…A review of Chidozie Chukwubuike’s The Poet Wept (Owerri: Loneranger Books, 2013)
Perhaps, the best approach to the poetry of Chidozie Chukwubuike is through psychoanalysis. How does a seemingly innocent poem become rebellious? Why would the poet, from a devout Christian or patriotic background, become an apostate and anti establishment, questioning, destroying all that he held dear, those things he once held truthful and reliable?
The psychoanalytical approach to Chukwubuike’s poetry, a Theatre Arts graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, playwright, teacher, theatre administrator, actor, author, scholar, political activist, poet, film maker, digital creator, etc digs into the recesses of the poet, not just to understand his literary or poetic formations, but to seek an eye into the thrust and trend of the third generation of Nigerian writing where he rightly belongs.
Because in just one slim, single poetic outing, The Poet Wept, a 2013 publication, his first, before his deluge on the literary landscape with his various works, Chukwubuike encapsulates the dreams and definitions of a generation whose voices started appearing like buds from the different parts of the country with no clear-cut delineation. While some of the early works of the generation, exemplified by the works of Olu Oguibe and Esiaba Irobi tilted towards the Marxist ideology as was the dominant aesthetics – they rule the works of the second generation of Nigerian creative writing such as Odia Ofeimun and Niyi Osundare – the third text in the 90s were still not defined.
But just about a decade later, The Poet Wept came, like an autobiography, to present, in one slim book, the definitions of that generation. We see the innocence of a child, aspiring with his dreams and hopes. We are confronted with the denials of these dreams by political and other leaders who bestride the land like gods determining the life of the citizens.
The individuals rave and rant. But it seems their anger is just a flash in the pan as there is no action, organised and forceful, from the people, to remedy the situation. The poet resigns to fate, or runs away. Some poets of the generation have written poems with the title, The Poet Fled, The Poet Bled, x-raying the dominant thinking of this generation – to flee.
These works leaned on an earlier publication, The Poet Lied, by Odia Ofeimun, which signposted the beginning of the second generation of Nigerian Literature. The book, in a way, attacked the dominant aesthetics, role and ideology of the first generation of Nigerian writers, especially, the works of its defining poet, JP Clark’s Casualties, a collection of poems on the Nigerian-Biafran war. Clark had fought as a propagandist for the government of Nigeria against Biafra. His poems were questioned by Ofeimun as per his role in that war. That war killed over three million lives. Clark had written in that book, that, ‘We are all casualties.’ But Ofeimun noted in his collection that ‘the poet lied’.
The disappointment on the first generation, who played major roles in the first republic Nigeria, with its role in the collapse of that republic and in the resultant war, birthed a new age – the second generation. A third came shortly after.
In a way, a new generation, tired of the subdued anger of the third generation of Nigerian writers, is emerging. Fired by political and massive looting of the nation’s resources and treasury, unemployment, inflation, economic deprivations, along with massacres by Boko Haram and other terrorists and herdsmen, as well as criminals and kidnappers, along with insurrection, secessionists, armed bandits who come either as herdsmen or Unknown Gunmen, vigilantes, the military, police, militia, international assaults and insults on young Nigerians, who were forced out, like the bulk of the third generation of writers, has risen.
Told point blank that they are not welcome in their new nations, the new writers have decided to take their country back.
We see this resolve to retake their country in the massive protests across the country – IPOB, Odua Republic, Middle Republic, Niger Delta Republic, the unifying role of the youthful voice as the social media has galvanised them, Endsars protests, the use of the social media by the youth to garner support for the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, have all forced a new generation, armed with knowledge and information technology, onto the field howling and hounding the powers that be out of office through all means possible.
This is unlike the third generation, which as Olu Oguibe and Chief Olisa Agbakoba once noted, sabotaged the human rights struggle through corruption.
In a way, therefore, The Poet Wept, even as a title, exemplifies the psyche of the third generation. Because the title shows the helplessness of the poet in a dire situation. It shows the poet is not empowered meaningfully to understand the terrors confronting him. He had left the university, with the mindset of a greener Nigeria, which his forebears enjoyed. The idea of the university was actually rosy. It was a shock when a new reality confronted him – a season of lack and economic meltdown, along with violence and massive deaths in the land. The poet is yet to articulate his way out of the mess. He therefore reclines back to his shell to understand the sudden but unexpected reality.
