Reading Peter Akinlabi—the Weakness of Sensibility

In sum, what Peter Akinlabi has tried to do with his poetry is to reclaim the strangeness of language, the strangeness of the image, the strangeness of the mind behind both.

When I wrote the essay on the Nigerian-ness of Contemporary Nigerian poetry, I called a certain poet “the beer parlor poet of Nigeria”—which was simply to say, his poetry has the air of drunk-talk, and I have been around beer parlors a good deal to know; and a number of his poems are directly about that (drinking). This poet wrote a newsletter where he took issue with a statement I made about a line by Nome Emeka Patrick: I said the line was better than hundreds of lines by the third poets. He encouraged me to read enough third poets, a piece of advice I appreciate (though I think the idea of decolonization, which he mentioned, is no business of the literary critic who means business). He actually gave me a list: He suggested that if I actually read three poets of the third generation of Nigerian poetry, I would realize my error in making the Nome-statement. The three poets are Peter Akinlabi, Niran Okewole, and Tade Ipadeola. I take it that, since he mentioned these three with much excitement, they are to him the finest of their generation (although I think Chris Abani is a much finer poet than all three). The critic (and I am an amateur critic) does not deal in polemics or rhetorical banter—the critic gets to work. I have gone to work on Akinlabi; I will do so on the others. This is not to say I have done this essay on the man primarily as a response to Dr. Dami Ajayi: at all. Anyone who reads the essay will know that a deep love of, and a respect for, Nigerian literature has informed this work, and informs my duty as a writer and an amateur critic.

The decade between 1957 and 1970 saw Nigerian poetry at its finest: the thrust was upward, the ambition was intimate with a serious devotion. That was the Golden Age of Nigerian poetry, a short, not fully-formed golden age, but a golden age nevertheless. (The potentials of that age have yet to be realized; it is to Nigerian poetry that Nigeria really happened.) Soyinka, Okara, Okigbo, Michael Echeruo, Clark—among others—were connected directly to the modernist tradition that peaked in the twenties, and they were not only carrying on the tradition, they were adding something entirely new, what John Ferguson in 1965 called “a freshly creative factor,” to it. In fact, modernism in poetry, as Randall Jarrell put it in 1942, was at the end of its line; it was running out of force. What our poets did was to bring their own line—fishing line in Clark, mystic line in Okara, bronze line in Soyinka, etc.—and knot it to the tradition that they had “received”; the knot at the place where these traditions connected was the new tradition, the new force, the freshly creative factor.

Then came the War, then the trio of no-fist Bolekaja “critics,” and the Marxists or radicals—with a barrage of necessary but shallow (in the manner of engagement at least) conversations that had so little to do with the quality of literature but everything to do with some deluded sense of culture and of the duty of a poet—and, it could not be helped, Nigerian poetry went downhill. Funso Aiyejina, who himself joined in the Literary Coup, summed up the whole discourse in an essay on Second Generation Nigerian poets, in 1985, “In general terms, Nigerian poetry in English before the Nigerian Civil War (1967—1970) was marked by an excessive preoccupation with private grief and emotions over and above societal tragedies and triumphs, undue eurocentrism, derivationism, obscurantism and private esotericism.” (Italics mine.) The idea that one could be excessively concerned with certain themes may sound wise, but when you fail to show how that excess rubs the art of its strength, then you are propagandizing. Also, the idea of “undue eurocentrism” without an explication of what “due eurocentrism” looks like means nothing; it is simply a glib attempt to pitch tent on the radical side. The other isms could be checked but they would reveal the little more than what the already-checked have revealed: a surface criticism.

The poetry of Niyi Osundare seems to me to have been, or to have represented, the precise turning point. The publication of Songs of the Market Place, which opens with “Poetry Is,” the man’s heady attempt to nail an art-form that is 5000 years old, was the beginning of a new phase of light poetry of nameless flowers and cliché-churning. Reading this poem, one feels that Osundare was not attacking (in a careful manner) any of the poets who came before him, but that he was summing up the temperament of the period and he was pitching his tent, as with Funso Aiyejina, in the radical camp. Clark’s poetry is the best poetry grounded in the physicality of Nigerian society that has yet being written; even in Okara, people cast dice; Soyinka’s poetry is perhaps “a philosopher’s stone” but that stone was formed in the collective consciousness of the culture that shaped him; and I have never stopped hearing the highlife playing on that street in Okogbule Wonodi’s “August Break.”

