‘Northern artists overemphasising certain themes for artistic gratification’

Poet Paul Liam, author of two poetry collections, ‘Indefinite Cravings’ and ‘Saint Sha’ade and other Poems,’ usually shoots from the hips and in this interview, his passionate and candid self is brought to the fore as he discusses why he thinks poetry is not for “market women”, why he feels some creative writers from the […]

Poet Paul Liam, author of two poetry collections, ‘Indefinite Cravings’ and ‘Saint Sha’ade and other Poems,’ usually shoots from the hips and in this interview, his passionate and candid self is brought to the fore as he discusses why he thinks poetry is not for “market women”, why he feels some creative writers from the north are selling the region short and his quarrel with “internet poets.”

Bookshelf: You have authored two poetry collections, ‘Indefinite Cravings’ and Saint Sha’ade and Other Poems. From the reception to these works, how would you say Nigerians react to poetry?
Paul Liam: The perceptions that I have gathered as a poet is that Nigerians have two approaches to poetry appreciation. Firstly, I would like to think that Nigerians like to read poetry and quite a number of Nigerians actually wish they could truthfully discern the complexity that poetry is but for the problem of genuine accessibility a lot of people pretend not to like poetry. This is because I have had encounters with people who appreciate poetry only when it is made accessible or interpreted to them by the poet or someone who possess a deeper knowledge of poetry. Secondly, poetry is appreciated on a large scale by poets or aspiring poets as the case maybe. Because of the mystery of meaning in poetry, only people with a higher sense of aesthetics and critical awareness tend to truthfully appreciate poetry. Generally speaking therefore, one could submit that the level of appreciation to an extent is dependent on the accessibility of poetry works. For example, I have had instances where people call me to react to my works. A particular case in view is when a prose writer from Makurdi who had read my work called to inform me that my book was the first poetry book he ever really read and that it opened his mind and made him more receptive to poetry. This particular person confessed and pledged that he was going to try other poetry works afterwards. So, what this experience taught me is that people really want to read poetry but are afraid of the supposed complexity of poetry. It is a matter of accessibility and aesthetics.
Bookshelf: There has been this insinuation that it is mostly poets who read poetry. Is this true you think? And why is this the case?
Liam: Well, the reason may not be farfetched; were it to be the case that only poets read poetry. Personally, I have met quite a couple of persons who appreciate poetry. Like I mentioned earlier, people want to read poetry but are only intimidated by the supposed complexity of poetry. Personally, I would like to think that quite a number of people appreciate poetry but of course the majority of people who read poetry are the poets themselves and this is because poets already have a deeper understanding of the components of the aesthetics of poetry which makes it easier for them to genuinely appreciate its magic. But again, how many people really like mathematics? I like to think that it is the same aversion that people have to mathematics that they have against poetry. It is not as if they generally do not wish to read poetry, they are just afraid of its many riddles like mathematics.
Bookshelf: Performance poetry is the rave now. As a poet, do you feel threatened by the rise of performance poetry?
Liam: [Laughs] Why should I be threatened? Performance poetry, as I have always held, is subordinate to poetry and people who truly have a deeper sense of beauty would stick to poetry, no matter the momentary pleasures of performance poetry. For example, in music there are different genres of music but quality and classical music and geniuses such as Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Elton John and  others exist in a category of their own. And people who have critical perceptions or who are philosophical in nature would always listen to quality music; the same thing applies to poetry. Performance poetry or spoken word is an adulterated version of the original because, for the purposes of rendition depth, both in terms of craft and aesthetics, is sacrificed for the sake of entertainment. I have argued this on several occasions that poets are on a higher pedestal while performance poetry is on a lower pedestal because poetry is generally a preserve of the intelligensia and philosophers; it is not a pastime for market women. A genuine poem should make you think and cause you to reflect on life and the meaning of existence as much as it makes you laugh. No, I don’t feel threatened by performance poetry because we don’t belong to the same class. Again, it is said that poetry began in its oral form and was usually performatic in nature, but such performances are often prosaic because of their penchant to appeal to a larger audience.
Bookshelf: So I can assume you won’t be going into performance poetry yourself?
Liam: No, I have never given it a thought. I am a person who likes to maintain his lane and I don’t follow the crowd for whatever reason. In Minna, everyone knows I don’t do performance poetry; I like to think that I am unfit for the glory of it. In fact,  I am sometimes embarrassed by performances because my sense of aesthetics is very high and I am not easily impressed. Performance poetry like I said earlier is in a category of its own and I don’t belong to that category. I am just a poet, those who wish to could perform my poems but I don’t see myself doing performance poetry anytime soon.
Bookshelf: You are seen as a rather blunt and direct person in your essays and social commentary. Do you think there is an onus on writers to be more engaging, or even combative, when tackling social issues for instance?