The poet therefore sings his life of innocence to let us into the mind of an age. The publication, made of 71 pages of 37 poems, which depicts a weeping face, is dedicated to immortal poets – Chris Okigbo, Ezenwa Ohaeto, Ossie Enekwe, Esiaba Irobi and Chinua Achebe. It opens the concerns of the collection with a romantic and pastoral poem, ‘His Abode’ and ends with ‘The Solution’. That solution returns the reader to the beginning poem, His Abode. ‘The Solution’, dedicated to his wife, Nnenna, comes in the guise of love from the abode of God as a means of healing the land.
‘His Abode’ describes the vegetation, huts and rurals living in harmony with nature. It is a place of escape from hurt, a recuperative solace with God and love. ‘The Solution’ in a way seems to signpost a future, a possible actualisation of the poet’s desires and aspirations. This is the hope that fires the fourth generation of Nigerian writers. ‘The Solution’ therefore argues that even though the poet may not have been violent and was lost earlier on how to deal with his new situations, violence may be one of the ways to actualise one’s dreams but the best solution is love which eschews violence.
This description of perfection and innocence in this early poem continues in the next poem, ‘Love’, which the poet says is higher than war and violence.
The love here made real, as in ‘Eulogy to a Friend’, is a romantic poem describing the love he finds in a woman in couplets and iambic pentametre. She is natural and simple, full of grace, wise and beautiful, the perfect companion. But there is a problem.
Here then is the conflict that marks all arts and literature. The collection begins to peak here. There is a desire but to actualise that desire is the beginning of the poet’s definition of reality. How he confronts this new reality is how his generation confronted their monsters. Anger sets in. The poet rants and howls, in ‘Unbound’, how and why the shackles holding down his dreams must be broken down.
“Now is the time, the moment of enactment/ When, together, we shall fart upon the barriers of tongue/and with pick-saw, hack down/ The restricting walls of hate.”
The poet has identified the problem facing the land. It is hate. Hate stops his marriage to his soul mate, Udokanma, which means in a way, ‘peace is better’. It means therefore that the desire of the poet in his collection is peace, and with its illusive presence, he weeps.
This poem tells about the limiting walls of mores and morals that define society and restrict the poet from marrying his love. The existing traditions and mores are therefore strangulating. He must redefine a new realty, by growing wings, and ‘and sail off beyond mores and marriages’.
Because the desires of the new age cannot be realised in the abode of hate which has replaced love, every effort must be made to dismantle the boundaries. There is a covenant, an agreed expectation, and it is intense between the couple. This intensity bursts the bottled feelings of the couple that both ‘agree that the heat of our passion shall melt obstacles.”
It is these hate and mores that ring clear in Unrequited Love. He defines this to be Odinsoerukaka, near but far. It is a mirage.
Decked in sexual images, the poet invites his lover to ‘destroy me with love/ suck away the juice of my life/ Drain me of every fluid of emotion…’
He asks his love to kill him, go ahead/ And quench this fire/That flames, wrecking/ The foundation of my being/Save me the trauma…this agony.”
It is a vain lamentation, an “illusive peace.” The call is unheeded, unrequited.
This is the relationship between the land and its people. The land is the poet’s lover, his country, the motherland. The solution is the answer to ‘Unrequited Love’. Love in this poem, in this early section of the book, is an illusion but is possible in the last poem, ‘The Solution’. The absence of love is death. The poet writes that when he dies because of hate, ‘ ..When the post-mortem says/ ‘Unrequited passion’/ Bury me, the carcass of a dead love/In the grave-yard of hope,” which signposts the last poems, ‘The Solution’, which is the hope.
‘The Assignment ‘ is a letter by the poet to his motherland, his country. It continues to explain what he wants from his unrequited love. So, the lover here can be in form of a woman or land and country. The poem cataloques the effect of hate on him-yearnings, hunger, exile or exodus for greener pastures abroad.
The cataloguing of the effect of hate continues in ‘Our Memory’. But there is hope that at the end hope shall prevail. The land is peopled by greed, plunderers, murderers, poisoners and polluters of the land, thieves, corrupt chiefs.
