Gyrations...

Gbogbo ilu,

in wrinkled gyrations,

tapped into the sounds of tattered drums...

who cares if the beaded waists are no longer

responsive,

the gongs and the songs bound in scattered steps,

beckoning....

portmanteau of waists;

who is going to pick dispersed beads unthreaded

from the jaded waists?

II

you can still remember

the fanned dusts trailing relunctant feet

whereas,

tattered tears of childlessness,

of poor harvests,

of crippled expectations

and Gbogbo Ilu

can still celebrate

even when the gorged harvests are nurtured

on patched ridges.

III

but where are the manicured voices,

where are the strewn claps

that would nudge

Gbogbo Ilu

into frenzy of laughters once again;

those laughters long lost in drenches of tears.

for students of sesan ajayi.....

For Students of Sesan Ajayi.....

Dispersed voices of yesteryears
wear the crimson cloak of distant climes as nightmares...
and we see,
garbed tears and glares
not so much to mourn the embalmed minstrel
but to doubt if tomorrow will ever bring a dawn
and to doubt a December without the jingled bell

Wait...
what if these silent stampedes
become the ablution of rites
to peep and to dip
and to become the harbinger of muffled tidings
that will not resonate only once a year
like the jingled bell
but forever told like gallant tales

OKIGBO 60th Birthday: A new insight into the works of an ageless poet

Written By Dele Bankole. Article first published in THE NIGERIAN TRIBUNE August 18th 1992

As we celebrate the post homous 60th birthday of Christopher Okigbo (born August 16th, 1932), there are certain impulses that make a reinterpretation of his only poetry collection LABYRINTHS a must. Some of them are the incessant reference to his iconoclastic status in African poetry and his knocking influence of his poetic signature on the present corpus of Nigerian poets. If we consider the second reason above which is in actual fact an acknowledgement and a reference to a passage that foretold today's political and economic trragedies which kicked off at the instance of a senseless civil, a new reading then becomes necessary.

Okigbo's influence on modern Nigerian poetry has become a poetic character whose virility is more of a touch of Muse. It appears more interesting to note that the works of the likes of Niyi Osundare, Afam Akeh, Harry Garuba, Esiaba Irobi, Chimalum Nwankwo, Odia Ofeimum, Sesan Ajayi, Olu Oguibe and several others partially and grossly belong to the Okigbo school. The overflowing stream of symbolic gestures in Harry Garuba's SHADOW AND DREAMS; the laments and repudiation of a world in shreds of Niyi Osundare's SONG OF THE MARKET PLACE; the individual celebration of weird images as a tool of psychic identification of self in Sesan Ajayi's A BURST OF FIREFLIES; and perhaps the expansive allussions to a mythical cosmology as a picture of an insane socio political order in Olu Oguibe's A GATHERING FEAR carry certain refractions of the Okigboian temparament.

It will appear that the need to re evaluate Okigbo is irrelevant since what will be our new definitions of his canticle are already in the works of what we have referred to Okigbo school. Since there is a one-to-one correspondence between the present concern and crux of the influence, the attempt here will reveal an index and a baseline for the reading and appraisal of the emerging tradition.

What first appeared as an individual enmythification of ideas at different public appearances in TRANSITION and BLACK ORPHEUS in the early sixties turned to be final versions of psychic fulfilment and a spiritual justification of self as an itinerant in quintessential journey of discoveryin LABYRINTHS.

In a sprititual stupour before mother Idoto, the mythical personage embarks on a reconciliatory journey between the imbalances of a threatened world and the innocence of a surrealist thrust. Through this, we see a figment of a pre human feint who engages in evocative sorcery with allusive characters in a dissonant trance. The subsequent matyrdom suggests, though in a veiled manner today's societal malaise. The period spanning the end of the lethal civil war and the present time, LABYRINTHS expressis verbis assumes a clinical testament of the unsavoury temper of an age that has not only lost its meaning but also sense of direction. As a subtle declaration, LABYRINTHS as we have it today is an existential verification of sordid realities.

"Heavensgate" cannot remain a ceremony of an innocence but a demand for a spiritual emulgence of misdeeds. The naked prodigal before the river goddess Idoto has had his physical make-up splashed with the life giving water, still he is a white sepulchre whose bowel is a horrendous sight to behold. The fitful personage is to embark on a journey that will enable him see odds of existence. He will not come out as a martyr but a panting soul in need of spiritual rehabilitation.

The cultic fantasy in "siren limits" and "Fragment" are not in this age a display of the Manichean simplism of life and death or as the imaginative clapperboard of a soul at a crossroads but an existential exemplification of human tragedy of hunger, poverty and civil strife. Note the use of extensive of irony in "Fragments IV" ("and you talk of the people/there is none thirsty among them"). The gods are even tired as chorused in the sublimnity of "Fragments XI" ("and the gods lie in state") ...Echoes of Nietzsche " God is dead". The sombre tone as a reflection of these odds is expressed in a punchline fashion in "Laments of the drums" ("the wailing is for the fields of men") the great river is drying and the fields of crop are withering. The dignification of ancestors is out of the place for they (the ancestors) could not foreclose the present misery.