[Poetry is/] not the esoteric whisper

of an excluding tongue

not a clap trap

for a wondering audience

not a learned quiz

entombed in Grecoroman lore

A large part of Peter Akinlabi’s poetry tries to reclaim that “esoteric whisper”—he calls it “ethereal mnemonics.” In Akinlabi’s work, resolutions are unmarked, each poem is a place

whispering its importance

only in hallucinatory narrative

to a guild of wildings.

But since there is no “esoteric whisper” in any of the poets who preceded Niyi Osundare, not in one, what is being reclaimed never existed in the first place. What Akinlabi does then is to create “shadows” of “the philosopher’s stone.” He has one feet plugged inside Soyinka, but his work belongs to a post-modern Negritudinal tradition: yet even this tradition, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist. So, the poet has another feet in Okara, who was the only one among Nigerian poets who supped at Negritude-table. There is an unresolved contradiction in the poetry of Peter Akinlabi: Soyinka would have nothing to do with Negritude, all that warmth of the soil; Okara’s early poems are brilliant, but all that mystic talk in The Fisherman’s Invocation is so dull, so sloppy, so confused, even Okara’s critical spirit was aware:

I want to hear no more of midwifemoon

I want to hear no more of the back of the womb

How to weld dead Negritude to a critical spirit? Negritude was not very critical; its pseudo-critical spirit was nostalgic, sentimental, and romantic. The Soyinka strand in Akinlabi is supposed to be critical, but the mask and shadows and darkness becloud the reason in his poetry. The only way to resolve the contradiction is to evade it: hence, the postmodernist aspect of his work. In Akinlabi’s poetry, the mask is a lie.

The masker lays the burden of expression

on the mask, having no face

of his own

The poet weaves strains of thrall to fill the holes

in his own speech, having no voice

of his own. . .

I reach to solve for the Haydean X in the darkness

of utterance . . .      —“Notations”

A mask is worn over a face, but in this case: the poet has no face and so the mask is his face. The mask is a lie because it is not performing its function: to conceal. The concealment is the reality. The poet says, “There is nothing under this mask, this is all I am. All these contradictions, this smoke over the liquid mirror.” Furthermore, the Haydean X (which I take to be a confused metaphor for the confusion that is the poet’s situation) is to be solved “in the darkness/ of utterance”—but, of course, nothing is ever solved in the darkness of utterance, the darkness of utterance is not even utterance, it is gibberish. (To take the phrase in another sense: “the darkness of utterance” could mean the usually shadowy hall of what we would call clear speech: the nature of language is that it can be misread and misunderstood; and the poet must actually work to allow for the possibility of being misread. The poet’s solution to his confusion is that shadowy room of clear language, the place of misreading. The problem, though, is that while that place is a lively place to visit—that place that gives room for fruitful misapprehensions—it is a kind of madness to make one’s home in that room. (This is why critics dislike Soyinka, though most of them are never patient enough, and are rarely total.) To accumulate the possible distortions of clear speech is to ruin speech; it to turn speech into nonsense: It is worse than trying to figure out a letter written in another language.) To promise that there is something to be found in gibberish, then, is post-modernist hodge-podge. The mask is a lie; so is the equation.

In sum, what Peter Akinlabi has tried to do with his poetry is to reclaim the strangeness of language, the strangeness of the image, the strangeness of the mind behind both. We lost this after Osundare—language became flat, dead, cold, to the extent that a poet—Emman Usman Shehu—could boldly say that using cliché in his poetry was deliberate. Of course, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher is an attempt to give new birth to the cliché, but anyone who has read the book knows the difference.

