Unearthing truth in dialogue and other verses

Alluring Noon is a collection of 32 poems. This is the first fruit in versification from Yemi Atanda, a theatre scholar, critic and playwright. Atanda is the author of The Vomit, a play(2017) and A Cord in Time, a play (2021). In contemporary Nigerian writing, the poetic genre seems to have the greatest subscription. While some published collections have attracted significant attention, many have come out and dried out like a drop of water on a red hot and thirsty iron. Unlike the latter, however, Alluring Noon is a product of conscious efforts in poetry, supported with aesthetic elements that produce lasting thematic appeal and enduring literary values. The poems address a wide array of subjects steeped in human experience of living in the contemporary world, especially Africa, with beguiling tales of conquest and domination, of social injustice and emancipation struggle. The poet captures the experience of the continent in several striking tropes that register the paradox of lack amidst plenty, a situation that sees the people thirst for water in the middle of the river as they cry for sand in the Kalahari dessert.  He places the reason for this sordid/absurd reality squarely at the door step of the governing elite in different countries of Africa who supplanted the colonialists in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, the postcolonial Nigeria is seen as an “Abiku” nation with ever vanishing dreams of living a fulfilled life.

Though the issues of politics, governance and development dominate the collection, Atanda is quite mindful of the role of the socially consciously artist who teaches, entertains   and writes to right the wrong of ends of politics and social interactions. Apart from political themes, some of the poems are inspired by his experience of people, places and events. Poetry as a tranquilizer of burning emotion also comes to the fore in “Song of Love” that concludes the collection.  Poetry is experienced here as a dramatic sensation rendered with the inner eye of the poet for histrionics, mimesis and emotional calibration. The reader experiences closely the affinity between poetry, music, narrative and painting. Images are graphically generated and rendered in a vivid manner that strips them of ambiguity and guided supposition. Atanda reaches out to the inner recesses of the poet personae through whom he projects the artist’s subconscious while still maintaining a reasonable measure of artistic distance from the subject.

One element that holds and sustains the reader’s attention in the collection is that the poems are freely arranged in a way that permits unobtrusive undulation of emotions and diffusion of anxiety.  In his bid to link the past with the present, the poet resorts to allusions broadly drawn from the Bible, history, mythology and literary texts, from the canonical to the unsung and not-so-well-known. There is a frequent recourse to the Yoruba pantheon to buttress observations about modern life and comment on pressing events and actions. He deploys imagery, symbolism, pun and sarcasm in poems that are satiric in orientation drawing the butts from recognisable personalities in contemporary Nigerian politics.

In the context of Nigerian politics, electioneering and leadership recruitment are cynically ruled by commerce. Democracy is an exercise is buying and selling of polls. Some dignify the perversion of democratic ideals as “stomach infrastructure”. Some less discerning call it “vote and cook”. Unfortunately in this political business of “vote and cook”, the crook oftentimes gets an easy passage to the throne because he is the highest bidder, even though, he is widely known to be an “article of no integrity value”. Charlatans, impostors and pretenders masquerade on the political landscape as messiahs, but they do not escape the eagle eye of the poet as Atanda does not spare them his acerbic vitriol. This much is evident in “The Monkey’s Game”, Market Talks”, “Crises”, “Sackcloth”, “Third Term Agenda”, “June 12”, “Requiem for Democracy” and “Our Born Jester”. In these poems, the rulers are presented, in the words of Henric Ibsen, as “enemies of the people”. They seek power at all cost and pervert the electoral process in order to perpetuate themselves in power. As rightly couched in “The Monkey’s Game”, politics is an unceasing exercise in exploitation from season to season. Some privileged individuals monopolise the resources of the state, leaving the vast majority stranded in misery.

Nonetheless, rather than limiting the verdict of “guilty” to the ruling elites, the poet contends that ordinary people are quite culpable as they provide the enabling environment for their own swindling. The electorates sell their right and vote for money. Vote buying is, therefore, an age old phenomenon in the politics of this clime and time. The electorate is described in “Crises” as “a conman” who is as deceitful as the “tongue-twisted politician”.

In this Beckettian “endgame”, religion is also pressed into service as a mechanism to deaden sensibility and rationality for smooth-flowing political and economic exploitation. Gullibility provides a fertile ground for deprivation by deceit. Ordinarily, religious syncretism is a practical reality of the postcolonial African thought system. It is seen as a means of navigating multi-culturalism. But in the hands of fake clerics and pretenders to piety, who turn holy places into business centres, it expresses the increasing desperation for the soul of the ordinary people, whose thoughts they control to sustain the exploitative status quo of social inequality. “Cannibalism”, “Shared responsibility” “Spider” and “Thunderbolt” are instructive poems on this subject.

