Cross Country Celebration of Poetry is an annual event held at different connect centres of Poets in Nigeria, an organization founded by Eriata Oribhabor. The event aims to bring poetry and its appreciation to all parts of the country with the aim to advance the motto of the organization, which is “poetry for service.”
This year’s Cross Country Celebration of Poetry was held all over the country on the 21st of October, 2023. As the current Lead Rep of the Connect Center at the University of Nigeria, Ugochukwu Anadị, alongside his predecessors, Ifenuanya Georgia Ezeano and Henry Onyekachi hosted the celebration in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, joining the University to the national celebration. In his introductory speech, Anadị, who is also our Book Review Editor, reflected on the theme of this year’s celebration, “A Nation on the Wings of Poetry.” Here is the speech in full.
Yesterday, the most noticeable thing in my small room – tucked away from the life I daydream of having but fully ensconced in the insanity we euphemistically refer to as a “writer’s wild mind” – was the Nigerian flag. The flag was not noticeable because it is the Nigerian flag, neither did it have a sizable area of occupancy in the room, but it was significant for two major reasons: the fact that it hangs from my bookshelf, which contains the oxygen without which you all here today might be matching over my remains – that is, if the Earth Goddess deems it fit to accept the carcass of the one who went with rope to the Grim Reaper’s abode; the second was that the flag has lost its whiteness – crimsonness has been forced upon it. Not the type of crimsonness you see in a bottle of wine, which is smooth and appealing and enticing, but the sort of red that smears, that scares, frightens and makes one want to seek comfort in the hot bottles of an insecticide or the chilling ambience of a well-made coffin.
Yesterday was the notorious October 20th, a date which has become synonymous with monstrosity. For many in our generation, it was the day we lost hope, totally, in this contraption we have chosen to call a country, or worse still a nation, in a typical poetically-inspired delusion. I can imagine that this sort of delusion was what irked Plato, causing him to expel all poets from his Republic, for truly, poets are liars. They call Nigeria a nation, spreading misinformation and confusing the youth. I can imagine that it was their misinformation that led to the most recent Obidient movement, a movement that strenghthened the survivors of October 20, 2020, and filled them with hopes of taking back their nation, only to kill them again. Odia Ofeimun would say that “the poet lied,” and the lie here is that these survivors, with their wounds and bruises still fresh and their minds still in shatters were convinced that they once had a nation, that this nation has been taken from them, and that they can recover it. Again, the poet lied, for there has never been any such nation. It is funny how it took a politician but not a poet to point out that what we have is just a “mere geographical expression.” I think it is important at this point we rethink how we select who we canonise.
Yesterday, I tried writing a poem in honour of our heroes falled at the Lekki Tollgate. Poetry failed me. Poetry cannot resurrect those young minds. Poetry killed them in the first place. It stoked that fire of patriotism that engulfed them and reduced them to ashes. Was it not poetry that told them that a pen is mightier than a sword, a gun, that the patriot waving the flag is a darling of the military? Was it not poetry that taught them that words have power, and that they can bring police brutality to an end by merely chanting “EndSARS” on the pothole-riddled roads and smelly streets of our country? What poetry didn’t tell them is that no book has been found which cannot be penetrated by a bullet, that no flag has ever been used to sew bullet proof vests and that in the end the patriot always dies. Poetry should have told those our compatriots that Fela wasn’t drunk or under the influence of weed when he sang ‘Zombie;’ that that legend was simply saying a truth our poets may not be so comfortable with saying. But we have learnt the hard way: that you only love Nigeria with a gun to your head.
Yesterday, I remember how I got the flag. It was exactly a year after the sad event, at Freedom Square, in commemoration of the death of these heroes that flags smeared in red paints were shared to attendees. That is the irony of our existence: the blood of the patriot is marked by paints by the admirers.
October 20, 2020 has come and the graves are still here with us. Same as police brutality. Close to the flag in my room is an empty space. Before I relocated to my present residence, that empty space used to be occupied by a takeaway foil. While the flag is my daily reminder of police brutality and the death of the country I call mine, the foil was my attempt to balance perspectives, a cherished past-time indulgement of poet-scholars. It was a few months after our compatriots were murdered at Lekki Tollgate that I got that foil. I had attended a conference at the Princess Alexandria Auditorium where I had to stay outside because I was late and the hall filled. Hungry and tired, I sat on an unoccupied plastic seat outside the hall even as some students tried to tell me, with mild alarm and concern, that the seat was reserved for an armed policeman who just stepped out to ease himself. I do not know why that particular student, who seemed more alarmed than the rest, felt it was important to add that the policeman was armed. I may still not know why, but remember that October 20th wasn’t far from the day this happened.
A hungry man does not care about guns or death from a gunfire. Hunger is already killing him and any other thing an extra, more like a catalyst. And most times, Death, the dead told me, is best enjoyed in a quick sip. So I was neither bothered by this policeman nor by his gun, as should be. When he returned, I stood from the seat but he signalled that I should continue sitting saying he is already used to standing. At that moment very noticeable changes occurred on the faces of the observers. The realization came that this man was not an armed monster but a human being who has chosen as his career to ensure the security of lives and properties. In less than ten minutes of this realization, a large foil of ‘small chops’ was thrust into my hands by this same kind policeman. Hunger has a way of marking he who it possesses and an embarassing way of announcing its presence, you know.