Liam: Sincerely speaking, I believe the writer is mandated by the nature of his or her calling as a public commentator to assume upon himself the role of safeguarding justice and being accountable to the society. Yes, I believe the writer has a responsibility to his society and for him to perform that very important function he must be honest to himself and the society. Writers are by nature the telescopic eyes of the society and as such should be more engaging socially and politically but I do not believe in combat, I like to think that I am a very simple person and I detest physical aggression. I believe in dialogue and speaking the truth as it is at all times and for this a lot of people don’t like me, including my family members who believe that I am too blunt with issues, but of course, some other people like me for being direct all the time. I hate to pretend and I detest hypocrisy with passion, there is nothing that honesty cannot solve. I like to think that I belong to the socialist school of thought and by this I mean that as a writer and critic, I am concerned with the functions of literature to the society. I believe that literature must serve its society and humanity. That is why if you check out all my reviews and essays, I am primarily concerned with how literature affects the society.
Bookshelf: I know ‘Indefinite Cravings’ was inspired by your experiences in detention on behalf of someone else. Can you shed more light on this and tell us how that experience inspired your poetry?
Liam: Quite true. I was once detained by the police on behalf of someone very close to me. That morning I was still in bed when I heard noises outside the house, it was around five or to six in the morning. I made for the bedroom door in order to find out what the matter was outside that early morning and was confronted with AK 47s and SAS [Special Anti-robbery Squad] police officers ordering me not to move. I was startled as I had no idea what was going on, the police ordered me to follow them and when we came out of the flat, I was shocked by what I saw outside. I saw a white Hilux police van filled with other young men they had rounded up earlier before coming to our flat and there were several armed police men surrounding the house. Some of us were still in our sleeping shorts. Without any explanation, I was taken away along with the others to the police headquarters, Minna and was detained for almost four days. They had actually come looking for a brother of mine, who was notorious for public disturbance and who incidentally, had travelled two weeks before the raid by the police. My dad had  protested and said he should be detained instead of me, that he couldn’t afford to have me locked up in the cell and other police men who knew my reputation as a coolheaded fellow and ‘professor’, as they called me, put in words on my behalf and that was how I was released from detention. Meanwhile, my dad was away on a visit to the village when I was arrested. He had to cut short his stay. Their report, which I later read, said that I was arrested for mistaken identity. By the way, all of this happened while my father was still in service as a senior police officer and we were living in the barracks. And during this period, I was working on my first collection of poetry, ‘Indefinite Cravings’ and two of the poems in the collection, Cell 1 and Cell 2, were inspired by that experience. I conceived the poems while in the cell and even recited them to my co-detainees who liked it. The experience is one I won’t wish anybody; we took turns to urinate in a La Casera bottle and poured the urine outside through the narrow window of the cell. Some of the detainees even defecated into polythene bags in the same cell we were in while we tried to find sleep on the cold cement floor without clothes on. To think that some detainees could actually eat inside the disgusting cell was sickening but they had no choice. The poems are therefore a reflection of my emotional state and what people pass through while in detention.
Bookshelf: That sounds like a terrible experience indeed. Is poetry something that you have always wanted to do or is it something that was elicited by circumstances?
Liam: Writing poetry was a deliberate act on my part. I started writing in 2004 but I didn’t start with poetry but prose. I discovered myself by realising that I had a story I wanted to tell the world and this was about my experiences living with my step-mother. I have suffered a lot in life and growing up without a mother is perhaps one of the worst things that could happen to any child. I grew up in abject lack, I wanted to talk about all the travails that I had gone through as a child and this was what pushed me into writing. The first story I wrote was titled ‘The Story of Usman Usmanu,’ a tragic love story of a young police officer who was and still is my friend in 2004. So writing has always been what I wanted to do, I was born with it and I discovered myself because I remember discussing with my friends back in 2003 or 2004 then that one day I was going to talk about our travails because they were also living under the care of a very callous step-mother, who would give them garri to drink while her children ate rice and stew.
I started writing poetry in 2005 in my father’s living room and I still have a copy of that poem with me. A girlfriend had given me the money for the typing of my first poems before I was later discovered by the playwright, Jibrin Bala Jibrin, who was my teacher in secondary school and others who took special interest in me and ensured that the spirit never left me. I also remember being greatly influenced by Victoria Kankara’s ‘Hisses and Hymen,’ which I found very intriguing and to think that I had only read excerpts of her work in a review or an essay by Toni Kan in the papers. I modelled many of my earliest scribblings after her work and that was before I was discovered by Bala. Well, I guess I could say that circumstance and fate made me a writer and poet. Writing is my destiny and that is why I am quite fanatical about it.
Bookshelf: Publishers are shying away from publishing poetry because of sales consideration. How difficult is this making life for poets?