Chukwubuike sees the poet in the image of a memory bearer, not one of action. Perhaps, this explains why the poet can only wail and weep. Deprived of action, he cries, “Everyday, we watch/ With tears in our eyes,/The macabre dance of bullets/The psychedelic wriggle of pain/Shedding of young blood with poisoned waters/The deaths in the creeks/The deaths in the swamps/In the belly of the Delta…’
The discontent is everywhere in the land. The violence of the Niger Delta echoes everywhere. The poet sees the violence of the Niger delta as metaphor that will consume the land. And over the years, we have seen how this rabid resort to violence in the delta has led to vile and murderous activities which have killed tens of thousands in the country.
Chukwubuike is a poet of influences. We hear echoes of his vast reading as in Okigbo and Alexander Pope. He takes a line off a poem of a well known poet like Pope or borrows the structure of another like Okigbo. ‘The Date’ here echoes Okigbo. While Okigbo’s echoes serve as a hope that the military regime or tyranny will die, the title poem, ‘The Poet Wept’, takes Pope’s line- ‘What oft was thought…’ This is Pope’s poem that celebrates learning, ’Drink deep the Argean Spring or drink nothing all…’
The two poems here are like a marriage. While ‘The Poet Wept’ signifies inspiration and defines how it starts and rises to take over the individual, ‘The Date’ points to an end of hate. Still, as evidence of the generation, the means of ending that hate is only by waiting, “upon/the conscience of time…’ devoid of action or determination activity to change the situation.
The bulk of the poems-‘The Watchman’, ‘Unleashed’, ‘The Tapper and Our wine’ continues the woeful effects of hate-state terrorism and brutality as well as exploitation. ‘TheTapper…’ is followed by ‘Pen-Paper Intercourse’, a homage to inspiration or the creative muse that is seen as a sexual liaison between pen and paper. The pen already phallic, is on the land, the woman, which is the paper. The poet writes to plant on the land the desires for change in a world “blooming bookshelves of hate and love’.
This section of the book continues the creative description of the art of the poet, such as the ‘Outflow’ till when the poet also begins to attack faith based institutions.
One can take ‘Guards of Giant Cathedrals’ as peak of the pack in this collection, with its intermingling of biblical passages into a song in a call and response pattern. It is like a liturgy. The priest says the biblical passages, the audience replies. The poet recalls and references messages of love in the new testament while echoing in the refrain that what the church practices is an opposite of that message, making the whole institution a house of jest and humour.
Still, in spite of all the violence, including witchcraft, the poet is inactive or immobile. We read about the total effect of hate in the land on him in the poem, ‘Desolation’. A cursory reading of the poem reminds one of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, a poem about procrastination, unfulfilled dreams and indecision to confront his destiny or challenges, a man, while waiting for the right moment to fulfill his desires, ends up not achieving them, even as he ages.
This is what the land does to the poet. He is sprawled on the floor of his bed, recalling his failures and unfulfilled hopes. ‘I lie with my shy dreams/ Tall deflated dreams of achievement/ Counting out on stunted fingers/Dashed hopes, ambitions, projects.’
He has nothing in the world and sees himself a failure, like Prufrock. He sees himself an innocent one in the midst of corruption and hate. But he is confronted by those that take their destiny in their hands and fight the mores and laws of the land that stifle them.
The poet seems to begin to rouse out of his stupor here. We can then understand the change to deviance in the poem,’ Unbound’. A new reality dawns on the poet. ‘The Poet Wept’ cannot bring the change he desires but the ability for him to rise above self righteousness and isolation, aligning with others to exit a formidable foe. Only this can the dreams of ‘The Solution’ be achieved.
The rest of the collection depicts the heroes of the land felled by it. Ojukwu, Achebe and the deceits that still rule the land, like ‘The catechism’ which in a way is extension of’ Guards of the Giant Cathedrals.’
The major attraction of Chukwubike’s ‘The Poet Wept’ is its lyricism. Cataloguing is just a listing of woes which very much declined the craft of the second generation of Nigerian writers. But the music of The Poet Wept, like in Okigbo and Eliot, with echoes of the Beatitudes, with avalanche of traditional music echoes, makes the reading light and easy.
And this is made possible by the simplicity of the poet’s vocabulary, his rhythm and imagery which are like an ornate mined from everyday experience but presented in a way that is unique and fresh.
Yet, the collection points to a glorious future, ‘The Solution’, which is here already. The poem has wiped away his tears. As Wole Soyinka will say, the poet must now set forth at dawn to confront his monsters. That seems the bulk of the poet’s message to his readers.. you must set forth at dawn.
