Is Contemporary “Nigerian Poetry” Nigerian?

This question has been on my mind for a while; I wrote the first few sentences of the essay last year. I was going to send it to a mag and get paid some money. But I am content to have it here.

I

In 2020, the organizers of the Lagos International Poetry Festival mistakenly invited me to be on a panel discussing the future of Nigerian poetry. Nome Emeka Patrick, Ojo Taiye, and Precious Arinze were the other poets on the panel (Toby Abiodun, the spoken word poet, was supposed to join us, but he was unavailable on the day); Saddiq Dzukogi was the host. I say my invite was “a mistake,” because, although I had written a few good poems, I am not sure I had a grasp of the panel’s subject; and, as I remember, no one else on that panel did either, our discourse ranged far from the subject. Titled “Rolling Canon: The Future of Nigerian Poetry Today,” the session was described this way:

It’s hard to tell when, but it’s true that we have entered something of a golden era in Nigerian poetry, a proliferation of prolific new voices defying the country’s enduring socio-political dysfunction and writing in step with global anxieties.

Three years later, it is clear that a number of things were wrong with some of the assumptions of the organizers. One, I don’t think “Nigerian poetry” exists, yet. Two, although the sentiment is understandable, it is hard to confirm that we are in any kind of “a golden era.” The idea is that a boom in publication and constant award-clinching is equal to a golden age; but that is far from the truth. Lastly, how can our poetry be Nigerian if it primarily concerns “global anxieties”? Yet these errors are common in the Nigerian literary scene today—Konya Shamsrumi, as excited as the organizers of LIPFest were two years before, last year published: “2022 The Nigerian Year of Poetry.”

At the time when Martin Banham, at Ibadan, was working with the poets who have now become apostolic pillars in the temple of Nigerian literature, Randall Jarrell, the American poet and critic, wrote two speech-essays. “Is American Poetry American?” was the first. Written in the fifties, and later published in the Yale Review, Jarrell argues here that the work of the earliest American poets (Longfellow, say, and Philis Wheatley) belonged to the English tradition—not the American. At their best, as in the case of Longfellow, they were “international” (global-anxieties-preoccupied) poets. But by the second decade of the twentieth century, heralded by the “eccentric” work of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, something distinct and incomparable had begun to come into being in the American literary landscape, something that can be called “American poetry.” T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Williams Carlos Williams, Jarrell writes, “created a body of American poetry that is an American tradition; a way of writing that is different from any other way of writing that has ever existed.” (Italics mine.) In the second essay, “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” written in 1962, Jarrell adequately describes the development of that sufficiently American tradition.

Here’s the Robb. Is it possible for us to make a similar claim about the body of poems that we are making today? Can we say, with our full chest, “We are creating a body of poetry that is [part of] a Nigerian tradition; a way of writing that is different from any other way of writing that has ever existed”? My answer is in the negative. “Nigerian poetry” does not yet exist. Many of today’s Nigerian poets are working within a tradition that is not ours, a tradition that is mainly American. Additonally, even if our poetry happens to be Nigerian in its character, if it possesses a distinct manner of speech, a movement of language all our own, the horizon of Nigerian poetry (of Nigerian literature) is greatly limited; to speak of “Nigerian poetry” would mean that there is already a wide variety of poetry “types” within “our tradition.”

The blatant Americanisation of our body of poems, as far as I know, goes back maybe twelve years, which is why this essay focuses on contemporary Nigerian poets. It is necessary to clarify what I mean by “contemporary Nigerian poets.” The group of poets I employ this term for consists, in the widest term, of poets born no later than in the last two decades of the previous century. In more particular terms, though the borders at times are porous, the work that these poets are making is thematically and stylistically different from the work made by Third Generation Nigerian poets: Remi Raji, Uche Nduka, Ogaga Ifowodo, Lola Shoneyin, Afam Akeh. This new group of poets include Nome Emeka Partick, Romeo Oriogun, Wale Ayinla, Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Jakky Bankong-Obi, Pamilerin Jacob, Adedayo Agarau, Jide Badmus, Jeremiah O-Agbaakin, JK Anowe, Itiola Jones, Logan February, Precious Arinze, Akpa Arinze, Chekwube Danladi. For conceptual purposes, I think they could be called “Fourth Generation Nigerian poets.” If we choose to go by the term crafted for other African poets of their “period,” we could as well call them “New Generation Nigerian poets,” since a good deal of them have appeared in the African Poetry Book Fund boxsets. 