Some poems stem from the poet’s observations about life while giving accent to Yoruba cosmology. They include – “A journey to Erebus”, “Ori”, “Alluring Noon”, Carnage on the Road”, Abiku” and “Obalufon”. Atanda finds inspiration in Greek mythology in “A Journey to Erebus”. Erebus is the god of darkness who dwells in the underworld. He is the son of chaos and Father of Aether and Day. The poem expresses the poet persona’s experience of life in its plain and complex dimensions. It describes a journey to the land of darkness, burdened by the vicissitude of life. The poet persona experiences the rhythm of life, alternating between pain and joy, between rise and fall, as symbolised by night and day with tiny apertures for hope. The concept of freewill and determinism associated with fatalism echoes in the fate of the persona. Ori, Orunmila, Atunda, Obatala, Ela and other spiritual beings associated with creation and destiny in Yoruba worldview are duly acknowledged in “Ori”.

“Carnage on the Road” extends further, Soyinka’s concern with the ogre of road accident in The Road and “Death at Dawn”. The contention here is that many of the accidents are caused by sheer carelessness, impatience, intransigence, ignorance and negligence. But disaster in the country is not restricted to those who travel on the famished road and get devoured by Ogun, the Yorùbá deity of metallurgy. Disaster also happens on waters and in the air. The reader is shocked by the graphic details of a tragic scene:

This toddler, dismembered/in red soaked cloth/under the seat of a mangled/metal across the road/sweet dream scuttled/at the cradle of time/and the mother/under the autopsy of negligence.

Easily the longest poem in the pack, “Unearthing Truth in Dialogue” is an imaginary conversation at a meeting between three distinguished Africa dramatists: Ola Rotimi who is represented as Ola in the poem, Wole Soyinka, represented as Kongi and Femi Osofisan, named Lanko.   The dialogue focuses on the principles of art, the mission of the artist, his creative muse and social responsibility. Each dramatist comments on the above in the four-movement fictional dialogue. Each restates his artistic vision and ideological conviction. While Lanko, for instance, opts for an art with wide appeal, Kongi is satisfied with writing that seems to “intimidate commoners on the stage of the present”. It is Ola that challenges the two dramatists into the discourse of art. There are allusions to the works of their real life models such as Osofisan’s Morountodun, Soyinka’s The Strong Breed, The Lion and the Jewel and Kongi’s Harvest. It is a dialogue between the dead and the living superintended by Ogun Òrúnmìlà, Osun, and other deities. The poem affirms Atanda as “a willing troubadour at the Cross road”.

The title poem, “Alluring Noon”, hints at the dark cloud of insecurity hanging over Nigeria and some neighbouring West African countries such as Niger, Cameroon and Chad. Insecurity, no doubt, is a menace to economic development and political stability. Insecurity registers in the frequent ethno-religious conflicts, Boko Haram insurgency, clashes between herders and farmers as well as politically motivated violence. 7y

“June 12” is written in memory of Chief M K O Abiola, the winner of the Presidential election held on the 12th of June, 1993. The annulment of the election by the then military regime headed by General Ibrahim Babangida sparked of confusion and anger in “a ravaging famished land”.  In spite of the passage of time, the national aspiration for unity and ideals of nation building expressed through the election remain elusive. While the poet pays glowing tribute in fond memory of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the world famous Afro beat musician and a philosopher of Africanism, he is full of sarcasm for a renowned General turned politician who is often referred to in the media as OBJ. Atanda reforms the acronym as “Our Born Jester”. One thing that comes to the fore is OBJ’s immense capacity for intrigues, deceit, mischief and vengeance. The character portrait of OBJ in the poem shows that this Very Important Jester can be humorous, just as he is amorous.

Apart from lyrics on people, the poet also recalls his experience of places in “Bode Osi”, a town near Iwo in Osun State, “Ilorin” and its famous market, “Ipata”.

The ideas are generally couched in images and symbols. The poet makes sense out of sounds with repetition, refrain and pun. There are occasional efforts at rhyming and neologism. The product is a collection of topical, alluring lyrics with keen sensitivity to the communication strategies of traditional and modern poetry in their oral and written forms. The mood is sometimes light and animated. In another twist, it is gloomy and somber. But on the whole, Atanda creates in Alluring Noon, avid images of personae that represent our desire and nightmare as well as our aspiration and frustration.

Professor Gbemisola Adeoti is of the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria.