‘(Today, Thursday, December 8), Sevhage Literary and Development Initiative is organizing an event where we can engage Osundare the poet of the marketplace; the people’s poet. The first question I want to ask him is why the deviation from his Marxist-oriented poems after two tragic events that happened in his life’
I BURNT my pot of rice because of a Nigerian poet. Or, I should say Osundare burnt my poet of rice because of his poetry.
I have been away from here. After I came back from Lagos with a broken screen, I decided to disappear for a while. I haven’t had time to write about Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo ensuring that I don’t drink Lagos water at Lagos Book and Art Festival, until I came back to base. He fed me what Christ would have turned water into in contemporary times.
I have also been researching and theorizing about contemporary Nigerian poetry. I can’t seem to sleep when I remember that Harry Garuba wouldn’t come to theorize on the new voices from the fringes of this age (refer to his 1988 anthology that became a historical marker for the third generation).
Talking of the third generation and periodization in Nigerian literature, I have discovered that I have a bias for the second generation which comprises Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide etc. I love their idea and aesthetic split from the Achebe-Soyinka-Okigbo generation. Known as the Alter-Native and Marxist Nationalist poets, they embraced Marxism as the ideology for their age. This generation’s break is evident in Osundare’s ars poetical “Poetry Is” and Ofeimun’s The Poet Lied which is all aimed at redefining style and aesthetic truthfulness in the writing of the first generation.
I encountered Osundare when I was in year one at the university. The man known as Elder who lent me Songs of the Season and Eyes of the Earth warned me not to read the books when cooking. Although a late bloomer in all matters of books, by year one I had read poets like Tchicaya U’Tamsi, Syl Cheney Coker, Senghor, David and Birago Diop, Kofi Awonoor and Anyidoho. On the foreign front, I had enough of Pablo Neruda, Owen Wilfred, Shakespeare, John Keat, W. H. Auden, and my favourite of all time, W. B. Yeat. I told Elder no poet could burn my poet of food.
My food got burnt because of Osundare. As I immersed myself in reading Songs of the Season, I discovered that I was reading a poet whose mark would never leave my view of poetry. His style of phonetic chiming and his thematic consistency are still things that I can’t seem to shake off. My love for him would increase after I read Sule E Egya ‘s NIYI OSUNDARE: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY. In my history of reading, two biographies are always on my top list: ANTON CHEKHOV: A SPIRIT SET FREE by V.S. Pritchett and Egya’s book.
From Egya, I learnt something pivotal about Osundare. When he was attacked in his days at UI, he wrote MOONSONG which is a departure from his other books. Also, after hurricane Katrina which almost claimed his life, he wrote what is hitherto his only collection of love poems titled TENDER MOMENT.
TENDER MOMENT remains one of my favourite love collections. I would pick it over Neruda any day. Osundare is the only poet who asks his lover “Do you have ears for the land of my gauge?” And he makes absence sad. I met him today and I recited this same poem. He laughed. His laughter is tender like the love poems in Tender Moment.
(Today, Thursday, December 8), Sevhage Literary and Development Initiative is organizing an event where we can engage Osundare the poet of the marketplace; the people’s poet. The first question I want to ask him is why the deviation from his Marxist-oriented poems after two tragic events that happened in his life.
Join us (today) at Silverbird Cinema, Second Floor by 5:00 PM as we have an amazing session with Niyi Osundare. Also, you can get copies of his books and his literary biography for sale at the event.
Perhaps, after this, I will disappear again.
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