Okigbo’s flaws
as poet
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (ifeanyi_mcdaniels@yahoo.com)
Sunday, August 6, 2006
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•Nwankwo
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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With a clean-head gleaming on a chubby face, stylishly carved
moustache and beards, and ritzy black suits and a golden necklace
round his neck, Prof. Chimalum Nwankwo goes about in an ingenious,
dandified regality you can only get in a Hollywood piazza.
Americans have a name for it: the real McCoy. One of the most
remarkable second generation Nigerian poets, Chimalum Nwankwo
is the Chair, Dept. of English, North Carolina A&T University,
Greensboro, USA. He is one of the peripatetic Nigerian literary
dons outside the country, who holds the view that “the
environment cannot satisfy his academic needs”.
A recipient of ANA poetry prizes with Toward the Aerial Zone
(1988) and The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems (2002) and
ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize (2000), Nwankwo’s poetic talent
blossomed in secondary school as he encountered the works
of English Romantic and Victorian poets like Alfred Tennison.
As an undergraduate at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka,
he encountered Christopher Okigbo and TS Eliot, which had
an impact on his literary development.
Writing in Sentinel Magazine, an online poetry magazine base
in Canada, the editor, Nnorom Azuonye, noted that “Chimalum
Nwankwo is one of the strongest poetic African voices of our
time. In his various highly acclaimed and applauded accomplishments
in poetry, he has honed his craft achieving a higher stature
and elevation in all its facets – language, imagery,
music and the subliminal idiomatic cuts effortlessly embedded
in the body of his work. Although he writes in English, his
poems are in fact in the Igbo vernacular expressed, rather
than transliterated in a foreign language resulting in dispensation
with any distracting academic plagues of universality, which
would have mutated the raw and intriguing energy of his unique
accomplishments (April, 2003).”
His first poetry volume, Feet of the Limping Dancer, was published
in 1986, ten years after he wrote it. “I was scared
to publish it,” he admits, “because I didn’t
know I was good enough.” But when the publication came
out, a friend encouraged him to submit it to the 1986 All
Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Poetry, and he summoned
courage to do so.
To his surprise, he got an honourable mention. “That
encouraged me to publish the next collection, Toward the Area
Zone, in 1988,” he smiles smugly.
Nwankwo speaks in low, gentle tone on the Afrocentric basis
of his poetry, “I’m always concerned with what’s
going on around me, I mean, the black world, specifically,
Nigeria and Africa. I’m always troubled by what’s
happening to the black man in the gathering of nations.”
A sudden silence wheels past at the La Palm Beach Royale Hotel,
Accra, where we are meeting.
On observing that he seems to have a fondness for the udara
tree, a popular tree in Southern Nigeria that produces red
juicy fruits, which recurs in the poems he has just read in
a poetry reading session, he harks back to a story his mother
used to tell him as a kid, “My mother told me when she
was a teenager she and other young maidens gathered under
the udara tree, because they believed that spirit children
were coming to that udara tree to pick the fruits while looking
for the woman who would be their mother. So, I developed my
myth around the udara tree.”
So, what does mythopoetry mean to him? He response is characteristically
laconic, “Myth is something which fortifies a literary
work. I don’t think there’s any work of substance
that doesn’t have a myth. Myths help to redefine the
work.” This leads you to recall the NLNG judges’
citation on the late Ezenwa Ohaeto 2005 award-winning poetry
volume, The Chants of a Minstrel, that he successfully presents
himself as an inheritor of the African traditional of oral
performance intervening in the age of print … he inserts
an indigenous folkloric tradition into the modern global system,
and forms a deliberate alliance with a tradition of oral performance
and so, by implication, turns way from the clerical and cerebral
forms that dominate much of modern poetry.
His response is that “If you want to write anything
that has substance and relevance, it’s going to be tied
to the people, and the people’re tied to the roots,
which writers exploit for their statements. This is nothing
new, for every writer around the world does the same thing.”
Asked to what extent his generation is indebted to their predecessor,
Nwankwo plays a counterpoint tune, “We [Osundare, Ofeimun,
Ojaide, etc.] tried, in a way, to continue some of the things
we found in the poetry of the first generation poets.
“For instance, people know that I like Okigbo’s
poetry, but I didn’t like his classical allusions; I
didn’t like going to other cultures to find validity
for the expression of my own works. So, I rejected also the
statement by Okigbo, when he got the African prize in Dakar,
that he was just a poet and not an African poet. I make it
clear to my readers that am an Igbo poet writing in English.”
Speaking on the remarkable rise in poetic expressions in contemporary
Nigerian literature, he says that “people foolishly
imagine that poetry is easier to write, but they’re
wrong, because, if they’re right, most people should
be reading poetry. But everybody knows that before you read
poetry, it has to be very good poetry.
That you carry a card or a book, which says you’re a
poet, doesn’t make you a poet. If it means that, then
everybody who has a manuscript is a writer. But it doesn’t
work that way.”
