces plaguing our dear nation; what, not surprisingly, accounts for the preponderance of social, economic and political issues in the anthology. Importantly, the anthology is a pastiche, a bricolage of disconnected issues articulated in multiple voices of the postmodern, a staccato of wish-fulfilment bedecked in hermetic mesh.
In reviewing this anthology, I find Femi Osofisan’s ‘’Upon Ifa’s Rebirth: Chaos and Creativity in our Literary Compound’’ very instructive not just because of the disconcerting affinity between ‘’anomie’’ and literary effluorescence, but also because it situates the catalyst of literary fecundity in that moment when a society is deeply afflicted by intolerable woes. Put another way, how does it happen that in its moment of acute distress a nation, almost invariably, experiences its greatest literary harvest? Femi Osofisan, one of Nigeria’s foremost playwrights, answers the question, albeit by way of illustration, positing that “psychotic experience”-the kind seen in a country in ferment- provides a fitting backdrop to the intractable maladies of daily encounters. This condition, he maintains, sharpens a writer’s creative imagination, offering an explanation for the disconcerting juxtaposition of chaos and anarchy on the one hand and the fervent of artistic expression on the other. Thus, the unimaginable contradictions and maladies bred in the dissonance between vicious circle of hope and dashed expectations of lived experiences becomes an apt backdrop for the works collected in Silver Lining.
Silver Lining is an interesting mix of writers’ private reflections on the scourges of the contemporary world, a fervid re-enactment of personal but collective tragedy of society in the grip of vicious menaces, the descent into anarchy and chaos, amidst the collective trauma of a postmodern world in a flux with no fixed, coherent explanatory reference. Though the works draw from imagination, they are eerily familiar in their painful recollections of our collective loss, and bear telltale signs of the strictures the social, economic, cultural and political forces exert on the texture of contemporary life; besides, I find in the anthology more than a scathing account of the threats -ism terms -terrorism, capitalism, globalisation, racism, sectionalism, provincialism, etc pose to the contemporary world. The poems, without exception, are reflections or lamentations, of loss or absence of reason, order, peace, security, happiness, either of the individual, family or society. They rue the scourges that manacle our age- class, poverty, disease, religion, greed, etc. Despite the pervasive motifs of loss, waste, death and hopelessness, few of the poets remain stubbornly hopeful in the face of choking depravity, their works tempering the stultifying feeling of the pathos with sweet serenade of love and hope; these poets affirm, by so doing, their unflagging belief in the indestructibility of humanity. The poems, a bricolage of local and international maladies plaguing our world, interrogate suffering, oppression and savagery and present them not as a local monstrosity but as an assault on the entire human race. The works collected in this book share one thing: they all have a passionate concern for humanity woven into the tapestry of writers’ rumination.
Part I of the anthology features 21 poets most of who, by my reckoning, are of new generation, with the exceptions of the quartet of Soyinka, Osundare, Tanure Ojaide and Okinba Launko. I do not include Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo in the quartet because her oeuvres share the same artistic vision and concerns with new generation writers. The poems lament the existential threats confronting our nations – death, leadership, terrorism, fundamentalism, corruption, disillusionment, the allure of power and wealth, deception, selfishness, charlatanism, etc all compounded by the sordid realities of life in a capitalist, globalised world, among others. In a way that suggests its reflection of public concerns about insecurity and the malevolent culture of mindless cruelty unleashed by dissident groups on hapless, vulnerable victims, the anthology opens with a poem dedicated to Leah Sharibu, the figure at the centre of the horrific Chibok -and let not forget Dapchi- school girls’ abduction and the global campaigns to bring the plights of the girl child to the front burner of public policy since the incident. In the poem, “A Humanist’s Ode to Chibok, Dapchi, Soyinka bemoans the callousness of the abductors’ cruelty but eulogises the rare courage of “a frail tendril” in the face of a ruthless assault on her person. Employing an abstruse trope as would a master bard, Soyinka figures religion as the scourge of humanity, warning of its threat to global security; its innocuous but prevalent symbols – cross, crescent and caryatid- constituting a potent spell that numbs adherents to insensate submission; its viciousness so endemic as to make it “history’s stalking hounds”. Humanity, Soyinka concludes sadly, is at the mercy of enslaving texts, being irredeemably shackled to “…minaret and spire, from crib/to grave…”, confronted by the peril of a new terror unleashed on the world by the “allure of gilded sepulchres”. In a paper titled “A Voice That Would Not Be Silenced”, published in 2001, Soyinka had raised an alarm of proliferation of a new threat given force by the murderous intents of warped “mind-set that feeds on a compulsion to destroy other beings who do not share, not even the same beliefs, but specific subcategories of such beliefs” (cited in Ato Ouayson and Tejumola Olaniyan (eds) African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory). According to Soyinka, the spectre of violence and conflicts in the world today has its fertile ground in the negative influence of religion and ideology and the scourges of bigotry and intolerance it has bred.
