The Miseducation of Nigerian Poets

First-generation [post-colonial] Nigerian poets succeeded at capturing the national imagination, in how they encapsulated certain experiences as regards, among other things, culture, politics and travelling. J. P. Clark’s ‘Ibadan’, for example, captures Ibadan in an image that is immediately identified with the city. There are many things about Ibadan, but it could only have been through poetic wisdom that J. P. Clark captured the brown roofs that run along a long distance when viewed from a rooftop. Reading some of Christopher Okigbo’s poems in Labyrinths, one is able to feel the ethnic tensions that underlined the historical Nigerian conflict from 1966 that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war. Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’ does not just capture an experience of racism abroad; it captures the awkwardness, the politeness of the ‘house owner’, as they try to discharge the potential tenant; the naivety of the foreigner who thinks he stood a chance because he was light skinned. And from second-generation poets, we can see how Niyi Osundare’s ‘Not My Business’ applies to the Nigerian condition today. Following the injustices around issues like police brutality and our present economic downturn, it is no longer a case of ‘Why should I worry, as long as if does not take the yam off my mouth,’ as Osundare’s poem satirizes. The poem lets everyone know that those who are silent when their neighbours are taken out, are awaited by the belly of a waiting jeep in the future. In the achievements of the first and second generation of post-colonial Nigerian poets, there was a clear sense of poets at work, not just in capturing the experiences of their times, but in actively awakening the consciousness of the people who read them. We see the sense in which poets, despite the esotericism of their arts, display not just an important consciousness, but also indispensable activism.

When a civilization thrives, its poets thrive, too, in the sense that their role in society is fruitful; similarly, in a suffering civilization, poets have either been persecuted, suppressed or forced into exile. The relationship These positions are given in recognition of the contribution of the poet’s art to the development of society. According to the US-based Poetry Foundation, for instance,

I have written before about how at the height of the 2015 general elections, I encountered a poem by Kanma Oduwegwu titled, ‘Their Fates May be Mine’. I explained how the poem sparked my journey into writing poetry. The poem spoke to an instinct deep within me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. For years, I had only read science texts where everything was rendered in prose and technical language. Discovering that poem seemed like the most profound way to express rebellion; to pass the message of what was a forewarning at the time. It was the beauty of language overwhelming me. Afterwards, I began to encounter people who wrote poems on social media; and the wonderful poems these young people wrote had me in a chokehold. It was almost impossible to resist becoming a poet. I then joined the assembly of social media poets, from which some of the most profound poets of my generation have emerged. Among the things they wrote about were love, culture, myths, the deplorable state of Nigeria. In hindsight, it is striking that even with our inexperience and imitation of poets we admired at the time, our style and voices were varied. The general consensus was that the social media revolution had revived Nigeria’s poetry tradition. From the online community of poets came gatherings of people like Kukogho Iruesiri Samson, Ayoola Goodness Olarenwaju, Erhiata Orhibabor, Efe Paul Azino, Romeo Oriogun, Chibuihe Obi and Aremu Adams Adebisi. Social media had filled the gaping hole left by the deteriorating literary system. Social media made it easy for isolated individuals scattered around the country to come together and create a community of poets who wanted to work together.

The culture of writing and posting poems on social media was mainstream for most of the 2010s, but then many poets, as they grew and got accepted in magazines, began to post their poems less on social media, submitting them instead to literary magazines. Soon, young poets formed their own magazines: in 2009, Dami Ajayi and his friend, the essayist Emmanuel Iduma formed Saraba; in 2014, Kukogho Iruesiri Samson formed Words Rhymes and Rhythms; in 2015, Wale Owoade began the now-defunct Expound. These platforms alongside other platforms like Praxis, African Writer, Kalahari Review, Jalada Africa and Brittle Paper became prized platforms to publish works. For a while, these platforms served the same purpose magazines like Black Orpheus and Transition did for the first generation of Nigerian poets.