Sam Omatseye functions as a journalist, novelist, playwright and poet. Still basking in the glory of his civil war narrative, My Name is Okoro, which has won him rave reviews, Omatseye, who chairs The Nation newspaper’s Editorial Board, has just released Scented Offal, a bardic offering. Like the novel before it, it is a work that interrogates Nigerian history. The multiple award-winning journalist and member, Nigerian Academy of Letters, spoke to HENRY AKUBUIRO on the intricacies of our history recollected in this poetry volume.

Barely a year after you released the novel, My Name is Okoro, you are out with a new poetry book, Scented Offal. And, like the novel, it has a historical overflow. What inspired this bardic excursion into time and space?

I wrote this book while I was writing My Name is Okoro, and part of the whole idea was to write Nigerian history in poetry and to write it with a view to capturing some of the essence of the conflicts, crises, and challenges of our history over the years. This is just Part One of what might be a two-three part series on the Nigerian evolution. This one simply looked at the Nigeria from its origin, and ended at the end of the civil war.

Can we say that this came as a surprise, or was it a conscious bardic excursion, given the fact that, it was while writing the aforementioned novel that you stumbled on this?

I didn’t intend to write a long book; I just started something, and it then had a life of its own; I had to look at Zik, Awo, and other Nigerian leaders. It probably wasn’t meant to be more than one page, but I discovered I was going on and on. It was going on in spite of me.

Why was it difficult to control the urge to keep penning the verses since it wasn’t meant to be elaborate?

Because I found myself in ecstasy when I was writing it. I was enjoying it. I didn’t want to end until it ended; and when it ended, I felt it should end there, because the other areas after the civil war requires me to concentrate and then get a poetic vision how to move forward when the civil war ended. So, I have to find a kind of template to work on the other part, because this part is actually about people coming together and having crises, culminating in a civil war, where we went to war against ourselves. Now that the war has ended, we ended another phase of our existence. You can see that the poem ended inconclusively –as a beginning. So, there is a sense that the story has just begun.

In writing Scented Offal, you shed light on different aspects of Nigerian history. Did you benefit from extensive research?

This is a history that I already knew. I didn’t have to do research for anything I wrote there; I just wrote it, because those are things I have studied and wrote overtime. So, it made it easier for me to write the poem. I may have to do the research if am going forward on the second part, because you have to talk about Reconstruction and Rehabilitation by Gowon. You have to look at the crisis of the administration. Were we leaving in denial?  The second phase is the phase of denial. We thought we have resolved our crisis, and so on. But it turned out that we had not gone anywhere. So, the next phase is actually the phase of denial that blew up in our faces, maybe, around June 12.

You could have written it as textbook, then. Why the medium of poetry for penning this history?

That’s the only way I could express it the way I wanted. I can’t write a textbook with this kind of language (laughs). You know poetry is about expressing the mundane in the flowery –in the world of metaphors. Aristotle once said literature is about metaphors. There is a way of looking at our history and trying to say, “Well, this is our history; this is our epic way of saying it.”

From my reading, you lionised the nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe as a true Nigerian nationalist, compared to his contemporaries.

Is that what you see?

Yes. Because you present him as a true nationalist. For instance, he appeared to be caviar to the general as the New Nigerian nation emerged so much so that he aspired to become the premier of Western Nigeria before he was schemed out by Awolowo…

Maybe that was what I felt like when I was writing it (laughs). In actual sense, he was very cosmopolitan, perhaps the most cosmopolitan of all our founding fathers. He could speak all the major languages. He had absorbed Yoruba language as much as he had absorbed Igbo language and Hausa culture. He could be free in any environment. It was a measure of his influence, even among the Yoruba, that he could aspire to be a Yoruba premier.

So, at what point was the seed of tribal politics sown in Nigeria?

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It still a very difficult thing to trace, but some people have traced it to that point when Zik wanted to be premier in the Western Region, and Awolowo said, “We are going to form Egbe Omo Oduduwa, and we are going to take care of ourselves”. Some people said it was Awo planting tribalism, and some people said it was Zik trying to become tribalistic by trying to impose himself by presenting it as a form of inevitability that an Igbo man could become a premere in Western Nigeria. It was a sour point. Some people believed that ethnic suspicion had always been there, but it came into formal form with that crisis of the Western Region when Awolowo edged Zik out. Some said Zik would have taken the higher road if he had left Eyo Ita intact, but, then, he edged out Eyo Ita, creating the tension between the Igbo and the Minorities in the Eastern Region at that time. Unfortunately, that was when that blew into the open.

Scented Offal focusses extensively on the three nationalists in Nigeria. Where did you think they got it wrong?

They got it wrong because they never became truly accepted as national figures.

Was it a failure on the part of Nigerians or themselves?

I think it was a failure on the part of themselves, because they were not able to rise above their ethnic groups, and they really needed their ethnic groups to become really strong; and having become strong, they didn’t rise above them. As I observed in Scented Offal: After that chapter, Nigeria officially became a three-chambered cocoon of warlord tribes…

One of the revelations in this poetry is that Nigeria started on a high and ended on a low. Is that, then, a justification for the dismemberment of this country of which calls have become vociferous?

Nigeria has always been that –high to low. Whether that justifies dismemberment, that’s another issue. But, at least, this is way of telling us: This is our story. And you find out that this poetry started by telling us we had so many things in common; we are interconnected; there are so many things in common. We are so interconnected that it is still one of the puzzles that we decided to forget what brings us together for the things that separate us.

This poem contains real-life character portraitures instead of using fictitious charaters…

There are poems in the past that have used real-life characters like “Shaka Zulu”. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is also in that tradition. There are novels that have used real-life characters; they use pastiche as part of their techniques. You can take freedom in building your characters. In this case, I presented the characters the way I saw them in history.

Don’t you think by using real-life characters, there is a tendency to limit your capacity to call a spade a spade?

No, I put it there for anybody to challenge what I said, and I have said it as boldly as I wanted to say it. I talked about the Awo and Akintola crisis and how it went. I also revisited the pogrom and the civil war, and I said them the way I saw them; I didn’t feel that I would use them in a fictional way.

There is this notion, especially in Nigeria, that today’s poets are talking to themselves. Considering that you function as a novelist, playwright and a poet, do you find this to be true, and are you not afraid you will be talking to a limited audience as a poet? 

One thing with my poetry is that it is so simple that anybody can access it and read. Poetry is a small but special market as J.P. Clark said. It is like we don’t need other people who don’t like poetry (laughs). You don’t write poetry with the aim of becoming a bestseller, but some poems have incidentally become bestsellers. Poetry is difficult to break into the market, but if you get people who appreciates it, that’s enough.

I am astounded by how prolific you have become since returning from the US after your long stay abroad. What stalled your literary development in America, which was supposed to be a serene environment for creative writing?

Crocodile Girl was actually written while I was in the US. I tuned it up when I returned to Nigeria, and the novel I am working on now, which I haven’t completed, was started in the US. I had done like three, four chapters before I returned to Nigeria. In the US, I was focussed on the job –you have to eat before you write; you don’t want to write before you eat as some people do (laughs). If you want to write before you eat, you may finish writing and you won’t have any food to eat. The love of writing keeps me going, and I have been able to discipline myself now more than before.