Banji Ojewale
The Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991. Concerned about what he perceived as a decline within the high quality of spoken and written English in American society, Brodsky proposed that books of American poetry be positioned alongside Gideon Bibles in motel rooms. His reasoning was compelling: “Poetry is perhaps the only insurance we’ve got against the vulgarity of the human heart.” His proposal mirrored a conviction that poetry might restore a measure of ethical and linguistic refinement to on a regular basis life.
More than three many years later, Steve Obidi, a Nigerian mental, communicator and pastor, assigns poetry an much more bold process. In Eternal Truth, he sends the style in pursuit of what he calls the “Most Excellent Eternal Truth”, with the intention of bringing its liberating energy to Nigerians and readers all over the place. A member of the Editorial Board of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry (DCLM) and a PhD holder, Obidi approaches this enterprise with the earnestness of a person who has immersed himself in a formidable physique of information. One is reminded of the acquainted literary conceit of ransacking half a library to provide a single guide.
His assortment attracts, generally obliquely, on biblical personalities and their deeds, Greek mythology, Nigerian and worldwide politics, environmental crises, human struggling, bereavement and the strange predicaments of existence. Beneath these various topics lies a conviction that sure basic truths elude superficial therapy. Poetry, in Obidi’s estimation, affords a way of bringing them into sharper focus and welcoming the reader to ponder their implications.
For the poet, reality is neither relative nor negotiable. It is a singular, enduring precept to which he has pledged his allegiance. In the opening poem, which bears the gathering’s title, he remembers the encounter that modified his life:
You beckoned and graciously hugged me.
Disarmed, convicted, I submitted
Thenceforth to be your devotee…
I signed as much as defend the Truth…
The encounter is offered as a conversion, an acceptance of reality as each a private self-discipline and a public obligation. The poems that observe are, accordingly, written with what the poet describes as a bleeding pen and a coronary heart wracked with ache. In “The Tipping Point”, he insists:
We should inform the reality, even at gunpoint
For intrinsic in reality is one thing that units free
If solely we might swallow our satisfaction and with reality agree.
The traces set up the ethical urgency that drives the gathering. Truth calls for braveness, significantly when its pursuit threatens private consolation or exposes collective failings. Yet the power of this conviction additionally presents a problem for the poet: how does one rework an ethical place, nevertheless sincerely held, into poetry that persuades by way of its imaginative drive reasonably than merely by way of the load of its pronouncements?
Obidi is at his most fascinating when he permits a human predicament to complicate his ethical certainty. In “The Mad Lady”, for occasion, two worlds seem to occupy the identical area with out understanding one another. The girl is dismissed by sympathetic bystanders who assume they perceive her situation. The poet asks:
She scorns on the ignorance of
Sympathetic bystanders…she’s misjudged
Who can persuade her that
Something has gone mistaken?
The poem exposes the space between appearances and actuality, suggesting that even well-meaning observers can mistake their assumptions for information. Its questions are significantly pertinent to a set involved with the issue of recognising reality amid the clamour of competing perceptions.
“A Bouquet of Queries” takes a wider view of human bewilderment, inspecting the persistence of need in a world seemingly wealthy in sources and mental capability. The poet sees smart women and men all over the place, but their knowledge seems powerless to rescue society from deprivation or restore its dignity. The paradox remembers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated traces in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, all over the place,
And all of the boards did shrink;
Water, water, all over the place,
Nor any drop to drink.
Obidi’s model of the predicament finds expression in a pointed query:
Why will we ask, “Where do we go from here?”
When no person stated he’s going anyplace?
The query activates the absurdity of a society that speaks incessantly of progress whereas showing unsure about its course. It is a promising second within the assortment, though the poem’s drive will depend on the reader recognising the irony beneath its apparently conversational phrasing.
Elsewhere, the poet’s urgency generally spills into the shape itself. In “We’re the King’s Brothers”, the traces run on with out punctuation till the eleventh juncture, making a breathless motion that appears reluctant to pause. The impact could also be learn as an try and embody the urgency of the poet’s mission, although such formal decisions should in the end justify themselves by way of their contribution to the poem’s that means.
