WEST AFRICAN POETRY

A: FRANCOPHONE POETRY

(i) The Negritude Poets

The study of contemporary African Poetry in French almost always starts with reference to the ideology
and poetry of the Negritude movement. The main voices of this group included

Lepold Sedar Senghor,

Birago Diop, and

Ousmane Socé Diop all from West Africa and

Aime Césaire from Martiniqque,

and Leon Damas.

The principal concern of these poets was indeed the assertion of their confidence and pride in the
originality and beauty of Black and African cultures.

Some critics would assert the chronological precedence of prose writing and fiction by Africans from the
former French Empire over the later appearance of poetry. There is an almost universal consensus with
regard to the initial primacy of poetry and the importance of Negritude in the development of
contemporary African literature in French. At the opening of the historic Dakar colloquium "African
Literature and the Curriculum," sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom in March 1963,
Senghor, then president of Senegal, did observe that: “The promoters of Negritude were initially
concerned with the creative and aesthetic expression of their new consciousness”.

Senghor felt the need to reiterate a precise definition of Negritude: He defined it thus:

... négritude is not racialism; it does not spring from a vulgar

and distorted attitude of mind. It is simply the sum of civilized

values of the black world; not past values but the values

of true culture. It is this spirit of Negro African civilisation,

which is rooted in the land and in the heart of the black man,

that is stretching out towards the world of men and things

in the desire to understand it, unify it and give expression to it. (Moore 15)

In an earlier statement Senghor the political leader had insisted on the role of Negritude as an
instrument of struggle against colonialism and domination: He argued that:

"To stage an efficient revolution, our revolution,

we had above all to rid ourselves of our

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 borrowed garments—those of assimilation—and

to assert our own existence, that is to say, our Negritude

It is first in the poetry of Senghor and his friends, and later in that of younger Black African poets, some
of whom are true disciples of Negritude, that the themes that characterize the negritude philosophy are
most eloquently developed. For instance, some of the major themes are the persistence of one's
culture over the centuries and the sense of continuity between the dead and the living in the
traditions of Black Africa. These are recurrent themes in many of the poems

For instance

Senghor’s “In Memorium”

O Dead ones who have always refused to die,

who have known how to fight death All the way to the banks of the Sine,

to the banks of the Seine, and in my fragile veins,

my indomitable blood Protect my dreams as you have protected your sons,

the thin-legged migrants.

( Senghor, "In Memoriam," Chants d'ombre [Songs of darkness], in Poèmes 9-10)

And in Nuit de Sine we get the following:

Woman, light the clear oil lamp,

that the Ancestors may chat and the parents as well,

with the children in bed.

( Senghor, " Nuit de Sine " [Night of Sine], Chants d'ombre , in Poèmes 14)

Birago Diop,another Negritude poet in his poem Souffles says:

Those who are dead have never gone away.

They are in the shadows darkening around,

They are in the shadows fading into day,

The dead are not under the ground.

They are in the trees that quiver,

They are in the woods that weep,

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They are in the waters of the rivers,

They are in the waters that sleep.

They are in the crows, they are in the homestead.

The dead are never dead.

( B. Diop, " Souffles " [Breaths], in Reed and Wake 20-23)

Another concern in negritude poetry is the evocation of a glorious Africa, the Africa of the prestigious
empires, of brave warriors and audacious princesses, the Africa of beauty, wisdom, and splendor
characterized also by a closer intimacy of man with his environment, with nature, as opposed to a dry,
lifeless, and decadent Western world characterized by excessive rationality and materialism, and by
its remoteness from nature and its propensity for the destruction of life.

In an early poem, " Neige sur Paris " ( Snow on Paris ), Senghor wishes to forget

The white hands that fired the shots

that brought the empires crumbling

The hands that flogged the slaves, that flogged you.

The white dusty hands that buffeted you,

the powdered painted hands that buffeted me.

The confident hands that delivered me to solitude, to hatred

The white hands that felled the forest of palm trees that commanded the heart of Africa.

(" Neige sur Paris ," Chants d'ombre, in Poèmes 22

DAVID DIOP: POETRY OF COMBAT

David Mandessi Diop, a much younger man then living in the southwest of France,
where he was born of a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother was another
important voice of negritude. Born in Bordeaux in 1927, Diop was definitely not a
member of Senghor's initial Paris Negritude group of the mid-1930s. Here is one
example of David Diop's vigorous, committed poetry:

The White killed my father My father was proud

The White raped my mother My mother was beautiful

The White bent my brother under the sun of the roads My brother was strong,

The White turned toward me His hands red with black blood

And said in his Master's voice "Boy! A drink, a towel, some water!"

