I
want to rub shoulders with the best male poets
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (akuhen@sunnewsonline.com)
Sunday, January
27, 2008
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•Ngozi
Obasi Awa
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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The poetry genre isn’t the most attractive forte for
female writers in Nigeria, unlike the prose where some of
them are among the leading voices of new Nigerian writing.
But with her poetry volume, Blade in Wind’s Eye (2007),
which has already started attracting rave reviews within and
outside the country, the poet, Mrs. Ngozi Obasi Awa, is confident
of breaking into the poetic firmament.
Commenting on the offering, Unoma Azuah, the Nigerian scholar-writer
living in the US, writes on the blurb that it is “particularly
grabbing and at the same time very visual”. Awa’s
poems have imagistic and lyrical appeals, and it isn’t
out of sync to associate it with the Okigbo tradition.
More than a decade has elapsed since I went to Umuahia, which
makes this invitation to attend the launch of her Blade in
Wind’s Eye an opportunity to rediscover the capital
of Abia State. Indeed, everything has changed, and I can hardly
recognize the scenery, with the new roads and buildings dotting
the landscape.
“Please, don’t write about my rickety car in your
paper , because you can write anything without warning,”
pleads my host with a jocularity that sounds persuasive as
she drives into an inn downtown to pick me in her Mercedes
Benz car that isn’t rickety at all.
As we drive into the Michael Okpara Auditorium in the heart
of the state capital for this conversation, the writer is
still basking in the euphoria of her book launch, which drew
many dignitaries from the academia and politics. “I
was overwhelmed by the turnout from all walks of life ”
she remarks.“People are still fulfilling their pledges.”
This is our second meeting (the first time being a brief encounter
at the recent ANA convention in Owerri), but she is so observant
this afternoon to note that “it seems you are a Cancerian;
Cancerians are reserved, creative and sometimes explosive”.
She must be a magician, for it isn’t a wide guess!
Like a shrinking violet, she barely looks you in the face
as she talks, which is a divorce from the strong tone of some
of her poems. “Actually, I did not set out to write
like Okigbo. I did not even know about the Okigbo tradition,
but I enjoy his works and wish to write like him,” she
replies to the observations that have been made on her pandering
to the Okigbo tradition.
The writer, who works as a principal registrar in Abia State
judiciary, seems to be popular in this part. We are seated
under a tree in front of the auditorium and, from time to
time, passersby will greet her with admiration. “Aminu
Mahmud [a poet] told me,” she interpolates, “after
reading my poems, that poets who studied at Nsukka [she read
Dramatic Arts at UNN] have this Okigbo tradition. Maybe, it
is subconscious,” she concedes.
Unlike the pedestrian poet, her poems manifest a predilection
for sophisticated diction. “Many people have told me
that the diction is elevated. Though I have written simpler
poets, I deliberately selected standards poems in this collection
to show that somebody has written something of substance,”
she admits.
Can she throw light on the predominance of imagery in her
poems? “The picture must be there for people to understand,”
she begins. “Imagery is the picture. Before, I used
to overflog my poems with words, trying to explain things
within my poems; but at a certain time, I got to know that
the poem tells the story: somebody will see something and
then interpret it. That’s why I am building my poems
around certain images.”
There is evidence of subtle activism in some of her poems.
Does it stem from her being a lawyer’s wife? Her activism
began, she tells me, in her undergraduate days at Nsukka before
she got married. She, under the leadership of the late social
activist, Chima Ubani, was part of the students who decried
injustice and took part in demonstrations against constituted
authorities. “I don’t like bad things happening
around me; I criticize so that there will be a change. It
has nothing to do with being a lawyer’s wife,”
she says.
In the poem “Oil on his Head”, she pens the verse:
“We begin to harvest/ a column of gilded growth/ a taste
of spatial paradise/ and a rain of fulfilled promises”,
which seems to betoken a political statement. She concurs,
“Since the coming of the new Abia State Governor, T.A.
