“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” - Antonio Gramsci


“You, who was born for poetry’s creation,
Do not repeat the sayings of the ancients.” – Anna Akhmatova

“The will of man is beyond surrender.” - Wole Soyinka

“Why is the first window that opens out on this fictional world the consciousness of an idiot?” -J.P Sartre on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury”

I
A writer’s business is to voyage into and take up commands at the threshold of consciousness; and report back freely the news of what is there. This is why the writer in any society being a freelance explorer of spiritually dense zones gains a certain license to behave differently from other people, to be eccentrics in order to fulfil the singularity of his/her vocation in the society. The definition of madness is arbitrary and at most political. The term madness fixes limits and could be exploited for alienating and repressive use; the frontiers of madness define who is ‘Other.’ The exemplary writer is a broker in madness because therein lies the powers of the new. And so when a writer accuses the other of being mad, we should ask what is his definition of madness? In the service of what idea is this definition and in whose interest is this idea?

I read with dismay Odia Ofeimun in his poem Anarch of Hubris (Sunday Mirror, 25 June 2006) deeming Chiedu Ezeanah, a younger poet, a mad, drunkard, morally irresponsible individual who mortgages resources for his wife and daughter to red-light captains simply because Ezeanah self-assertively queries Ofeimun in a soki poem, The Spinner of Dialectics (Sentinel Poetry, #43, June 2006) on why Ofeimun had to release larger doses of himself into his private life. Interestingly, their use of poetry as such flows from the tradition of the neoclassical poets: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Congreve and such use had spun brilliant masterpieces like The Rape Of The Lock, MacFlecknoe, The Dunciad. Had I not reckoned the physics of paradigm shift and boundary maintenance, I would have disqualified my mind and pen from the fray. The godfatherly overstretch is a figuration in the process the older generation employs to pollute the progressive conditions that make vigorous, serious and necessary literature viable. The new Nigerian writer even before s/he is born or converted to one is already encumbered with the triple tropes of sleaze: enfeebling tuitions, philistine criticisms and standards, and insidious paternalism.

Unfortunately, Ibadan has yielded reluctantly its esteemed place as the capital of Nigerian literature and literary criticism to Lagos which unlike the days of Ibadan, is too considerate, obedient, compliant, kabiyesi-ish, worshipful, offensive to life of significant contentions, germane to received and comfortable positions and attitudes, and more about literary politics and self-posturing than critical vitality and qualitative literary tradition. In fact Lagos is an Absurdistan where to write and to line up are synonymous verbs; whereas continual rebellion is the driving force of aesthetic dynamism. Ever since this change of seat, there has being just one man, a Don, who does not entertain questioning, whose over dozen year dictatorship coincides with the inevitable loss called ‘the lost generation’ and his own inevitable literary leanness.

Says Helon Habila: “Odia Ofeimun was probably the most influential and
the most visible poet in Nigeria. He was something of a cult figure among young poets, and few poetry books were published in Lagos during the 1990s without his name among the acknowledgements.” (Granta 80: The Group). He later adds: “Some of my friends advised me to get close to Odia Ofeimun, because in Lagos he decided who won which competition.”

Undeniably, Ofeimun cannot ‘blind himself to putrefying carcases in the market place pulling giant vultures from the sky’, nor can one refute that The Poet Lied is not a cherished addition to the Nigerian canon, nor that Ofeimun in Postmodernism and the Impossible Death of An African Author is not of obese intelligence, nor that Ofeimun of Imagination and the City is not a superb literary archivist. Chinua Achebe offers a good paradigm in Arrow of God where the people of Aninta set fire to and crush their god because he refuses to serve them and in its place installed another god. More pertinent here is the Yoruba mythological paradigm of Atunda, the first insurrectionary grand iconoclast. At the birth of time, his revolutionary initiative of rolling a stone over his master Orisanla (god of purity and father of the gods) disintegrating him - the original godhead into countless debris so that there is not just one god but many gods. That action liberated humanity from the divine tyranny of theism and monotheism. It inaugurated continued gustiness, revolution, fragmentation, individuality vis-à-vis heterogeneity and their other polysemic significations which in the Ibadan days of actively progressive scholarship were the impelling credos not only in spirituality but also the choice of literary teacher, mentor, critic, muse, discipline, genre of fiction or type of literature, worldview and epistemological system.

The scene changes to a venue of the Lagos readings of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come in October 2005. From the floor came a comment from the chairman of a big publishing house: that some days before he was terribly disgusted to see someone deliver a public lecture with a laptop. He was alluding to Dele Olojede, the Pulitzer Prize co-winner who rendered a lecture during NLNG award ceremony. The question is: what is bad in the new possibility of giving a lecture from a laptop? How come this ‘experienced mind’ in literature obstinately persistent in things of the past, whose interest is not magnetised by a dosage of custom-bending features which is what imagination and creativity is all about be a juror of literary prizes? Even more. His company feeding on past glory has not discovered any new writer in the last 20 years. The textbook publishing that is their staple is a process of recycling annually old textbooks that are long overdue for revision. The company like all others (Macmillan, Heinemann, Longmans, Evans, University Press) are yet playing notorious roles in keeping the WAEC and NECO literature curriculum reading lists caked. To mention a few. For African prose, on WAEC’s syllabus, the newest title is Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys Of Motherhood (1979) and on NECO’s (founded 5 years ago) Animata Sow Fall’s A Beggars Strike. For African Drama, on WAEC’s is Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and on NECO’s, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Mugo’s Trial Of Dedan Kimathi (1976).

Students are in all directions fed cognitively with information, themes and atmospheres that history has overtaken and left museum caryatids. Whereas when those books were enlisted, they were refreshingly and contextually relevant. When Odia Ofeimun first appeared in Idoto, the University of Ibadan English Department journal in 1975 and was again included in Wole Soyinka’s Poems of Black Africa (1975), the curriculum quickly accommodated the young poet as the latest happening to literature worth studying. Can the embalmed syllabus do the same today to bombs like Rotimi Babatunde, Kunle Okesipe, Tolu Ogunlesi or a Chimamanda Adichie?