(" Le temps du martyre " [The time of the martyr], in Hammer Blows 40-41)

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Appropriately, Senghor described David Diop's poems as aggressive, direct, and efficient in displaying
an acute, uncompromising race consciousness. But in light of Diop's later poems and other activities
these traits, which Senghor attributed mainly to youth, remained the trademark of this genuine
representative of the stance of protest to European supremacy. From the moving poem about the
African mother "A ma mère" [ To my mother] to the thought-provoking "Nègre clochard" [ Nigger
tramp], dedicated to Césaire Diop's poems can be said to be thematically circumscribed within a
framework of uncompromising and sometimes deliberately harsh denunciation of prejudice and
exploitation, and an unconditional faith in the Black man's capacity to rise triumphantly into a new
and scintillating dawn. And it is within this framework that the secondary themes of love, brotherhood,
beauty, tenacious courage, and admiration for one's elder's visionary example of dedication are
developed. Here are two additional examples from Coups de pilon:

Your smile that spoke old vanquished miseries O mother

mine and mother of all Of the negro

who was blinded and sees the flowers again

Listen listen to the voice

This is the cry shot through with violence

This is the song whose only guide is love.

( Hammer Blows 2-3)

And From un enfant noir ( To a Black child ):

And that justice might be done

there were two of them Exactly two

on the pan of the scales

Two men on your fifteen years and the glimpsed kingdom.

They thought of the mad blind man who saw Of their women

besmirched Of their tottering rule And your head flew off

to hysterical laughter.

In air-conditioned mansions Around cool drinks

An easy conscience relishes its rest.

( Hammer Blows 26-27)

The latter excerpt is from one of the most biting denunciations of racism, inspired by the lynching in
Mississippi in 1955 of Emmett Till, a Black youngster from Chicago.

The tone of his protest was, however, much more uncompromising and harsh. A poet of pardon and
reconciliation he was not.

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Activity

1. Select one Francophone poem and critique it from the perspective of Negritude.
2. Make notes on the concernsof Negritude.

(ii)THE POETS OF THE AGE OF DISILLUSIONMENT

The next ideological stance appeared in the I960s. It is a stance of disillusionment with the new
independence and the new African rulers, and it is expressed sometimes with great bitterness.

Alpha Sow, from Guinea, probably already disillusioned with Sékou Touré's leadership after the
euphoria of his country's symbolically courageous vote in 1958 against membership in de Gaulle's
French Community, wrote:

One sees only Night, the demons on our heels;

One feels only time, mournings, sobs

Of a country that wails in the spring of life!

Where did they go, the indomitable heroes,

Who used to brave the storm, pull us away from distress,

Revive our confidence and lead us in battle?

Under the weight of demons, of lackeys, of accomplices,

To revive the Voices, their complaints, their revolt,

To scorn death, march to battle, snatch victory,

A thousand years! We looked for the ray to draw the furrow!

Revive the fire, sister; The dark night has come;

We must walk noiselessly.

(" Où sont-ils donc allés? " [Where Then Have They Gone?], in Nouvelle somme 75)

The Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, the author of the controversial novel Le devoir de violence
( 1968; Bound to Violence, 1971), a bitter satire of the new order, which seems to have swallowed up the
exalting dream of the previous era, writes as follows:

We eat grapes pasteurized milk gingerbread all imported

And we eat little It's not your fault Your name was Bimbircokak

And all was just fine

Then you became Victor-Emile-Louis-Henri-Joseph

Which as far as I can remember does not indicate that you are related to Roqueffelère

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(Pardon my ignorance I know nothing about finances and fetishes)

But as you can see Bimbircokak

It is your fault that From being underdeveloped I have now become undernourished.

("A mon mari" [To my husband], Nouvelle somme 95)

THE FUTURE

It is appropriate to end this chapter with quotations from two Senegalese poets, Cheik Aliou Ndao and
Marouba Fall. These quotations epitomize the most current trends in Francophone African poetry. They
also exemplify what the directions of this poetry are likely to be, namely, a poetry that thematically will
still continue to explore some of the areas pioneered by the Negritude predecessors. These themes will
naturally include:

(i)the pride and genuine admiration and respect for one's past

(ii) the exaltation of one's heroes from the remote as well as from the recent past.

(iii)A strong sense of race, but without undue ostentation,

(iii) some references to past abuses and prejudices,

(iv)A genuine confidence in the making of a new and strong Africa,

(v)The denunciation of abuses by the post-Independence rulers and leaders of Africa

B: ANGLOPHONE WEST AFRICAN POETRY

-Most of the pioneers were born between 1910 and 1920

- published their works in the I940s and early I950s.

With the exception of Gabriel Okara, the poets of the first modern generation were born between 1926
and 1936. The major poets of this generation are Lenrie Peters of The Gambia, Kwesi Brew and Kofi
Awoonor of Ghana, and Gabriel Okara, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark Bekederemo, and Christopher
Okigbo of Nigeria. Sharing a particular moment in time, these poets share similar educational and
political experiences as well. Educated in developing African institutions such as the University of Ibadan
and the University of Ghana, they encountered the Anglo-American expression of the Euromodernist
poetic tradition. They read Hopkins and Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Their early poetry, which began to
appear in the late 1950s, is often imitative of those masters. The presence of Eliot is strongly felt in
Okigbo's earliest lines, and some of Pepper Clark's early poems are inscapes in sprung rhythm in the
manner of Hopkins. But one thing they learned from the Euromodernists is the efficacy, indeed, the
primacy, of the individual voice. These poets learned, they did not imitate.

