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Paddle on to the great beyond, JP Clark

This is to my family/ Do not take me to the mortuary/ Do not take me to a church,/ Whether in or out of town,/ But take me home to my own, and/ To lines and tunes, tested on the waves/ Of time, let me lie in my place/ On the Kiagbodo River.

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JP Clark… as a mentor of young writing enthusiasts at the Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF) in 2011 at the Freedom Park, Lagos Island . Photo: Aderemi Adegbite

IT is just so fitting that in announcing the death of Nigerian poet and dramatist, John Pepper Bekederemo-Clark, in a signed family statement, the Clarks said he “has paddled on to the great beyond.”

Among the Ijaws of which the late writer is one of their most famous sons, it is possible that in describing someone who has transited, they look for the closest symbols; one they can relate to directly.

In their own case, it is water. And where there is an abundance of water, you will find paddlers in their dugouts – farmers, fishermen, market women, teachers, traders, artisans, even children rowing and rowing on the measureless rippling mass to work, to school, for pleasure, even ceremonies and festivals.

So, nothing seems more apt and sublime than giving the impression of a lone paddler in his canoe disappearing from view between an expanse of water and an ever-receding horizon, never to be seen again. For JP, there couldn’t have been a more befitting metaphor for a man who was born in the riverine area, grew up and lived in it for a greater part of his early years.

JP was born on 6 April 1935 in Kiagbodo, Burutu local government area in Delta state, began his primary education in the same place and then to Government College Ughelli from where he proceeded to University College, Ibadan, to meet his fate as a writer.

There, at the premier university in Nigeria, JP met and became friends with Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka, like-minds who devoted their time to writing and would become pioneers of modern Nigerian literature.

From there, their friendship and commitment to literature/ writing blossomed, starting off literary magazines or journals, writing poems after poems, plays and novels, discussing them and those they read, thus cementing their relationship more than ever.  

As they say, you can never live life in a straight line. Some odd things were bound to happen. They did, starting with the Nigeria/ Biafra civil war. Okigbo was the first to go, in 1967, then Achebe, in 2013. JP has now joined his soul brothers, leaving Soyinka as the last man standing of the famous four of Nigerian literature.

JP died on the morning of Tuesday 13 October 2020, surrounded by his family in a Lagos hospital. News of his demise got around by early afternoon of the same day. He was 85.

AS anyone would expect and considering his stature as an iconic literary figure in Nigeria and Africa, tributes have been coming from far and near, friends and foes, politicians and those in academia, writers like him – young and old – all of them queuing up respectfully to pay homage to a man many of them were not even aware was sick until he passed on.

President Muhammadu Buhari has already sent a carefully worded condolence to the Clarks through his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity Mr. Femi Adesina.

If you think the president may not have browsed “Abiku,” “Night Rain,” or any of JP’s poems, you may not be wrong. (That is not to say, however, Mr. President didn’t read other literatures, military histories and campaigns, and much else.)

But from the content and tone of PMB’s message, there are some in the presidency who are quite conversant with JP’s works, which they read and studied in secondary school up to university and, perhaps, after. 

On behalf of Mr. President, Adesina stated that JP “is one of Nigeria’s finest poets, dramatists and recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for Literary excellence, whose repertoire of published works depicts the hard work of a great man, devoted to a lifetime of writing, knowledge and promotion of the indigenous culture of the Ijaw nation.”

“Clark’s works will continue to inspire upcoming Nigerian writers,” PMB said, “to pursue literary excellence and flourish in their chosen vocation.”

As if he knew! The Society of Young Nigerian Writers (SYNW) who sent their condolence to the Clarks about the same time, had launched, in 2015, a JP Clark Literary Society to “promote the works, legacy and literary ideology of the poet” at the JP Clark Centre, University of Lagos. JP himself was in attendance that day.

Not stopping there, SYNW used the condolence message to urge Delta State Government, JP’s home-state, to immortalise him, describing his contributions “to the creative industry of the country as legendary.”

On its part, Delta State Government has also sent their “profound condolence” from Governor Ifeanyi Okowa to the Clark-Fuludu family. On behalf of his principal and the people of Delta state, Mr. Olisa Ifeajika, Okowa’s Chief Press Secretary, stated that “the literary world has lost an enigma whose works would continue to dominate contemporary Nigerian society,” adding that the late emeritus professor “was a consummate patriot, a great literary icon and a teacher par excellence, whose literary publications inspired deep thought, especially on social and political themes.”

At least four former presidents of the Association of Nigerian Authors have paid their respect. Erstwhile president of ANA, Mallam Denja Abdullahi, said: “JP Clark will be remembered as the most sterling of our first-generation modern Nigerian poets. He was in a class of his own with quite a number of totemic poems that vividly describe the environment in which he was formed or which he encountered in his life,” saying that JP “would go down in people’s memories as the taciturn, quietly fiery and most misunderstood writer who may have departed with some unshed knowledge about some dark periods of Nigerian history.”