The prophetic vision of Okigbo is delicately constructed in "Path of Thunder" (a series he never saw its completion before his death in 1967 during the civil war) which shows poetry could be a visionary rendition of caustic feelings. Those feelings actually saw the Nigerian civil war. The unfolding trauma we consistently experience today as a nation is presaged in this terse book of revelation. In "Elergy for Alto", he refers to politicians and robbers as ravening eagles, ("the eagles have come/the eagles rain down on us"). Politicians of today and armed robbers are a twin of some sorts, a singular entity that partakes in a comedy of errors.. This age indeed hears nothing more than "condolences" ("Elergy for for sit drum") for the nation that treads on a long stretch of paroxysm. The prophetic construct here could be a knocking lampoon composed long before now for the age whose definition is meaninglessnes and chaos.

This ageless collection is a feeder to the poetic pre occupation of the modern Nigerian poetry. Apart from their indulgence in Okigbo's symbolic and allusive modes, the minstrelsy of creative texture, and a style and structure in the sublime,the new school is nonetheless a tentacle of context, form and style as presaged and scrolled by Christopher Okigbo. Indeed this development has placed Okigbo as a member of the sacred "living dead"who have continued to register their veiled existence on modern poetic creations. In fact, what Christopher Okigbo's LABYRINTHS has done for us is akin to what T.S Eliot's WASTELAND did to post World War western modernist poetry.

THE POET AS A SOMNABULIST.. A review of Sesan Ajayi's A BURST OF FIREFLIES

This article was published in DAILY TIMES April 12,1992 and DAILY SKETCH April 16, 1992

Title: A Burst of Fireflies
Author: Sesan Ajayi
Publishers: Kraft Books Limited, Ibadan
Reviewer: Dele Bankole

At a moment like this when pretenders and literary quacks parade themselves as poets, a work like Sesan Ajayi's A BURST OF FIREFLIES seems to have marked the beginning of the end to these traumatic pretences. In a very rare coalition of intellectualism and gripping colourlines of symbols, images, sound and style, the poet has reproduced the exact temparament of today's world through the consciousness of an untiring somnabulist (poet/persona).

The collection which is crefully arranged under three sections - ''muffled -beats, ''distant beats' and "up-beats" is a device to show the metamorphic facets of human temparaments of sobriety, loneliness and uncertainty, of pleas and supplication, and of hope, wishes and unsung celebrations. In the "Introit" to the collection, there is creative ablution in the surges of fire of ritual: i calcify nagging utterances/shared rings of morphemes/I echo the sprinting rivulets/fast flowing streams of fire. The poet/persona here invites us to partake in the ritual of fire.

What strikes one while reading this collection is the use of poetic chronology. A new poem is always an offshoot of the former. The ritual in "Introit" is cleansing. In "A Penitent Song", there are tears that ignite votive urges to spiritual eloquences pleading for a shower of forgiveness. The subsequent emulgence of guilt and sin had empeopled the collection; the poet-persona then becoming the hardy social commentator and chronicler softening daunted souls with emollient streaks of "Atoning word(s). Poems like "God's Children", "No tears today", "Anti sap-song I and II, "A burden of ties" etc are a registration of this poetic concern. The confessional tone in most of the poems could be deliberate for an outward thrust of the message which are heavily laden with extemporary symbols and metaphors often intrusively individualistic.

Earnestly, the poet appears to be a hortative symbolist more in the tradition of Christopher Okigbo. The power of the poems rests solely on the horst of symbols, metaphors and images delicately employed as an index of testy realities. Cutting across the entire collection is a persistent reference to "dream" and "chloroform"(a dream remembered", "a love song I and II","no tears today", "the promise of age", " grief shared") which is to create a picture of loneliness, nothingness and inactivity.

Though we see that the gazes of the "somnabulist" (the persona) are oneiric, there is a pull of a symbolic orgy where an escape from inactivity and loneliness can be effected. " A dream remembered" typifies a fervous display of symbolic gestures of those gazes of a somnabulist; "dark clergies'', "syllables of death''"yellowing pages'', "drowsy hibiscus", "liquid moment". "muscled amens'', "Aluminium dream''. This overload of symbols, metaphors and images, apart from concretising in sombre tone the persona worries and restleness, it also depicts an engagement in poetic psychosis punctuated in wierd and dissociated symbolism and imagery.

If influence is anything important in literature, Sesan Ajayi seems to have licked a bit of that invocative poetry of Niyi Osundare and Afam Akeh. "Ofirima" "Isiokpo" and "a night out in Choba" show the poet's romance with nature, in this sense, physical and metaphysical landscape. To be candid however,Mr Ajayi has not presented himself as a poet of nature, for his poems (even those three) lack the intense invocative , mesmerizing and magical prowess noted in the supposed sources of his influence.

A BURST OF FIREFLIES is a hymnal tract with a boundless power of lyricism. This singular effect has re-affirmed that poetry , apart from the stylistic and the contextual appeal, is essentially an outlet for musical craft.The syncopation, in "a verbal collage" and ''a marriage song'' makes one to tarry awhile before deciding if indeed one has before him a poetry collection or a canticle of a selected songs.

It should be noted here that through the exploration of the "shuttered self"("anonymity") poetry could be an externalisation of those moulding dreams which are nevertheless the exact picture of the world out there. The poems ithe collection are not particularly independent of that moralist voice of the poet. It can be added here that A BURST OF FIREFLIES is a re-write of a moribound order of poetry; it is a rebirth of imaginative texture in poetry so they can stand the test of time.