The poets developed individual, highly distinctive voices and styles. They arrived at their individuality
through complex processes: by selecting and adapting Euromodernist techniques, by developing
unique personae as responses to their experiences as men and as Africans, by interacting with—
coming to terms with—Negritude, and above all, by working their way back to their own indigenous

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oral poetry. However distinctive their voices, tropes, and techniques, they are nevertheless united
thematically. They all write about the same things, the same two great, deep themes:

(i) the meaning of African history and

(ii) the significance of their own experiences as modern Africans.

These themes can best be explained as intersecting. The first is a paradigm of African history, and
the second might be called the psychological myth of the cyclical journey. The historical paradigm is
the conjugation of a long historical process consisting originally of five "tenses":

i. A rich traditional past that is both pastoral and romantic and is made up of both villages and empires

2. A ruthless European conquest against heroic resistance

3. A period of oppression and exploitation in which Black character was purified through suffering

4. A determined struggle for liberation culminating in triumphant independence

5. A returning glory to independent Africa.

This vision of the African past is, in effect, a kind of counter myth, a repudiation of the European myth of
the dark continent to which Europeans were bringers of light. It provides African poets with a tropology
and with a set of moral assumptions on the basis of which African experience can be interpreted.

QSTN:Discuss the historical paradigm and the psychological myth of the cyclical journey

In West African poetry.

The psychological myth casts the experience of the westernized African into the pattern of a cyclical
journey.

(i) He is Born into the tradition of hearth and village,

(ii)He is then pulled away in the disorienting world of the West.

(iii)Through schools and universities and often extended periods of time spent in Western countries, he
is then transformed into a modern African.

(iv)But in the process he finds himself rejected by the West

(v) while, at the same time, he learns to see—and then see through—its racism, imperialism, and
materialism.

(iv)The cycle of this journey is completed as the altered African returns to an altered Africa,

(vii) often he seeks to help in the attempt to build a meaningful future out of a usable past.

Much of the imagery of the modern Anglophone poets is derived from the historical myth. In this myth
Africa is depicted in pastoral images of nature and nurture, symbolized often as a woman in tropes that
are both maternal and erotic. The traditional past, figured by dance, drums, masks, and other artifacts, is
both sustaining and creative. The Europeans who violate it are presented as birds of prey or other
predators. The psychological myth often determines the character of the persona and its relation to
historic Africa:

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 Awoonor writes from Stoneybrook, New York, as an exile;

Okigbo presents himself to Idoto as a prodigal;

Okara wanders as the lonely African between the piano and the drum.

Writing later, after a different set of political experiences, the Anglophone poets bear a complex,
ambivalent relationship to the two myths and the images derived from them. They completed their
education during the struggle for political freedom and matured as artists during the first decade of
independence, when, amid coups, wars, and scandals, glory simply failed to return to Africa. This first
generation of modern Anglophone poets developed strategies for coping with the dysfunction between
myth and experience. The bereft personae mentioned above, suspended between the past and the
future, are one example. Most importantly, the Anglophone poets develop strategies of irony that
enable them to take this dysfunction to the brink of tragedy without quite abandoning hope in Africa's
future. Thus, on the basis of their most distinguishing common trait, they can be thought of as the ironic
generation.

All seven major poets have produced a substantial body of work, and each is represented by at least one
collection. It is in their collections that one can see the common themes of these poets and hear their
unique voices. It is in the collections that one can see the members of the ironic generation bring
together in personal, individual ways the rich traditions of Anglo-American and vernacular poetry. The
result is what Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier call "a fresh exploration of language" (22).

(i)THE NON-NIGERIAN IRONIST POETS

The Gambian poet Lenrie Peters has produced four collections of poetry:

Poems (1964),

Satellites (1967),

Katchikali ( 1971), and

Selected Poetry (1981).

This last collection contains selections from his previous volumes and fifty-four new poems. In all these
he is something of a literary maverick and very much his own man, though he writes within the
mythopoeic matrix. That is, he writes with an awareness of the personal consequences of the cyclical
journey, and he focuses frequently on the dysfunction between the promise of the African past and
the experience of the present. In fact, the center of his poetry is an African present of grief, violence,
oppression, loneliness, and death.

In Satellites Peters calls this Africa "a house without a shadow / lived in by new skeletons" (31). This
dead land is the result of a "bartered birthright" (44 ). And he views it from the perspective of one
devastated by westernization:

We have come home

From bloodless wars

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With sunken hearts

Our boots full of pride From the true massacre of the soul.