Osundare’s “My God is Godder Than Yours” is a humorous but serious poem that re-echoes the real and present danger of proselytization to the social fabric of society. The poem bemoans the affectation and total absence of decorum and reason in the practice of religion, a development that has bred disgusting and pervasive norms of total disdain for hardwork fuelled by perverted faith in the benevolent intercession of a caring God whose only requirement for blessing is holiness shorn of the obligation of diligence. Achebe’s description of certain fiction as malignant is a fitting description of the insidious damage religion has done to the work ethics of contemporary times; a telling affirmation of the belief and expectations of some sanctimonious converts in manna from heaven. Today, Osundare observes, many believers “…pray and pray and forget the work/” expecting “passing angels …come with mobile banks/ live all day in …castle in the air”.
Akintan-Ralph’s “Merchants of the Temple, while re-echoing the mockery that epitomises religion in recent times, suggests in its title the perversion that has become ingrained in religious observances. The poem tears through the veneer of ‘pretended holiness’ believers often profess to expose the inveterate morass of corruption pervading the church. Akintan-Ralph handles language with dexterity, employing a panoply of tropes that highlights the extent of the pretence and deception that mar contemporary religious practice. The discordant tunes of the cacophonous words parallel the dissonance between the sacredness of religion and the mockery it has become in the hands of holy servants who speak for God. A combination of apostrophe, rhetoric, hyperbole, enjambment, etc is employed to denounce what “robbers in sanctuary” have made of the church. Akintan-Ralph’s “Ringlet of Lawlessness” is ironic in its suggestiveness of anarchy in the very chamber where laws are made. A poignant indictment of political corruption emblematic of politics in postcolonial nations, the poet employs a plethora of imagery of dirt and mess to deplore the gargantuan level of corruption in private and public life in postcolonial nations. Given to chaos, the legislature lacks the moral authority to enforce its own order, choked by “clouds of corruption” and by contesting vested interests that ignite the spar “in the madhouse”, and the inevitable need for “calling the police /Inviting the khaki boys” to maintain order. The poet asks in the concluding stanza whether it is not justifiable to recall bigoted MPs in the “attic of lawlessness” considering their role in the destruction of the labour of “our forefathers”.
Chiytwo Ola’s poems, “Do the Heavens Know?” “Hung” and “Depth of Darkness”, are private reflections on life, pondering on the shifting interplay of happiness and sadness and the welcoming relief refuge in art offers writers when they are confronted with the dilemma of the unsaid, the unsharable, cogently expressed in these lines “uncertainties/chain my soul/to inked pages/of woven words/that speak of/thoughts I can’t share.” In “Lull Our Fears” Ola interrogates the pathetic system the Nigeria state embodies, afflicted by continuing cases of mishap and sadness. She deplores the lethargy of the law enforcement arm of the state but sees it as victims of the ubiquitous pain and uncertainty that are familiar to the general populace. Apparently referring to the utter disregard for life as has become the norm in recent times, she bemoans utter disrespect for sanctity of life seeing as the cause of this the ordinariness of blood, its descent from the sacred to the banal, represented in its loss of its crimson red to green, explaining its incapacity to draw any revulsion and the rise in the orgy of killings, what is clearly brought home in the mindless killings of the seven policemen to whom the poet dedicates the poem and whom, she insists, are not just mere numbers but humans.
AJ. Dagga Tolar’s “I Can’t Breathe” is a damning account of the abuse of power and mindless cruelty by agents who, acting on the imprimatur of principals immune from the ravaging carnage and tyranny they oversee, commit heinous crimes under the state’s protection with impunity. The poem interrogates the politics of oil and the economic imperativeness of shoring up support for a despotic leader whose unguarded actions upset the fragile local and regional peace. The poem laments the absence of freedom, the choked atmosphere of censorship and the fettered lived experiences under an oppressor. I find the poem instructive not only because Kashoggi’s last words, “I can’t breathe”, evince the unuttered, repressed cries of a people who live under the jackboot of a despot but also because the irregular, uneven rhythm of the lines parallel the unstable, jumbled contours of life under the regime.
