Right from the emergence of the first generation of written African poetry that saw the publication of confrontational verses that challenged colonialism and its ills to the contemporary period of African poetry characterised by police brutality, queer identity, feminism, terrorism, regional/tribal conflicts, and suchlike, time, space, and place have always informed the context of literary creation. The themes or thematic preoccupations explored by writers surround mostly the contextual occurrences within their given society—an artistic way of portraying their kind gesture to where they belong.
The last quarter of 2024 arrived with a lot of poems featured in magazines and journals alike by Nigerian poets, poems that explore various thematic concerns—ranging from the surrealist to quasi-religious, to the usual revolutionary and confessional, and a few place poems. It is however these few place poems, which are not frequented as other motifs, that form the purpose of writing this, examining the two that piqued my utmost interest: Osogbo and O Cicade by Isaiah Gbenga and Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe, respectively.
Marvellous’s O Cicade
In the course of reviewing James Wright’s collection, the prolific and award-winning American poet, James Galvin, observes that “the poet of place situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it.” To Galvin, there is an existing, latent or obvious, situation in the place in which the setting of the poem is situated, of which the poet is trying to paint and, in hindsight, escape, if ever there’s an escape. “Poetry of place,” Galvin affirms, “is actually a poetry of displacement and self-annihilation.” One might conclude that it is in this Galvinian sense of the sullen reality of place poetry that shaped the creative process of O Cicade by Marvellous Igwe. As often employed by poets who engage poetry of place, Marvellous deploys pathetic fallacy, charged with synaesthetic effect, in the first beguiling two lines of the poem to articulate the obscene spectacle of a city:
Pitakwa is eternal— like any other Nigerian city— in linen & rags. Her dirt is alive. Her stench, lightning. Her markets, thunder.
The dissatisfaction of the speaker with Pitakwa’s unwelcoming sight is revealed even further:
& everyone in the bus can behold them from two miles. Pink lights in our throats— corporeal, rising like overflowing gutters. & here, gutters are not the only thing that overflows.
The disgust for the murky gutters, as portrayed in the lines above, is no longer that of the poet persona but rather witnessed by everyone within the city. With the squeamish visage of Pitakwa formed in the memory, we can see a poet deliberate with his bidding, with rich poetic devices at his disposal, showing us a place we might have never visited but now conveyed to. His ugly experience becomes ours. We grow inarticulate with retching as he retches.
It was once the dirt and stench of this city, but now, in the lines that follow, a kind of new revelation—which is grim, and bloody—permeates the poem and the reader throughout. In retrospect, there’s a sturdier development of a rationale for the Galvinian sense of displacement and self-annihilation of the poet that is pervasive in the poetry of place created by Marvellous:
Sometimes it’s blood. Sometimes it’s the road— when it rains— thinking itself a river. & tomorrow, on this road, will there not be another dead man? You cannot live here, see no one, & call yourself bonafide.
If not the simple diction, it is the vertiginous nature of the poem that stimulates the reader’s interest to delve more into the body of the work. The specific and original positioning of the poem, without being overshadowed by language, that is attained is something that anyone who has ever resided in Nigeria for some time can ever be grateful to encounter:
Now, in the market, the woman arranges the fishes on her cutting board. Or is it not the other way around? The city, arranging the woman. All the ways we’ve been reduced. All the ways we’ve lain Ourselves on the table, our bodies, our little lives. & have come up broken, bloody, piscine.
The lexical parallelism of the poem—”blood,” “all the roads,” and “burning”—injects the reader with a dominative effect of desolation that seems interminable in the city, all of which Marvellous uses to achieve rhythm and sound the perpetuity of an unsafe environment. Once again, the Galvinian truth is fulfilled.