Orji, things are moving well: good roads, electricity supply,
payment of workers’ arrears and pension. That’s
what I wrote in the poem. He is an anointed governor for us.”
There are other political poems with echoes of committed
literature in them. “I believe that literature should
be able to say things for things to change. I am committed
to whatever am writing. The poem “The Vanquished Can
Sing”, laments how Igbos are being marginalized. “If
the federal government can put things in other and accept
everybody, and not maroon us, there will not be that kind
of activism in my poetry,” she notes.
In some of her poems, sometimes she chides women for moral
laxity in the same way she celebrates womanhood. For example,
her poem “Letter to Eve” lampoons female undergraduates
for weird dressing. “I am only saying in that poem that
they should not be dressing provocatively and that they should
get married and earn the respect of people. It is better for
them to showcase their intelligence instead of flaunting their
bodies for men to exploit and dump them later.”
In contrast, In “Nigerian Woman”, she extols the
virtues of Nigerian women “because they shape our homes
and the society”, and “if women are loose, society
will be bad and crooked.”
Linguistically, she tries to infuse the Igbo vernacular into
some of her poems. The bard explains, “I want to bring
my poem home. In ‘Okada Rider’, I try to come
down to the level of the okada rider, who is more or less
an illiterate, and when he drives his motorcycle, he tries
to harm others who are poor like him. That is why I am addressing
them in a language that is common to everybody to understand.
In the poems “Faces of my People”, “Tearing
the Village Drum Asunder”, etc., there are echoes of
marginalization and Biafran sympathy. How close to truth is
this observation? She chuckles and utters mildly, “Somehow
I am pro-Biafra,” then she accentuates, “because
of the increasing injustice in Nigeria. The roads in this
part of the country are bad and accidents occur daily, claiming
lives; are we still part of Nigeria? I lost some relations
during the civil war and I don’t want to lose people
again. If our people are brought in, like the Yoruba and Hausa,
into the federation,” she harps, “we won’t
clamour for Biafra. That is why I say, in a way, I am pro-Biafra”.
Blade in a Wind’s Eye contains sixty poems and she wrote
them for many years but was not in a haste to get published.
Initially, when she began writing, she was writing for her
personal enjoyment, but, buoyed by the flattering comments
of some readers who read and recommended them to be published
in newspapers, which she did, she decided to compile them
for publication in one volume.
Her title poem “Blade in Wind’s Eye” is
deceptive and deconstructing it doesn’t look like a
dog’s breakfast. “Many people have noted the same
thing,” she smiles. “You can look at the poem
from up to three angles. The title I wanted to give the entire
collection before was ‘Total Woman’, but some
men who saw it expressed reservations that it was attacking
men and could put off men from reading it. But I am not fighting
men. I am married with kids and living with my husband, who
is the one supports me.
“In ‘Blade in Wind’s Eye’, you see
the poem as a leaf or vegetation, what we get from the farm.
It is before everybody’s eye, that is, the wind’s
eye. The second angle is that it is a blade, because my writing
is a blade: it has many faces. While I am writing it, I am
hiding under the shadow of God.”
Generally, her [poetry volume shows an eclectic dimension:
her Christian belief, her aspiration to go to heaven, political
statements, her being a patriot, etcetera. “My poems
are not one-sided, that is why I don’t want to divide
them into parts,” she explains.
If you think she is scared of the leading poets in the country,
who are mostly men, you miss the mark, because she isn’t
a pushover. “I am not scared, I can rub shoulders with
men any day, anywhere, and nobody tries to bring me down,”
she declares.
What of her embrace of the pastoral universe, going by the
way she weaves rustic images in her poems? “I love the
rural setting,” she says in her almost masculine voice,
“and sometimes I feel like going back there because,
for one, people do things in common and they are united, unlike
in the city. Though I am not a man, I love the war dance of
my people (Ohafia). There is no way the rustic images won’t
come into my poems,” she says matter-of-factly. |