Osundare is an innovator, in terms of the degree to which he adapted Yoruba sayings and tonalities for his work—not entirely successfully, as experiments are bound to be: two-thirds of the achievement is the ambition. But Osundare’s poetry would never have been possible without Soyinka’s. What restraint exists in his work (and there is little, it is a major flaw of the man’s work) most likely came from Kongi. However, with his radical thought and his “Poetry Is,” Osundare broke the bridge that linked the Unborn to the Fathers, so that those who came after him did not have the previous tradition to learn from. His own work being an innovation, and not a solid one, those who tried to learn from him, who tried to do what he did (to make such plain but useful poems) failed. The hundreds of poetry books that have been published in this country since the 90s are so poor, one cannot guess that Osundare fed them. But he did, and he clapped for them too. Peter Akinlabi himself, though he tries severally in his poems to find his way back to those before Osundare, is a son of the Poet of the Marketplace: particularly in terms of the structure of his language. The Soyinka he has in him is not ignorant of Osundare. Here again is another problem.

I think that the structure of Osundare’s language, the core of the language which is oral, almost incantatory, that language is spent; it is at the end of its line. (This is a reason why the Fourth Poets moved out beyond here to find a different structure for their poetry: Ayoola Goodness used Osundare in Meditations, but Ayoola is slightly different from Osundare; but even Ayoola’s recent poems are unlike what they used to be, they are coming into their own.) Akinlabi has tried to work his way, still the poems in his full-length, Iconography (2016), work in a failed refiguring of the Osundare structure. The ambiguous mysticism does not save them. And there is the trouble of inherited excess and extravagance. Osundare, like Akinlabi, is a man of ideas, but, unlike Akinlabi, his ideas are not innocent of action, of bodies (he is a Marxist). “A Sketch for a Communal Festival,” an incredibly bad poem, is an example of what results when a Platonist mind uses the structure of the philosopher who wants to change the world. Contemplation becomes gibberish.

II

Is Peter Akinlabi’s poetry then—as a professor of History at Lagos State University likes to say—“an accident of history”? That would be an easy way out, and it would only be a small aspect of the truth. The truth has to do with the sensibility of the poet. Sensibility is what makes a poet—and sensibility is affected by history and culture and more—but sensibility is never enough to make a good poet. The good poet tortures his sensibility when he writes; his sensibility must be taken through fire, it must be starved, it must be wounded. T. S. Eliot said it better: “[I]t is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.” One could rephrase that. It is not the “presence” of ideas, high or low, that counts. Reading Akinlabi, it is immediately apparent that he does not like to torture his sensibility.

As has been suggested in the first part of this essay, Akinlabi is an idealist—or, to be more precise, a mock idealist, for what we encounter in his poems are not ideas, they are the shadows of ideas. Even when he is writing about things (such as places), the Things are absent from the work. What we see is a myth, received, or of his own making (it is usually the latter). His poems are filled with weak sensations, faint shivers of the mind, the uncultured intensity of experiences that are hardly ever apparent. And when they are apparent, they are stone-dull.

I sit still and attempt a reconstruction of reality

weaving you another mirror

in the rainforest of inclinations,

placing you again on the stalk chair

in the garden, your body, long and luminous,

and defiantly brown, a shade of which

you now emerge from once again,

absent in anchored evaluations.

There are three primary problems with this excerpt. (1) If we take the description that has been given here as “reality,” the excerpt doesn’t quite hold up—for example, the mirror is woven (which implies that the poem has stepped into Dream Mode); (2) if we take it as a “reconstruction of reality,” it also fails, because the language has nothing fresh about it, the body is described as though involved in a commercial for selling body cream (“defiantly brown” reminds me of “Brown-skin girl, that skin just like pearl,” and the latter is a finer image); and (3), if we take it as an “attempt” to recreate reality, we see almost no trace of an attempt—and this last one is the most important. To attempt something, that thing must require some effort, it must be outside yourself. For instance, it would be nonsensical to say, “God will attempt to keep the world from crumbling.” Peter Akinlabi shoots himself in the leg by telling the reader “I attempt” without making any effort; instead he sits in the comfort zone of his sensibility, so that we get scraps of barely effectual dreaming (the weaving of another mirror; we get cliché descriptions (she is “long and luminous”—how long is this person?—and “defiantly brown”), tired tropes (the body of the dead is placed in the garden or appears there: Hello, Nome Emeka Patrick)—but crucially, this “attempt” is taking place in the “rainforest of [the poet’s] inclinations.” In other words, the poet says to us—“I am indulging myself”: that is what “the rainforest of inclinations” means. “Reality” is the poet’s idea of it, so is the “reconstruction of reality.” This poet does not reconstruct, he falls back on his idea of everything. The “absent in anchored evaluations,” which reads like a poor imitation of Marianne Moore, points to the “ideation” of everything in Akinlabi’s poetry. Also, there is the clunky line: “and defiantly brown, a shade of which/ you now emerge from once again,” a shade of which? The phrasing defeats the sensitivity of the ear.

