Omatseye's Mandela's Bones

A Speech I Would Have Given, If I Had Attended the Launching of Sam Omatseye’s Mandela’s Bones and other Poems.

Some disclosure is necessary. Sam has been a friend for a long while. In Colorado, we would, over ogbonno and some home styled meals, engage in feisty chats about our homeland at Nigerian events. At other times, these exchanges will be either at my place, or Chidi Nwaubani's, or at Sam’s condo. I fell in love with him the first time I met him at Philip Etiwe's house. You could discuss literature and the arts with him. He would debate a fine point from Leibnitz with you. He is at home with Pascal, familiar with something called Derrida, and knows that Foucault is not a Parisian brand name clothier. His deep Christian faith—Sam could recite the Holy Bible back and forth without misplacing a letter—does not preclude him from arguing the underlying idea of traditional poetry with you. Of course, he will tell you why your Soyinka idolatry is wrongheaded. Why would you not love this Nigerian who has in him no molecule of philistinism, especially the variety that troubles the heart of many Nigerian immigrants in the US and will rise to bloat their phrases the moment thy open their mouths to speak. (“Na book we go chop?”) I have recited these observations to indicate why he instantly became a true intellectual sparring partner. In those years of sharing àmàlà and ewédu in the arid Rockies, Sam never let it out that he was writing poetry. I only knew of his efforts at fiction, which he never shared with me despite his promises to do so. When I read that he launched two books of poems in one go, I asked myself how is that possible. After all, he doesn't drink, not even the occasional wine that the bookish types, substantive and acting, will sip after dinner!

Oh, pardon me, this piece is about poems and not Omatseye. I like to talk about Mandela’s Bones and Other Poems. The works in this volume are uniformly mournful and elegiac without being melancholic. (Of course, I use these words in the Freudian sense here.) In addition to the reflection on the carnivalization of funeral rites in southern Nigeria, there are poems about (and for) Obafemi Awolowo, Michael Jackson, Grandma, and Nelson Mandela’s war of independence. The poems praise persons and cherished ideas judiciously and sometimes get nostalgic. They cheer sparingly because the present seems utterly dissatisfying. It looks like there is a lot to mourn in the overwhelmingly dystopic environment of these poems. Detention camps (Ita-Oko). Virtual monuments of despair that choke memoryscapes. Permanently deferred dreams. Squalor that defies solutions. The unending sabbatical of genuine spirituality. A disorienting abeyance of the principle of responsibility. Normative hypocrisy. Sweet-less homes. Flaccid memories abandoned by history. Tall histories orphaned by memory. Massacre, yet on Easter Sunday. Prematurely lost youth. Deprivation in plenty. Rotten Ibadan, alas! (My belief that you are not yet an Ibadan boy, until you write about that city is confirmed one more time.) Stagnation, like “the riots of the righteous/ the grudges of the generous/ the wounded parade of the bereaved,” is of oceanic proportions.

For Awo, the mourning is complete:

we who beaked out of your egg

. . .

come here for the blood rays of flame

kindled from your lips.

For Grandma, the elegy is for the living:

at 70, visions of heaven

might wreathe your barn

but you bequeathed sweet morsels

to last out lifetimes.

The only thing an inheritor of a dream deferred, if I can borrow a phrase from Langston Hughes, can do is to pray. Even then, Mandela’s Bones speaks of prayers with ambivalence. Yes, the inheritor of a permanently deferred dream can desire till kingdom comes. However, the deity to help realize the wishes is unhappy. Which God will waist its favors on a place in which “every tomb hosts a feast/ the glutton hires a preacher; minstrel replaces music” and admission qualifications for paradise (the symbol of ultimate goodness) are redefined with moral indifference by the proverbial minute?

In this collection, Omatseye fears the death of hope more than anything:

angels of mercy

have no material revenge

so please give me a hope. . . stay awake

let your courage and integrity

outlast my fear

don’t punish me with this death

or else I will have nothing to report.

But his fear is not the paralyzing type. There is a lot to mourn; but it looks like the society from (and for) which this poet speaks cannot afford melancholy. In this, Omatseye follows mainstream elegiac conventions in African poetry where the common feeling is that endless wailing that kills the spirit should be held in check. In African laments and elegies the mourner is usually realistic about life and death; only the greedy fly follows the corpse into the grave. African elegists reconcile themselves to the finality of death quickly even, as they say, while the body is still warm. Thus Omatseye observes in “Funeral” that at the passing of a woman:

honour festooned her death

in

sons and daughters

relatives and friends

who

like athletes on their feet

geared with humble flourish

signaled by the majesty of the giving

the ruddy cow for slaughter

the culinary wash of water and liquor

the congregation of ingredients

the tents of party

the pride and fury of aso ebi

the tears too

the coffin in ornate sobriety.

The sensibility that assembles these lines is unhappy with “the pageant.” But to dwell on the surface discontent will amount to “clutching the literal for the sense.” (That phrasing belongs to Wole Soyinka.) The mourners may be “making light of loss,” as Omatseye notes in the poem, but it is also obvious that these are efforts to minimize the “magnificent misery” that would otherwise have descended on them.

The main value of the observations in Mandela’s Bones, therefore, does not lie in the correctness or pithiness or aptness of the poems. Omatseye’s work is important because it captures, perhaps not self-consciously so, its society’s deep structures. The poems remind readers that the work of mourning ends effectively when the bereaved transfer their emotional attachments to the new substantive reality they face. Endless wailing serves neither the dead nor the living. The bereaved must lament the passing. Omatseye shows abundantly that there is no way around that.

His more subtle and more important observation is about the need for deploying carefully calibrated thought to pilot desire towards the cultivation of new attachments. The example of Nelson Mandela, manacled for decades on Robben Island, shows that spirit-sapping brawn, no matter how determined, will succumb to the superior ways of the mind. “Mandela’s Bones” invites us to see in Mandela how thought trumps matter. If hope is to be rekindled, I understand Omatseye to be saying, we must emulate Mandela’s strategies and tactics of overcoming.

Omatseye says “It was silence/ not guns/ that brought Pretoria/ to its knees.” Historians and other analysts will contest that conclusion. They will not doubt, however, that the land written about in this collection of poems can benefit from “language wombed in the Greeks” and “reborn in the Enlightenment.” It can use less “rote” and a little more of “rebellion.” The land, spanning “the wily gates/ of Ibadan” and “the dreamy foothills of Sokoto,” does not need megalomania, itself the sign of a stalled mourning that turns against the victimized self. To achieve “the happiness they crave,” the vanguards of that land must, in the spirit of the standard African elegy, resolve their work of mourning and “make sturdy/ the wall of resistance.”