I think it is symbolic how I lost that foil but not the flag while relocating. It is in that manner we forget kindness but never wickedness; in the outrage, performed or real, killing causes while the saving of a life is rarely acknowledged; in the proverbial manner oil picked by a finger speedily spreads to the others but not so a diamond-studded golden ring attached to a finger.
Maybe poetry asking us to remember this particular kind policeman when telling the stories of Oct., 20, 2020 may not be poetry lying, it may not be a manifestation of deluded poets. Maybe language, which is the primary tool of the poet do actually have some powers; maybe poetry has wings strong enough to carry our country, after it has turned it into a nation. Maybe it is true, what Romeo Oriogun wrote, that “only language can begin/the restoration of those/pushed out of history.” Just maybe.
In order not to tell a single story, I think it is important to point out that two of the major organizers of the commemoration event where I received my blood-stained flags write poetry too. Maybe it is because of poets like them that Jean Cocteau said that “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth,” with Wendy Lesser counselling that we should not mistrust poets even though they are liars. Maybe the salvific nature of poetry is akin to the salvific nature of Christ: while the Jews were expecting a Messiah as prophetic as Moses and so powerful a military figure who can drive away the Romans from their land and return them to the glory days of King David, Christ came as a servant-messiah, the one who dies to save. Tomorrow is Sunday and I know the Christians amongst us here are happy with me for putting them in this solemn reflection mode, call me John the Baptist.
In a like manner, poetry has offered us itself as a servant-messiah. It may not be able to stop bullets but it can point at the monsters behind the trigger if only the poets are true to the spirit of poetry, in the manner of which Salman Rushdie said that “a poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” Poetry has the power of giving us the language with which we express our pains; the beauty needed to survive the grief, and most importantly, the memory, that we may never forget.
Even if in our typical short-term memory, we tend to forget the massacre that occurred on a Sunday morning in a church in Mbalom, the poet, Suéddie Vershima Agema reminds and helps us curse in these lines from “The Dreams Shall Find You”:
they are there tonight
the ones pressed against their will
and those whose songs you drowned in the benue
they shall – wait in your dreams
— your orchids shall become maggots
— and your sun shall die before you rise
hell shall not wait but find you
as you try to throw a blanket over lost memory
before you get to eternity’s gates
satan impatiently awaits with the fork
hoping to bless you, cursed runt, who sentenced
our loves to a night that came when their sun was rising
For those of us for whom it has become very stylish to beat the war drums, Achebe reminds us of what it was like the last time the summoning of that drum was answered in “Air Raid:”
It comes so quickly
the bird of death
from evil forests of Soviet technology
A man crossing the road
to greet a friend
is much too slow.
His friend cut in halves
has other worries now
than a friendly handshake
at noon.
Poetry is our way of speaking the unspeakable, of lamenting about our oppression, like the persona in Romeo Oriogun’s “Boy,” lamenting the “sexistential crisis” that is the lived reality of queer Nigerians:
Only I knew his fears as he waited for his mother
to come home with the girl who she said held his cure.
Only I knew he cried as he couldn’t touch the girl,
both of them naked in bed, while his mother
stood by the door praying for him to be saved.
But poetry is not just for lamentations. It offers hope and bliss and can be used to tell our beloved sweet nothings like in James Eze’s “melanin goddess” where the beloved smile becomes “a crescent moon glowing against the night” and the eyes “a pool of diamonds in a cloudless sky.” And if we agree that poets are to be listened to and poetry not an exercise in time wastage, we can then ask, what does it mean for a nation to be on the wings of poetry.
One quick answer is the assignment of creating a nation out of a country that is a mere geographical expression. How do poets contribute to that? Sincerely, I do not know. Dike Chukwumerije, one of our foremost spoken-word poets do have a suggestion though: the call to togetherness which the poet must sound from the peak of the mountains for the enemies are our collective enemies, no matter our tribe:
Do you not know that our enemies have no face?
They are indigenes of no state, they come from no place
And, if this boat capsizes every one of us will go under
So, when the drums sound, let everybody answer.
Let’s pretend that we already have a nation. If poetry is the wings with which this nation will fly, considering how massive and troubled and diverse this nation is, these wings must be sturdy. It is our duty as poets to make these wings sturdier. And to make these wings sturdier we need honesty and enhanced craft. As poets, we are called today to be honest to the subjects we handle. True, we perform poetry but we must not reduce poetry to mere performativity. That is why I love the vision that drives PIN, the motto, “poetry for service.” We must be very careful here though. It is good and advisable to have great dreams and plans for poetry but we must also understand that poetry most times thrive in the sublime. We are motivated to put poetry into national service, but you owe yourself service to the self. And I think that is where poetry serves the most. It is where poetry and literature in general has served me the most. So, when I speak of poetry in salvific terms, when I use Christ and Poetry in the same manner, that is not an exaggeration. Poetry has the power to put morticians out of job. That is because sometimes it is not the truth that sets us free, but lies told truthfully. So, the question remains, how do we fly with these wings? For me, if poetry can save a soul – and it has saved mine – then it is just a matter of time and we all as a nation will soar like an eagle.
Ugochukwu Anadị is the Book Review Editor at Afreecan Read and an editorial intern at Counterclock.
Recent Comments