Ethel Ngozi Okeke’s “I Come to See You, Mama” is ironic both in its morbid courting of death and in its capitulation and surrendering to the trauma of lived experiences. The poem presents suffering as part of the tapestry of ontological reality, but its defamiliarising effect on the audience resides in the flippant choice of death as a relief to ordeals, not to mention that the personage’s attitude to death demystifies it not as a cruel finality but as a powerless, ordinary incident that humans can choose when they feel the need. But beyond this, the poem calls attention to the unbearable agony of existence that makes such a forbidding option a choice.
Akinsimoye Samuel Omoniyi’s “I Should Have Told Her I care” is a frank expression of regret of the unpleasant consequences of individualism now permanently ingrained in the contemporary social life. Completely foreign to African and inimical to communalism, individualism fixates on the needs of the individual and ignores the welfare of the community. It is a new social order given to repressed desire, to the shifting relationship between what is desired and the undesirable outcome of unfulfilled desires. The poet deplores the avoidable loss of lives following the indifferent attitudes to the welfare of others. Metaphorically, the dominant trope employed in this verse might also have been condemning the general lackadaisical attitude of many to their nation. Unfortunately, the deed has been done, and the terrible consequences of our collective actions are expressions of regret. The personage in the poem laments, “You see, I-I should have/I didn’t and never would./I should have told her I cared. Omoniyi’s poem strikes at the heart of the tragedy afflicting our nation in the way in which what it deplores, intertextually, is the cause of the maladies lamented in the works in this anthology. His “Recyling Debris” is dismissive of any attempt to fix the rot choking the national life, saying it is a wasted futile effort destined to fail. The brevity of the poem suggests its abrupt dismissal of any redemption to change a bad system, writing “It’s useless-mending the cistern/For within us lies what kills us.”
Kayode Adaramoye’s poem “Dark Sun” is suggestive of the paradox in a world that has gone awry. The preponderant image in the poem is despairingly troubling, morbid and apocalyptic, alluding perhaps to the disturbing image of bloodbath and horror as foretold in the book of Revelation. In “Migratory Flight”, he chronicles the sheer waste of lives resulting from the desperation of hassled migrants who, motivated by illusory material comfort in Europe, brace the odds to cross the Sahara to Europe. But the poem’s tone is pessimistic, predicting that more migrants fleeing the intolerable conditions in Africa will risk crossing the Sahara to Europe. The poem concludes raising a question as to whether the dead will come back to life to haunt the world they so unceremoniously exited.
Okinba Launko’s poems are personal reminiscences on the triumph of the human spirit and the enduring values of true friendship, fondl memories of lost loved ones, immortality of art, the ravages of time and the blessings of a prosperous future.
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s two poems “Me too “Movement” and “Our “Time Person” of the Year” espouse the cause for which she has devoted her works: depiction of women as an oppressed class and a passionate cry for their liberation. “ “Me Too” Movement” is replete with images of an abused, violated woman but the poem also eulogises Alyssa Milano’s courage in drawing attention to the pervasive sexual abuse of women and encouraging victims of sexual assault to speak up. The poem, then, is a tribute to the campaign that draws global attention to the suffering of women. Amina Mohammed, to whom “Our “Time Person” of the Year” is dedicated, is also a champion of women cause for freedom and gender equality. Amina is celebrated for her role in bringing women to see themselves as one oppressed class, irrespective of their differences. The poem also acknowledges the sacrifice of love and care of women and mothers to the society.
Folu Agoi’s “Shithole”, a picture poem, laments the ‘animal instinct’ that explains man’s descent into bestiality and his recourse to brute force as is typical of life in a jungle. Utter decadence has perverted the ideals of a rational society settling for a “shithole” where man has descended from his height to play animal, a fitting reference to the return of, and increasing dominance of, animal instincts in the affairs of man in contemporary society. The poem is a damning portrayal of deification of brute force and the loss of reason. His descent into unfathomable decadence explains the fiction of “ … snakes guzzling cash/Munching cash, chewing cash like sugarcane”. The society is a jungle ravaged by virulent pests with insatiable taste for blood. Shorn of any sense of order, there is utter chaos that transmutes an “abbey” to an abbatoir, the oxymoronic juxtaposition providing an apt context for the events in the jungle. The “fantastically rich, fantastically famished” adds to the depth of the depravity in the jungle. In “Longing for Lilongwe”, Flying at such altitude brings the poet in close touch with the dazzling beauty of the stratosphere, leading to comparison of his experience with an encounter in heaven and craving of immortality. So total is the experience that he develops a longing for freedom from “life struggles”.