Peters believes that what happened to the individual and the race is the result of a rupture, not a
transformation. In a quatrain of remarkable insight he suggests that the rupture has occurred because
change has been so sudden that a healing mythopoeic process has not had time to work.

Too strange the sudden change

Of the times we buried when we left

The times before we had properly arranged

The memories that we kept.

(39)

In the new poems of Selected Poems the primary focus is the present, depicted in the lives of individuals,
in the clash of cultures, and in the exploitation of neocolonialism. Peters is compelled to make the
simple, sad assertion: "It has been dismal / since the new freedoms came" ( 91 ). Juxtaposed against
this view of the present is an intense nostalgia expressed in pastoral images of traditional Africa. He
speaks longingly of "messages from wood fires and the warm / pungency of cooking" ( 113 ), messages
he receives in the "shanty town sinks" of modern urban Africa. One of the best of these nostalgic poems
begins with what seems to be the poet's claim to both of these worlds, but it ends with the sad failure of
separation. Speaking of men roasting nuts and girls dancing by firelight, he says:

“They know where sorrow ends, and I, the broken bridge across the estuary, across worlds, cannot reach
them”

Nostalgia is the mood that enables Peters to explore the suffering of contemporary Africa and the
disconnection between the present and the past.

Kwesi Brew. In two collections, The Shadows of Laughter ( 1968) and African Panorama ( 1981), the
Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew writes longingly of the past and hopefully of the future, but he does so
while maintaining a personal sense of a present made up of uncertainty and fear. In the earlier
collection Brew focuses on the process by which Africa was forced to encounter change and the process
that took the poet persona from the secure center of tradition to the painful realization that he had
been "crippled by a god / I do not know" ( 53 ). In the title poem, this alienation and discontinuity are
presented in lines as moving as any in West African verse.

We fear the look in the eyes of our old men

Where they sit in the corners

Of their crumbling huts

Casting tremulous looks

At the loud crashing waves.

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Section 3 of The Shadows of Laughter begins and ends with poems that incorporate either implicitly or
explicitly the entire historical myth. " The Lonely Traveller ," the often- anthologized first poem of the
section, begins with the Senghor-like oxymoron "sweet enemy" and develops through a series of
characteristically African images—the spear, the shield, the drum, the green hills of the African
savannah. Here the past is a source of strength. Then the image shifts from the martial to the musical.
"Our hands that slept on the drums / Have found their cunning" ( 33 ). The result of this quickening of
the present by the invocation of the past is the promise of the future:

Now far on the horizon

The red suns set

The tired suns set

To turn old nights into new dawns

And people the skies with black stars.

(33)

This is pure Negritude, not only the imagery and the myth but also the hopeful attitude. But neither here
nor in the second volume is Brew able to maintain the optimism. He is subdued by the broken dream of
the present.

Brew's second volume shows his creative staying power. Its greatest strength is his ability to construct
images that are sharp and detailed and mythopoeically resonant. Even the titles illustrate this ability:
"Our Hillside Home ," " Drum Song ," " Consulting a Fetish ," " Dancers ." The persona folds the historical
myth within his own psychological journey by writing of the past and the future from the vantage point
of the disordered present. It is there that the ironies gather to make the poet aware of his own
contradictory role as a modern African poet—African and Western, son and stranger:

We are the old dancers

of a new dance an old dance revived by new men,

strangers who are no strangers to our songs.

(55)

Kofi Awoonor.

Kofi Awoonor, Ghana's most important poet, has produced five overlapping volumes of poetry:
Rediscovery ( 1964), Night of My Blood ( 1971), Ride Me, Memory ( 1973), The House by the Sea ( 1978),
and Until the Morning After ( 1987). In all of them he develops his own richly textured version of the
historical myth in which a sustaining tradition is celebrated as

“The trappings of the past, tender and tenuous woven with the fiber of sisal and washed in the blood of
the goat in the fetish hut.”

For Awoonor this is the old, which must become the basis for the new. "Sew the old days for us, our
fathers / That we can wear them under our new garment" (Night of My Blood p 29).

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Awoonor is resolutely a poet of hope. Encouraging his African readers (and, indeed, all of us) with the
concept of ongoing revolution—the need for continued struggle in the present against the forces of
oppression—he promises a triumphant future based on the values and strengths of the past. " The
Wayfarer Comes Home ," the final poem in The House by the Sea, is one of the best mythopoeic poems
in all West African poetry. In it Awoonor offers this affirmation:

...” the dance has begun the drummers all in place this dreary half life is over our dream will be born at
noon.”

(77)

But this rich past and bright future are viewed from within the broken dream of a present in which the
exploitive white West and its Black bourgeois henchmen bring suffering and sorrow to Africa. The house
by the sea in his fourth collection is in fact a cell in Fort Ussher prison in Accra, from which he complains,
"I never had known that my people /

wore such sad faces" ( 41 ).

