Listening to the voiceless at Betty Abah’s Abuja reading

“I planned to read the poem, and I had thought that maybe it would make some in the audience cry,” Betty Abah said as an introduction to one of the poems she read at the International Institute of Journalism where she was the Guest Writer of Abuja Writers’ Forum, AWF. She didn’t need to say […]

“I planned to read the poem, and I had thought that maybe it would make some in the audience cry,” Betty Abah said as an introduction to one of the poems she read at the International Institute of Journalism where she was the Guest Writer of Abuja Writers’ Forum, AWF.

She didn’t need to say it loud on that occasion. And that is because anyone who reads the volumes of work of this well-travelled, and highly decorated journalist formerly on the stables of Newswatch and TELL magazines would not but feel what she meant, and shed tears for the downtrodden, the voiceless that were majorly the focus of her poems.

But then the emphasis once again was more on how effectively she had utilized her genre to convey to the society many an inhuman condition. She used literature to serve a useful and known purpose on that score, and of some of her works, a participant had said, “You score a big blow for women.”  That was just one subject in Abah’s work that could make a reader shed tears for the human condition especially in Nigeria. It is because she wrote what she feels, and captured how others feel too.

The various subjects in her three volumes of poetry collection resonate with her readers, and one reason is because there is this delicious, down-to-earth touch to her writing. It made some in her audience ask why she writes the way she does, and if she has preference for any specific style of poetry writing. “I don’t have any particular style. I write the way I am inspired,” she said. “My writing is my expression of my being, so you cannot remove religion from me,” she stated while responding to a question on why she takes on her kind of subjects.

Women are not left out of Abah’s writing, as well as the issue of environmental degradation. How she conveyed the condition of women in her poems would draw sympathy, and the devastation in the Niger Delta region of the country would draw tears. As for the environmentalist part of her, the author had even boasted to an associate of hers when she was on her way to the reading in Abuja that she would use the occasion to carry on the struggle against the degradation of the earth. And that some of her poems did so.

Some call her a feminist because of the course she had deployed her genre to pursue. “But you don’t need to be a feminist to know there is so much oppression going on.” She recalled how women in some parts of South-South would wait outside town halls with umbrellas to shield them for the elements while men take decisions inside.

J.P Clark is the author’s favourite poet, and she reads Maya Angelou’s work a lot.

This article was written by Tunji Ajibade