Fear is the greatest threat to art – Sidi

Umar Abubakar Sidi is author of ‘The Poet of Dust’. A helicopter pilot with the Nigerian Navy, here he talks about his poetry collection, the art of writing and more. Excerpts:   Bookshelf: Your latest collection of poetry is titled ‘The Poet of Dust’. Why dust? Umar Sidi: Recently, a dear friend of mine attributed […]

Umar Abubakar Sidi is author of ‘The Poet of Dust’. A helicopter pilot with the Nigerian Navy, here he talks about his poetry collection, the art of writing and more. Excerpts:

 

Bookshelf: Your latest collection of poetry is titled ‘The Poet of Dust’. Why dust?

Umar Sidi: Recently, a dear friend of mine attributed the ‘dust’ in the title to the dusty terrain of Sokoto, my ancestral home. That may be true, but I was not very conscious of that when I wrote the book. You will notice that ‘The Poet of Dust’ is one of the many titles of the meta-character Al-Arshad. In the ‘Testament of Sand’, the persona in the poem, needed to embark on a spiritual cum metaphysical journey through the regions of contemplation, to seek meaning. Like every mystic and traveller, the persona needed a guide. Without a guide, the journey would be arduous and tortuous, the traveller could unknowingly derail from the path and could lose his mystical integrity and balance and even go mad. A guide came in the person of Al-Arshad, a suprasensible being who was present “when God breathed into man/the immortal Breath of God/who created the alphabet and encrypted it with metaphors.” For a lack of better words at portraying his enormous personality, I used the title ‘The Poet’ to describe Al-Arshad. He is “poet of the testaments/poet of mud/poet of many colours.” As you may have noticed, in this sense, the word ‘poet’ is used in an expanded manner, to reflect the omni-dimensional nature of the character Al-Arshad. This comes from the nature of poetry in Arab poetics where thought is poetry and poetry is pure thought. A poet in this context is a thinker, perhaps a lord in the temple of thought. As for ‘dust’, I think it symbolizes the universe, and our inability to comprehend its various dimensions and manifestations. I love to contemplate, I love star gazing, I marvel at the sheer metaphysical beauty of the galaxies and often wonder if we are able to penetrate through the ‘cloud of stellar dust over the galaxies’, perhaps, we may arrive at meaning and purpose. So, ‘dust’ symbolizes the quest for meaning.

Bookshelf: The collection almost entirely revolves around ‘poetry’ and ‘poets’. What triggered that?

Sidi: Most creatives have a dominant motif that defines their creativity. For instance, despite his engagement with many themes, through the different periods of his painting life, Picasso remained principally, a poet of the grotesque through which he explored the absurdity and awkwardness of being human. Mahmood Darwish’s poetry is defined by his quest for homeland. Adonis is known as a metaphysics jockey, Charles Simic is known for Surrealism and Billy Collins for humour. I have always been interested in the creative process, in the gradual manifestation of a work of art. I consider myself quite lucky to have been chosen by ‘poetry’, to be its physician or private investigator. Using a magnifying glass to scrutinize poetry has been perplexing and sometimes tormenting but always gratifying. When I began to take poetry seriously, I had this romantic view that poets were sages and poetry was holy. But through meta-poetry, I began to lose faith in the sacredness of poetry and the pretentious notion of poets as guardians of truth. I now see poetry as a vehicle and the poet as traveler. The poet is, in my view, a seer who must essentially have incredible power of sight and vision. The poet ventures into the unknown to seek and chart territories hitherto unexplored. His or her vehicle of travel is poetry. The persona in ‘The Poet of Dust’ is a traveller. Using the vehicle of poetry, the poet penetrates the depths, seeking the hidden, the unknown, the absurd the bizarre and the profane, not as ends in themselves but as means to the transcendental. I attempted to explore mysticism. The notion of ‘the poet as mystic’ is also very apparent in the poems. Poetry has always offered mystics cloaks to conceal their madness. The mystical experience is so intense, so ungraspable and so complex to the point of sounding nonsensical. It can only be accommodated in the regions of poetry. Most mystics, be they Sufi, Zen masters or Christian monks have often flirted with poetry.

Bookshelf: Your poetry is philosophical and sometimes reads like a song. Take ‘The Peninsula of Poets’ for instance. What informs your writing style?

Sidi: The question of style depends greatly on the severity of the poetic experience. Elsewhere, I have discussed the mechanics of craft as having to do with a plunge into a pool of feeling or what I sometimes refer to as the core of poetry. This is exactly what happened when I was experiencing ‘The Peninsula Poets’. I wore the garb of a holy mad man to complete the meaning of truth and seek the transcendental. I remember being in a trance-like state where anything and everything is possible for about three days. Thereafter, I archived the experience on paper. Now, I step into a landscape blindfolded without any expectations, loose the blindfold in the middle of the landscape, and then attempt to capture the image that appears before me with words. I think my style is evolving and I am pleased with that.

