Huricane Katrina turned me a love poet –Prof. Niyi Osundare
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (ifeanyi_mcdaniels@yahoo.com)
Sunday, January 21, 2007

•Prof Osundare Photo: Sun News Publishing

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The Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos, is seething with a dense crowd of mostly dressy travellers, giggling hysterically and nattering unend with the approach of evening, creating a half dusky atmosphere. Prof Niyi Osundare’s ensemble today looks unusually dandified. A pair of blue jeans trousers, sky blue jeans shirt and black boots give him a youthful physique, seemingly invigorated after Christmas holidays and exuding the bonhomie you expect from a famed hartbitten bard.

Where we sit at a table in a restaurant awaiting his late night flight to the US, a young smarmy deaf beggar smiles ingratiatingly for alms, and he gratifies her request with benevolence. A one-year old child beeps uncontrollably in her mother’s arms, and he sings an improvised lullaby that quietens the child instantly. Ever since he survived the rages of Huricane Katrina, love has kindled within him.

In his latest poetry volume, Tender Moments, Osundare, one of the most celebrated poets in Nigeria and Africa, sacrifices his characteristic overt cerebral poetry replete with political agitation and social engagement for love poetry. This has come as a big surprise. Osundare admits the surprise is at two levels: subject matter and thematic focus.

The poet speaks with inflection, “This is certainly my first love poetry volume, but not my first love poems. Virtually every volume of poetry I have produced has one thing or another to do with love. Even when I am talking politics, there are times I talk politics in romantic terms. Thus, the love we have for our country intermeshes with the love we have for our lovers. We cannot separate the two. So, there is some kind of surprise at that level.

“But, at another level, another surprise. After the Hurricane Katrina experience, people expect me to come out with Katrina poems and Katrina works – those ones will come later. Katrina was such a traumatic experience, and it is not the kind of experience that delivers instantaneous literature. I am taking it a little at a time. But these poems (Tender Moments) came after Katrina, and recalling and writing them actually constituted part of my recovery process. This is because I lost most of the poems in this volume to Katrina,” his voice ebbs low-pitched.

The poems in the new collection are poems he had been writing for the past twenty-five years. Katrina took all the manuscripts away, along with his books and other manuscripts. For a long time he couldn't write, nay, sleep well. But while at Franklin Pierce College, New Hampshire, USA, as a visiting professor and poet-in-residence, the kind, nurturing atmosphere provided by the College enabled his gradual recovery, and what came to his mind were love poems. “Although I couldn’t recapture all the poems or rewrite them, I was able to re-engineer or re-imagine them,” he reveals.

The Katrina experience also made him extremely tender. “I started looking at life in a different light – never cynical, never pessimistic, but cautious and skeptical in some instances. And the kind of overwhelming support I got from people also aroused that love not just for the lover but for humanity as a whole. It was the design of wicked Katrina to silence and destroy me, but when I started writing these poems, I began to get better. I wrote so many that I couldn’t contain in one volume. Now I can move on to other things.”

Osundare suddenly dissolves into laughter and sneers jockingly at me, “You raschal!” when I observe that some of the poems in “In the Mood” section must have been inspired by a Sweet-16 somewhere. Listening to the University of New Orleans English professor, you won’t experience ennui. “I am not surprised at that kind of guess,” he says. “But you must remember that the history of love poetry is a long and exciting one.

The sonnet tradition came to life through the encounter with love. Boccaccio and Petrach of the Renaissance period wrote a series of poems for their lovers. But these lovers were either real or imaginary most of the time. In the 17th Century, the England’s Silver Poets carried on the sonnet tradition. I am talking of poets like Philip Sydney who wrote “Astrophel and Stella”, Wyatt and Surrey, who dedicated powerful love poems to real or imaginary lovers.

“Shakespeare the Elizabethan decided to write his own sonnet cycle for a ‘dark youth’. Nobody is sure up to this day about the real gender of that youth. Edmund Spencer also contributed significantly to this ‘courtly love’ tradition. One of my favourite periods in English poetry is the metaphysical period (I like John Donne, and also Andrew Marvel, the author of that tendentiously delectable poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’). The hero of that period was John Donne.

The way he was able to combine the strategy of feeling with the method of thinking was powerfully effective. And coming home to our own African tradition, there are hundreds of love poems – in Yoruba, in Igbo, in Wolof, in Zulu, in Gikuyu. etc. The two traditions (African and foreign) always provide the momentum for my creative writing.”

The prof probably would have published the poems before now, but he was shy, because each time he read any of them at his reading engagements, the audience invariably asked, “Who did you write that for?” Osundare wants the audience to concentrate on the persona, not the poet; on the imagined subject, not to go hunting for a real lover or comical inamorata. The third and last part of this volume was inspired by Pablo Neruda’s El Postino, a movie about the poet in exile. “This volume is more than a love story; it also goes back to what I have always believed – the possibilities and power of the Word. That is why the section last is entitled ‘Metaphor’.

When I was writing that section, I was very close to the consciousness that inspired The World is an Egg. Words can provoke love, hate, admiration or disdain. The love poems in this book go beyond the merely sentimental,” he explains further.