In his chapbook, A Pagan Place (2015, African Poetry Book Fund Boxset), and in Iconography (2016), there are poems about places, as the titles suggest: “Re-membering Borno,” “Ouidah,” “A Pagan Place (Barkin Ladi),” “Oyo,” “Ilorin,” “Ogbomoso,” “Ijaiye,” “Oke-Olumo,” among others. Some of these poems appeared first in the chapbook, but were included in the full-length; they form the titular section of the book. The first part of the full-length, “A Laying-On of Hands,” is filled with flimsy images, clumsy thoughts, clunky lines, and excess: the only poem that is worth any serious attention in that section is “Bone Mending”; there is some clarity to the poem, the poet tries his best to not play Ventriloquist. Bearing the burden of murk that fills that section, the hope one has is that the place poems will offer some respite.

It is necessary first to show examples from the first section. The excerpt discussed above is from the section, from a poem titled, “Three Schedules for Passion in Lieu of an Elegy”; it is perfectly representative of the poor nature of the poems in the section. Written in memory of a lover who has died (I take this death to be literal, but it could as well be figurative: say, a lover who has died to the poet, who has severed relationship with the poet), it begins:

I dream of our first walk, two shadows shuffling

towards the base of a garden, pausing mid-steps to

pick the shells broken beneath our feet.

You hold some up to light, to me, dark and damaged

in their unquantified isolation. . .

The “shadows” here are everywhere in all of Peter Akinlabi’s poetry—in the titular poem of his chapbook, he uses the word three times, in one case the same way he has used it here: (1) “an invasion of shadows announces identities/ of arms and whispers”; (2) “voices and shadows, a happy/ hysteria loops Benita’s bar” (a fine line); (3) here is the one that recalls “Three Schedules, “Two lovers/ part into two unrevealing shadows.” Somewhere else, “marked shadows in motion.” When Akinlabi needs something to use as an image, it is shadow or darkness or memory or light (and these are not images, in fact, they are merely symbols); these words, in sum, appear in his poems over a hundred times and they are rarely used in a distinct sense. In “Lumumba Serenades the Congo,” the only poem that contains an almost particular image, shadow appears to destroy what the poet builds. “We crawl like wasps” (this is the image), he writes, and then:

swooping sinews, roving

or crowding, shapes

of thirst, wanting people,

wanting a place, shadows lurked. . .

It is real lazy writing. Of darkness: “a life once touched/ by pain does not go dark/ with forgetfulness”; “Darkness preceding the cold of the boarding floor”; “Darkness has shifted towards the reeds”; “the pitch-dark corners of the room”; “you are just as spotted, as darkened, with certitude” (remember “defiantly brown”); “echo to the darkness”; “the shroud of darkness,” etc. Of memory: “may memory treat us kindly”; “at every turn of memory” (repeated twice); “in the cool of sand and memory”; “in the memory of the sea”; “this memory will return you to the dark”; “memory, running in stealth as if eager” (the last four are from a single poem); “I have let memory wear me like a forebear” (and he is right). Of light: “What is the poet who has not sought a precedent song/ to light”; “the pale figures in twilight” (another way of saying shadows); “watch his face rise to light”; “so much in light, so much that is light/ so much that is lost to light” (the ironic thing is how his psyche makes it known that he is excessively using the “image”); in “Three Schedules,” “you hold some up to light,” “some realities are unplaced, so death-light” (light in a different guise), “evading light/ at every turn of memory” (this is repeated twice). Note that all the examples in this paragraph occur only in the first section of Iconography, which contains just twelve poems. If I should comb the entire book to show how the poet leans lazily into these words, it may take up the entire essay.