In each of the collections Awoonor infuses the historical myth with two highly personal components:
first, the record of his own cyclical journey to the West and back, and second, his sense of the special
role of the artist in building the African future out of the past. He makes many references to his own
journey and subsequent disillusionment.

“If only I had known I would have stayed at home to clear the bush.”

(Night of My Blood 49)

Beyond this, Ride Me, Memory and The House by the Sea are structured around the journey. In the
former Awoonor writes from America about his disillusioning experiences there and about an Africa to
which he returns in memory. The latter collection begins with American recollections of Africa and
concludes with poems, many of them painfully ironic, of his return to a troubled land. Still, he returns to
Africa to carry out the task of the artist as a man of action, that is, to weave Africa's future out of the
raffia of its past.

... I plait my hope into poems The sounds I make here part of the landscape of my new homeland

(62)

These themes are restated in the few new poems included in Until the Morning After, in which his
tough, idealistic hope is expressed as a promise to continue the poet's militant task "until the morning
after freedom" (206).

THE NIGERIAN IRONIST POETS

The largest number of significant poets of the ironic generation come from Nigeria, most of them
connected at one time or another with either the University of Ibadan or the University of Lagos. They
share with their fellow West Africans a preoccupation with the two dominant mythic themes, the
historical experience of the continent and the psychological experience of the individual African. All of
their work, however, was deeply affected by the Nigerian civil war. For all Nigerians the war was the
most devastating experience of the 1960s. For the Nigerian poets it became the primary symbol of the
failed present and their third great theme.

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 Gabriel Okara has produced a smaller body of poetry than any other major poet of the ironic
generation. His one collection, The Fisherman's Invocation, was published in 1978. Nevertheless, he had
been publishing verse since the 1950s and has composed poems before, during, and after the civil war.
He has written a half dozen of the finest lyrics to come out of West Africa, all of which are contained in
the collection.

In most of his prewar poetry Okara deals with the two mythic themes, the African past and the African's
journey. To depict the latter he projects an alienated persona, longing for death: "And O of this dark
halo / Were the tired head free" ( 21 ). He makes this alienated voice specifically African, the product of
the cyclical journey. In contrast to Awoonor's and Okigbo's prodigal, his is the voice of the lonely African.
In " One Night at Victoria Beach " the poet observes the ritual of the Aladuras, a syncretistic religious
sect, taking place on a stretch of beach symbolically situated between a traditional fishing village and a
string of "modern" highlife bars. He longs to join them, to connect, but instead,

“standing dead on dead sands I felt my knees touch living sands but the rushing winds killed the budding
words.

(29)

Cut off in midjourney from both traditional Africa and the West, he finds himself, in his most
famous poem, "

In Piano and Drums, Okara asserts:

lost in the labyrinth —

wandering in the mystic rhythm of jungle drums and the concerto.

(20)

From the perspective of the lonely African, Okara explores the historical relationship of the two worlds,
tradition and the West. In “The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down " he presents this relationship in surreal
but very African pastoral imagery.

I dreamed of birds, black birds flying in my inside, nesting and hatching on oil palms bearing suns for
fruits and with roots denting the uprooters, spades. And I dreamed the uprooters, tired and limp,
leaning on my roots— their abandoned roots and the oil palms gave each of them a sun.

He then points out that Africa's tragedy is that the uprooters frowned and rejected the suns which
"reached not / the brightness of gold" (3 ).

In the war poems Okara struggles with the central irony in the historical myth, the failure of
independence to ameliorate and enrich the lives of Africans. The suns are gone; instead the poet sees
"sad smoke curling skywards" (37), "bodies stacked in the morgue," and "children playing at diving jets"
( 31 ). The postwar poems suggest that a great spiritual fatigue has been added to the poet's sense of
alienation. He speaks of "tired songs" and complains: "I am tried, tired. / My trembly feet drag" (56).
Since then Okara has fallen silent in his loneliness.

-113-

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 J. P. Clark Bekederemo has published five volumes of poetry: Poems (1962). A Reed in the Tide (1965),
Casualties ( 1970), A Decade of Tongues ( 1979), and State of the Union ( 1985). A Reed in the Tide
incorporates and rearranges the poems from the first collection. A Decade of Tongues incorporates
poems from the first three collections with very little new material. State of the Union comprises new,
highly political poems composed between 1975 and 1980.

Pepper Clark is very much a man of his time and place and, in his early verse, very much a poet of the
two great mythic themes. He weaves those themes together in the long early poem " Ivbie ," in which he
speaks of traditional Africa's "treasures so many and beautiful" ( Poems 45). And he attempts to speak
for those "that cry out of a violated past" but fails because, as a result of the westernization to which he
has been subjected, he finds that he is only the Niger's "bastard child" (Poems 51).

