Youth, Poetry and the Nigerian Traumatic

Poets

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Ref: Poet, Ude Ugo Anna / INSTAGRAM.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / POETRY DEPT.

Youth, Poetry and the Nigerian Traumatic

In a nation like Nigeria that is not so far removed from constant distress and anguish, it is only reasonable that literature, especially from young writers, serves as the analytical medium of these experiences.
Poets

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Ref: Poet, Ude Ugo Anna / INSTAGRAM.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / POETRY DEPT.

Youth, Poetry and the Nigerian Traumatic

In a nation like Nigeria that is not so far removed from constant distress and anguish, it is only reasonable that literature, especially from young writers, serves as the analytical medium of these experiences.

The past generations of Nigerian poets expended colonialism, neocolonialism, exile, racism, and political corruption as some of the thematic preoccupations of their work. However, if the purpose of poetry is the emotional and rational understanding of the human condition, as the American critic, Yvor Winters, insists in Forms of Discovery, then our younger Nigerian poets’ concentration on trauma (both national and individual), our history of violence, and to some extent, spirituality, is simply inevitable.  

While many of the past literary preoccupations are still present in our current work, they are no longer as central to our recent literary concerns as trauma, spirituality, and criticism of our social and political conventions. Even though the latter themes receive condensed attention from our new poets, sometimes to the point of impulsive proliferation (much like the former themes in the hands of older poets), it is also true that the significance of the individual is often overshadowed by the collective experience. Hence, in select poems by younger Nigerian poets, these issues examining the Nigerian traumatic experiences find proper identification as well as representation through fresh perception. 

WHAT DISTANCE BETWEEN THE BULLET AND THE BODY?

Trauma is a universal reality. Since literature is, to a considerable extent, a representation of the real, the traumatic is what the poet feels for his world to write of both its blissful and bleak intensities. This dated notion of fashioning lived experience to literary introspection is precisely what has fascinated, and continues to fascinate, our poets, both young and old, inspiring their strong artistic enthusiasm. In a nation like Nigeria that is not so far removed from constant distress and anguish, it is only reasonable that our literature serves as the analytical medium and appropriation of these experiences. In poetry, however, those experiences—when we recollect them, strung with fine language and parallel figurations—become a deeper and stricter way of rehearsing the past, rising to the level of the transcendental sublime that provokes not only reasoned contemplation on that past but also affects our measured approach to the present while also preparing us for the future. 

Having become acquainted with the world at its most distressed and strained, the Nigerian poet, active in and perceptive to the Nigerian conditions through the proportionate lens of our society and its politics, our religions and their shortcomings, becomes the best to articulate, for instance, the irresponsible means of our political leaders which consequently leads to unencouraging ends for us—ends that are far removed from the human ideal. It is no doubt that our poets represent these stark conditions with unrivalled intensity as any primary witness of capable literary integrity should. 

During and immediately after the end of the #EndSARS—the series of mass protests against police brutality in Nigeria in 2020—our younger poets acquired a new sensibility, especially in their recounting of those devastating occurrences during the protests. Bullet or its sound equivalent immediately became the ultimate trope for modalities of the political irresponsibility and unaccountability that lead to the violent conditions to which the national protests served as consequence—systemic injustice against Nigerian citizens as well as nationwide insecurity. 

As a result of the singular fault of condoning incompetence, these dangers are entrenched in our society, everyone except the government agreed, by the maladroit supervision of those the Nigerian poet, Gbemisola Adeoti, compares with the land of terrible tolerance in his poem ‘Ambush’, accommodating, ‘a giant hawk / that courts unceasing disaster / as it hovers and hoots in space.’ This summation is not to say that the new trope of bullet that our poets now employ represents only our physical insecurity. Rather, it also allegorizes every aspect of our living conditions moved by bleak experiences to distrust anything with a label of, or resembling, security. Just as our body—or being, so to speak—is insecure from the selfish ambitions of our leaders, so also are our intellect, freedom and lives from their terrible secrets as well as their public scheming propagated as policies of progression. 

shop the republic

shop the republic

In his 2022 poem, ‘Demystifying the Science Behind Boys in My Country Evaporating into Mist at Every Shutter Click’, Abdulkareem Abdulkareem’s affirmative, disinterested voice is not so much dishevelled by the condition of insecurity it reifies any more than Samuel A. Adeyemi’s mien in his 2020 poem called ‘Requiem for a Democracysuffers the pang of inarticulation as he performs the solemn chant for our system of government too battered by corruption to inspire hope or public interest in politics. Characteristically, Adeyemi begins with a gentle, sardonic tone: 

The distance between the bullet & the body
is a protest poem; I too am just a metaphor
away from filling a grave, I will bless today
if it closes outside a coffin. 

