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I am the drowning man,
the snake may just be my redemptive rope… Remi Raji.
Poetry is many things to many people.
For some it is an instrument of war, for others a portal for love.
The two poets in this review have known both, but it is Amatoritsero
who seems more wed to the notion of the poet as warrior. In his
Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children (GHC), Ede begins
his war against the neo-liberals of his Germanic exile right from
the foreword to the book.
Crusades are a cross that beleaguered
poetry is loath to carry and African poetry has done game service
in the Negritude season, which produced much poetry of sublime indignation
and average art. But it is always the case that in every poem that
crusades, the spirit of poetry has to war against verbiage —
and the spirit of banner-wielding protest. The skilled poet will
of course produce a marriage of poetry and its inspiring passion.
The question, is whether Amatoritsero Ede and Remi Raji have managed
this marriage.
GHC is Ede’s exilic
offering. The poems are spare and whittled down: two lyric sequences
acrostically titled a-z with an extra helping of five stand-alone
poems. The poetry of these pages have the texture of vignettes
from a writer's notebook. The hint is in the title, Globetrotter.
Some writer. Some notebook. The first
poem, Globetrotter, is both a paean to his current domicile
in Canada as well as an advice manual on how to graft new branches
onto the maple tree (p.30). Toronto is likened to Prague without
her anchoring of narrow streets, narrow sky/ and/ virgin tight
apartment blocks. The visual style of GHC is as graphic
as the poet’s imagination. Style and substance blends well
from the first line of Globetrotter:
toronto is
amsterdam
adrift at sea
the message, the versification –
such that remains – is pared down almost to inarticulacy.
The result of this compression though, is that the book delivers
line after line of relentless imagery. The lyricism is compressed,
in consistently enjambed lines, but it flowers when read aloud.
Sometimes, though, as in [as spring-spruced statues sparkle]
despite the sumptuous sibilants the poetics seem a trifle indulgent.
Raji is not immune to this indulgence. In one of his most effective
poems, Words can heal (p.99), he ends, Woman, wear
the wind like the winsome night.
Raji has his own Toronto poem, but
the subject of his Song of Toronto is the fake degree saga
that embroiled the Nigerian House of Representatives several years
ago. In this collision of the Torontos, the difference between the
poets is unmistakable. Ede, spare and driven by the bare raft of
images, Raji, voluptuously raging against the hapless object of
his verse. But the sum of their poetry cannot be boiled down to
the coincidence in poem subjects. For an example of the surprise
in Raji’s poetry, The carpenter of Campbell Street (p.44)
will do. Because it ploughs a well-worn path (the undertaker’s
glee in the season of death), the poem is all the more successful
if not for novelty, for the ease of the images and the effortless
change in rhythm from the first to the second verse. The tame third
verse does not take away from the beauty of the poem.
for two hearses he gives an
extra shroud
for three hearses he gives a rosary
and for four and more he rents a crowd
The second ‘hearses’ in
an Ede audition may well not have made the cut. Raji’s next
adventure down well-worn paths may not be as successful for he boldly
titles a poem, Abiku (p.34), thereby inviting comparisons among
others, with Wole Soyinka’s poem of the same title. In this
critic’s estimation, the Nobel laureate’s offering remains
on its perch, but these Raji lines remain:
Whatever I did at birth must
have been whispered to the stream
Whatever I told the stream must have been sold to the river
Whatever the river knows is in the sea’s bosom, the ocean’s
belly.
Raji’s previous collections include
A Harvest of Laughters (1997), Webs of Remembrance
(2001), Shuttlesongs America: A Poetic Guided Tour (2003)
and Lovesong for my Wasteland (2005).
Apart from its form, the unity of Ede’s
long poems are maintained by his carefully calibrated refrains of
not in love and how did it transpire, which speak
of different things when they recur in successive poems. Occasionally,
the refrain is neatly upended (as in not in lust p.94).
The entire poem is neatly summed up in the final canto, z, how
did it transpire /that empires/ do expire! (p. 96). Individual
poems themselves adopt peculiar refrains, like ajantala (monkey
no fine im mama like am p.81), which is a fair example of a
balanced Ede political poem which spares its incisively delivered
propaganda payload for the final couplet. The monster-baby, democracy
is described thus:
It drinks milk and blood in
equal quarts
not from bottles
but direct from the battered breasts
…
shrieking at mom for more blood
after that first mammary meat
Raji is an observer and aesthete. With
one foot in mythology and the other in everyday street , his omnivorous
collection is a ‘journalist-poet’s‘ whose notebook
collects mementoes. He writes to fellow poets (Odia, Osundare…),
and cities (Stockholm, St. Louis...). He writes into situations,
making the ubiquitous and frustrating check-point policemen into
a subject of his own scathing poem. In Ode to torch bearers (p/45)
he pours restrained vituperation,
I know you’re kitted
like the tattered rat
But you behave still like one, …
When next my daughter wonders
why your pocket bursts with your victim’s sweat
I will tell her the tale of torchbearers
In Raji's poem for Word Aids Day, (p/84)
‘the mark of the virus slits
the streets
Like defiant swords
The virus is eager
the virus is eager
waiting upon the wings
of lyrical groins’
Once again, this is poetry that provokes
a quickening, excitement. The language is sinuous and twining, the
images, surprising. Although widely anthologized, this is Amatoritsero
Ede’s second collection, following the award-winning Caribbean
Blues; A Writer's Pains (authored as Godwin Ede). At the end
of the book comes five short poems. Anike (p.97) is taut with erotic suggestion and the swagger and dash of The
Crescent and the Cross, (p.98) is a literate indictment of the
organized irony of religion that is shaped for love and for
war
hate is in your eyes
rage in your blood
swords on your walls
In these days of acerbic religion
purveyed in the evangelism of terrorism, lines like death sheathed
in prayer will have added pungency. Inevitably, for a device
that is retained throughout the collection, the graphic affectation
of Ede’s verse is distracting. But by and large, as a stylistic
convention, the poet has made it his own, and the peripatetic subject
of his poetry is well-suited to the free-flying structure of his
verse on the page.
those motes flying around the electric
bulb
now crowd around
my mocked head
like chirst’s sad
bitter crown (p100)
Poetry, in the hands of both poets
is a politicized weapon, but it is also a personal calling card,
a canine creature leaving traces on the haunts he has inhabited.
It is a poet singing nostalgia, as much as a nostalgia calling out
to the poet. In Rust, whose dedication reads ‘for Nathalie Desverschere’, Ede ends
this way:
your going has exacted a riot
the clock has stopped
between my legs
It can no more mark the seconds and minutes
of the breathing-in and the breathing-out of your thighs
knowing that the winter
shall be an unbearable weight
come back or I’ll desverschere!
In Amatoritsero Ede and Remi Raji,
Nigeria has two quite different poets who bring different aesthetics
to bear on their preoccupations. In vain does Olive Senior in the
blurb of Ede’s book claim the poet for Canada as ‘a
startling new voice in Canadian letters’. Both poets are indelibly
marked with the country of their engagement, enlisted in Nigeria’s
literary cavalry. Even Ede’s preoccupation with Hitler’s
children is after all on behalf of Africa’s children, among
others. Gather my Blood Rivers of Song is a sizeable 143-page
collection arranged in 7 swathes of poems. These poems, uniformly
ambitious, are not uniformly accomplished; yet, although disqualified
from Nigeria’s controversial NLNG 2009 Literary Prize for
still unclear reasons, in this critic’s estimation, it was
that country’s loss.  |
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