JOHN Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Lagos, paddled his own canoe to his final destination in the early hours of Tuesday October 13, and was buried on Thursday October 15, 2020, according to his wish. He was 87. We at Naija Times commiserate with his family and the literary community at large, for this irreplaceable loss.
He was, undoubtedly, one of Nigeria’s foremost poets and playwrights, who had tremendously suffered some lack of adequate attention from critics. But JP Clark wrote remarkable and legendary poems such as “Abiku”, “Ibadan” and “Night Rain”, which were studied by a generation of students for the West African School Certificate Examination in Literature in English. In fact, there can be no meaningful discussion on the development or growth of modern Nigerian, nay African drama and poetry in English, without mentioning his pioneering role.
Born on April 6, 1933 (erroneously recorded as 1935) at Kiagbodo in present day Delta State to an Ijaw father and an Urhobo mother, Clark had his primary school education at Okrika and Jeremi before he proceeded to the prestigious Government College, Ughelli for his secondary school education. After a brilliant sojourn at Ughelli, he gained admission to the University College, Ibadan, then a campus of the University of London in 1956 and graduated four years later in June 1960 with a B.A. Honours degree in English.
After graduation, he worked briefly as an Information Officer in the defunct Western Region of Nigeria, between late 1960 and early 1961. Thereafter, Clark joined the editorial staff of the Daily Express as Features Editor. It was while on the staff of the Daily Express that the young Clark won the Parvin Fellowship to embark on the now historic study tour of the United States of America in 1963. He returned to Nigeria under controversial circumstances and that gave rise to his celebrated but only prose work, America, Their America.
It was upon his return from Princeton University in the United States in January 1964, that Clark took up appointment at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan as a Junior Research Fellow. He was at the Institute until 1966 when he joined the staff of the newly established Department of English at the University of Lagos where he taught and rose to become its first Nigerian Professor of English. He retired from the university in 1980 and set up his professional theatre group, the PEC Repertory Theatre Company, of which he was the artistic director.
Prof. Clark’s career as a poet dates back to his undergraduate days at the University College, Ibadan, where he helped to found the celebrated poetry journal, The Horn. The journal was soon to become a forum for the communion of souls of the emergent generation of new Nigerian writers such as Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Okogbule Wonodi, Benedict Obumselu, and Clark himself. The Horn was the Nigerian equivalent of The Partisan Review, which was the melting pot of highly gifted and precocious American intellectuals in the nineteen sixties.
Just at about the same time of the evolution of his poetry career, Clark was equally making waves in theatre production as a playwright. As a scholar born in the Eastern Ijaw area around the creek of what is now known as the Niger Delta, out of the mixture of rain-forest, delta jungle, riverine mangrove and water spirit, Clark evolved a philosophy of man and his environment which informed the background of his theatre. Combining poetry with theatre as the basis of his literary corpus, Clark was acclaimed for his prodigious output.
Quite ahead of most of his contemporaries who helped to establish the main direction of written African poetry in the late fifties and early sixties, Clark made a brilliant debut with his first collection of poems entitled Poems (1962), which shot him into instant limelight. In 1965, he published his second volume of poems under the title, A Reed in the Tide, which now confirmed his popularity as “the Nigerian Poet”.
In the field of drama, a combination of the Ijaw sagas and epics, the festive Ekine drama and its conventions, as well as the residues of what he learned from classical Western European drama in the university, formed the major theme of his plays. Ozidi, published in 1966, was a drama-supported narrative based on an Ijaw saga.
Before then, he had published The Raft in 1964 which came after Song of a Goat (1961), etcetera. Aside from his earlier poems, one of JP Clark’s remarkable verses was Mandela which decries the imprisonment of the legendary Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in South Africa by the then apartheid regime of that country. In fact, Clark’s volumes of creative output, both in poetry and drama, are so numerous to be listed here. There is, indeed, a prophetic, all-embracing commitment to a depiction of the reality of the plight of his kinsmen in his works about which he seemed helpless. Of course, the problem with appreciating JP Clark’s works is that he was so prolific it is sometimes difficult to separate the droll from the dross.
Yet, it is possible to assume that a factual and narrative account of Prof. John Pepper Clark’s formative years within the context of the social and cultural milieu in which he grew up may enhance our understanding of the poet-playwright. The whole gamut of his work underscores our mutual admiration for his genius. In all circumstances, not only was he one of the pioneering leaders of our modern literary tradition, he was one of the best. By his death, Nigeria has lost not only one of the original progenitors of modern drama but also a master of creative metaphors.
Of course, not much in terms of stylistic exegesis has been carried out on his works by critics, but the canonical ambience of his art shows a more than clever anatomy of its technical grace and distinction. We therefore urge our army of critics to embark on the logic-semiotic study of his plays for posterity. May his soul rest in peace.
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