Goodbye To A Laureate
IN JUNE, 2011, two weeks after I returned from England after a two-year stay, I was invited to chat with an unknown friend on Rhythm FM in Abuja. My partner and I were to discuss writing, books and authors on a general note. I kept wondering who my sparring partner would be on the subject and Matilda Duncan, our hostess, would not disclose the name.
At a quarter to airtime when I was ushered into the studio, a young man in a black suit, a tuft of beard prominent upon his chin, was already seated before one of two microphones. Reading glasses over the bridge of his nose, he was flipping through a small book and held a ceedee in hand.
We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Matilda introduced us to each other, welcomed us both to her programme, “The Afternoon Drive Show” on Rhythm 94.7 FM, Abuja, and began to pop questions. Until then, I had never heard of the name Ikeogu Oke. But in one instant, I was meeting the man and the content of the man in one living bundle. From his first outpouring over the microphone, he struck me as articulate and eloquent. He expressed himself with the certainty of a man who was well informed and at home with his share of knowledge.
For one talkative hour, Oke and I had a lively discussion that Matilda described as one of her most exciting sessions on radio. There was still so much to talk about, and the time proved to be too short. Our discussion continued outside the studio, long enough for us to walk to each other’s car, exchange numbers, and sign autographs.
Oke gave me a children’s book dedicated to his daughter, a book of rhymes set to music, complete with musical notes and scores. An accompanying ceedee was stuck into the cover. I read the book perfunctorily, taking note of the playful nursery rhyme scheme, but did not get to listen to the ceedee.
I was, however, struck by an endorsement of Oke’s work by no less a figure than Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. Oke said he had met her in South Africa, and she had graciously and willingly taken a look at his manuscript of a forthcoming book, and given her word for it to be reproduced on the blurb of the book.
I thought that was fantastic, and I still think so. To get an endorsement from a Nobel Laureate is fantastic for any young writer. It doesn’t happen every day. It’s a credential worth brandishing, and I looked forward to reading Oke’s book in quick time.
After that, I didn’t get to see or hear from him again until we became friends on Facebook. I followed his posts with studious devotion, even though I was not loud in my followership. But every time he posted a poem, I found reason to like it. And whenever he marked a like on my script, I saw it as an endorsement from higher quarters.
The big surprise came to me when Oke’s book, The Heresiad, emerged winner of the NLNG poetry prize, beating renowned contenders including Ogaga Ifowodo and Tanure Ojaide out of the way. My first reaction came with the initial shortlist. I was rooting for the poet, Amu Nadi, but he didn’t even make it to the first three. I remember carrying a placard in honest protest, but a revelation was just ahead of me.
I am familiar with the folkloric mastery of language in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide, and I recognise him as a poet worthy of all the laurels he has won so far. He remains a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina, United States of America, and I missed getting to meet with him when I visited the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, in July 2006.
I was also at home with the urban quality of Ogaga Ifowodo’s poetry, its evident cosmopolitan muscle. I remain a first-hand witness to Ogaga’s growth as a poet from his first collection, Homeland, winner of the 1993 Association of Nigerian Authors poetry award, to his second, Madiba.
His strength as a poet of remarkable discipline and dedication to popular causes were fully demonstrated in his third collection, The Oil Lamp, and I could understand why Ogaga Ifowodo went that far with his new book of poems, A Good Mourning.
But I knew nothing of the poetry of Ikeogu Oke. Only much later did I get to understand why the respected panel of judges chose Oke’s book ahead of his peers. Today, I am better advised about the poetry of Ikeogu Oke. I can speak with fair authority about the mission of his poetry, and his relevance in the evolving poetic schemata in the Nigerian literary space.
The Heresiad, winner of the 2017 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, occupied my attention on the long journey from Makurdi to Yenagoa with five cantos which confirmed to me that a major poet had arrived on the stage to define new parameters for Nigerian poetry. That’s my take as to what Ikeogu Oke did in that work, and I have every reason to celebrate him for a truly ground-breaking experiment in Nigerian poetry.
For me, Ikeogu Oke proved to Nigerian poets that Homer could jolly well have been reborn within our borders, complete with the sheer metrical discipline of his lines, and the universal gamut of the subject he undertakes to explore. I find it remarkable that Oke conceived of that book twenty-seven years ago, and took that length of time to complete work on it, when in fact the narrative thrust of that epic work is so recent.
