‘Femi Morgan’s Renegade is a collection of sixty-one poems divided into five parts stitched together by the existential angst the poem persona harbours against poets and other harbingers of words. In the first section, a collection of ‘Selected Poems’ from the poet’s bank of poems which, for issues of time of conception or theme, didn’t make it into the poet’s earlier collections (Silent Drummings, 2008; Phases:Poetry of People, 2013; Whispers, 2019), poetry and its hawkers are the major focus. Published also in 2019, Renegade is a sharp deviation from what the author and Tokunbo Dada did in Whispers which started in love and ended with love. Here, poetry is ‘non-sense’ not because the poem persona detests poetry (after all, this same persona would announce later that “poetry is my ever enduring lover”) but because poetry has been reduced to a mere hustle–“The hustle is in print.”
The reason for this hustle the persona interrogates in the poem, ‘Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?’ The use of chicken as an extended metaphor in this poem is a testament to the fecund imagination of the poet. Is the chicken a reference to younger, newer, aspiring writers whose understanding of poet-being is as an opportunity to join older established poets (referred to as “fellow chickens”) in “a spree of cake,” to become prominent, rich and famous? Or, is it a blanket term for all writers, all poets? Is it an indication of the temporality of the attention, listed in the third stanza of the poem, the compromised writer enjoys, just like a chicken fed fat only for its meat?:
“Why did the chicken cross the road?
To further its show-biz on a reality road show
You should ask the writer of the road
Chickens want libertine liberation
Chickens want social media pages, selfies–
Chickens want to tweet at followers beck
Chickens want endorsements and awards
Want to crackle in British and American style…”
In its sustained interrogation of poetry and the role of poets in the society, the poem ‘No One Will Remember You’ in the second part of the collection entitled ‘Bar Room Conversations’ cautions such poets who write only for “endorsements and awards” in “the tone of the rich” conspiring with pretence that “no one will read you/except writers like you…your face does not ring a bell except/On Chimurenga, Saraba, Sankofa, Granta/Anything the mould of writers looking for/Grants.” Mentioning Saraba in this roll call of reputable literary magazines and journals in this poem leaves a lesson that keys into the theme of the ephemerality of the (compromised) writer’s glories explored earlier in ‘Why did the Chicken…’ Saraba is today dead, buried maybe, with all the ‘likes’ and ‘clicks’ it generated for writers it published. It reminds the poet of the quick death that comes with the absence of an emulation-worthy legacy.
What approach then does the persona advocate for those who want to engage poetry especially as her writers? The answer, like a renegade’s attitude which is almost always guerilla like, is scattered all over the collection. We may begin to make sense of it though from the last part of the collection entitled ‘Two Legs’. In the poem ‘The Congress of Memory’ in this section, the persona pronounces that “Poetry is not child’s play” even as children are not forbidden from it. The persona elevates the place of the poet to a deific height–“Poets are the strings that hold God’s heart.” This nature of poetry and the great expectations it places on poets (and writers in general) makes poet-being a difficult task to carry out. The herculean state of being is well acknowledged in ‘Pastiche,’ a poem in the fourth part of the collection (‘New-Inverse’). But that, the persona insists, must not remove fresh air “in the promised serendipity of prophets” for “the poet died/when the metaphor is too beautiful/But the carpetbagger’s praise prods on.” For the poet to live, poetry must not be taken as a second option or as a hustling tool but must become the first and the principal lover of the poet.
The attitude of placing poetry as the first and the principal the author did in ‘Postcards for Irene,’ a section that talks about love and the memories it creates by announcing ab-initio that “writing is the first wife.” The poet for whom writing is the first wife is not an “imposition.” What grows on their pages are not “facades of weed/sprouting, forcing themselves to grace the sun” for they have made their “voice never be scuffled.” They are the good poet who: “cannot hate, else he won’t write good poetry.” While the persona’s good poet cannot hate, such a poet can love and express anger, is permitted to be activistic but must not have the impression that activism is what makes a good poet for “when poem mocks without language/when it builds without fencing…/silence is allowed.” Artistry is hereby maintained as the foundation of poetry, language its fence.
Poet-being, even though it is painted in gloomy terms in this collection, is not without some hopes. True, the newspapers may be “loud in words but low on sounds” but the poet still has a chance at revival for, as the poem persona in the opening poem ‘German Machines’ observes, “Flowers are made from plastic/Recycled from nearby dump site.” The chickens can still be saved if they should commit to reading (the intense and intensive study of the Self and the Others) and unite (as one body guided by honesty, transparency and integrity) so that there will be no need to ask the question “why did the Chicken Cross the Road?” or to make chicken soup.
While Renegade’s major thematic focus is poetry and poet-being, the collection is not only for poets and writers. There is something in it for any and every lover of letters: a message, a brilliant pun, new metaphors or sprightly imageries. The book, for example, in ‘All My Fathers’ laments environmental degradation which it compared to the erosion of age old values–“Nothing can swim,/except nylon, plastic and industrial spills.” The issue of racism is highlighted in the poem aptly titled ‘Black.’ In ‘Black,’ we laments that to be black is to be a baggage of stereotypes, “to be cautious/For I have been foresworn with a gun/Having none is betrayal of notion.”
Technology is looked at as the double-edged sword it is in ‘Techy’: a tool of disconnection and divide–“my wife pings a kiss every night and my son tweets/me good morning. I don’t beat him, I poke him”(one must not miss the wordplay on Facebook’s earlier ‘poke’ feature; this play on words ran throughout the poem); an adhesive–“The World is big enough/for Arabs/and Jews to/kiss without contact” and a level playground “big enough for a transsexual/classmate/a deeper living born Christian/and a Sheikh in front.”
‘Bar Room Conversations’ like its name implies is like a tape-record of the typical conversations that occur when people gather to drink. From the mundane that exposes (harmful) deep-seated convictions like seen in a ‘Response from a Chauvinist’–“we both have rights/But I am the referee/I decide when the ball is over” to the moments of brilliance like in a ‘Response from a Feminist’–“Mary is the mother of God” to the funny praises of commercial sex workers and their immortalization–“you will be remembered for you have stretched yourself/to provide this service/through your cervix” to the canonization of beer as the truest lover who never nags, there is no shortage of funny (and the not-so-funny) reportages of words from the bar in this section.
In ‘Postcards for Irene,’ the renegade persona is presented as a lover, though one for whom writing is the first love. Eroticism is here merged with poetry and similes used to anoint the ‘unholy’:“You make me melt/Like hot chocolate/And hard like cake.”
One will not be wrong to conclude that the poem persona and the author of the collection is one and the same; nothing suggests otherwise. The author might as well be the persona who in ‘The Nod’ laments that “I come from a place/where laws are broken by an older face” considering the gerontocratic nature of his place of geo-socio-cultural situation. In this light, it makes sense therefore to say that the dedications some of the poems were written as, were written for people who have made impacts on the author’s life, either directly or through their works: the legendary poet, Niyi Osundare, the late writer, Charles Bukowski, Tade Ipadeola and Tope Mark, Aramide (in memoriam), and Iye Osundare, the mother of Niyi Osundare. For Iye Osundare, the poet recognizes that there can be no offspring without a mother and that the greatness of the child can be traced to the parents because “a child becomes a poet from the canon fodder of mother’s philosophy,” an endorsement of the wisdom of the feminist’s response earlier, “Mary is the mother of God.”
Through anger deflated by humour and the presentation of defiance as a virtue, Renegade provides a newer, sharper, more focused lens of looking at the world: a critical self-gazing at the mirror.
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