Bored by the poverty, mediocrity, and corruption around them—subjects that dominated the work made by the poets of the third generation (or the Third Poets, for convenience)—the new poets owe something of their becoming to the social media. Some of them began to write on Facebook around 2013. Their subject is primarily the body, not the body politic. They confess. Some are looking back at what history did: my guess is that, at the rate that these poets are writing about the subject, soon we will need an anthology of Civil War poetry. A large number of them are not in Nigeria; they are a part of the “Japa Generation.” As with Oriogun, some leave the country to seek safety in the States, others to study. Some are American-Nigerian: Itiola Jones, Kemi Alabi. Some are British: Inua Ellams, Fiyinfoluwa Oladipo. Unlike the Third Poets, these poets are much better poets. Yet, like the poetry of the first and second generation, the poetry of the Third Poets was very Nigerian. 

Take this poem, “The Traffic Light,” from Voices from the Fringe (1988), edited by Harry Garuba, for example:

Three hundred yards

Green! 

“Come on don’t be a slow couch”

It teased with a mocking smile

A hundred and fifteen yards

Orange!

“What are you waiting for?”

It said with fringed alarm.

Two yards

Red!

“Where do you thin[k] you are going to?”

It shouted with a burst of triumphant laughter.

If personification qualified strung lines as poetry, then this would be a poem. But because that is not the case, this is best described as a dramatic rendition in words of a well-known Nigerian experience. Yet no mind but a Nigerian mind could have made something like this; any Nigerian would recognize the weight of the statement: “Where do you thin[k] you are going to?” Nollywood throws it around like confetti. However, no Nigerian poet writing today, of the new group, I am sure, would write a poem entirely devoted to the traffic light. Only Dami Ajayi, the Beer Parlour Poet of Nigeria, might.

II

Tell it this way: depression is the 30cm nail driving into the walls.

This line, taken from what is perhaps the most accomplished poem of the last ten years, “Sylvia Plath as an Old Story Title for Learning to Fight Depression Where the Semiotics Simply Suggest That a Garden Illustrates Peace as a Foreshadow Rather Than as a Vivid Depiction of an Ancestral Society of Sad Mothers & Helpless Fathers,” by Nome Emeka Patrick, is worth more than hundreds of lines by the Third Poets. Its precision, its freshness, its power. The entire poem is remarkable for how it moves, the sure hand, each line’s polished rawness, the weight of the subject (“In Lagos, another news says a student of microbiology, 400L, took/ a nook’s way to the sky”), how it betters what it borrows, and that little “yelz” we trip on at the floor of the poem, signature of a period in our culture, plucked from the mouth of Jennifer—the character that has become one with Funke Akindele—with her horrible but jolly English, as much a flavour of the culture as the scent of Jollof. This poem has no predecessor in our literature. One would have to go back to the pioneer poets to find lines that equal its first. Though much of our recent poems are not good, overexcited, complaining or sobbing via a barrage of recycled metaphors, it is not difficult to see that the new poets are the ones who can stand next to Soyinka, Okigbo, Clark, Okara, the Osundare of “A Song for Ajegunle.”

Depression as a subject is the dominant strain of recent poetry by Nigerians. Things climaxed with the death of Chukwuemeka Akachi, a young Nsukka poet, after a severe battle with the illness, in 2019. As Patrick’s poem shows, a healthy percentage of Fourth Poets are the sons and daughters of the American poet Sylvia Plath, and of Robert Lowell, who was her teacher. Logan February writes in “Boy Lolita”: “Boy read Plath—now he eats men like air, unless they are paying for his food.” Recent American poetry is largely imitative of Lowell and Plath, even though the bulk of the poets who write confessional poetry in America do not have the discipline of Plath nor the formal sense of Lowell. Because we are studying poetry in America, and we are putting out work through American publications, and most of the poems we consume are recent American poems: we are constantly drinking Lowell and Plath from these streams. I believe this explains why much of what we are now writing is so alike. Poetry, good poetry, is rare in America today. And because we are consuming America, good poetry is even rarer in Nigeria.