Akeem Lasisi’s “Udeme: Constituency Project” is a scathing attack on politics and governance in postcolonial Africa. In three stanzas, Lasisi laments the depth of decadence in governance, uncovering the layers of malfeasance that have undermined the development of the African nations. As Lasisi aptly makes clear, “constituency projects” are nothing but a huge scam, an extension of the graft culture that diverts budgeted funds for “purported” provision of infrastructure into the personal accounts of the self-serving MPs. This is what has undermined development in postcolonial nations as venal politicians, thereby denying constituents the badly needed infrastructures and amenities. The poem captures the nadir of a rigged system that thrives on perversion of ideals of leadership; Lasisi exposes the mundane lifestyles and the folly of leaders who are bereft of any enduring ideals that can engender national progress. Politicians are cast as a crop of hedonistic, self-centred leaders who forsake what matters in governance – tackling poverty, providing basic infrastructure and amenities, eager to splurge the state resources on satisfying the exclusive tastes of Udeme. One of the shocking revelations in the poem is the brazen perversion of the electoral process through which the boasting personage in the poem rigs his way to power.
Lasisi’s “Even If the Road to the Cemetery Is Closed” is a befitting elegy to a courageous woman who sacrificed her life to humanity. The poem eulogises the extraordinary humanity of Dr. Adadevoh who stopped the dreaded Ebola virus from becoming an epidermic. Despite her sacrifice however, Dr. Adedavor’s corpse is denied the kiss it deserves and her casket is not showered with thousand blooms that should have decked it“; worst still, even those she saved could not gather for a national rite in honour of her death. Despite all of these, the poem insists that even though mourners are barred from the cemetery, she shall be buried in the “ earth of songs, …/in the earth hail of songs …/a hail of songs …”. Dr. Adadevoh’s personal sacrifice provokes an admixture of feelings, loss, courage sadness, fatality.
In “Oshodi”, Lasisi celebrates renewal and redemption, and highlights the possibility that despite the anomie and depravity that have characterised contemporary social, economic and political affairs, our nation can still achieve real progress if leaders are committed to the task of governance. Using a panoply of figurative elements and trope, apostrophe, question mark, rhetorical question, metaphor and simile, Lasisi compares Oshodi’s former deplorable state with the renewal and rehabilitation that have supplanted the mess of former years. It is in this contrast the beauty of the poem resides, for the “rose that has risen from a bed of thorns” has a powerful resonance for the wider, national redemption of a nation at the precipice of implosion, setting up a fascinating promise of national recovery.
Part II of the anthology featuring R. C. Ofodile’s A Magical Meeting, is a work of pure beauty. Postmodern in approach, the drama, “welcomes” , to borrow Tyson’s (2016) words “ a thinking about itself in terms of multiplicity”. Characteristic of the postmodern text, the drama lacks a single stable reference as it is a bricolage of recollection of the past, romance, casual talk, nationalism, history, law and dissidence, among others. In addition, there is a striking sameness in its dialogue to the Absurd drama, as the two characters in discussion talk at cross purposes without any attempt at making meaning. The tone of the discussion is set when the dialogue segues into politics and an appraisal of the “state of the nation”. It is a paradox that the sweet victory Obiromi envisages in his 1949 paper remains illusive as he looks on while Bamifu he wrested from the imperialists goes to rot. Despite the commitment in the preceding dialogue, the playwright’s resort to bathos in the end of the text seems odd. Seeking the assistance of international media to fix the rot in Bamifu is simplistic and reductionist, and glosses over the complex nature of the “evil” which Finbar believes must be fought.