Edging on the seat, he echoes the talking point in Nigeria
on the churning of poetic hogwash nowadays, describing the
new poets as reckless when it comes to quality. “Remember
what I told you that I was afraid to publish my first collection
of poems. The present generation of poets is not afraid to
publish, because they’re not honest about quality. If
they’re honest about quality, they should look at older
writers and see what made them tick, and ask themselves, ‘Is
what I’ve written as good as what’s out there?’
You’d be doing something honest to be a self-critic.
“The poets we’ve today aren’t afraid to
publish bad works. They just take whatever they’ve written
and publish it.
“I critique my books for months before I let them go
to press. Somebody once asked me, ‘How do you remain
consistent?’ And I told him, ‘I remain consistent
because I don’t rush’. If you look at the gap
between my publications and the quality that comes out each
time, you’ll know whether I’m rushing or not.
I take my time to do my works. What’ll it profit me
to rush my works?” he queries. On the appreciation of
his works, he says that it is universal, “Whenever I
read my poetry, people’re spellbound. It doesn’t
matter where, which just tells me that I’m accepted
anywhere good poetry is appreciated.”
The poet teaches African Literature, World Literature, British
Literature, Creative Writing and sometimes Drama, depending
on what the university wants. So, doesn’t he feel guilty
that the West is reaping from the knowledge that was sown
in Nigeria? He is visibly po-faced, “I only feel guilty
that I ain’t in Nigeria inspiring the undergraduates,
but it isn’t my fault,” he says as a lash of silence
trails that delivery.
“It doesn’t matter where the writer is based,”
the lilt of his tone heightens as he speaks on what defines
contemporary Nigerian writing, noting that the Nigeria-West
bifurcation is unnecessary. “We’re all Nigerians.
We can write from any base that’s convenient in terms
of what you’re doing. But, if some people try to make
distinctions, such as trying to exclude us from Nigerian prizes,
that’s their business. They know why they’re doing
that. If you’re a confident writer, you should be ready
to compete anywhere. Those of us residing outside the country’re
amused,” he says, apparently appalled by the tangled
situation.
His poetry volume, Prisons of Fire, will be out by the end
of the year. The title sounds quite captivating. Seems he
is mad keen about myths. “That we live in prisons of
fire means that every human being is trapped by something
just as the ball cosmic system, according to the astrophysicists,
is a ring of fire. We’re living in prisons of fire:
marriage, friendship, whatever.”
Whenever the poet hears about a good writer making a debut,
he tries to encourage him or her. For instance, when Helon
Habila won the Caine Prize for African Writing, he had wanted
to use his book, Waiting for Angel, in one of his classes;
unfortunately, it arrived late for evaluation. Nevertheless,
he wrote to encourage him.
People have always wondered why new Nigerian novelists find
it a bit easier to achieve international renown nowadays than
writers from other genres do. Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie,
Sefi Atta, Uzodinma Iweala, Helen, Oyeyemi, to mention a few,
are some of Nigerian novelists who have gone into global reckoning
within the last two years. Nwankwo explains that this is partly
so because the novel sells faster than other genres because
everybody can read it, while you need a certain sensibility
to be able to read poetry, especially complex poetry. Another
reason is that the reader “has to read more slowly in
order to enjoy poetry, and not too many people’ve that
kind of patience. “Novelists, even in the West, have
a field day in terms of money, prizes and recognition,”
he admits.
In some literary quarters in the country, some people believe
that new Nigerian poetry is becoming a hard sale because of
the penchant by the poets for obscurantism. So, you wonder
if obscurantism is a hallmark of great poetry. “There’s
an obscurantism that it’s as a result of the complexity
of the thoughts of the writer,” he begins cautiously.
“There’s also obscurantism that’s unnecessary
difficulty. They’re two different things. If you don’t
understand me and what I’m doing, you may say I’m
obscure. You’ve your intelligence to blame, not mine.
“But, if you’re reading my poetry and seeing unnecessarily
games there, which I don’t play, then that’s a
different thing all together. Whenever you talk about obscurantism,
you should make a distinction between the obscurantism that
comes out of the complexity of the work and a deliberate obscurantism,”
he says.
Veteran scholars and literary critics, such as professors
Theo Vincent, Chukwuemeka Ike and Ernest Emenyonu, in recent
interviews with Sunday Sun, have inveighed on young writers
for producing shoddy works. Nwankwo thinks this is appropriate.
“Young Nigerian writers should slow down in terms of
how they bring out their works. They shouldn’t be shy
to give their works to older writers to read and critique
before publishing. The Igbo people‘ve a saying that
the person who started cooking first must’ve more broken
pots.
They use that saying to define the value of experience. If
you start anything before anybody, you’re likely going
to’ve more experience and be better at doing whatever
it is,” he harps gently.
For Nwankwo, a good sense of humour doesn’t cost a thing.
“My daughter’ll be too hot for you,” he
teases you in response to the joke that it seems he would
make a good father in-law. “She behaves like an American,”
he adds, as we laugh over his witty response. |