A Reed in the Tide is designed to reflect the first half of the cyclical journey. The poems are arranged to
reflect the persona's movement from childhood to adulthood and from the banks of the Niger to Times
Square. All through this journey the imagery of the individual poems is derived from the historical myth.
In the best poems Africa is symbolized by images of women: maternal images of a grandmother's
protective hug and a mother securing her home against the rain and erotic images of dancers and
bathers both emanating from and integrated with nature. In " Agbor Dancer " he says of the dancing girl:

In trance she treads the intricate Pattern rippling crest after crest To meet the green clouds of the forest.

(7)

Africa contrasts with the West, to which he journeys only to find that "spirits / sink with sirens" ( 34 )
and "all [is] sterile and faceless" ( 35 ).

Casualties and State of the Union are poetic reflections on the civil war and life in postwar Nigeria. Both
reflect contemporary Nigeria as a betrayal of the past—a bitterly ironic conclusion to the historical
process and to the promise of independence. Casualties, a controversial book, is a poetic record of the
war and the poet's involvement in it. It concludes with the following lines:

A song was begun one night,

The song should have begun A festival of three hundred tribes,

Instead it lit for cantor

And chorus a funeral pile.

(40)

Burning on that pile was a nation—its myths, its men, its past, and its culture. Along with several
miscellaneous poems, State of the Union consists of twenty-five poetic comments on life in postwar
Nigeria. The first line of the first poem reads "Here nothing works" (3). The last poem begins "It never
was a union" (30). Everything in between is a variation or a particularization of the vision of
contemporary Nigeria implicit in those two statements.

Wole Soyinka, best known as a dramatist, is also a significant poet. His four main poetry publications
are Idanre and Other Poems ( 1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt ( 1972), Ogun Abibiman ( 1976), and
Mandela's Earth and Other Poems ( 1988). All these works reflect Soyinka's awareness of the
mythopoeic power of art and the social significance of myth. In Myth, Literature, and the African World,

13
a collection of essays and lectures, Soyinka speaks of "one of the social functions of literature: the
visionary reconstruction of the past for purposes of social direction" (196). His poetic works are, or
contain, visionary reconstructions of the past, present, and future.

Soyinka has always insisted on the appropriateness of Yoruba mythology and metaphysics as
instruments for the interpretation of modern life. He finds this appropriateness especially in the irony
with which the Yoruba mind contemplates the relation of violence to creativity, war to peace, and life to
death. In Idanre and Other Poems these ironies are reflected in a number of fine lyrics and especially in
the title poem, " Idanre ," in which they are all personalized in Ogun, the Yoruba god of creation and
war, life and death, "the shield of orphans who is also the orphan-maker." As a cautionary tale, "Idanre"
contains the same wry warning that is found in Soyinka's play A Dance of the Forests . The poem tells of
Ogun's "reluctant kingship," assumed only at the insistence of the people, and of his battle slaughter—
how, after leading his people to victory, he turned and slaughtered them:

“their cry For partial succor brought a total hand That smothered life in crimson plains With too much
answering.”

(78)

On the brink of civil war, Soyinka reminds his people that the blood of mankind is on the hands of men
for having made Ogun king.

The second collection, A Shuttle in the Crypt, comprises poems written in prison during the civil war. It
constitutes a harrowing personal record of the consequences of having made Ogun king. The central
experience in the collection is the poet's coming to terms with the hanging of five prisoners, and the
image that haunts the volume is the image of the dead dangling men. "Their hands are closed on
emptiness" (43). It ends on a personal note close to despair. In the last poem the poet suggests to the
shade of Christopher Okigbo that it might be better to be killed than to survive—to die like Christ than to
endure like Prometheus.

This is the point where the tragic ironist must fall silent or turn to new visions. In his next published
major poem, Ogun Abibiman, Soyinka turns to the concept of ongoing revolution by recasting Ogun as a
"revolutionary archetype" who "appears to be a definitive symbol of Africa's immediate destiny" (jacket
note). In the poem Ogun meets Shaka, and of that meeting of north and south, myth and history,
Abibiman, the triumphant black nation, is born. The future stands clear on the horizon, and "the clans
are massed from hill to hill / Where Ogun stood" (22).

Mandela's Earth is more ironic and less militant than Ogun Abibiman. It focuses on the South Africa of
Soweto and the Mandelas and on the New York of befouled subways and "packaged" news. Its
prevailing tone is controlled rage—rage at Africa's failure to rise to the challenge of Mandela's courage
and vision and at the rest of the world's indifference to it, as symbolized by a New York television
anchorman's "Mind calloused to universal loss" ( 43 ).

Christopher Okigbo. In 1967, at the age of thirty-five, Christopher Okigbo was killed while serving in the
Biafran army. He left behind a group of "organically related" poems that were published together in
1971 under the title Labyrinths, arguably the most important single volume of poetry to emerge from
Anglophone Africa. Certainly it is the most difficult and complex. The early sections are very much in the
Euromodernist tradition of Eliot; the later sections are increasingly enriched by the incorporation of
elements from traditional oral literature. Okigbo said the poems constitute "a fable of man's perennial
quest for fulfillment" (xiv). That quest is depicted in the African context of the cyclical journey.