Liam: Very difficult. I mean it is almost impossible for anyone to be successful as a poet in Nigeria. There is no organisation or structure that should encourage distribution and even patronage of poetry works. Everyone is interested in writing prose because that is where the fame and money is. Poetry, as they say, is a solitary endeavour and so the poets are their own fans and market as it were. Life for poets in Nigeria is not an easy one. It is even a miracle how some people still fancy being called poets in spite of the daunting challenges of being a poet in Nigeria.
Bookshelf: Being someone with a strong opinion about writing, how would you assess the crop of contemporary poets and the kinds of works they are producing now?
Liam: Contemporary poets have quite a lot of promise that if properly harnessed would greatly improve the state of our poetry. However, many so called poets are nothing but pretenders to the revered throne of poetry; many do not really understand the intricacies inherent in poetry and its production. They do not understand the magic and spirituality of the muse of poetry. Many think that jamming words together or simply by creating rhymes one has become a poet but far from that, poetry is a spirit and for anyone to really understands its undertone, they must be possessed by the spirit. There are quite a number of contemporary poets that I really regard and some of them include Gimba Kakanda, Jumoke Verisimo for her new collection, Servio Gbadamosi, Dami Ajayi, Sadiq Dzukogi, Hauwa Shaffi Nuhu, Deborah Oluniran and others. These are poets whose freshness of language and style is enthralling, these guys really understand the language and meaning of poetry, they know that poetry isn’t just about words and rhymes, these are people who understand that to be a poet means to have a voice and style distinct from that of others and until you have attained that status, I cannot consider you a poet.
The internet poets are a bunch of copycats and confusionists without direction and who are drown by the premature greed for acceptance and for this they come up with different stuffs so they can be published in journals abroad. 
The internet and journal addicts, I like to call them ‘Diaspora Nigerian resident poets,’ since their poems, though written in Nigeria, do not appeal to our taste but to those of journal editors. It is not just enough that you are doing what you are doing but you should try and understand the philosophy behind why you are doing it and why you should do it. The quest for fame and acceptance is no doubt responsible for the high level of mediocrity amongst the internet poets.
Bookshelf: I found your comment at the AWF guest writer session on the focus of Ishaya Bako’s new film ‘Henna’ and Maryam Bobi’s novel ‘Bongel,’ rather interesting. Do you think northern creatives are overemphasizing certain themes and narratives about this part of the country?
Liam: That was exactly my point. Bako’s new film speaks of child-marriage, VVF and the lack of education of the northern girl-child and it is the same theme, mind you I did not say almost, I mean it is the same subject in Maryam Bobi’s ‘Bongel.’ This is not an irony neither is it a coincidence, Hadiza Bagudu’s ‘Fanta’ and Halima Aliyu’s ‘Fire on the Tip of Ice,’ are all northern Nigerian authors x-raying the conditions of northern lives and culture, which is a good thing to some degree. I said to some degree because when a particular narrative of a people becomes everybody’s selling point, it means the people are being abused by the artists for their own artistic and commercial benefits. Take for example; Bako’s movie that premiered at the AWF guest author session which has several issues such as the portrayal of a single story of barbarity by northern men on the girl-child without providing us a counter narrative for the purposes of objectivity and the conclusion of the film is actually a mockery of the campaign against child marriage.
The education of the girl-child is a right that should be emphasised and not pleaded for as done in the film. The film does not suggest hope for other girls in the north. What I mean is this, when you show us the ugly case of the girl-child in the north we expect you to juxtapose it with a positive story. Why? Because the north cannot be totally barbaric as you may have wrongly assumed, at least there should be a family that is sane enough to treat the girl-child the right way; this for me is objectivity in art.
In Bobi’s ‘Bongel’ as well, it is strange that with modernity and education and the appreciable level of literacy in the north, we still cannot find a man sane enough to appreciate the value of education and who knows about the disadvantages of earlier child marriage to be able to speak up for Bongel in the novella. Are we then saying that there are no sane, educated and conscientious men in the north? Are we being the victims of a single story and portraying the north as a backward place where only evil dwells? How then do these female writers go to school to become educated women writers? Do they not have fathers? Yes, I feel strongly that northern artists are indeed overemphasising an aspect of the north for their artistic gratification and this is not good for the image of the north, frankly speaking. We should talk about our issues but we should also talk about our progress and successes too. We must avoid the temptation of a single story; it is a great disservice to the region and its people.
Bookshelf: Finally, what should readers be expecting from you next?
Liam: I am at present working on a collection of short stories and a collection of poetry. Although, I am not looking forward to publishing another book anytime soon, I want to take my time and put my acts together and read more books, especially academic books for self-development. I have special interest in research and I will be joining a research group founded by Professor E. E.  Sule of the Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida University, Lapai for professional training in research writing. These are my intentions for this year; I want to really improve myself and surpass my previous strides.