An interview with Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare

18 januari 2006 Barely escaping hurricane Lily, which was about to hit New Orleans at 110 miles per hour the day he left, Nigerian poet Osundare made it to The Netherlands just in time to take part in the Literary Passport poetry festival in a much less tempestuous, slightly drizzly The Hague, early October this year. The bi-annual international festival features poets reading their work in the embassy or ambassador’s residence of their home country, and seeing Osundare’s spirited performance in a small anteroom of the embassy, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Yet it was the first time in his life, the poet reveals, that he entered a Nigerian embassy without apprehension. Only three years ago, Osundare would never have accepted the invitation. ‘I did not recognize any ambassador of the Abacha dictatorship,’ he says. Nigeria has been a democracy only since 1999.

Niyi Osundare, who was born in Nigeria in 1947 and is currently a professor of English literature at the university of New Orleans, is considered the greatest living Nigerian poet. Most of his books are published in Nigeria; The Word is an Egg, his latest collection, appeared earlier this year. Just recently, two books of his, Pages from the Book of the Sun: New & Selected Poems and Thread in the Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture, were published in the United States by African World Press. His work has been translated in Dutch, German, Korean and French, and has won many literary awards, such as the Noma Award, Africa’s most prestigious literary prize.

A distinguished gentleman of indeterminate age, the poet still bears a striking resemblance to his self-portrait in the poem ‘Meeting’ (dedicated to Swedish scholar Olle Nordberg):

When I arrive in Nairobi
I will be wearing a face
Not so different from
The one you saw some seasons ago

My spectacles, now bifocal,
Their frames round-rimmed with the years,
Still sit on the humble bridge
Of my nose. I peep through them

Like a sage stitching the rags
Of a broken age.
You will find a moustache
Blooming patiently on the cliff
Of my upper lip
And a mane, now low-cropped,
triumphantly salt-and-pepper
Delectably groomed
(…)

A self-proclaimed ‘practitioner of the poetry of performance’, Osundare got his Dutch audience in The Hague to sing along with him while he recited one of his poems. ‘Poetry for the Yoruba [one of the three largest ethnic groups of Nigeria, MM] is not something an individual reads and enjoys alone; it is shared,’ he explains. ‘I always have that sense of community, a community of singers, hearers and composers, in my mind when I write my poetry. I believe that the audience is the most important element of an artistic performance.’ Osundare started out as a dramatist, has written four plays, and is ‘never far from the stage’, as he reminds us. ‘Poetry has been my passion for a number of years now, but it is poetry that’s mixed with drama. When I was young and my mother was telling us stories, every story came with a song, which all of us would sing before she went on to the narration.’

The poet even goes as far as to give specific musical directions for some of his poems. ‘Invocations of the Word’, for example, the first poem in his new collection, is ‘to be performed with full musical accompaniment’. Osundare: ‘When I perform in Nigeria, I have a number of musicians backing me up with different kinds of drums. Each drum has its own kind of symbolic message. The drums are very important as tools of expression and interpretation. Poetry flows, it is rhythm. And the rhythm is in every word, every syllable. My language, Yoruba, is music. In Yoruba, you don’t say ‘I am going to read poetry’, you say ‘I am going to sing, to chant poetry’. This is what I try to express in my English lines too.’

English and Yoruba are intertwined in Osundare’s poetry. ‘I write in both languages,’ he emphasizes, ‘depending on the nature of the experience, activity or idea I want to describe. But sometimes it poses a problem when an idea comes to me in Yoruba and I want to express it in English. Moreover, the music of Yoruba is quite different from the music of English. In Yoruba, every syllable is stressed and carries equal weight. It is also a flexible language, and verbally generous. For instance, the Yoruba word for computer literally means ‘the machine that is as fast as a hawk’; a radio is ‘the one that talks without taking anything in reply. Yet whichever language one chooses, writing is never easy. When we are writing, we are so anxious to get ideas across that the words are like butterflies; they keep flying in our stomach, and when it is time to write them down, they start dodging us and become really shy.’

In his collection The Word is an Egg, ‘Word’ is always written with a capital W. Although Osundare claims he is a humanist, there seems to be a certain religious element in his poetry about the ‘Word’. ‘The title of that book, The Word is an Egg, is the literal translation of a Yoruba saying,’ the poet explains. ‘Among the Yoruba, the mouth is treated like a God. What makes us live goes in through there and what kills us also goes in through there – and comes out of there, in the form of the Word. The lips are the threshold to the shrine of the mouth; the lips and the mouth are to be treated with reverence. According to the Yoruba, the Word is the medial link between humans and the Supreme Being. When you want to commune with the Supernatural, you have to be careful with the Words you choose. Incantation is very important: you keep reciting until the Gods really hear what you say, and accede to your supplication and fulfill your wishes. Undoubtedly my poetry is influenced by this incantatory mode, hence my constant use of repetition.

‘The Yoruba believe that a Word is extremely useful but also extremely risky,’ Osundare continues. ‘You have to think before you speak. The moment you utter a Word is like breaking an egg. You can’t put the pieces of an egg back together again.’ It is a sentiment the Nigerian government under the dictatorship of general Abacha wholeheartedly agreed with. In the Abacha years, writing poetry was considered a dangerous activity, as Osundare found out himself. ‘With the kind of poetry I write, I can never be the dictator’s friend. So I got a knock on the door at two in the morning a couple of times.’ Osundare has written on the execution, in 1995, of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the unlawful imprisonment of journalists. Subsequently he was visited by security agents and asked to elucidate his phrases. ‘By that time I realized that the Nigerian security apparatus had become quite ‘sophisticated’, quite ‘literate’ indeed! A couple of my students at the university of Ibadan had become informers; a few even came to my class wired. And when I was reading abroad, someone trailed me from city to city. At home, my letters were frequently being intercepted.

‘I survived all those dictators by hiding behind my words. I used animal images, the hyena representing the dictator, for instance, and the antelope the people.’ Now, according to Osundare, the situation is better: ‘We have a democracy, but it is still an infant democracy. The problem is that we don’t have a modern democratic culture; it was killed by the military, and before that by colonialism. Our new democracy is taking a long time to grow. But we have to nurture it. There is no alternative to freedom.’

There is also no choice for the African poet or writer but to be political, Osundare emphasizes. ‘You cannot keep quiet about the situation in the kind of countries we find ourselves in, in Africa. When you wake up and there is no running water, when you have a massive power outage for days and nights, no food on the table, no hospital for the sick, no peace of mind; when the image of the ruler you see everywhere is that of a dictator with a gun in his hand; and, on the international level, when you live in a world in which your continent is consigned to the margin, a world in which the colour of your skin is a constant disadvantage, everywhere you go – then there is no other way than to write about this, in an attempt to change the situation for the better.

‘In the West, art has become entertainment, mostly. In Africa people see art as a weapon in the battle for liberation. The writer in modern Africa is treated like the priest and warrior in traditional society. And the African audience is a talkback audience, very active and responsive.’ From 1985 to 1990 Osundare wrote a weekly poetry column called ‘Songs of the Season’ for the Sunday Tribune, a Nigerian newspaper. ‘The responses I got from readers were tremendous. I was amazed: some people wrote poems back, some wrote me letters or approached me in the street. The experience confirmed my idea that literature has a role to play in society.’