Abdulkareem, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion calling attention to its own baritone of cynicism justified by the imminent recurrence of violence as the last line of Adeyemi’s also implies that, ‘there is no mystery here, every language / spoken by the gun is a disaster.’ In both poets’ performances of our unencouraging condition, present as well as inevitable as their copulas, is the awareness of the broader effect of insecurity on our national health.  

Adeyemi’s poem is the first of the four poems published by the American journal, Pallette Poetry, in their section titled Voices for Change, all in response to the #EndSARS movement, a series of protests that left many Nigerians dead and many more devastatingly injured. The protests ended but, ‘every shutter click [still]… sound like a gunshot,’ Abdulkareem writes in his poem which is neither a ‘demystification’ of the violent situation nor the violent ‘evaporating’ he refers to in his title a science per se. Rather, the poems and their corresponding figurations are the result of political irresponsibility, injustice and cruelty to which our leaders have exhaustively subscribed. In poems such as these, flooded with our experience, one can see that the poets understand that literary integrity is next only to action as the perfect response to the injustice we are all living. So, Adeyemi’s vision of possible relief, far-fetched in the current clime no doubt, is only derisive and ironic until our view of our political helplessness is transposed and transfigured to be personal as well as individual responsibility. 

Abdulbaseet Yusuff’s 2020 poem,Too Much Wahala in This Country, one of the most powerful poems on the traumatic dimension of being a Nigerian in Nigeria, follows the documentation of the Nigerian ideals of random and sanctioned violence as a counter-response to political criticism and exercise of our human rights. The anaphoric ‘Wahala’ (meaning trouble) in the poem is reiterated to such effect, emphasizing unrest so strongly that it seems to leap off the page, convincing the reader of its imminent presence. For a Nigerian to whom the experiences described in the poem are primary, it is reasonable to feel the pressure of the possibility of reliving the trauma at a close, iterating contact with the word and its practical ramifications. But apart from the structural ambition of the poem—from the anaphora to its paradoxical ‘if-conjectures’—the beginning of the poem is a significant contribution to the poetic tradition of the younger poets in electing ‘the bullet’ as the ultimate metaphor for the average Nigerian resident’s fearful relation to security. Or, in this particular and commonplace case, insecurity: 

Wahala if you are a bystander, watching
the protest from afar; hands tucked in pockets
Wahala if a stray bullet finds a home in
your bones, or your liver 

The poem begins and ends convinced of the ubiquity of ‘wahala’ in Nigeria, which is not a hyperbolic stance to the situations that we have come to accept as normal. Also, this is not a singular stance because the rhetorical question posed at the beginning of Adeyemi’s 2021 award-winning poemPortrait of Water—‘What is left of a country if it keeps rescinding / into its shadow?’—is rather compendiously answered by Abdulbaseet’s psychologically affecting repetition: ‘Wahala,’ a trouble that exponentiates as its constancy in the poem multiplies in the mind. 

Meanwhile, the conversation continues in Njoku Nonso’s 2022 autobiographically intense, if somewhat philosophical, poem,Pray the Elegy, in which diurnal and dystopic brutalities converge in the image of a bullet: ‘Mid-afternoon housetop / views of a new world nesting outside the wicked / mouth of a homeless bullet.’ However, figurative affinity is not the only percept of the poem to the broader conversations of the other poems: it also accentuates the pessimistic and chaotic dialogue between Adeyemi’s beginning in ‘Portrait of Water’ and Yusuf’s terrifyingly grim answer. At the end of his poem, Nonso’s affirmation of the previous poems’ conviction is articulated in the form of a rhetorical question redolent of absurdism, giving an allusive nod to Aracelis Girmay’s existential curiosity in the beginning of ‘Elegy’—‘What to do with this knowledge / that our living is not guaranteed?’—as well as loaning the structural finesse of the apostrophic ending to W. B. Yeats’ infamous poem,Among School Children. The existential question, if here as it is in Girmay’s poem a rhetorical question, is just as Nigerian as it is universal:  

O borderless mirror O eyelids
snapped shut against this blade of tattered glass, 
of what use is living if we are all moving graveyards? 