Back to the excerpt we sidelined.

I dream of our first walk, two shadows shuffling

towards the base of a garden, pausing mid-steps to

pick the shells broken beneath our feet.

You hold some up to light, to me, dark and damaged

in their unquantified isolation. . .

When the poet writes that they are “shadows” and then says that the shells are held up “to light,” one must ask where the light has come from. The only escape for the error here is that it is a dream; but dreams are not incomprehensibly absurd, they have a structure that appeals to reason. So let’s agree that the light is dream-light: how come the shells held up to light are “dark and damaged”? Have they being made dirty by dust? If that is the case, “dark” is not a fitting word. However, the scene is simply uncoordinated, it happens in Akinlabi more than once. In the second section of the same poem, he commits the same error, and here he is not dreaming; he writes, “I am moving through the rooms/ gathering the limbs of memory.” He continues,

A cold wind flushes the windowpanes;

and the purple birds are still perched

on the Moringa branches.

Now they have stopped singing

their querulous serenades,

eyes darting about in fear, perhaps sensing

the tension of silence.

Certainly no birds are singing anywhere, and perhaps there is no Moringa tree. These are inventions, figs of an idea. The poet tells us that the eyes of these birds are “darting about in fear.” How does the poet know that their eyes are darting about? He is in a house, moving through rooms. He is in motion, and the birds are on the branches, outside the house. Even if the birds were to be singing right in front of his face, he would not know that their eyes are darting. I have only been able to look into the eyes of a dead bird; birds raise their head and are restless as they sing, you cannot catch their eyes. The poet has invented the birds with restless eyes because he needed them to sense “the tension of silence”—he intended to use them to sell the idea of tension in the room absent of the lover: we don’t buy it.

The place poems are, in a sense, even more frustrating. To put the name of a place in your title and to write a poem that could be about anywhere is a little fraudulent. He is usually concerned about the skeletons of these places, what they were in the past. There is not a lot of history in the man, there is some legend. Yet his best work happen to be place poems, in them the man’s suggestive imagination really gets a chance, we experience its animating power. It would be hard for one to forget these lines from “Oyo”: “Tourists may find houses mud red/ or marble white—a town that walks in the shoes/ of its name.” The personification of the town wakes what is being said; the almost legendary history of the empire of Oyo has been condensed; we truly get a sense of poetry’s power to move beyond the burden of history, to reach the place of feeling, which is a primary link between the past and the present. History goes, it is the shadow of history, our claim (tied to our needs, emotions, our poverty) upon history, what Hayden White called “the practical past,” that remains: it is that shadow that Peter Akinlabi reaches here. It is also in this poem that we find “reluctant modernity.” (“A murky modernity” is used in “Ouidah.”) However, the poems about Ghana, on the other hand, where I believe he was raised as a child, are burdened by history. The history poems fail. In Iconography, there is a poem (“Kumasi Cantos”) where he describes the experience of his father, a trader in Ghana who had to leave when, following the coup in 66 (the stuff of Kwesi Brew’s “A Sandal on the Head”), the Ghanaian government issued the Compliance Order in 69, directing “that all aliens leave”—though several “processes” were laid down for Aliens who wanted to remain in Ghana, and many found ways to stay—Akinlabi quotes his father as saying, “I have fled hate everywhere: Ivory Coast, Cameroon,/ Zaire. . .” The poem, however, is like bad reportage, we are told everything, and the attempt at poignant moments fall like water thrown up. Yet what I consider to be his finest place poem is about the Ghana-experience. The nostalgia that one encounters in the poem is palpable; he is less of an idealist, perhaps because the experience he is describing already found its place in his mind before he knew anything about Plato; he is reaching for the child in him in the poem, and he is desperately hungry for us to know and meet that child. There is a touch of anger somewhere in his voice; and that, too, is understandable. “How We Became Modern” (or 1969) is the poem I am talking about.