Onetime president of ANA, Professor Olu Obafemi, has said of JP’s demise as “both painful and devastating,” describing him as “a foremost poet, dramatist, theatre artist and distinguished scholar, who helped erect and hone the essential contemporary literary traditions…a genuine humanist and an inimitable man of unique character and genuine compassion.”

To this portrait painted by the former heads of the national body representing writers in Nigeria, Odia Ofeimun, also a former president of ANA, has added to the JP canvas, putting him squarely along with Achebe, Okigbo and Soyinka “as a pathfinder for literary creativity, making the envy of other Africans and the world…Clark was a poet and dramatist who never allowed himself to be distracted from his chosen vocation. He let his poetry and plays speak for him. He treated critics and admirers with magisterial distancing.”

As any literary historian in Nigeria can tell you, Ofeimun had his spats with his senior colleague sometime back after he published his own repudiations in The Poet Lied, to some of JP’s claims in “The Casualties.” Despite all that acrimony, Ofeimun declared that “I am obliged to report that he was generally a very civil elder who did not over demonstrate his likes and dislikes. He was a balanced Homer who did justice to his Ijaw roots and Niger Delta provenance… a very unapologetic Nigerian who wished, in his own way, for true justice for every citizen.”

UNAPOLOGETIC is the proper word, you want to believe, to describe a writer who, in his late-twenties, was invited to the United States as a young scholar at Princeton. JP wrote of his experience and impression of America, published in 1964 as an autobiography cum travelogue entitled America, Their America. It was an unflattering portrait which his hosts were not too delighted with, and so sent him back to Africa from whence he came.

Literary historians have toyed with the idea that this encounter alone may have diminished JP’s international stature as a writer, for taking on the mighty American establishment, for identifying and not failing to record the hypocrisy he found in a system that preaches otherwise. How true or false is that, we can’t say.

But what we do know is that JP had far less publicity traction in his own natal country, Nigeria, compared to Achebe and Soyinka, his contemporaries. Again, literary historians have put forward a theory (ever propounding one theory or the other) that JP’s relative obscurity had to do more with where was born and less because of his creative output.

If for nothing else, Nigerians are notorious for showing loyalties along ethnic lines, in politics, religion and so on. The writing profession is not excluded. Thus, Achebe had his Oriental brothers solidly behind him, championing and promoting him. So has Soyinka with a phalanx of Occidental supporters. But who was ever there for JP?

Even now on his demise, that mentality has not been completely erased, as if it is encoded in our DNA. Witness SNYW’s request for immortalising JP, a request directed not to the Federal Government but to his own state government.

Whether or not the young writers’ wish will come to fruition is hard to say now. What is very clear, as clear as an unpolluted pond or creek in the Niger Delta pre-oil rigs, is JP’s confirmed place as one of the founding fathers of modern Nigerian Literature, among the now famous quartet – Achebe, Okigbo, Soyinka – who have influenced, in many ways, generations of writers that came after them.

Just this last September, the moderator of a literary event in Accra recalled how he was bowled over after reading Soyinka’s “Telephone Conversation” as a 14-year-old even though he didn’t understand “the layers” in the poem.

Youngsters like him would have felt the same way after reading “Night Rain” one of Clark’s best known poems to students of a certain age in Nigeria and across West Africa, particularly Anglophone West Africa.

Like “Telephone Conversation,” “Night Rain” was required reading for literature students preparing for WAEC, and JAMB for Nigerian students. Rich in metaphors and imageries that can easily stump any teenager anywhere from Aba to Accra, Banjul to Benin, Kaduna or Kumasi, many of them would certainly have experienced a tropical downpour sometime in their lives, at home, late in the night, alone or curled up with sibs on a mat or bed, as the case may be, mother busy removing pots and pans from leaky thatched roofs, as the poet so very well imagined it.

“What time of the night it is/ I do not know/ Except that like some fish/ Doped out of the deep/ I have bobbed up bellywise/ From stream to sleep,” the sleep-drowsed narrator tells us in the opening stanza, then goes on to describe the destruction the rain had caused in their household, closing with the calming effect of the deluge, in that slumber state, “Of drumming all over the land/ And under its ample soothing hand/ Joined to the sea/ We will settle to sleep of the innocent and the free.”

FOR a writer whose roots are deeply entangled in the rippling mangroves of the Niger Delta, it is no surprise water is a prominent feature in JP’s works – plays and poems. Moreover, much of the setting of his plays is on water; his heroes are fishermen, in Song of a Goat, The Ozidi Saga and The Raft, rowing through the complexities of life as they experience it, as told by JP Clark.  

Those who know JP closely describe him as self-effacing but not aloof. By their nature, writers prefer to work in monkish seclusion. On the very day he died, for instance, a friend sent a WhatsApp message to me, stating that JP was sort of aloof from his younger colleagues.

Well, I thought to myself, it was the much he knew about the late poet and professor. I didn’t correct him.

Hours later, from his base in Canada where he is professor of African Studies another Nigerian immediately dispelled that notion, citing some of his own personal experiences with JP.