Obidi additionally turns his consideration to the results of humanity’s disregard for reality. “Lost Opportunities”, “Denial”, “It’s All Over”, “The Zeitgeist”, “The Famished Earth”, “Man and Time” and “Tears” ponder the harm wrought by human folly, missed possibilities and the refusal to confront uncomfortable realities. “Tears”, regardless of its brevity of simply 14 traces, evokes a span of human expertise that appears to succeed in throughout centuries. Here, compression turns into an asset, permitting the poem to counsel greater than it explicitly states.
The assortment doesn’t ignore the COVID-19 pandemic. In “A World on Pause”, Obidi revisits the worldwide suspension of strange life caused by the outbreak. Yet the poem’s closing motion factors past the rapid disaster in the direction of a extra everlasting reckoning. The pause it anticipates shouldn’t be merely the short-term interruption imposed by a pandemic, however a finality that lies past humanity’s energy to manage. In this studying, the poem’s non secular message is that the world’s obvious permanence is an phantasm, and that human beings would do effectively to arrange for what lies past the acquainted order of existence.
Some of the poems grouped below “Aspirations and Assuagements” supply extra promising situations of inventive expression. “My Beloved”, “Moonlight Concourse” and “Dream Fulfilled” reveal a poet keen to stretch his traces and discover the chances of lyrical motion. There are echoes right here of Christopher Okigbo, whose subtle imagery, musical cadences and experimental dealing with of poetic kind helped form fashionable Nigerian poetry. Obidi’s longer traces distinction with shorter ones, generally creating a way of imbalance that mirrors the fractured world he seeks to painting.
The assortment additionally makes room for dirges during which the poet mourns departed family members. These elegiac passages lend a extra intimate dimension to a piece in any other case preoccupied with ethical and non secular propositions. They culminate in “The Sacred and Symphonic”, a poem that returns to questions whose solutions, within the poet’s conception, are to be present in Eternal Truth.
But what, exactly, does this reality entail? In Obidi’s ethical universe, it includes an unyielding power of character in a society more and more tolerant of ethical compromise, along with the willingness to defend one’s convictions at private value. Such steadfastness rests on religion in a God who embodies reality. The assortment’s underlying proposition is that humanity’s predicament can’t be resolved by materials progress or mental ingenuity alone; it requires a change of character.
This is an bold burden for poetry to hold. Obidi clearly believes that strange prose can not adequately convey the gravity of his message, and that poetry, with its capability for compression, metaphor and heightened expression, is healthier suited to the duty. Yet the excellence shouldn’t be at all times so clear-cut. A poem’s ethical seriousness doesn’t robotically translate into poetic achievement. At occasions, the gathering’s insistence on its message threatens to overshadow the imaginative work by way of which poetry makes that message compelling.
It could also be untimely to pronounce on the complete measure of Obidi’s poetic items from a single assortment. But literary historical past affords ample examples of writers whose early work proved solely the start of an extended journey. Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe and Okigbo, amongst others, show the hazards of treating a author’s current output as the ultimate measure of his potentialities.
Where, then, does Obidi stand? His work shows a curious mix of arresting verse and prose-like passages charged with rhetorical power. He appears equally relaxed with the 2 modes, although their coexistence sometimes creates formal difficulties. “I’m Just Me”, for instance, may need benefited from the extra sustained self-discipline of the standard heroic couplet reasonably than its association in four-line stanzas. The query shouldn’t be whether or not a poet ought to observe typical kinds, however whether or not the shape chosen serves the poem’s expressive goal.
Ultimately, Eternal Truth is a set pushed by a conviction that ethical renewal begins with an uncompromising encounter with reality. Obidi desires his readers to look past the rapid sights of worldly existence and study the rules by which they dwell. Whether each poem succeeds in changing that conviction into memorable verse is one other matter. Yet the gathering’s earnestness is unmistakable, as is its need to make poetry an instrument of private and social transformation.
If Obidi’s poetic journey remains to be unfolding, its vacation spot seems clear sufficient: a society during which integrity shouldn’t be an inconvenient advantage however a situation of human dignity. His problem, as a poet, is to make sure that the language carrying this message possesses the imaginative energy to endure past the second of studying.
• Ojewale, a author, is predicated in Ota, Ogun State
