‘Poetry can make things happen’

It has been a poetic week in Abuja with a couple of guest writer events focusing on poetry.Prominent poet Odia Ofeimun stormed the capital Thursday with a horde of his published books as the guest author of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Abuja branch, to give poetry lovers a treat, while the Abuja Writers Forum […]

It has been a poetic week in Abuja with a couple of guest writer events focusing on poetry.
Prominent poet Odia Ofeimun stormed the capital Thursday with a horde of his published books as the guest author of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Abuja branch, to give poetry lovers a treat, while the Abuja Writers Forum over the weekend hosted a couple of budding poets in Minna-based BM Nagidi and Nkemjika Crystyn Akudo all the way from Enugu.
Odia’s was an assured performance, reading from about half a dozen collections like a master chef serving numerous courses, teasing the audience with a variety of poems. Their themes and style were as diverse as the decades and circumstances in which he wrote them.
Some touched on politics, others on the vicissitudes of life and yet others on love. Yes love. The 64 year old Odia was once a young man whose poetry was inspired by love.
“Almost every young person starts writing poetry about love,” he said.
Interestingly, the question also arose at the AWF reading when the guest poets where asked if poetry is always inspired by hunger and love. This question was as a result of BM Nagidi’s opening salvo in which he said, “My poetry is inspired by hunger.”
His hunger, as he later explained, is such that can be satisfied by words. It is a hunger for knowledge and understanding and in words he finds the answers. “Hunger is a craving for anything.”
“Despite the hunger,” he said, “we still fall in love and still have other concerns.”
And the samples of poems he read from his collection, Slaying the Wayfarer, touched on divergent themes.
Nkemjika Akudo, author of the poetry collection, Beyond Dialogismo, is one who plucks inspiration from the air, from facebook updates by friends, from snippets of conversations, and sometimes from deeper emotional struggles.
Coming from a family of medical doctors and engineers, Akudo was expected to toe the line, but her muse dictated otherwise.
“I woke up every morning on my birthdays with a cake and a novel. So I started reinterpreting the stories I read,” she said.
When she was invited to the Fidelity Creative Writing Workshop in 2012, she was certain her destiny lay in writing. Now she has a published collection of poems, Beyond Dialogismo, and has another on the way.
How many copies she eventually sells is a question for another day, but the sagely Odia pre-empts this when he said at his own reading, “Poetry is something written by a few, enjoyed by a few but it is something that continues into perpetuity.”
Poetry thrives on the powers of words, something both Odia and Nagidi acknowledged. The latter sort to use some of his poems to capture the plight of the almajiri children he has been seeing in Minna and the deplorable state in which they live.
And so when a member of the audience asked him what solutions he would recommend for the almajiri situation, Nagidi said, “In this instance, I would rather remain a poet. I have no solution to proffer.”
If the audience are asking such questions of writers, and they do so quite often, it is in recognition of the powers writers command as manipulators of words.
Odia expresses this better when he said, “As writers, what we do has an impact on everyone else and that is why we must never lie in what we do.”
“Every performance and symbol that can make one change the way we see things can make things happen. Poetry can make things happen,” he said.
There is an irony in Odia’s statement especially when one considers that writers’ stock in trade is the manipulation, not only of words, but of lies to the extent of causing the reader to suspend belief.
This is something American writer Steve Almond captured better when he said, “All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
But of course, what Odia was referring to was that in confronting social issues, writers are duty bound to be upright and honest and if anything, his life and willingness to take on any debate head on is a pointer to this.
But the deluge of poetry was not without some sprinkling of prose as Mike Ekunno, also a poet, at the AWF event read a short story titled “Village Christmas” in which he recounted with nostalgia the communal feel that bucolic Christmas used to engender.
The importance of prose was summarised by Odia when he said, “If you want to know where Nigerian literature began and converged, take a look at these three books: Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe), Death and the King’s Horseman (Wole Soyinka) and The Last Imam (Ibrahim Tahir).”
He said all three works focused on three leaders who for some reason could not discharge their duties and the calamitous consequences such failures had on their communities.
It won’t be a bad idea for today’s leaders to read this books, would it?