It just so happened that sometime around 2000, 2001, he and his wife were on admission at separate times in Eko Hospital on Mobolaji Bank Anthony Way, Lagos. “JP Clark would visit my sick wife every other day,” Professor Nduka Otiono of University of Carlton in Canada, told me this week. His senior colleague would often stay for hours “to cheer us up.”

But what Otiono recalls of the separate episodes needs quoting in full. “During two episodes of separate hospitalisation of my wife and I under precarious conditions, the compassionate poet shared his philosophical reflections on beingness during his very gracious regular visits to the hospital. His wise, witty, cynical and generally inspiring outlook on life and being which one also finds in some of his poetry were the tonic that lubricated my will to survive. To that extent, therefore, to think about JP Clark’s transition to eternal glory is to meld a precarious past with the metaphysical reflections of one of the most important modern African poets.”

AS Otiono’s testimonial has shown, JP’s concern for other people’s welfare had no limits, relations, friends or fellow writers, as most Nigerians witnessed in 1986 when JP himself, Achebe and Soyinka requested and met with military president Ibrahim Babangida to spare a fellow general, Mamman Jiya Vatsa, who had been implicated in a coup and had been sentenced to death by firing squad.

Before the historic reunion of the remaining three of the famous four, Clark and Soyinka had kept their distance, not on speaking terms. What led to it isn’t our concern here. Suffice to say that literary feuds or clashes between towering figures in whatever profession are not new strange at all. They go back in time, to classical Greece and Rome, the Renaissance up to the modern period.

Either in groups or pairs, the duelists are almost always contemporaries, in the same profession, masters of their art in their own ways. A few examples of famous feuds might suffice here: Aeschylus versus Sophocles; Shakespeare versus Thomas Greene; Tolstoy versus Dostoyevsky; Mailer versus Vidal.

In the case of the Russian duelists, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy never met one-on-one except through their works. Of course, the age of television was still far away, a technological invention Mailer and Vidal took advantage of fully in their spats.

Perhaps one of the most (in) famous literary duels of all time, the Mailer/ Vidal confrontation held the American public for years culminating in an infamous encounter when both of them appeared in the Dick Cavett Show in 1971.

A pugilist, Mailer never hesitated to remind his rival that if his pen cannot speak for him, his fist will always do. On at least two occasions, he brawled with Vidal, always starting off such punch-ups. In one of them, Mailer decked Vidal to a loaded dinner table, ready to go all the way if Vidal had responded. But with aristocratic unconcern, Vidal dusted himself and then said: “Once again, words fail you, Norman.”

But years later, the two became inseparable friends, often seen in the streets of New York, side by side, out for lunch or dinner, or returning from one, two venerable old men, distinguished American writers, former sworn enemies but now close pals.

“If you are quarreling with a friend,” Tibetan writer, Sogyal Rimpoche has written, “pretend that he is dying and you may even begin to love him.”

WHETHER that sentiment had any place in resolving one of the most famous literary feuds in Nigeria – between Clark and Soyinka – one can never tell. The two former friends had gone their separate ways during and after the Nigerian civil war over disparaging comments by one or both of them. It took the imminent execution of a soldier/ writer to reunite them and resolve their differences.

Condemned to death by firing squad, JP, spurred on by his concern for others mooted the idea of himself, Achebe and Soyinka meeting with Babangida right in the corridors of power then, Dodan Barracks in Lagos, to spare Vatsa. Achebe readily welcomed the idea. Next thing was to meet and speak with Soyinka whom JP had been incommunicado with for several years.

According to those who know, JP arrived Soyinka’s abode in Abeokuta quite unexpectedly one day, something of a surprise visit. Soyinka was not home. He was in the bush, squinting and taking aim, hoping to drop a bird or two.

Some games in the bag, Soyinka returned from his hunting trip only to find a most unexpected guest in his sitting room, possibly sipping his choicest wines and as calm as a professor of literature in a literature class.

Without much ado and, possibly, after a one-over, the two men ended up at the dinner table. Menu? The guinea fowls, Aparo – a species common in the west – Soyinka brought back from his hunt, cooked and fried which they both shared, helped along with vintage wines from the cellar of a confirmed oenophile. 

From then till now, Soyinka and JP have never been far apart, almost always seen together at literary or arts events, maybe at any of the cultural outposts in Lagos – Freedom Park, Maison de France, MUSON Centre, The Lagos Boat Club or anywhere for that matter.

JP’s fascination with water (as Soyinka with the Yoruba deity Ogun) transcended his earthly life. According to reports this week, JP instructed his family to bury him somewhere in his natal town, Kiagbodo.

REPUTED for his reticence, there is something of a romantic beneath that inscrutable exterior. In one of JP’s last poems, “My last Testament,” the poet wrote to his immediate family, more like a literary will thusly: “This is to my family/ Do not take me to the mortuary/ Do not take me to a church,/ Whether in or out of town,/ But take me home to my own, and/ To lines and tunes, tested on the waves/ Of time, let me lie in my place/ On the Kiagbodo River.”

True to his request, the Clarks granted the poet his wish. JP, they told the world, “has paddled on to the great beyond.”

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