Pamilerin Jacob’s Gospels of Depression (Poets In Nigeria, 2019) is the first work to deal explicitly with the subject of depression among the new poets. Thoroughly Nigerian, influenced by Niyi Osundare, using references from the Bible in the way that MFM members use the blood of Jesus—at every turn, for every purpose—but in this case to ridicule, and to portray a mind that is unwell, the poems are untidy, littered over the page, words are etched out, forms are invented (say, a conversation between the depressed and a therapist). The images are brutal, but even more brutal because they are familiar: “I scratch my eyes with a knife/ & light changes colour.” Each title, a small pleasure: “Salmon on the Mount or Why I am Deaf to Beatitudes.” There is a poem in this book where he repeats over and over, “[in my country. . .] there are more coffin makers than psychiatrists.” Here, it is not the country that is mad, it is the poet that is mad. But the country cares nothing for the poet. But Jacob’s brutal gospels are poised, primarily, for the sentimental Nigerian Christian. The two poems by Njoku Nonso that won the 2022 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest are in this mode as well, though they are tidier, they are a gentler indictment. Here—unlike in Gospels—the “Nigerian sentiment” that prayer works instead of meds is playfully subverted:

The meds are working more than your prayers,

my mother scribbled in one of her pink little journals.

I understand the joke. I count the bottle of pills

on the room divider, the crest of my tongue, hunger-green.

In JK Anowe’s poetry one can sense Omah Lay singing “Soso” behind a cluster of ribs in the poet’s language. But the poet has such discipline, such maturity, we never get more than a sense. Yet that sense is enough. Because his poetry is much more accomplished than a lot of his contemporaries’, his “invented” confessions enter us successfully in delicate places. His best phrases, solid, turn like Elijah’s chariot wheels. His images are at once delicate and striking—“a grand/ piano with a finger nailed to its single key”; and, being attentive, nothing’s lost on him, not even this tiny detail—“as kids we wouldn’t/ shut the fridge door all at once/ just to see the inner light go off”—which becomes a how-to note—“that’s how you tend to the heart.” His best poem appears to be “Tender Crow’s Feet.” 

to come from a pedigree    of women

          who never enjoyed the sex but moaned anyway

There are hardly any lines sadder, more finely wrought, than these two in recent poems by Nigerians. We are immediately sent back to the scene in The Wasteland which Edmund Wilson in an early review describes as portraying “love [that] has lost its life-giving power and can bring nothing but an asceticism of disgust.” Sex becomes a tragic routine, layered. We know what the men ploughing the women do not, and so their pain—different from the women’s—is transposed into our souls. Beyond sex is the mortification of the body (and its desire) of any human consciousness touched by serious depression; yet this deadness takes on a dramatic tone. The dead moans. By “invented” confessions, then, I am not saying that Anowe is not a truly autobiographical poet (it matters less that he is), I mean that his autobiographical psalms, forged in what T. S. Eliot called “the ghost of a form,” are inventions, like small machines. Romeo Oriogun’s poems, for example, are confessional in a direct, careless way. If we judge by the poems in Sacrament of Bodies, he lacks discipline as a poet. Oriogun does not reinvent his time at the gay bar, so that it becomes something inscribed permanently on the page, not a replica of memory. This fault in the poet is due to a pursuit of intensity, heart romantic. In another sense, that romantic sensibility appears to have found fresh expression in Nomad: here it is not sexual exultation but cultural exultation. The Mansa Musa talk in his long, brilliant poem, “Cotonou,” which appeared in the New Yorker last year, gets at what I mean.

The struggle you see in Anowe’s work—in Biblical language, a constraint in the work’s spirit—is absent from Oriogun’s work. You will find the same constraint in work by Jeremiah O-Agbaakin and Wale Ayinla. These three guys, and Patrick, are the most disciplined poets working in the scene today.

Ayinla’s To Cast a Dream is a good book, it contains some of the best poems he has written yet. Few poems are as good and Nigerian, among work by the new poets, as “Sea Boys” and “in praise of a night of perdition.” His English is stilted, but the stilt is a style. Grief is the other dominant strain in recent poetry by Nigerians, and Ayinla’s (also, Patrick’s, and Saddiq Dzukogi’s in Your Crib, My Qibla) are some of the finest grief poems in what I hope is becoming a tradition; there is a measured distance between what he mourns and what he makes of what he mourns, though sometimes the distance could be shortened. You get the sense reading our saltwater poems that a lot of our poets are not making art, they are crying for help, are seeking pity—not in Ayinla. He has also joined Gbenga Adeoba—Exodus (University of Nebraska Press, 2020)—in writing the poems of the Meditarranean. 

The subject of Nigerians trying to reach Europe via the Sahara and through Morocco is becoming hot. It represents another major trend. The only problem is what imagination and skill are we bringing to it? This trend has various faces: the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta, the EndSARS movement, terrorism cum insurgency; in the deep past, the Nigerian Civil War of 1967—70, the earth-cracking boot regime of the military, the Slave Trade. These subjects make the social conscience of the new Nigerian poets eloquent. Here, you will find Hussain Ahmed, a Yoruba poet in English, Ajibola Tolase (whose chapbook Koola Lobitos was published in the APBF boxset), Ojo Taiye, Ayinla and Adeoba, as I have mentioned. There are poems here and there on the EndSARS movement and the Lekki Massacre, most of them are not very good. On Biafra, Precious Arinze’s chapbook, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us So Far, a few poems by Chinwenite Oyenkwelu, Tolase touches the matter.