For me, a child, the world

was like a wraith gift,

wrapped in bulrushes

and enthralling water pots;

and I often sat

in the night, within arm’s reach

of the mother’s baobab, ageless,

bestriding the house in Kumasi,

before the silhouettes fell

into the consternations

of politics, and

alien became a proper name.

I held to that image

of Lagos town en route

from purities to injuries

as mother

assembled lives and baskets

into the ship sailing away from

Tema Bay.

You could ride a bicycle on the deck,

or recite the lapidary psalms

with Padre Doug, praying for peace,

a white man with doggerel

as dark as his habit.

The sail was calm but peace

was a function in a shroud.

We would become modern

in that moist migration, learning

how a compass shifted between innocence

and populated growth—

between Lagos Town that was home

and Lagos we never knew.

Before leaving this essay alone, it is necessary to leave some notes on the following poems: “A Strophe for the Body” (the first and the second, respectively) and “Oedipus’ Will.” These three poems are remarkable to me for the vividness of the voice, which is enhanced by the structure and the movement of the language (“That the body darkens in bloom/ to engage itself with/ illuminating ghosts is a/ pulped given”)—the pulped given almost feels like grape exploding under clean heels. While the Platonic mind of the poet still conceals—the man finds it very hard to take off the mask—we know we are being spoken to, that the poet wants to be heard; there is a clarity, a near-plain sense of things (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens: and it should be said that Peter Akinlabi’s poetry aspires to Stevens’s, he aspires to “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”; but the studied voluptuousness, pure in its obscurity, that we find in Stevens’s is not studied in Akinlabi, the sludge of sensibility has not been purged from the poetry). The second “Strophe” is much more pellucid than the first: the poet is lying in bed, a tie around his neck, thinking—about suicide. The last two lines are a rewrite of the refrain in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “and on the porch women come and go/ talking of suicide,” Akinlabi writes; Eliot: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” While Eliot’s women are supposedly real women, and his room is supposedly real, the women in Akinlabi are unambiguously the women of his mind, the porch is his mind. The poem succeeds in achieving what this poet so rarely achieves: “an appearance/ of distance to clarify sensations,” as he writes in the first stanza of the poem. The distance that creates clarity allows the strange women to appear; and while Solomon warns against the women, they ignite passages of Proverbs, which contains much great poetry; the women do here, on a lighter scale, for Akinlabi, what they did for Solomon. (It should be said that Akinlabi paraphrases Eliot more than once, and it is from “The Love Song” that he takes his dose: they are slight paraphrases. I take it that they are regurgitated trickles from a mind intimately familiar with the poem: in “Ouidah”: “But there will be time enough. . .”)

Akinlabi’s “Oedipus’ Will” is Oedipus’ speech, directed at Antigone. The poem concerns the scene where the secret (that he is the son of his wife) has been let out the bag. What one finds here is that when the idealist comes into the terrain of grandiose myth the language has something to carry, something to strive against, something to propel it (compare this with “Oshun” and you see the point). The five-page poem is guilty of some of the man’s flaws, but, surprisingly, does not bore. The myth, something to work against, creates a certain amount of restraint in the poem: Soyinka’s smell is strong here (of course Soyinka has used grand myths better than any Nigerian poet or playwright), in fact the “gray intimations” in “Oedipus’ Will” recalls the grey everything in Soyinka’s “Post Mortem”: “grey slabs/ grey scalpel, one grey sleep and form, grey images.” In the bulk of the poems in Iconography (including the poems written in honor of dead writers), the material—the substance of the poems, that is—is largely made up by the poet, and shallowly; the structure of those poems are themselves poor (the poet tells you what he is doing and he does not do it: it is the boast and no kick). The chapbook is different, and the highlighted poems succeed, as I have discussed, because they have something serious to work against, sensibility is tasked. ◼

Note that, while the free spots for the two-day workshop I will be teaching in July has been filled, there is still room for those who want to pay. Also, there are poets who came late for the spots and I promised to reach out if someone decides to sponsor: please send an email to ogunyemiernest@gmail.com if you would love to sponsor one or two poets. In case you missed the workshop announcement, please visit this page of the Substack to access it. Thank you.