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"Heavensgate," the first section of Labyrinths, begins with the persona, having returned bereft from his
journey, invoking the spirit of an African river and river goddess—the African muse:

“Before you, mother Idoto, naked I stand before your watery presence a prodigal.”

(3)

Having invoked the muse, the poet depicts a series of departures and returns by a lonely, abandoned
African who is himself "sole witness to my homecoming" (53 ).

Through this cycle of cyclical journeys key images emerge from the historical myth. Traditional Africa
and Africanness are personified as Idoto and the lioness and also depicted in images of river and grove.
In contrast, the Africa to which the persona returns is violated and abandoned. Okigbo compresses the
whole history of colonialism

into a quatrain:

A fleet of eagles over the oilbean shadows

-116-

Holds the square under curse with their breath.

(31)

But the prodigal African also bears a burden of guilt because he has abandoned his traditions. "Our gods
lie unsung … Behind the shrinehouse" (34).

The cruelest irony on which the collection insists is that the prodigal returns not to a living tradition but
to this violated and abandoned land about to self-destruct. The last section of the volume, " Path of
Thunder ," is subtitled " Poems Prophesying War ." Here, as in Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt and
Clark's Casualties, the Nigerian civil war constitutes the failure of myth. Independence brings not glory
but self-destruction.

The smell of blood already floats in the lavender mist of the afternoon. The death sentence lies in
ambush along the corridors of power. And a fearful great thing already tugs at the cables of the open air.

(66)

The result is, seemingly, the death of myth and of hope:

The glimpse of a dream lies smouldering in a cave together with the mortally wounded birds.

And the Ibo poet's only consolation is the Yoruba ontology of cyclical change, the "going and coming
that goes on forever" (72).

OTHER IRONIST POETS

To these major voices of the ironic generation it is possible to add the voices of other talented West
African poets. Included among these are A. W. Kayper Mensah of Ghana and Michael Echeruo of Nigeria.
An important early collection is Songs from the Wilderness by Frank Kobina Parkes. Parkes, who
complains in one poem that "the hour of hope is long, long lost" (9), is among the earliest to lament the

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failed dream of independence. The Cameroonian Mbella Dipoko records the disillusionment and
alienation of the cyclical journey in Black and White in Love (1972). Several members of the generation
better known in genres other than verse have published important collections. Chinua Achebe published
Beware, Soul Brother in 1971. In 1973 he added seven new poems to the collection, then retitled
Christmas in Biafra. Along with searing images of war's cruelty, Achebe's collections communicate the
fear that the modern African may "become / a dancer disinherited in mid-dance" (47). In Locusts ( 1976)
the scholar and critic Emmanuel Obiechina expresses the same fear in a parallel image: "Musician, you
lost your song. / Your tune is a dry echo" (32).

THE DISILLUSIONED GENERATION

A second generation of Anglophone West African poets has established itself in the late 1970s and
1980s. Like their predecessors, these poets, who were born in the 1940s, come from different countries
and draw on different indigenous traditions as well as different aspects of the Euromodernist tradition.
The result is a poetry of great range and diversity, yet united by theme and mood. Having experienced
their own cyclical journey and acquired a strong sense of disillusionment, the younger poets continue
variations on the theme of African history, in which the present is seen as a betrayal of the past and of
the political leaders and intellectuals of the previous generations.

Although this disillusionment is more pronounced in some poets' work than in others, the mood and
subject are pervasive. Themes of disillusionment can be found in Ghanaians as different as Atukwei Okai
( Lorgorigi Logarithms and Other Poems, 1974) and Kobina Eyi Acquah ( The Man Who Died , 1984) and
in Nigerians like Ken Saro-Wiwa ( Songs in a Time of War, 1985), Tanure Ojaide ( The Blood of Peace,
1991), and Niyi Osundare. Osundare 's The Eye of the Earth ( 1986) is an effective fusion of nostalgic
pastoralism and revolutionary vision. Together with his earlier collections, it establishes him as a poet of
major importance. But perhaps the three most significant poets of the generation are Syl Cheney-Coker
of Sierra Leone ( The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, 1980), Odia Ofeimun of Nigeria ( The Poet Lied, 1980),
and Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana ( A Harvest of Our Dreams, 1984, and Earthchild, 1985).

Syl Cheney-Coker

At his best, Syl Cheney-Coker is a strong, angry poet. He is also conscious of influences, among which he
includes the social vision of radical Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda and the surrealist techniques
of Tchicaya U Tam'si. These influences suggest a closer affinity to Francophone African poets than we
find in other West African Anglophones—an affinity seen in the surreal imagery and in the declamatory
rhetoric and invective of which he is fond. More important, however, is the moral dimension of Cheney-
Coker's work, expressed over and over again in judgmental terms—rages against past and present
betrayals of the cause of Africa and the cause of man. There is little variety of mood in his poetry, which
is shrill with anger and sorrow. What redeems it is its confessional intensity.