On social and historical matters, as we Nigerians say, in a sly manner, Imagination wan kill us. The main problem with the social poems is not that they lack imagination, it is that the imagination is made comfortable by the absence of skill and knowledge. And I think it is an American thing. Oscar Wilde wrote a small cultural essay in the nineteenth century, “Americans in London,” where he made this comment about the American woman: “She has exquisite feet and hands, . . . and can talk brilliantly on any subject, provided that she knows nothing about it.” The same is true of our poets. By filling our poems with seemingly exquisite images, by working out of an emotional sense, we write “brilliantly” about everything we know nothing about. You just have to have had a grandfather (the grandfather is choicest) who died during the war to have something interesting to say about it. 

When you read Koola Lobitos, though, you find a poet who has knowledge. Tolase represents something that is rare today in our poems: a dialogue with the past. His chapbook opens with a line from Afam Akeh, a deliberate act that captures something of his attention to yesterday. It may be because their books are scarce, but we rarely read our ancestors. Meanwhile, Seyi Vibes is sampling Sola Alysson. Everybody is sampling Fela. Barry Jhay owes much to his grandfather. Is this a reason why even when we make poems about Nigerian things, they sit comfortably in another tradition?

Chinwenite Onyekwelu, for example, is a fine poet, his new poems are calm and collected, like good boys. His poems in Adroit are in their own league. But the distance between Anowe and Onyekwelu is long. Read a poem on Biafra by this poet and you know you are reading an American poem. It is the same sense you get when you read Samuel A. Adeyemi, or Prosper Ifeanyi, or even Itiola Jones (she is particularly conscious of it), and much of the poems that are coming out of Nigeria today.

A note on Oriogun. Oriogun seems obsessed with how people read him; he tries in his poems to validate his desire, his person, to the preacher calling fire and brimstone. He does not appear comfortable with his desire, not in the way that, say, Logan February is. February’s poetic landscape is Rumi’s field, which is seemingly beyond questions of right and wrong, acceptance or non-acceptance, that is where they want us (their readers) to meet them. Of course, there is a longing for God—the Father who does not appear when called to—in their work, and February sings about the evil of homophobia; but when they write about the brutal posture of the world toward their desire, it is with a certain kind of grace, Wendell Berry’s peace of wild things, that you find totally missing in Oriogun. Without knowing it, Oriogun has sung many praises to homophobia. Perhaps Itiola Jones is right when she comments in one her poems on the internalised homophobia of black gay men.

This strain in Oriogun may be reflective, too, of American poetry’s invasion of our poetry-scape, i.e., the obsession of recent (black) American poetry with oppression, with the oppressor. Chris Abani’s new book, Smoking the Bible, may be taken as evidence of this point; also, Kemi Alabi’s Against Heaven. In fact, it is impossible to grasp much of the EndSARS movement poems outside of the paradigm of the recent Black Lives Matter movement and the many poor poems it fueled. Obviously, Nigerian poets of the previous generations have been obsessed with the oppressor too, but we are not reading them, our work is not a continuum of theirs; it is a breakaway, a part of a globalised poetics.

III

What makes a poem Nigerian? What qualifies as a Nigerian poem? These are important questions to ask, but at this point the available answer may not satisfy the reader; and that is precisely because there are few Nigerian poems. Yet, brothers and sisters, what can I say but that you recognize a Nigerian poem or a very Nigerian line when you come across it, especially if you are a Nigerian? 

Egbo naa,

Which of the boys is a reed?

I am the squirrel teeth, cracked

The riddle of the palm.

Here evenings are pale smokes 

Snaking out of idle kitchens

The toothless swagger of beer parlours 

If I was God, 

I would do it differently. 

Grant those who pray for beards, breasts and buttocks 

their dream bodies.

Again I steep my sweet tea in sweet palm wine

& again, I sìrànrán, kiss the devil on the lips.

