In Which Nothing Happens

In their introduction, the editors write:

The introduction offers a bland summary of the period and its atmosphere. Just like the poems in the anthology, the introduction was written in the mood of protest. The editors say little about the worth of the poems they have collected—the only reference to the essence of the poems, beyond the talk of ‘speaking the truth to power’, is the last statement in the excerpt above.

The editors also fail to elaborate on how ‘inchoate metaphors’ are ‘reinvented’ in this book. Reading the introduction, one feels that the poems in themselves do not matter; it is the #EndSARS movement that matters: the poems simply ‘bear witness’ to that. Contrary to what the editors suggest, however, the poems don’t reinvent anything. The word ‘invention’, suggesting deliberateness, a knowledge of the mechanics of what is being woven, looks ill on them. They are a burden of cliché, lame lines, shallow tropes, slight plagiarism, and cold allusions hawked like bend-down-select-cloths. If the names of the individual poets were to be removed, it could be argued that one person wrote the fifty-plus poems in Sọ̀rọ̀sókè, with maybe four exceptions. At best, the talk of ‘reinventing inchoate metaphors’ is a weak attempt to deny the inchoateness of the poems they have put together. ‘Bad’—lacking the neat concealing power of ‘inchoate’—seems a more accurate way to describe them.

— from the poem, ‘Here’s a Dirge to Lost Dreams’

— from the poem, ‘Asking for Sunrise and Getting Silence’

In the first excerpt, what does the poet mean by ‘pains unfelt’ and ‘wishes unknown’? Perhaps, by ‘pains unfelt’, the poet implies that the Nigerian government was ignorant of the plight of the youth, that it did not ‘know’ the youth’s pain. On the other hand, ‘wishes unknown’ cannot meaningfully mean that the government did not know what the youth wished for. ‘Wishes’ trivializes the substance of the desire that culminated into the movement—the government perhaps plays deaf because they think the youth are ‘wishing’, erecting fancy castles in the air. To try to read the poem meaningfully, with depth and the keen attention that poetry demands, is to render to Caesar what is not his due at all: the poem is unknown to the process of its own meaning. This is the case with more than half the poems in this anthology; of the other half, those that are conscious about how they mean are too anxious to mean, and the poetry is killed by the anxiety.

‘Tired hollow ways’ from the poem, ‘Asking for Sunrise’ is a welcome phrase; there is something going on inside it. Sound saunters through the first two words (rising and falling) and then drops flat in ‘ways’. We can bear the cliché because the structure of the phrase tonally carries the situation it signifies. Imagine a traveller, tired, burning with thirst (hollow), sauntering across a parched field. (In the absence of poetry, phrases like this are the primary things worth savouring in Sọ̀rọ̀sókè; and even they are rare.) The second line, should we replace ‘by’ with ‘with’, remains confusing. The problem is not the absence of finesse, the problem is the absence of clarity. In the third line, we are told that ‘if nothing else rhymed like pentameter,’ meaning, I assume, even if there was no coherence to the protest, no single voice (and of course there were divergent anxieties within the movement), still, the poet says, ‘the chants broke the brass’. A fair image, reminiscent of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of iron-and-clay feet in Daniel, which foreshadowed a brutal kingdom. ‘[N]othing else rhymed like pentameter,’ though, is a confident disaster.

The brass recalls feet, and the image of feet calls to mind Idowu Odeyemi’s from the anthology, ‘& they killed Jimoh Isaiq’ (note that ‘Isiaq’ is misspelled). Odeyemi steals an image from a well-known Wole Soyinka poem—‘Abiku’—and there is no acknowledgement anywhere: ‘as they toss our body inside the mud/ deep into the god-swollen foot.’ The entire line is in fact a rewrite of the Soyinka line: ‘[D]ig me deeper still into/ The god’s swollen foot.’ The fact that the editors failed to note it—as persistent as Soyinka’s poem has been in our culture and in intellectual cum academic circles—the fact that there are so many errors in this book, so much blunder, sincerely makes one wonder if this anthology was ‘edited’ or compiled.