Dr. Onookome Okome
University of Calabar, Nigeria
When Will This Carnival For Looters End?
Notes on Tayo Olafloye's A Carnival of Looters
This is a major publication of a book of poetry
that Tayo Olafioye has put out in this country [Nigeria],
the place of his birth. He currently stays and teaches in
San Diego, California, where he is a distinguished professor
of literature. This publication marks a major turn in his
poetic career since he emigrated to the United States in the
late 1980s. The reason for this movement into the world where
he is not culturally anchored is a painful one, yet the inevitability
of the choice is even more painful to this poet whose lines
reek of painful memories of the geography of home. This is
the crux of this book of poems. In it, Olafioye dialogues
with his native society, those he has left behind, his beleaguered
country, creating a pattern of remembering, which is littered
with anger and hope on the one hand and on the other hand,
a sense of pity for those who engage in the wanton plunder
of his homeland, his country, Nigeria. That he loves his country
is not in doubt at all. The fact that he insists that this
volume of poems must be published here in Nigeria bears a
curious testimony to that irreducible fact. He loves his country
with the anger of someone who cares for its health. As the
celebrated African-American writer, James Baldwin, once remarked,
to love one's country is to be critical about its hateful
history, its unwholeness, its idiocies. In this sense, loving
and hating are not polar regimes of living, rather they exist
to check and maintain a balance in man's very existence. This
balance is very necessary in every society. This is what Olafioye
seeks here.
Like patriots all over the world, what Olafioye
strives for is to create, at least in his poetry, this balance
by insisting upon making obvious the imbalance of contemporary
Nigeria's social existence. In this sense, Olafioye suffers
the fate that all poets must carry in similar social and political
contexts. This is the kind of poetry that comes from the deep
recesses of a heart tortured by deeds which belittle and denigrade
humanity. It is this kind of poetry which Pablo Neruda describes
as imperfect:
A poetry impure as the clothing we wear,
or our bodies, soup stained, soiled with our shameful behaviour,
our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies,
declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the
shock of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts,
infirmation and taxes ("Toward An Impure Poetry," 1994).
Tayo Olafioye's poetry is all of this. It
is political. It is cultural, and beyond all of this, it is
an inner quest to conquer the turbulence of his world. And
because it is all of this, Olafioye insists on making this
voice public first in his own country, this crucible of the
new morbid face of post-colonial conditions.
This volume then is an important contribution
to that kind of poetry written "at certain hours of the day
and night to look closely at the world of objects at rest"
(Neruda, 1974), the mark of which is the harsh revelation
of life in its starkest form. The tone of A Carnival of
Looters is harsh in part, quick and witty, and the tempo
is vibrant, topical. The anguish expressed is lyrical, properly
laced with elaborate satirical bites. This is a very significant
feeling that the reader experiences as he reads through the
lines of Olafioye's lyrical anguish which is an intervention
in Nigeria's narrative idiocies.
The first part of the collection, "Another
Spring of Meaning" explores the poet as a father tutored by
the tenderness of care and loving. This section has a total
of three poems, "Treasures," "To my daughter anna" and "orion."
The first is written by the poet's six-year old daughter and
the other two by his students at the University where he teaches.
The inclusion of these poems here is meaningful in more ways
than one: it is a direct declaration of the poet's tenderness
towards the humanity around him, and the response he gets
from this humanity around him. In a very important way "To
my daughter anna" can be parachuted into the larger engagement
of A Carnival of Looters, which is the undying love
for one's country. In this sense, anna becomes the symbol
of a country for which the poet (mother) tames sleepless nights
in order to understand. The second part, "The Vision of Crazy
Looters" best exemplifies the closeness of this poet's definition
of poetry to the "ordinary" touch and feelings of living,
unornamented, real.
"My patriotic quest" is significant in many
ways as it foregrounds the debate of nationhood and nationality
in a plural society on the verge of disintegration. Central
to the debate generated in this poem is "the need to question
and relocate the nation in this turbulent times" as the saying
goes here. The answer which the poet proffers lies in the
nostalgic response to and longing for the comfort provided
by the discourse of ancestoral world. This theme of nationhood
and the question which it has generated in post-war, post
oil-boom Nigeria has been a common decimal in recent Nigerian
art, especially in recent poetry and novels. It has also found
persuasive expression in recent scholarly writing. The whole
gamut of Tanure 0jaide's poetry from Children of Iroko
and Other Poems, (Greenfield Press, 1973) to his latest
collection of poems, Delta Blues and Home Songs (Kraft
Books, lbadan, 1998) is replete with this theme. Wole Soyinka's
Open Sore of A Continent. A Personal Narrative of The Nigerian
Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1996) is to date the
most eloquent testimony of the many shades in this debate.
In the first chapter of this polemical book, Soyinka poses
and reposes this question: "when is a nation?" with the ultimate
intention of eliciting critical responses from the reader
to the idea of nation (and subject). In other words, Soyinka
is asking: when does a subject acknowledge a nation as his?
Soyinka only hints at the possible answer, he does not give
an absolute one.
Olafioye's poetry asks this question many
times over. Of course he insinuates that this question is
outside the vision of the rulers which he refers to as "the
looters". It is a critical question only patriots ask. This
is why "The pathology of hope" rejects the "vacant notion
of nation building" since "Death has no assignment/in a deserted
home."
In Olafioye's poetry, the conceptual difficulty
of the question, "when is a nation," is not left to float
aimlessly in its intellectual orbit. It is concretized by
the poet's reduction of its essence to bare human existence.
The whole idea is concretely redeemed in the poem "Martyrdom."
This poem extols the worth of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni Environmentalist
and Civil Rights activist hanged on November 10 by the Abacha
Regime. Here is how the shock of Ken Saro-Wiwa's death is
recorded:
In you Ken lived the muse:
language lost one of its alphabets
that dead day in our November.
Ken Saro-Wiwa is a symbol of the dissenting
majority of Nigerians. He is the embodiment of the question:
"when is a nation?"
Never tired of restating the obvious, "Mission
abroad" reposes the questions: "how do we carve a new nation?",
"when is nation?" The answer provided by the poet is not surprising:
"Poetry must whittle new alternatives."
Nationhood and citizenship (subject) debate
is only one of Olafioye's concerns in this collection, although
it is an over-riding one. He writes about love too. This is
the longing for a glorious past that was lately submerged
in a carnival of shameful deeds in this kingdom of looters.
How else can I end these brief and probably
unfinished remarks on the poetry of this distinguished professor
of literature but to go back to his poetic manifesto:
We must use poetry for politics
or politics of poetry,
our nuclear bombs of the mind.
For now this is the only reassuring space
for poets. After all, Olafioye confides in us:
We are all patients
in the hospital of guilt,
dancing together in sadness.
I know this because I live it.
And for posterity, the only hope of redemption,
Olafioye has this terse verse:
Be still in your soul,
my child.
Daddy did not stand at roadside
like a tree askance.
His pen wept his time
and sang its happiness.
I find reading Olafioye's book of poems a
rewarding experience for many reasons, one of which is that
it restates, in concrete terms, the blinding realities of
Nigeria's post-independence social and political madness.