“The Outcast”, one of the short stories under Part III of the anthology, tells the story of a barbaric tradition which crude deduction in the unquestioning association of death and procreation constitutes an assault on reason and, nonetheless, the “vastness of the ignorance” of its purveyors. Malignant fiction such as this tradition, like the belief in racial superiority of one race over another, is a product of sick imagination, as Achebe puts it. But traditions and conventions are virulent in their unquestioning hold on people whose minds have not been formed to question the truth they purport to state. They are woven into the fabric of ideologies that permeate the social structure of society, hence the King, who is said to have “lived most of his life abroad”, acquiesces in the inviolability of the superstition that oppresses until Prince Ade, his son, uncovers the folly of the barbarity. The story is instructive because it shows that barbarous stories such as this manacle their victims until they are subjected to scrutiny. Given the role of ideology we need not question the willing capitulation of the woman to undignifying cultural practice, her complicity in her own oppression and suffering under the oppressive burden of a malignant tradition; though, the uncommon show of affection between two unequal amorous birds whom social conventions forbid to show affection to each other let alone marry is unexpected. The end of the story may satisfy our expectation of a romantic story but it is less than realistic.
Bunmi Oyisan’s “ A Private Kind of Death” narrativizes the pitiful experience of a woman who, like Mrs Curren in Coetzee’s Age of Iron, craves solitude after she is diagnosed of cervical cancer. Like Mrs Curren, she craves a lonely, choosing to live in a part of Canada where there are not many Nigerians. Above all, the story reminds us of the tenuous nature of life, and the fickleness between the boundary between health and illness. However, the character of the anonymous woman lacks depth and character. Oyinsan’s two other stories , “Mother Love” and “Egusi Soup” are about memories and love, of a mother in an abusive relationship, of a jilted lover, all horrid experiences of women’ in the diaspora.
Olatunbosun Taofeek’s “the Last of the Missionaries” raises the question of not only the corrupting influence of politics in ecclesiastical matters but also of the necessity of self-censorship as a writer’s tool. Beside exposing the descent of the church into wickedness typical of the secular world, the story also examines the complexity and the dilemma of choice writers make from competing materials. The story recommends that a character in any fiction should be built around a model of complex human emotions and actions, not around specific human idiosyncrasies. This way, what emerges is a universal portrait of man, not one of a stock character in a particular age. The story raises questions about deception, dispossession and abuse of power, all of which, we believe, should not be seen in the body of Christ. But as the stories pointedly makes clear, the church is not inured to the tragedy that plagues its society, this is, in itself, a serious contradiction that is worth our ponder.
Tunji Sotimirin’s “Dear Death”, an epistle addressed to God, is ambivalent as it both confronts and pacifies and casts the poet as incapable of taking a position on the subject of death. Confronted with death, man sees the full measure of his limitation, his immortality, his capitulation to its finality. Despite his bluff and bravado, Akilapa betrays his limitless powerlessness in the face of inscrutability of death. But it is impossible not to make a reference to the intertextual affinity between Sotimirin’s story and Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” despite the different formal and aesthetic features of both poems. Whereas Donne’s defiance of death is done in urbane and flowery language with preponderance of wit, Sotimirin’s language is belligerent and violent. But the irony in his empty threat is not lost on us, for it is apparent that it is he, and not death, that stands in peril of destruction. The bathos in the concluding part of the story seems totally out of tune with Akilapa’s preceding posture.
Christopher Nwachukwu’s “Amaka” calls attention to the dissonance between nature’s seasonal changes and how irreconcilable such changes are to human’s selfish need for comfort; the story also illustrates that man’s breakthrough in science and technology is incapable of disrupting nature’s untrammelled seasonal changes.. The snow and blizzard Dickinson experiences are a reminder of man’s powerlessness in the face of nature’s own designs. Beyond the exoticism of the weather, the story hints at the pressure modern capitalist economy exerts on the family, amidst the overarching needs of families for financial security. While not much is given away to suggest why Moma and the two children, Amaka and Nnaemeka, are in America without their father, the separation does signify a conflict of a sort. While nothing is said to suggest that Moma is a single parent, she claims that the need to earn enough money to give the children a good education informs her decision to brace the cold instead of returning to Nigeria. As is typical of postcolonial writing, the juxtaposition of varied lived experiences by subjects in the global north and the global south privileges those in the former while “ordering” those in the latter, a recurring motif in all postcolonial texts. There is usually a description of the postcolony as the “other” world bereft of amenities and infrastructure that make life worth living, what, incidentally, has often been considered by postcolonial subjects who live their countries in droves to the First World.