Bookshelf: You describe a poet in many different ways in “The Peninsula of Poets”. As drunk with wine of God, as Confucius, Buddha, and so on. What influences these perceptions?

Sidi: Those perceptions belong to the beat-poet Allen Ginsberg, who he is a character in the poem. Ginsberg is saying that a person is qualified to be called a poet only when he or she rises above social restrictions and cultural aberrations, a kind of radical bastard who queries and not one who easily conforms. History has shown us that profound truth comes to us through the most insane in the society. Buddha, Lao Tsu, el Hallaj and others mentioned in the poem were all considered mad men by their contemporaries. Even the existentialist and mystic Ibn Arabi is still condemned as a heretic in some quarters.

Bookshelf: You use a lot of vulgar words in your poetry. Do you not worry that it may not be well received?

Sidi: Yes, this is quite true. But I prefer to call it ‘erotic’ rather than vulgar. I use the erotic motif in my poems to explicate desire and social frenzy as a means to the transcendental. This view was influenced by Sufi and Surrealist ideas. I remember when the poem ‘Poetry in the Republic of Love’ first appeared online, I was chastised by a reader for promoting the vulgar and the obscene. I totally disagree with that standpoint. Poetry requires more than surface reading. The poem was a social-realist poem coated with the absurd and the bizarre. At one level, the poem is a celebration of genius, at another a reflection on society. I remember meeting a group of poets from AJ School Poetry, led by the maverick AJ Dagga Tolla at the British Council sometime in 2014. I was profoundly touched by these young poets and promised to capture that encounter in a poem. The poets gave an impressive hallucinatory performance which received applause and commendation. So, I visited their locality, the notorious Ajegunle, a number of times and noticed its ugliness, its smells, its raw energy and madness, its congregation of drunks, junkies, and all sorts of night marauders. I recorded this in notebooks both mental and physical. I kept thinking about the poets and the sights, sounds and smells of Ajegunle. A year later, I found alter-egos for the young poets in the beat poets. I also carved various territories for the poets in Ajegunle. For instance, Adonis of Denver, became, Adonis of Wilmer, Jack Kerouc became Jack Kerouc of Boundary, Neal Cassady became Neal Cassady of Tolu. Wilmer, Tolu, Boundary being popular areas in Ajegunle. In what I call ‘sanctification of the absurd’, each of these poets, in the mould of their alter-egos, went berserk indulging in the bizzare and extremely obscene and provocative practices while at the same time venerating art and advocating for its sanctification. In reality, the beat poets notoriously called for and encouraged the use of hallucinatory drugs and free sex as a form of social protest. The beat poets were a product of their society. Ginsberg galvanized his band of holy desperados to challenge the capitalist system and its discontents. When Ginsberg first read ‘Howl’, his definitive poem, it attracted the attention of the great Lawrence Felingheti who eventually published it. As expected, ‘Howl’ was banned and declared obscene. Years later, Ginsberg became a rockstar with an unimaginable number of followers. When I was writing ‘Poetry in the Republic of Love’, I had Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ in mind. The poem is a reflection on the beats poets and their eccentricities. It is also a celebration of the young poets of AJ House of Poetry. Contrary to all expectations, feedback from most readers has been positive. They seem to suggest, it is a crazy poem but we love it.

Bookshelf: In ‘Instructions to a Poet’, you seem to be saying a poet can become anything or be shaped into anything. Sometimes it sounds positive, but then negative at the same time. What do you hope to achieve?

Sidi: ‘Instructions to a Poet’ is a clarion call for poets to embrace courage and conquer their fears. Fear is the greatest threat to art. Fear shackles thought and imprisons imagination. When fear is conquered, freedom becomes the guide and destiny of every artist. Freedom can free the reins of thought, leading to serious art. Freedom is bliss.

Bookshelf: What are you working on at the moment?

Sidi: I just completed a novel written with fidelity to a Borgessian conundrum. By now it is apparent that Borges is one of my patron saints. There is a place, a literary pantheon, which I fondly call ‘The Realm of literary Immortals’ in my head. This place is populated by immortals like Italo Calvino, Umbeto Eco, Ungaretti, Saramago, Qays, Rumi and the persian masters with a few living persons such as Adonis, Pamuk and Vagos Liosa. Borges sits at the head of the pantheon of course, with Adonis at his right-hand side. The novel is a meditation on Borges and a salutation to Italo Calvino. I am also working on another collection of poetry. It is pillared on the principles of visual poetry. This time, I am not exploring philosophy and mysticism but art, particularly surrealist paintings and ideas. I am in fine company with the ghosts of Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Masson, Dali and a host of others.