But if trauma is the proven presence of, ‘emotional wounds, traces left on the mind by catastrophic, painful events’, as the scholars and editors Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja’s definition has it in their anthology, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, then Nigeria is the foremost candidate as the leading capital of the nation-states of, ‘tragic events and severe distress,’ as a commonplace reality. It is not only the result of our national politics that seems to be the lasting damage on our collective psyche to record these bleak events in all sincerity through our imaginative media, but also personal and subcultural conditions like domestic violence, sexuality and discrimination in all its particular strata. 

shop the republic

shop the republic

BETWEEN WINE AND BLOOD

Religion, being one of our socially fundamental human conditions, Adeyemi’s 2021 poem, Applying Psalms 121 to a Gentile, treats his subject with the same verve with which high literature is performed. At the first, second and third reading of a poem that should be an anthem for the spiritually progressive yet filially responsible, meagre as they might be in our nation, one not only becomes acquainted with the hyper-reality of the effect of religion on the psychology of our younger generation that feels differently about its strictures, its beliefs. One also feels the poem demonstrates Adeyemi’s fine moral integrity, that is, courting familial consideration in place of self-satisfaction: ‘How do I say I am a church bell / swaying without its tongue? Her heart— / a holy book my chaos must not set on fire.’ 

Battered and betrayed, by divinity and biological acquaintance, the speaker transcends the burden of painful memory as filial duty escapes the self, the ego. In another poem by Adeyemi, the frustration versified in ‘Applying Psalms 121’ is given a reason, an origin too perhaps, in his 2021 poem, ‘Epiphany’, a poem with which Samuel A. Betiku’s 2022 poem of the same title engages in an interestingly polar conversation.  

A gradual swerving away from the Christian faith, Adeyemi’s persona feels it appropriate to name his reasons—spearheaded by the divine willing disregard of man in His transcendental existence—as the speaker empathizes with a hint of judgement and without any shift of blame whatsoever that is undeserved (emphasis is mine): 

I pray to the glass, let it transcribe me into the boy
I desire by morning. & of course, it does not hear.
All my gods wear their deafness as idiosyncrasy.
& I am the same songless bird, partitioned from
miracle. But at least, I’m pragmatic with this tiny
jar of hope. 

Bold and delivered with a sober tone, the poem echoes Cynthia Cruz’s conviction in one of the many eponymous poems in her book called Guidebooks for the Dead in which the historical doubt in our need for a god, despite its believed yet strained existence, rises to the level of total mistrust:  

Somewhere there is a god,
I swear. 

Someone must be in charge.
What is the word, again, 

In Spanish
For useless

In Adeyemi’s poetic eloquence, as in Cruz’s, the divine is as ever-present as any godhead is theologically claimed to be, but practically absentminded which validates both poets’ noted conviction of its passivity. However, Betiku’s ‘Epiphany’ does not treat the divine with the casual hostility and outright judgement with which its two precursors do. Rather, his poem alludes, from its beginning to Christ’s plight in his walk to Golgotha through many rhetorics, all to show his faith and give weight to his Christian sentiment: 

What does it mean to hold sorrow like hammered nails?
What does it mean to carry the grave as a hammering chest?
I see your heart split into blue and gray by the embrace of thorns, 

watch your face fold into a grimace as you watch this cross
-road, this moment when you choose between wine and blood. 

What is most interesting about the conversation between these two poems is the realization that the one-sided dialogue of Betiku’s poem, which is the persona’s way of demonstrating his unquestioned Christian faith, seems to be the qualification of Adeyemi’s critique of ‘all my gods’ in his ownEpiphany’. This is all the more accentuated by Betiku’s paradoxical imaginary physical engagement with Jesus Christ at the end of his poem (all emphases mine): 

And I picture you. . .
.
.
.
. . . I look at you and the weightlessness of my sighs,
your hands on mine weighing in again for the umpteenth time. 

The thematic estrangement, however, between the poems is in each poet’s definition of or conviction about what epiphany, either as a secular or theological phenomenon, means. For Adeyemi, it is figurative, with its interpretive undertone that implies self-realization or secular realization, which is also a rather adept criticism of the one-sided, pragmatically unrequited relationship of man to God. Betiku’s definition, on the other hand, has its origin in orthodox Christianity to mean revelation but, specifically to the poet’s narration, through secular activities like empathy and imagination. Also, the latter’s comprehension of epiphany is of transformation from not being to being in the particular sense of the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after his crucifixion. 