Browse Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry, edited by Adedayo Agarau, read the poems by Sàlàkó Olúwapèlúmi Francis, by Olajide Salawu, by S. Su’eddie Vershima Agema, read the poem by D. M. Aderibigbe (Aderibigbe is very conscious about putting his Nigerianness into his poems), Jumoke Verissimo, Dami Ajayi; read “Oja Oyingbo” by Goodness Ayoola. These poems are so Nigerian, it is impossible to describe them any other way. It has something to do with the placement of Nigerian things in the poems (Yoruba demon, semolina, market as metaphor for life, the descriptions of Lagos and of a Lagos night in Sàlàkó), with the peculiarity of their speech. A Nigerian poem, as in one of Anointing Obuh’s poems in the anthology, may simply include the word “Tueh,” or as in Patrick, the word “yelz.” As in Anowe and Agbaakin, it is something about the discipline, the eccentricity of their poems. In Logan, it is this fiery, casual yet meticulous sensibility.

An American poem written by a Nigerian is an American poem because its influences are American to a fault. I think it is fine to write in the ways that keep your imagination fertile, but if we must be able to say, “This is ours,” I believe what we are claiming as ours must truly be ours. The Nigerian short story should have done what I am hoping that we do in our poems, but if Pemi Aguda writes in an authentically Nigerian voice, what about Ope Adedeji? You know when you read “Caterer, Caterer” or “24 Alhaji Williams Street” that this is not American stuff, no American would be crazy enough to write that, and like that. But you also get the sense, though maybe not as sharp, in “After the Birds.” Nigerian poets are conscious of this. It is why we are translating Ifa verses into English and incorporating them into our poems (Kolawole Samuel’s Invocations); it is why, as in the last example from the excerpts above, the poet Logan February would use “sìrànrán” instead of the English equivalent. It is why we are incorporating pidgin into our poems. Ajibola Tolase’s poem in 20.35 Africa Volume V—not too good, but we need to fail wonderfully—is written entirely in pidgin.

I think we need to find a way to go to America and not be Americanised in our writing. As the mystic Simone Weil once said, we must take the feeling of being at home into exile. Oriogun may offer us clues in this case, the poems he wrote when he first got to America were struggling to be good but they were the poems of an outsider, someone trying to understand, to settle down. It is not advisable that one maintains that posture for long, but what can we learn from it? Fiyinfoluwa Oladipo’s poems, as British as they are Nigerian, masterful, may also be pointing us in a direction. A good deal of his poems are unpublished, but check out “The Shape-Shifters,” in the 2019 Foyle Young Poets Anthology, and “Dawn,” in The Fire That Is Dreamed of: The Young African Poets Anthology (Agbowó, 2020), edited by Patrick and Itiola Jones. I think, too, that it is becoming cheap to throw in Yoruba phrases, some pidgin, in our poems; to translate Ifa proverbs into English (Kolawole Samuel’s chapbook may be majestic, but it is not so good). We must start doing what we have not been doing—Soyinka wrote a poem about seeing a dead dog in the road, it is a classic. Clark wrote an ode to a house he grew up in, which filled with water every time rain fell; this poem is a classic. I get the sense all the time that Nigerian poets are not interested in Nigeria. The world around us is not interesting to us. We don’t find the maruwa or danfo bus interesting. The Third Poets wrote about the bus conductor, albeit satirically. We don’t even see the conductor. Boys are doing weed all over Lagos, some of us are those boys, we don’t capture the texture of their lives. We need to be able to write a poem about such simple Nigerian things as the generator, the woman selling fish, the man who talks too loud in the compound, and without any judgement, with grace. We need to be able to praise the ordinary aspect of our lives. Who is describing Nsukka in their poems? We need to expand the frontiers of our art. Let each man go his own way. At this point, na one way most of us dey go.

A poet like Jakky Bankong-Obi is doing something interesting, something I don’t think has been done among us before, at least in the way that she does it, praising the natural world and the body as part of that world, calmly. Her poem in Memento—“Need”—stands like a lone maple in the middle of a road. It commands a silence all its own. So different, so clear, so staggering.

Like the Savannah plains  

Of my Sahel body, 

I need a watering hole 

To calm the animals beneath my skin. 

I need grass, chlorophyll to fuel 

This light brown melanin sheathe. 

I need trees, here and there 

To soften the blow of these trade winds. 

I need fire, a ferocious hunger 

For the things I want from life.

I need speed, like the gazelle 

To traverse this vast landscape.

I need sweetness, new beginnings 

Like the tropical rain after a hot dry season.

To be sure, the future looks good for what we may come to call our own poetry, if the finest among us would not be comfortable with winning American awards for books that don’t bite off more than they can chew, to paraphrase the American critic, William Logan; books that bite off so little they don’t need to chew. We cannot afford the consequence of failing to bite off more than we can chew.