Isaiah’s Osogbo
Contrary to the dread that Marvellous’ poem transmutes into, Osogbo by Isaiah Gbenga maintains an atmospheric and sensual mood throughout the poem, although the idea of Otherness of James Galvin is inherent too (the poet is not present in the locus). Isaiah’s rendition, however, is not concerned, if at all it wants to, with any glimpse of danger that could have occurred or existed in Osogbo’s reality; rather, the poet’s assignment is to create a kind of idyllic scenery. Almost all senses are at work—haptic, aural, and visual. Reading the poem, with the acute descriptions of the changing weather, houses, and people, It is Once Again the Season of Corn by Onyekachi Iloh comes to mind, although the rigour of Onyekachi’s is more formidable compared to Osogbo or even O Cicade.
Unlike Marvellous, the poet is obsessed with one thing: a city’s splendour despite its dirt and dust. The undertone in Osogobo is almost eulogic rather than denigrating and devastating, as signalled in O Cicade:
Every evening wind-intangible,feral shadows burst open the walls of the city like hand ploughing deadgrass.The hard, inarticulate things memory-familiar, loyal to a fault— prise the city’sboughs and sunders, its Recyclable God,beat against morning & the innocence of parks& fountains.
Also, the language differs. O Cicade is rendered in a simple diction infused with rich devices, open to an average reader who wants to know about Pitakwa once and for all, whereas the stylistic quality of Osogbo is cryptic, if not obscure, to a layperson who might need a cypher to unlock and reach the tranquillity or nostalgic feeling inside this poem. But anyone who’s been familiar with Isaiah Gbenga’s literary work can confirm that he’s a writer who’s always been known for his heavy syntax; however, the ambiguities of the poem are flawed, and the poet could have done less with the adjectives.
Other than the language that astounds to a certain extent, the ecological resonance of the poem is vibrant; it conveys the reader through different seasons without belabouring the message:
In the day of wrath in the day of wrath in the day,Vacuous things persist without the possibility of movement. June’s colour terminal, February’sInordinate frost, colonies of children like swarms against Akindeko’s mapled sunset, November’s billeted hand sturdy on dust-green Salvation Trees—
Reading these lines, in the most linguistic sense, the voice of Soyinka or Clark’s Ibadan is reminiscent. And at once, we are drawn to the sensual mood of the verse (In the liquid silence of night, she draws close her curtains. // Bulbs put off, camisoles, baguettes, briefs, passed into darkness.) The parallelism, just as in Marvellous’ O Cicade, adorns the poem, reverberating echo, where the poet persona describes a woman (a metaphor, I believe, for Osogbo) during a lovemaking moment in the most traditional way that is peculiar to Yoruba praise songs/odes:
woman of the pebble-heart; woman of fourth monsoon;woman made of dew and fog; blessed, the hands that reach in certain that reach in certain, inexact places.
As erotic as the poem gets, even in the few lines that follow, the poet does not lose sight of his bidding. In the last couple of lines that end the poem, Isaiah writes:
the low of evening andthe gold-brown lacustrine filth, the speed of road to ambush and the safety of simple, eternal darkness.
Peroration
In Nigerian contemporary poetry that is filled with a persistent trope of confessional strains and grief that seems to be stuck within a roundabout language, Isaiah and Marvellous show a good range of movement, even with the desolate and sensual tone. Despite the contrasting elements, there’s some sort of striking convergence in their poems, with the exception of the tedious similarity of motifs that recurs in many poems one reads today.
On one side there’s the outskirts of a city that is subjugated to perpetual road accidents; on the other side, there’s a city peopled with frolicking children and lovers, engaging the reader with a scenic view. And in the middle, there’s dirt and dust inherent in the two. Writing, for Williams Carlos Williams, is creating, among other things, through metaphor “to reconcile the people and stones.” Isaiah and Marvellous are able to invent a realistic line of events through serious poetic language. It is the poetry of young writers as such that reassures the promising talent of Nigerian contemporary poetry.
Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo is a poet and essayist from Nigeria. He was shortlisted for the Inaugural Chukwuemeka Akachi Prize, and received a honourable mention in 2024 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Contest. His works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in 2024 Small Fictions anthology, Bacopa Literary Review, Weganda Review, The Republic, Afapinen, 4faced Liar, PoetryColumnND, 20: 35 Africa, Ake Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review.