For Betiku, a believer in the Christian faith and the centrality of Jesus Christ to the salvation of man, the silence and the imaginary tactile gestures are mere though significant suggestions of the spiritual sanctity between the divine and man. Indeed, Betiku’s personalized language along with its romantic properties attempt to revise Adeyemi’s reactionary yet confident tone of self-belief and epiphanic self-integration. While Betiku’s ‘Epiphany’ does not supplant Adeyemi’s poem as the verse par excellence of spiritual conviction and authority, the poem succeeds in providing the other side of the argument Adeyemi sets out to articulate in both his ‘Epiphany’ and ‘Applying Psalm 121’. Whereas Adeyemi writes of religious disappointment and tolerance, Betiku writes with great enthusiasm about the advantage of believing in something transcendent. And through the poetic articulation of these ideological differences, we see the magnificent body of the younger generation of Nigerian imagination in its full, elegant stride.

shop the republic

shop the republic

ROSES, PAGES, AND TEA

Even though we suffer from the literary overpopulation of the traumatic in our new poetry, we are sometimes capable of less stark ruminations—even if they are also reactions to the traumatic. Of those poems of lighter ruminations is Ude Ugo Anna’s 2020 minimalist, epigrammatic Yelga. Published before the renewed outbursts for pro-choice movements around the world which began in 2022 but around the same time the world was inventing new belief systems during COVID-19 regarding social interaction, spirituality, politics as well as everything else essential to the survival of the human and sustenance of our civilization through the pandemic, Anna’s poem could not be more temporally perfect. The poem, grandmotherly in tone, smooth in lineation, and generally memorable, sounds a reasonable voice against what is conservatively believed to be the feminine essence despite the possibility of personal choice, despite private circumstances. Anna declares in the entirety of the poem that, 

Not all wombs are foetus-shaped.
Oyinma,
bury your chisel and stop carving.
If what you have is ‘irregular,’
fill it with roses, pages and tea.
Wombs are wombs for everything
and anything. 

A temperate protest against social and cultural convention, the poem is seductive and provocative of radical interpretations. On one hand, its declarations resonate with the same verve of conviction of the fiercest pro-choice activists: ‘Oyinma, / bury your chisel and stop carving. / . . . Wombs are wombs for everything / and anything.’ On the other hand, however, there is an undeniable undertone of accepting choicelessness, born of perhaps serious medical circumstance, resounding through the lines: ‘If what you have is “irregular,” / fill it with roses, pages and tea.’ Here, minimalism once again proves fashionable through which the poem’s simple vision is not a ground for either artistic or rational weakness, but the main reason why its lyrical narration is losslessly profound.  

But if Anna’s poem is thoroughly assertive and universal in its encouragement of feminine possibilities, then Ernest O. Ògúnymí’s 2022 poem ‘Gee’—dedicated to me as well as you, living in this country—all but guarantees that there is a triumph of sort (if not a triumph of accomplishment, then of survival) through the overbearing trauma which our beloved country continues, in all its pronounced grace, to perpetuate: 

I swear I swear I swear
one day, brother, our lives, these tiny 

birds, carrying in the safe of their
bellies creeks, will mean something
—something—
o, anything. 

This is all the while hoping that a day of triumph is fast approaching for all of us. As always in Ògúnymí’s poetry, there is an interminable reconciliation between the invariant experiences an accursed man and his seemingly meaningless tendency for creativity, for beauty. If death is the great leveller, the end giant and final, and suffering of every kind an inevitable constant, more so in Nigeria than anywhere else, then for Ògúnymí, writing poetry, whose language is a separate, more specified and refined one from that of everyday communication, is one of the major ways of attending continuous disappointment on the inevitable we are living here. Making art becomes a way of raging against the darkness of the Nigerian night and dawn, as one poet famously sings: 

—o, brother, I swear 

I will dance with you in a better
country, where the mangoes are 

ripe before they are eaten, where
we can make music without having 

to bleed into a bucket to paint
the language of our dreams, 

Here, Ògúnymí positions art as a central force not only in resisting Nigerian traumatic realities but also in overcoming and transcending them, as each poem considered here invariably implies. Hence, through these varied poetic voices—from Adeyemi’s constant questioning of the divine to Yusuff’s anaphoric intensity, from Anna’s quiet resistance to Ògúnyẹmí’s overdetermined optimism—we hear the sound of a new Nigerian poetic consciousness, which is quite nimble to the expression of the situation of the time. These younger poets have fashioned fresh linguistic and metaphoric implements to explicate our collective trauma: the bullet becomes more than just a projectile but a metaphor for systemic, institutional violence; religious doubt is transformed into a lens for examining our human oppositionality; and personal pain opens windows into national wound. While trauma may be our patrimony, their works signify, poetry serves not merely as documentation but as a vital act of resistance and a radical way of reimagining our reality. In their hands, the Nigerian traumatic experience is neither simply endured nor merely recorded—it is transformed through artistic vision into a triadic complex of survival, critique, and possibility. Each of these poets proves that even in a land where ‘wahala’ threatens to become the national anthem, the poetic voice remains undiminished by serving as both witness and warning, as well as lamentation and hope⎈

BUY THE MAGAZINE AND/OR THE COVER