Ayodeji Erubu’s “Discordance, Disharmony or Abuse” is different because it employs a second person narrative technique, suggesting the need of immediate audience to whom Osaz needs to share his story. The dominant subject is conflict in marriage. Adesuwa is an arrogant, petty wife who contests for power with her husband, unmindful of how much this is the cause of the frequent conflict with her husband. Statistics indicating the increasing number of divorces notwithstanding, the story discloses what we already know: every marriage has its challenges, its epiphany and that it takes great courage and patience for a couple to weather the storm. Despite the conflict, Osaz and Adesuwa love each other, a contradiction in itself and it does require that both work to accommodate each other’s differences.
Somitirin’s “Change” is an allegory that reduces the intractable problems in Nigeria to ones capable of being solved through attitudinal change. I find it incredible that all Nigeria needs to rediscover her true greatness is just attitudinal change Change, the eponymous character of the story, radiates noble qualities of a citizen, and succeeds, through personal example, in bringing people to be honest and patriotic in their dealings. That is where Change’s uncommon leadership stops. The bottom-up approach which he champions does not specify how the people in authority in the realm of politics, who are given to venality, will be redeemed from their venal habits. It is also important to state that Somitirin’s allegory is simply reductionist and does not take cognisance of the complex vortex of competing social, economic, political forces that determine the positions subjects take. At another level, Somitirin’s allegory of change might also have been a parody of the All Progressives Party’s change agenda which, if anything, have brought unimaginable hardship and pain to the masses. It is in this wise Somitirin’s allegory of change becomes a recipe, a recommendation or suggestion of what manner of change the nation desperately needs. Art often invents an alternative reality to the one it finds too harsh to endure.
Kilani Hassan Taiwo’s “The Falling Hero” draws attention to the ennobling value of sacrifice and kindness and how much these qualities can make our world a better place. The story indicts political authority for its indifference to the security of the people over whom it rules. But the story, above all, points to a revealing defect in nature’s purported perfect design. While man privileges the surface details and ignores the repressed imperfections, these remain all the same. The story is a fascinating example of kindness and sacrifice, an affirmation that the world is a beautiful place if we all care for the welfare of others. It an extra ordinary story of love, kindness and sacrifice. Above all, the story is a practical guide on the care for epileptic patient especially during sudden attack of the disease.
Part III of the anthology features Ralph Tathagata’s critical essay “Of Nursery Rhyme and the Truth of Poetry is a metafiction. A brilliant polemic in defence of the sanctity of poetry, the piece argues that poetry should be spared revisionism which attenuates age-long touchstones that are sacrosanct in the assessment and judgment of good poetry as has become the fad in recent times. Tathagata posits that writing exquisite piece of poetry requires discipline, rigour, and “avid encounter” with eclectic sources of profound ideas, knowledge and thoughts, an immersion in the catholic apotheosis of classical and neo-classical models, a habit of great intellectual propagation of finesse and urbanity. I agree that a timeless art as literature should not pander to the subjective criteria of nomination for literary prizes, just as an aspiring poet must strive to cultivate the “the depth of vision and language” of poetry, eager to learn from the finest masterpieces of existing poets by “drinking rapaciously from the wellspring of master poets and by consuming and internalising eclectically, the other materials from every field of human knowledge” (156). According to Tathagata, panegyrics uttered in praise of a poetaster are misdirected to an impostor unworthy of the honour. But I disagree with him that doggerels passed off as good poetry make a poet an “enemy of truth” and “destroyers of beauty”.
It must be said, then, that while much of what Tathagata said in defence of poetry is true, it does not stand to scrutiny when subjected to the ideas of the postmodern in relation to production and consumption of all cultural productions, including literature. In the first instance, postmodernism rejects in strong term any attempt to subject art to the constraining straight jacket of a single coherent reference or signification, either of theme or of style, on literature on the assumptions that every text, irrespective of its quality, has polysemic potentials. Postmodernism, while acknowledging the presence of grand narratives, strips them of the so-called “supreme authority” they purportedly have, and attacks the touchstones of “universal literature”, under which such works claim to “provide a framework for everything”, to borrow Benneth and Royle’s words, as nothing but Eurocentric ideas of production and consumption of literature. Aware that contemporary worldview is unstable, fragmented and dispersed, postmodernism argues that “little narratives are grounded on non-totalising assumptions that recognise the plural, local and contigent nature of cultural production. Thus, the poetry Tathagata has dismissed are, I must point out, little narratives which, in their own right, should also be contemplated by the audience whose assessments, it should be pointed out, are not totalising or absolute.
