Tosin Otitoju: The poet optimist

With a degree in Engineering from Howard University, Washington and a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology, United States, Tosin discovered her passion  in poetry late. But how did an engineer turn out to be a poet? “The engineer found she had a collection of poems and said I think […]

With a degree in Engineering from Howard University, Washington and a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology, United States, Tosin discovered her passion  in poetry late.

But how did an engineer turn out to be a poet?

“The engineer found she had a collection of poems and said I think I am a poet now,” she said laughing. But on a more serious note she added, “I think I am inspired by silence.”

That silence was what she encountered in her service year after a decade studying in the United States. With time on her hands and her first extended stay in Nigeria in a while, she turned the light on herself and discovered a pool of emotions struggling to burst out. She picked up a pen and put them down in verses. These poems, mostly, formed the nucleus of her first collection.

“I think all the poems in Comrade are about struggle even though the struggles I think about range from what we normally see as political to the personal. It’s not a military or violent thing but a thing about desire for the better,” she said.

This desire is very obvious in her poems. Most of them froth with optimism for life, for Nigeria; products of her homecoming euphoria.

“I think that we will learn from many of the things we have done wrong. I think it’s what we need to survive because if we don’t have hope, we will just sit and drink and die but because of the hope, then it makes life more juicy,” she said.

Variety

Her poems touch on a lot of things; politics, introspective musings, contemporary debates, life, communal existence, even sports – but no love. For a young woman, just 29 and single, that seemed a bit odd.

“Romantic love, ehn,” she said jovially, “What happened was that I had a lot more poems than I needed for my collection so the struggle themed poems went into Comrade and the others have gone into a future work. So, I have a couple of volumes that are as sappy as you like.”

That does not suggest Tosin does not have a fancy on a man. “I’m in love with Rafael Nadal,” she laughed. “Can you help me meet him?”

Nadal is the world’s number one ranked tennis player. The restless Spaniard has won eight Grand Slam singles and hardly has the patience to read, as he admitted in an interview. But still, Tosin, the academic, fancies him. She has even written a poem about tennis.

Her debut collection is largely experimental; some are just the musings of a roaming mind. She was not particular about keeping to any poetic style. This, she attributes to her diverse interests.

“I have a lot of influences ranging from really serious literature to movies and music. So maybe the diversity of influences makes the poems come out diverse,” she said.

Not surprising, she couldn’t pin down a single source of inspiration for her work as she lists Shakespeare, the Bible and music as some of them. But her biggest inspiration is the most unlikely of sources for a poet.

“Hollywood has had a greater influence on my writing than any poet at the moment,” she said.

Free poetry

Tosin’s non-conformist poetry is not entirely what she had in mind. When she set off writing her poems, she did so on the spur of the moment. Not being trained in the art, it was simply the passion guiding her pen.

“When I started writing, I haven’t read a lot of poetry. I read a few in school but I never thought I would do this [writing poetry]. In fact, I tried for years to create maths and to be a productive academic engineer and mathematician. Now I am more curious about poetry,” she said.

She has since started reading more poetry but thinks it is still too early to single out a favourite poet. Talking about literature, this engineer seemed at home, reeling off writers and books offhand. As in many things, her scope in literature seems broad she could easily pass off as a literary academician. But as it turned out, she is teaching engineering at the University of Lagos, Akoka.

Grappling with poetry and academics

She admits dealing with the two have been challenging especially as she lectures in a field not related to her passion.

“I’m learning that now; like this thing we learnt in agric science, crop rotation. Maybe sometimes I do this thing that requires the maths side of my mind. Other times I do the more creative things,” she said.

She is however determined not to let her passion for poetry suffer as she works to develop herself. Already, with the experience garnered from publishing her first collection and the critical reviews, Tosin hopes to produce something different in content and style.

“I am just wrapping up a collection of poems on the themes of fear and loathing. Everything about this collection is dark and it’s trying to go into the root of our fear; what we fear, what we hate, you know, trying to present that in a beautiful way,” she said but adds that exploring fear and loathing does not take the shine off her optimism. She chose the themes because one has to accept “beauty and the other side”