The very first sentence of the first canto caught my attention. “A monarch, of a subterranean kingdom, angered by some of the contents of a book, pronounces a death sentence on its author, accusing him of heresy.”
That story line still sounds familiar to me. It reminds me of what happened between Mingi and Mingi-Yai. I hastened to read the book and came away with the distinct impression that Oke was utterly prophetic, even to the point of speaking peace.
Let me be frank about this. I had a hard time trying to cope with news of his demise. I just couldn’t bring myself to understand why it had to happen. I drifted along with thoughts about him for so long that I almost forgot my personal tribute to him, scribbled in the most unguarded moments of grief.
I didn’t write a poem about him. I didn’t write anything spectacular. I just thought of the few times I met with Ikeogu Oke after that radio encounter, and wondered if he was really without life anymore.
I had come to know him as a spontaneous craftsman capable of responding to every prompting of the spirit. I was even more intrigued by the ready couplets he composed on the spur of the moment, and how speedily they captured current political events as they unfolded in distinctive rhymed verse.
Oke would have served delectable verses about the withdrawal of Oby Ezekwesili from the presidential race, and the peremptory suspension of the Chief Justice of Nigeria by presidential fiat. Alas, his soul has levitated to higher climes, and we are left to miss him.
When he won the prize, Ikeogu Oke came into his element. He had achieved the well-deserved status of a poet laureate and he celebrated it with a conscious appreciation of his newfound place in the hall of Nigerian letters. He appeared at public functions with appropriate afflatus, and conducted himself with an apparent esteem of his ranking as a prime griot to reckon with.
We met again on the dinner night of the ANA Makurdi convention on October 28, 2017, and that’s when he autographed a personal copy of The Heresiad for me. I heard him read from his book at the occasion, and I could not help but feel slightly let down because he did not strike me as a good reader.
He could not rise to the lofty tonalities of his poetry. His performance was forced, his interpretation of his cadences far less majestic than his pages suggested. Even so, Ikeogu Oke saw himself as a poet-priest, and this was to be seen in his costume. He saw himself as the manifestation of the seer with the proverbial tiger mask and nude spear that Christopher Okigbo wrote about.
But I could not quite come to terms with his persistent attempt to get his audience to appreciate rigorous, if not exotic metrical English verse, dressed as he was in the garments of a local dibia. It was a cross between music from a piano and the wild syncopation of jungle drums.
It was like watching Homer or Virgil or Alexander Pope bestriding the stage in animal skin, sporting the woolly cap of a juju priest. For, indeed, these were the models upon whose delicate art Ikeogu Oke built his career as a poet.
I saw a dramatic disconnection there, and I meant to point this out to him, if we ever sat down together to chat the world to tatters. I would have gladly persuaded him to put aside the theatrical gear that was becoming an identity mantle on him. But that’s how he wanted to be remembered.
I have since come to the conclusion that Ikeogu Oke was a teacher. He came to teach Nigerian poets how to write poetry in the twenty-first century, in the mould of the classics, in the manner of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth and John Keats.
He came to teach Nigerian poets the importance of metrical discipline, the intricate vitality of rhyme and rhythm. He came to teach us how to fill up the lines in our free verses, and clip them at the end with the safety pin of a suitable rhyme.
In a literary landscape inundated by an overgrowth of free verse, Ikeogu Oke came to tend the lawn, to demonstrate the rigour that goes with metrical composition, to show how to come to grips with the dictates of the heroic couplet, and keep in tandem with the compelling march of the iambic pentameter.
Ikeogu Oke is no longer in a position to add one more line to his impressive poetic legacy, but any Nigerian poet who seeks to learn the rudiments of instantaneous versification is free to log on.
His Facebook wall, like his open heart, is still festooned with immortal nuggets of his everyday wisdom couched in structured, lyrical verse. Nigeria is less by one visionary interpreter of human nature. To say the least, his comments will be sorely missed in this season of treacherous politics.
At the height of the apartheid era, Lewis Nkosi, the erudite South African critic received the loss of the irrepressible Can Themba with a feeling of personal deflation. Of his maverick fellow country man, Nkosi said as follows: “the son of a bitch had no business to die.”
It was a verdict that captured the anguish of that painful moment. Ikeogu Oke was no son of a bitch by any standard, but he had no business to die.