By Henry Akubuiro
One of Africa’s prolific and most celebrated poets, Professor Niyi Osundare made a triumphant entry into the Nigerian literary scene with a poetry collection, Songs of the Marketplace, in 1983. So far, he has published 21 poetry volumes and has won a number of literary and other prestigious awards, including Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Noma Award for Publishing in Africa and ANA Poetry Prize. He has been a recipient of the Fonlon/Nichols award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa”, Nigerian National Order of Merit Award, to mention a few.
Over the years, Osundare’s poetry has maintained a fidelity to the cultural heritage of his sociological home base, especially the Yoruba oral tradition, deploying it as an intrinsic canvas to reach the world, as well as enriching his writings with a hybridity that appropriates foreign cultures without conferring an legitimacy.
Recently, Professor Niyi Osundare presented two new poetry collections: Snapsongs — Home groans and Foreignflares and Green: Sighs of Ailing Planet —to bibliophiles in Lagos. The two poetry collections, published by University Press, Ibadan, and Black Widow Press, Boston (2021), pay witness to Osundare’s relentless quest to save the earth. Genuflecting to the altar of reason in his bardic assignment, the poet refuses to be lured to the schema of mundane things. Painstakingly, he makes a quick ferret for those enobling things of nature — of green and blue — that edify the universe. For Osundare, the universe is the local and the local is the universe. Salvaging one is a stepping stone to salvaging every creation and rewriting the forlorn story.
A social critic, Osundare is like an anopheles to the ears of bad leaders and non-state actors. The odium of corruption, misrule and the widening chasm between rich and poor do not excite him as a humanist; hence, he bewails the death of innocence, the colours of societal sepulcher, lampooning the sorry state of the planet.
Snapsongs: Homegroans and Foreignflares
Before now, many poems in Snapsongs… (2021) have been published in different media outfits across the world, but they are united by similar motifs in its four sections. While the majority of them are nature poems, others are laced with social criticisms, with some chronicling vistas gone by and still evolving, plus taking a detailed look at the power game as it affects the globe.
Also, most of the poems in Snapsongs are quatrains. There are no deliberate rhymes in this collection, but many of the poems show an enhanced prosody with a fecund imagination. Evidently, music meets at the doorstep of poetry when an Osundare is involved. He is a crooner whose idioms are soul searching, from the epigramatic to the parabolic.
Osundare comes across as a seller of words, and m words have consequences, as the poet hawks his wares in the streets of absent ears. Some of the poems in this collection contain anachronistic words of wisdom, couched in traditional idioms. Frankly, some verses read like pastiches of an ancient baba. Take for instance, in “Set the Night on Fire”, you get to learn agelong verities: the butterfly cannot count the dazzling colours of its robe: the millipede glides on legs that move in magic millions. In “The River Sleeps in Its Bed”, the verities echo that, if you quarrel with the moon, you must learn to deal with the devil of darkness.and don’t forget that the night’s mystic cloak hides a rattling cache of knives.
Osundare is not a conformist. In “If Eden Was So Benign”, he asks knotty questions begging for answers. These are declamations that do not lend to the jejune but rather interrogate things we take for granted about existence and religion. The Bible tells us that the garden of Eden was a wonderful place, but Osundare is confused how the Serpent was smuggled into this idyllic locale, thus: “… What was the Serpent doing on its tree/From where did it derive its venom/Who was the Gardener/… Who gave Satan so much power//Who planted that Tree with the Forbidden Fruit?” (p. 11)
The inquisitorial voice seeks to know in what strange language the Serpent cajoled its audience (Adam and Eve) and what primal electricity of being powered the glow of the Original Sin. He continues this search for answers in “There is a God in Every Man” when the speaker in the poem asks who told you God is a man. He disabuses our minds that the bearded, white-faced patriarch in the books is nothing but the figment of imagination of some wild, tendentious imagination. Perhaps paradise is overcrowded with wishful thinkers, too. However, it would be wrong to qualify this as a nihilistic resignation.
In this bardic project, Osundare projects a better understanding of life and its hidden meanings. Life is a riddle, needless to say, and what’s left unsaid is often louder than what’s said. When you pray, do you channel your prayers to a God with a year-long beard or clean-shaven like a millennial monk? The poet dwells on the truth we fear, the only straight line on the horizon, the thousand lessons of the valley, and whatnot.
In the Homegroans section, the bard talks about a “wonderland”, a land of miracles where anomalies reigns supreme, with those in authority mortgaging the future of the dystopian African country by always thinking of number one. The voice in this section is trenchant, constantly calling out on them for providing darkness instead of light, plunging the nation under water, and being delinquent defectors across party lines. “O to Gee” is the anthem for rebellion against the King of the Senate in a recent political dispensation in Nigeria. There are scenes from a Nigerian political circus, while the cantos of “June 12 and Its Children” recalls a lachrymal political past woven by a political Maradona. This section is replete with political satires.
From Foreignflares to Parables of Power, Osundare’s cultural straddles manifest in verses, with a keen eye on racial matters and socio-political convulsions elsewhere. When you read, towards the end, “Parable of the Fingers”, predicated on the nuclear red button palaver, one distills that it’s no longer paranoid to think that apocalypse can be triggered any moment by maverick leaders against our wishes.
Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet
The second poetry volume, Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet, is a poetry volume woven around ecocentrism. Osundare’s environmental concerns are taken a notch higher here. From the cover to the contents, the poet’s eco sensitivity and awareness of its rape attains a sedulous highmark. This is, no doubt, a fascinating offering for students of ecocriticism.
Structured in nine unequal sections, Osundare paints disturbing images of our dying planet, the culprits, in most parts, being man and his industrialisation, his actions and inactions. Osundare also recognises some important artists and ideologues who made nature interventions decades ago by, serenading our ears with enchanting verses about how beautiful their world/our world was but which have turned to mere whimsies today.
In Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet, the poet makes a plaintive cry to save the planet, eulogising beautiful seasons across the world. The poet immerses himself in these seasons, making himself an eco hero above commonality.
“Hole in the Sky” speaks to us about the degradation of the ozone layer caused by the greenhouse effect from factories and automobiles thereby creating a domino effect that has impacted on every living thing on the planet and inanimate things. It is a “blazing, blinding hole/In the garment of the sky” (p. 10). Several years ago, humanity sowed the wind. Now “The Whirlwind is ripe for our heedless reaping” (p. 29). It’s a climate of fear, a malingering mountain and a dying lake.
Osundare laments of a fallen tree and of Amazon burning. He is unhappy with a forest of vanished glories, with roots shriveled in earth’s heat-harassed crypt, amid blighted leaves floating in the wind.
Osundare remembers the environmentalist and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who fought and died to save the environment in his Niger Delta. Sadly, today, “The Delta’s door shakes in its feeble frame” (p. 51). There are other references to Gabriel Okara and his aquatic poems, which when juxtaposed with today’s reality, would blur the lines.
In the sixth section, Osundare serenades fruits and food we eat, garden and harvest. In the next, he celebrates seasons, from West Africa’s dry season to Western World’s autumn. In the eight section, the poet renders aquatic verses, while he sings of life beyond the geography of pains in the concluding part.
This is a consummate work that enlists Osundare among the best nature poets in the world that include, among others, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Blake, Alfred Tennison, who sang of the wind, guessed into the sky, kissing it, and made the moon appear on mere plates. Osundare’s Green… is an oblique attack on humanity and its inimical relationship with nature. Is man not mortified? Osundare poetises for redemption.