The confessional quality is presented in terms of the myth of the cyclical journey. The title of Cheney-
Coker's slim early collection, later incorporated into The Graveyard Also Has Teeth (1980), is Concerto
for an Exile. His exile is similar to Awoonor's, but he adds his own Krio dimension to it. His alienation is
not just geographical or cultural but genetic, carried in his "tainted" Creole ancestry, which he calls "the
plantation blood in my veins / my foul genealogy" (7). The only way he can end his exile is to "return" to
Africa as a poetic man of action, a poet of revolution. "I write the brushfire that spreads," he promises
(61). This revolutionary poetry emanates from the historical myth. Cheney-Coker depicts a Sierra Leone
of rich tradition violated by the Creole taint. His most focused rage, however, is directed at that

16
tradition's betrayal by the contemporary black bourgeoisie: “my poetry assumes its murderous intensity
because while remaining quiet I have observed the politicians parcelling out pieces of my country.”

(65)

Odia Ofeimun.

Odia Ofeimun has been West Africa's angry young man. He is also the poet as a man of action,
translating his anger into poetic indictments and promises of revolutionary triumph. He insists on the
political significance of the poet's craft. "At the moment I can't think of putting anything down on paper
unless I want to influence some situation" (Osofisan et al., 9). Poetry's social utility is the basis of
Ofeimun's evaluation of the poets of the ironic generation. He praises Achebe, Okigbo, and Soyinka for
their conduct and their vision of the African past and future while he excoriates Clark for his
ambivalence during the civil war and his failure to provide vision.

The Poet Lied is a collection of forty-one poems in four sections: "The New Brooms," " Where Bullets
Have Spoken ," " Resolve ," and " The Neophytes ." These titles reflect a thematic organization. The first
section deals with post—civil war life and leadership, the second with the war and its consequences. His
disillusionment and sense of betrayal can be seen in the following lines:

the magic promises of yesterday lie cold like mounds of dead cattle along caravans that
lead nowhere.”

(4).

Three persistent themes run through all four sections: the exploitive corruption of the elite, the
sordidness of contemporary Nigerian life, and the role of the poet in African society. In sections 3 and 4
he carries out the poet's role by projecting a bright future that might result from his own generation's
revolutionary action. He alternates between hopelessness and hope. In one place he confesses the need
"to scream / on paper" (3). But he concludes by offering hope for the future if the integrity of the myth
and the future of the continent are in the hands of the resolute of his generation, who are determined
"that the locust shall never again visit our farmsteads" (42).

Kofi Anyidoho

Kofi Anyidoho, perhaps the best poet of the disillusioned generation, is the author of three collections:
Elegy for the Revolution (1978), 119, A Harvest of Our Dreams (1984), and Earthchild (1985). The best of
what this good poet has done can be found in A Harvest of Our Dreams, a collection filled with echoes.
His use of Ewe forms suggests Awoonor. The controlling images of seedtime and harvest remind one of
Soyinka's Idanre, while other images—heaven's gate, the sun bird— suggest Okigbo. But he is not a
deliberately derivative poet. He speaks in his own voice, but where the ironic generation learned from
their encounter with Euromodernism, Anyidoho and his contemporaries have learned by reading the
ironists.

A Harvest of Our Dreams is divided into six sections, some of which contain very personal poems, others
of which contain the poet's reflections on America. But the two most important sections are the first
and the last, "Seedtime" and "Elegy for the Revolution," the latter a reprinting of the first collection. The
poems in the other sections exist in a parenthesis of mood controlled by these two sections.

The title of the first section seems hopeful in its own pastoral way, but it is ironic rather than hopeful.
The irony derives from the vantage point from which the persona contemplates the hopes of seedtime

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—the failed harvest, the ruined present. Everywhere are images of despair—references to "discarded
myths," "sickness of soul," "famished dreams," "exiled gods." In every poem in the section are lines that
speak of the poet's sorrow and the country's desolation: "Our hive went up in flames"; "Harvests go
ungathered in our time" (6).

"Elegy for the Revolution" suggests the mood and tone of the collections of nearly all the poets of the
post-Independence generation. The dedication of the section is "to the memory of / The revolution that
went astray" (57). In it the dreams are "unhatched," "corpses lying strangled" in "smouldering
wastelands." The collection ends with pastoral images made tragically ironic: images of the calabash, the
gourd, the iron pot, in all of which "there was a void." Faced with this void, the poet is forced into
grotesque art. "Mine is the dance of the hunchback," he says (83), and then a generation's cri de coeur:
"My mind fails / my heart dies" (85).

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