Whereas Tathagata is right in his defence of retention of symbols, allusions and tropes in poetry, but we must ask what tropes and figures are worth retaining and critique their value to the ‘purity’ of African cultural redefinition. Tathagata maintains that the purity of poetry should be sacrosanct and that “quacks” who lack the refined skills and intellectual acumen and the depth of vision and language to “grasp great conception”, to use Longinus’ immortal words, should be denounced. I want to assert that we should not resort to generic dismissal of all poems that fall short of Eurocentric critical touchstones. I stand to be corrected, Africa’s traditional bards are gifted raconteurs with extra-ordinary creative brilliance that can match the sublime skills of Shakespeare and Milton, but for differences of culture and the consequential incongruity of translation which robs the works of their elemental aesthetic nuances, bereft of any worthy minutiae of beauty worthy of comparison with the works of Western canonical writers. Poetry, and the cultivated taste that lends form to it, should come from the depth of the poet’s soul, complemented by intellect and skills, but we may ask, at what cost does a postcolonial poet achieve this feat?
On this account, if the literary community decides to ignore or consider the works of purveyors of bad poetry as lacking in depth, that is excusable but to label the writers as “enemy of the truth” or “destroyers of poetry” is to be snobbish and narrow minded, a belief that is informed by an assumption that there are fixed, coherent criteria of artistic production. If already there are established criteria and time-tested tradition through which poems that are worth reading, and which are a waste of time reading, are selected, yardsticks that are exotic and biased and so not entirely infallible, it makes no sense to dismiss the so-called poetasters just because their works lack exotic imageries and ideas that express none of African cultural values. If anything, it is preposterousness that the works often touted as original are themselves a pastiche comprising tissues of ideas and thoughts extracted from other sources. As Chris Barker (2008) makes clear, “Reflexivity encourages an ironic sense of the ‘said before’: the feeling that one cannot invent anything new but merely play with the already existent” (201). The doggerels from the creative kiln of “apprentice” poets might have little to recommend them in terms of profundity of artistic or aesthetic ideas, but we have a duty to regard these works as a part of “the discourse about experience, to borrow Gergen’s (1994) words. In fact, granted that poetry expresses the depth of the poet’s mind, neither the mind nor the subject the mind ruminates on, can be contemplated in absolute terms in total exclusion of the inherent possibility of their being multiple, heterogeneous and different.
Silver Lining is a captivating work of enormous virtuosity, yet another addition to the trove of Nigerian literature. The anthology reflects the eclectic vision and concerns of writers at this critical time. Despite the differences in age and artistic vision, both the old and new generation writers address issues of common concern to Nigerians, the global community in general, in the belief that tyranny and wickedness should not be spared the sharp edge of writers’ pens. There is another important reason for the preponderance of social, economic and political issues in this anthology, namely the need to protect the nation’s democratic values against the increasing threats posed to them by the venality and idiocy of self-centred political elite; incidentally, one of the objectives of PEN Nigeria is to project literature as the bedrock of our democratic culture. The anthology is an interesting work, an enduring collection that offers fresh perspectives on the current local and global debates on the scourge of humanity in the contemporary period.
Despite the quality of the anthology, I consider the absence of any clear-cut position out of the quagmire enunciated in the text, issues orientation of the anthology notwithstanding. Writers, served by their untrammelled vision, should point the direction to a rudderless society. I find no such direction in all but Yetunde Somitirin’s “Change”, a work that itself betrays its lack of understanding of the complexity of the postolonial nations’ dilemma in its shallow recommendation of attitudinal change as the elixir to the woes afflicting Africa. This is rather surprising considering that writers whose works feature here are liberal humanists who share the same ideological ethos of concerns for the progress of human society. I must point out though without running the risk of being misunderstood that liberal humanist ideology itself does not lend itself to a set of coherent explanatory theories. But it does justify the reason we cannot fault the anthology for absence of any cohesive thematic or aesthetic form; on the contrary, the multiplicity and heterogeneity of thematic concerns and formal properties confirm the complexity, fragmentation and dispersal inherent in the contemporary social, economic and political issues. That most of the works here are jeremiad in outlook are not surprising given the litany of intractable maladies of our time, a situation that inevitably informs the urgency to draw attention to these problems. Almost all of the works in this anthology, to the discredit of this anthology, are content with lamentation, embrace of pessimism, or submission to the calm and quiet refuge of death; an escapist predilection that many readers might find disappointing given the assemblage of writers whose works make this edition.
– Ezekiel Segun Ajose
