Niyi Osundare: Poet of the Moon

The occasion for this brief statement was my introduction of Professor Niyi Osundare as Keynoter at "Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa," a conference organized by Professor Tejumola Olaniyan for University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities, April 26-28, 2012. Note to self: you have still not written that full length paper on the poetry of Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre.

When I was given this task some months back, I told myself this should be an easy one. After all, how hard would it be to speak about the author of Village Voices, the book of poems which, in 1985, inspired my 9th grade students at Modakeke Islamic Grammar School to believe that they too could write poetry, and indeed wrote poems they sent to the Daily Times in Lagos.

Sorry, Professor Osundare, my students, motivated by your book, beat you by nearly a decade to the wisdom of distributing poetry in the tabloid platform. But that is an aside. To return to the task at hand, my real dilemma was how this Ajíjẹbébà (the erudite one who wakes up to a breakfast of papers) will restrain himself from writing his first paper on the enchanting poetics of Niyi Osundare.

Because a pleasant task should not be unduly prolonged, Ii will quickly rattle off the known knowns, the Wikipedia facts, about Professor Niyi Osundare. He joined the marketplace of existence 65 years ago in Ikere Ekiti, an event for which we should thank an accomplished farmer-singer and weaver-singer, from whom Osundare received his earliest training in poetry making. Osundare went to school in Ikere-Ekiti, Ado-Ekiti, Ibadan, Leeds, and York in Ontario, Canada. I should note as well that he has taught school at Ado-Ekiti, Ibadan, New Orleans, and countless other places in between. 

Niyi Osundare is one of the most decorated poets alive: Noma Award, Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Cadbury/ANA Poetry Prize (twice), Tchicaya UTam’si Poetry Prize, Fonlon-Nichols Award for literary creativity and human rights, and two honorary doctorates from Franklin Pearce and Toulouse. Later this year, one his poems, "Raindrum," will be performed and placed on display in London during the summer Olympics. I must add that last, not but not the least, Niyi Osundare, along with Kemi Osundare, his wife, survived Hurricane Katrina. They both survived Katrina

Osundare is the author of 17 collections of his own poems, two plays, one volume of literary criticism, several shorter monographs. Between March 1985 and September 1990, Osundare wrote a weekly poetry column for the Nigerian Tribune in Ibadan. The result of that experiment is Songs of the Season. He also kept a regular column with Newswatch at the same time.

For this occasion, I think, the not-quite-unknowns about Niyi Osundare should be more important. I will speak briefly of only two. First, I will like to call him the poet of the moon. In every Osundare collection I have read, and please allow me to boast that I have read them all, I cannot recollect one in which there is not at least one thing said about the moon. For heaven’s sake, one collection is titled Moonsongs (orin òṣùpá, in Yorùbá). Osundare speaks of moonechoes, moonbean, moonbeam, moon mountains, moon rivers, moon valleys etc. Inside the book titled, Pages from the Book of the Sun, it is one thing or another about the moon, one moon after another. I am sure the sun is very jealous, probably mad, that the moon is so large in the book named for it. In that central Osundare imagery is captured his notion of human existence in all its dimensions: material, spiritual, ideological, moral, etc. Left to Osundare, the earth will be a moon, and the moon will be earthly. This poem, Phase XXII, from Moonsongs, will speak for me:

Ikoyi

The moon here

is a laundered lawn

its grass the softness of infant fluff;

silence grazes like a joyous lamb,

doors romp on lazy hinges

the ceiling is a sky

weighted down by chandeliers

of pampered stars

Ajegunle

here the moon

is a jungle,

sad like a forgotten beard

with tensioned climbers

and undergrowths of cancerous fury:

cobras of anger split in every brook

and nights are one long prowl

of swindled leopards

The moon is a mask dancing . . .

It is clear in this poem that the moon nicknames slices of Nigeria’s unevened socio-economic earth, greenery domesticated, nurtured, and nursed in one emblematic section but left untreated in the other.

The second thing I will like for tonight’s audience to know about Osundare’s work is that optimism drives teleology in virtually everything he has written. Osundare’s critical observations can be acerbic; dictators hear his words and want to cut out his tongue. The deadly Hurricane Katrina almost took the lives of Kemi and Niyi Osundare. Osundare has composed the most solemn and gripping lamentations. I have caught elegiac mournfulness in Osundare’s line. Overall, the human spirit, as Osundare construes it, always has a tomorrow to anticipate. Even when the spirit is depressed, in my reading of Osundare, tomorrow will not let us alone. In Osundare’s poems, tomorrow is unrelenting in its calls and beckons. You think I am making this up? All right, see “Death Came Calling”:

Death came calling

It never met me a home

It met aruwele, shrub of the moon

Dancing dreams and waving ferns

And the crab’s small eyes and sleepless gaze

The timeless smile on the face of the sun

It met a clump, dusty-red

Stubbed its toe on the Rock of Life

Fell face down like a footless foe

Lost its teeth and clipped its claws

It met Olosunta, Father of Rocks

It met Oroole Ruler of Lofty Heights

It met Esidale, Founder of Earth and Sky

It met Ifa, Source and Living Wisdom

It met me shielded

By a cloak of kindness

The quenchless fire of human soul

Hope whose flair defies the flood

Death came calling

But it never met me at home

Harry Garuba, another Ibadan poet—I should say that there is something in the waters of the University of Ibadan that turns people into poets—once described the driving sentiment of poems like this as animist materialism. All that Garuba was trying to put on record there about Osundare’s poetry is the unrelenting desire to make words do enchanting things, a desire to charm the world with word with incantation (ọfọ̀), divination (ẹsẹ'fá), divinatory incantation (àyájọ́), malediction (àbìlù), benediction (ìwúre), interdiction (arọ́bi or atúbi), encomium (oríkì), crowd mobilizers (apèrò), proverbial communication (òwe) invectives (èébú), etc. 

Let me say that in spite of these, Osundare bears no ill will. He bears no malice towards anyone. Indeed, Osundare’s optimistic teleology is pervasive and deep. His most lyrical lines are probably to be found in the Katrina poems. In the collection of poems about that horrifying experience, an ordeal that almost killed Niyi and Kemi Osundare, I found, for the first time in my reading of Osundare, a poem with end rhymes. You will find in that book—I was going to say “I swear”—the most moving praise of a son for his mother rendered in the voice of mother commanding the universe, at times threatening it, to give life to her son.

In the land of Osundare’s birth, they say that plenty words do not fill up a basket. Although they know that ordinary winds will blow the words away, they do not stop talking anyway. But I should close. Preparations for an episode of madness should not take seven years, after all.

It is my pleasure this evening to present the:

Farmer born, Peasant bred

U.I. buttered, U.S. jammed

But,

Ekiti rooted

Niyi Osundare.