POETRY OF MEANING

fore the Golden Jubilee by Omo Uwaifo; Hanon Publishers Limited, Lagos; 2010
Omo Uwaifo comes at poetry with humility that is quite ennobling.

An engineer by training, Uwaifo earned his initial literary marks as a writer of prose. Unlike the brash young poets of Nigeria who in the manner of the Shakespearean access to greatness would never tire of telling of their genius as born poets, Uwaifo is more down-to-earth in the portrayal of his embrace of poetry.

He in fact lets out this gist thusly: “Five years ago, I started to put my thoughts together in verse though I wrote no poetry. I bought books on the literary genre and called on poets to help me. They were busy, but a few were generous with their time.

Two years ago, I decided to test the waters. I worked hard on a collection and submitted it as Litany for the 2009 NLNG Nigerian Prize for literature. It was a huge surprise that the eminent judges thought it deserved to be one of the long short-list of nine out of more than one hundred and sixty entries. No encouragement could have been greater; thanks to them.”

In a curious twist of fate, it has to be revealed here, the so-called eminent judges of the NLNG Prize turned around not to award the coveted prize to any of the shortlisted authors.

The judges instead awarded the prize money to themselves in the guise of the Academy of Letters, in the greater interest of developing literature that would at a future death be worthy of the NLNG-sponsored Nigeria Prize for Literature! From the evidence of this barefaced heist it is obvious that the 419 game permeates all strata of Nigerian enterprise, especially the academe!

Even so, the fate that befell Uwaifo’s debut collection of poetry, Litany, was not the first below-the-belt blow to be received from the NLNG Prize judges by our long-suffering author. His 2001 novel, Fattening House, was amongst the three books shortlisted for the inaugural prose phase of the NLNG Prize in 2004 when the selfsame judges melodramatically decided that none of the works was deserving of the prize!

It is indeed worthy of celebration that Uwaifo has stoically put behind him the shenanigans of the judges to keep on reworking his poetry such that we have here in our hands this collection entitled Before the Golden Jubilee that puts Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary in profound poetic perspective.

Before the Golden Jubilee is a no-holds-barred eye witness account written from the frontline. Poet Omo Uwaifo does not beat about the bush. He goes to the heart of the matter, making every word to count. He does not dance around the subject, as he admits, “I cannot afford the luxury of the young who probably would have chosen to hope and wait for politicians to find the courage to tell them what the problems are and what they plan on doing to fix them.”

Uwaifo has seen through “the euphoria of independence” having served in the electricity sector in several parts of the country, notably Lagos, Ibadan, Shagamu, Ijebu-Ode, Onitsha and Kaduna. Against the background of all he had borne witness to in the long eventful years, Before the Golden Jubilee represents a true message from the innermost of his heart.

A book “dedicated to lives ravaged by small minds in power wherever” can in no way be misunderstood by any reader, no matter how non-aligned one is!

In an insightful prologue Uwaifo paints the elegiac picture of colonial intrusion and the despoliation of his beloved Benin Kingdom following the valiant resistance of Oba Ovonramwen and his stalwarts. The irony of the monarchy being celebrated in colonising Britain while being derided in Nigeria is not lost on the poet who would rather the diverse ethnic nations of Nigeria were allowed to choose the ways they would want to follow.

The anger in the poet is heartfelt as he thunders: “Federal Nigeria is a hoax. Aso believes its Rock is whiter than the White House. What refracted reality!”

In Before the Golden Jubilee, the word Naaboa, coined from the names of Nigerian leaders at independence, to wit, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello or Abubakar Balewa, and Obafemi Awolowo, is a personification of Nigeria and its concomitant domination by the so-called three major ethnic groups that Poet Uwaifo dubs the Illusionary Tripod (IT) as opposed to the more common WAZOBIA. The poet makes the point that the centre cannot hold for the nation that was meant to stand on three unequal and unsteady legs.

The collection is divided into two broad sections, namely “Matrix” and “From 1966 to 2010”, with the “Matrix” section containing 15 poems, while the second section, “From 1966 to 2010”, accounts for all of 76 poems. Even with the division into two sections, seamlessness is the word for the entire collection.

Uwaifo sets the tone in the poem “Serendipity” pg4:
If the wills of the ethnic nations matter
If they wanted to be part of the larger land

Terms should have been drawn and agreed
Even after the buccaneers turned their backs!
A mob, ruled by greedy mobs, is out of control.

Before the Golden Jubilee embodies the entire Nigerian gamut of monkeys working and baboon chopping as we say, squandering of riches, electoral roguery, coups and counter-coups, flight, civil war, boom as doom, political chicanery, military legerdemain etc. Central to the Nigerian question is the poem “No Longer at Ease” pg49:
A reluctant and an uncertain South-west,
A humiliated and fidgety South-East
A triumphant and arrogant North
Came together at the end of the war

Gave birth to the Illusionary Tripod (IT)
Conceived by the buccaneers as they exited
But resented by a silent, fractious minority…

In the end, Nigeria is only worthy of lamentation as Uwaifo offers in “The General’s Kiss of Hunger” pg123:

Trapped in hedonism’s deep holes
We walk paths dark and damp
With dewdrops of sloth!

Petrodollars lure and delude us.
We stand prostrate, ready to knock
On the door of the Fourth World

Omo Uwaifo in Before the Golden Jubilee has rustled through the innards of a diseased nation approaching actual decease and makes manifest his unsavoury discovery on the altar of history. Nobody can read Uwaifo’s words without question marks piercing his grey matter.

There would of course be the critical poser of the poet letting his outrage to rule the roost. But then, a man with fire on his beard is doomed to tackle the fire instead of waffling around the niceties of verisimilitude. Most Nigerian poets who have nothing really to say hide behind the pyrotechnics of style.

Uwaifo is different. He has so much to say, and he makes his meaning to tell. In the manner of Thomas Hardy’s “never explain, never retract, get it out and let them howl”, Uwaifo lays all bare on the page such that nobody can be indifferent to his poetry. Omo Uwaifo has in this collection offered poems that shoot guns in the mould of the African-American Imamu Amiri Baraka..