What is the connection between love and poetry, because in some of the poems like “Love in a Season Terror”, “Public Passion,” etc, there are political echoes? The poet believes there is a strong connection between the love we have for our country and the love we have for a woman or a man. “The human template for love must be there. The tenderness must be there. The human mind, in that circumstance, is like the compost – it is lush; it is wet; it is rich; it is untidy but extremely fertile. Without that guide or template, love will be impossible. From the little I know about life, people who love their country passionately also happen to be people who love human beings passionately – that is one way of looking at it,” he notes.

Another way he looks at it is that politics can be a barrier to love. “That’s why you have that poem, “Love in a Season of Terror” (p.33), with the opening lines: ‘I wanted so much to come/but there were corpses across the path’,” he says. He wrote that poem and quite a number of other poems like it during the iron regimes of Babangida and Abacha, when love for one another and for the country became an illusion. “

How does one love in the time of bayonets? When I was writing that poem, the penis of the dictator was, to me, like a bayonet, an instrument not of regeneration but of terror and death. Love is supposed to heal. It also helps us survive tyranny. It aids our survival of dictatorships and other negations of the human will. That’s why love breaks down all barriers, including those effected by prison walls. Remember Dennis Brutus’ ‘Letter to Martha’. Why don’t people ask Dennis Brutus, ‘Who is Martha? Who did you write the poem for?’”

The essence of love poetry, he says, is in the ability of the poet to idealize and idolize, that is you create a human figure and you idealize her or him, creating in that figure the kind of love you don’t see around. “So, love poetry operates at a level that is higher than other forms of poetry. It goes beyond the real and it goes beyond the first level of imagination and fancy.” In this volume, like in previous ones, lyricism recurs as a technique. “Lyricism is the basis of my poetry,”he asserts. “I have always said it: poetry and music are first cousins.

If you take music from poetry, what is left? It’s like taking the sugar out of the sugar cane, what will be left will be chaff. So, lyricism is extremely important. The Yoruba don’t read poetry; they chant it. For me, music and love live in the same room. Love itself is lyrical; it is music.”

For the second time, Osundare echoes, “You raschal! You want to drag me into that controversy!” when I ask him to comment on the sore subject: whether he thinks there is (are) a new generation (s) in Nigerian poetry? Silence reigns, then he remarks without demur, “O yes, there are new generations, but I think my friend, Tanure Ojuide, was recently misunderstood on that issue. I have read your interview with him and the reactions of people to it. But the reactions people had to that interview were at variance, in some ways, to what you actually reported.

He is not saying that we don’t have a new generation of writers – he is saying that there are no groundbreaking ruptures yet, the kind of groundbreaking ruptures you need to have before you can simply differentiate one generation and another. I think it is just as he said, because I am always very skeptical about generational demarcation in literature.

“There are things in Wole Soyinka’s new works that you see in the works of new writers aged 20, 22 and 23. These are also things in those works by him that you see in the works he did when he was 26. Human life is not as chronologically arranged as a series of lamp-posts neatly standing in one invariate line. Generations flow into one another. I see young people doing things that are new; but then we ask, how different are the things they are doing from what came before? Take our own generation, for example, we would be hypocritical and mendacious to claim we had a clean break with the Soyinka generation. My poetry is strongly influenced by Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Look at the journey from prose to poetry, from an older generation to a new generation. Achebe opened my eyes to the possibilities and challenges of using language in a second language, second culture situation.

“I make bold to say Soyinka is a strong influence on me. Writers who deny the sources of their influence are false and arrogant –we are all influenced by other writers. Soyinka is not the only one who excites me. Sometimes when I read the poetry of younger writers such as Ogaga Ifowodo, Akeem Lasisi, Joe Ushie, Chiedu Ezeanah, Nike Adesuyi, Remi Raji, or Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, I am struck by the spark between their lines. So, the generational factor is not a one-way thing. We all climb on top of each other’s shoulders.

“So, what Ojaide said is right to a large extent, but the reactions of people to him were not fair enough. Remember we all operate within the same geographical unit, and we all fish from the same pond. Take Wole Soyinka, Osofisan, Sowande, Akeem Lasisi, Wunmi Raji, and so on: we all operate from the same Yoruba culture. Take Christopher Okigbo, Ossie Enekwe, Obi Nwakanma, Chimalum Nwankwo, Obiwu, among others: they operate within the same Igbo culture. We are looking at two different cultures –Yoruba and Igbo – but these cultures also cross into each other. Christopher Okigbo who I like calling the patron saint of modern Nigerian poetry, wrote most of his poems while living in Yorubaland. He is still largely an understudied poet.

“Most of us brag about knowing him, but we have yet to grasp the essence and significance of Okigbo as a border-crosser, a spirit without frontiers. Just consider the adroitness with which he interweaves African poetics and Classical poetics; the way he encounters Idoto in the valley between Ibadan and Fiditi. The Nigerian unity, the Nigerian idea, we are looking for all over the place is already in our poetry. I am not going to burst my pipe arguing about the generational question. Our literary landscape is a river –it flows – but, unlike the conventional river, this river flows back and forth.”