By Anote Ajeluorou
LAST Sunday, March 21, Nigerian writers held World Poetry Day, a yearly poetic feast, which according to UNESCO, is designed to celebrate poetry as “one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity… that speaks to our common humanity and our values, transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for dialogue and peace. World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recital, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media.”
In his message for 2020 World Poetry Day that was postponed due to the outbreak of the coronavirus disease that became a global pandemic, UNESCO Director-General, Audrey Azoulay had said, “Arranged in words, coloured with images, struck with the right meter, poetry has a power that has no match. This is the power to shake us from everyday life and the power to remind us of the beauty that surrounds us and of the resilience of the human spirit.”
That was precisely what World Poetry Day 2021, sponsored by Providus Bank Plc and held in Lagos, delivered to the eminent guests at the Eko Hotel & Suites venue on Sunday. With the event’s telling theme on environmental concerns ‘Voices in the Cause of Earth’, poetry was conjured for the advocacy service of man’s most abused ‘being’, Earth!
Some, if not all the poets that performed, pointed to a dying earth due to the unrelenting negative activities of man and the need for him to let up.
With Nigeria not yet a heavily industrialised country, some observers, however, pointed out that perhaps the poetic feast that had such weighty theme and concern for mother earth and its despoiled environment ought to have been held close to the environmentally-degraded mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, where the activities of oil companies most typify a wounded earth that needs these urgent and compelling poetic voices to plead its cause to better health.
Except for occasional flood disasters in states like Nasarawa, Kebbi and Niger, which the Director of Lagos International Poetry Festival, Efe Paul Azino referenced in his performance, and gully erosion in the Southeast, the bulk of the evening performance centred on the man’s damaging activities on the environment, which in Nigeria, is most rampant in the Niger Delta, where mindless oil exploration and exploitation activities take place without the needed remediation to alleviate the sufferings of the region’s environment and its hapless inhabitants, who have neither say how Nigeria’s vast oil wealth is being expended nor benefit from it.
But, of course, he who pays the piper dictates the tune, as the saying goes. And so, Lagos, a city renowned for its vibrant poetic output, as event compere, culture advocate and former Editor of The Guardian on Sunday, Jahman Anikulapo, reminded everyone, played host to the biggest poetry event backed by the power of a bank. This was the second time Providus Bank Plc, a relatively new financial institution, would respond to calls from the arts and culture community for sponsorship, which has become increasingly hard to get in the face of Nigeria’s dire economic situation. But the bank has kept faith with poetry, thanks also to the towering stature of Africa’s first Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, who has headlined the event in its two editions – 2019 and 2021.
But while he merely played a fatherly role in galvanising the first edition, Soyinka, who has a new novel recently released in over 40 years, Chronicles of the Happiest People, stepped forward to also perform, which indeed lent a unique aspect to the World Poetry Day 2021 celebration. Soyinka, donning the garb of a senior astronaut, and flanked by his two trainee astronauts, octogenarian veteran actress and actor, Mrs. Taiwo Ajai-Lycett and Bimbo Manuel, took the audience on a comical astronomical travel through space and time, as one of the imaginative wonders of poetry to make light serious situations.
But this was after the Nobel laureate had comically told his audience that, in the age of space tourism, he just might be preparing to go into space for real and watch earth below when the world eventually comes to an end and earth in prophesised Armageddon and is presumably destroyed! He also enjoined young poets to not only see poetry as “heavy and gloomy” occupation, but one capable of highlighting the lighter side of life. His space travel poetry, he said, was exactly how the poetic art can also make light weighty matters.
Earlier, while declaring the event open, Soyinka had told his audience that although the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the planned outing last year, the gathering this year signified a triumph of the human spirit, which poetry represents in its tracking of human emotions in man’s journey through life. He also said holding the event even as the pandemic was yet to abate meant that poets had found a way to navigate one of man’s most difficult periods in history. He enjoined the poets to be unrelenting in deploying their poetic art in service of humanity and the environment.
YOUNG and older poets took to the podium to serenade the audience that had diplomats and corporate industry leaders with poetry that called attention to the need to protect the earth, so the ‘balance sheet’ of profit does not trump a sustainably safe environment. Some of the poets that featured were drawn from poetry collectives such as Ajegunle-based and AJ Daga Tolar-led AJ House of Poetry, Eriata Orhibabor-led Poets in Nigeria (PIN), Chisom-led LOUDTHOTZ, and Segun Adefila-led Bariga Poets Collective.
Other performers on the bill were Efe Paul Azino, who declaimed Nigeria’s inability to respond meaningfully to flood crisis in states like Nasarawa and Kebbi, where floods perennially kill citizens and destroy food crops. For the spoken word poet, Nigerians were good at one thing: “we build bulwarks against the flood/with our words”, but never with concrete actions, since the same problem will resurface next year and then lamentation and everyone goes back to sleep again till disaster wakes everyone up in yet another year.
According to Azino, “There was flooding in Nasarawa in 2012 and 2020, yet nothing happened beyond mourning of the dead,” saying “as flood dislodged our dead,” and concluded that “earth (is) at the receiving end of the balance sheet” of corporate profit without a thought for the dying earth.
EVELYN Osagie also kept up the environmental despoliation tune with her performance, where she said “Man and earth may soon be extinct”. She concluded her performance with ‘Follow me to abegi’, a performance-rendezvous spot at the National Theatre, Lagos, which she dedicated to the renowned poet and polemicist, Odia Ofeimun, who clocked 71 on March 16, and to whom the event was dedicated. It spoke of the inspiring role of Ofeimun on Lagos poets for which she is a beneficiary.
Umar Abubakar Sidi dedicated one of his performances to Gen. Mamman Vatsa, who was killed in a phantom coup, where Sidi lamented that “earth is a language in crisis” and made a passionate appeal: “Let poets save the earth”. ‘Testament of Sand’, as witness to the creation of earth, was his second performance, where man, who emanates from sand or dust and goes back the same route after his earthly journey, ordinarily should have treated earth with a lot more reverence and care than man is currently doing.
Reginald Ofodile with his ‘The prettiest warrior’, and Akeem Lasisi’s ‘The divination’, where “the earth flounders, totters to a stop”, thus foretelling the tragic consequences of man’s activities on the environment, where “the sun rising from the east/is yet to land in the west/detained by vagrant smoke”, ostensibly from the activities of gas flaring and illegal refineries in the Niger Delta as double acts of environmental degradation and sabotage that harm the earth irrevocably.
Yinka Davies invoked her duet with the masked musical icon, Lagbaja, in ‘Wherever’, a tune that was the rave of ea.rly 2000s.
Special guest poet, Ofeimun’s two poems ‘Geography of fate’ and ‘Lagoon’ were fitting voices in the cause of earth yearning for rebirth, as the programme’s promise in the varied spatial attention to issues of environmental degradation in the far-flung oil-rich Niger Delta region in need of healing and Lagos, with its alluring lagoon and how it has inspired a generation of poets to produce sublime poetry.
Indeed, it was an ‘evening of ideas, rhythms and reasons around climate change and the environment’ in Providus Bank’s promised ‘support of contemporary Nigerian literature’ on World Poetry Day 2021. No doubt, the bank’s support is a direct challenge but more so invitation to other corporate entities to come to the aid of the arts, obviously an endangered sector, for a robust engagement of culture producers and performers with their society, as the case was at last Sunday’s unforgettable evening.
As the chief host of the night, Walter Akpani, managing director of the bank sad, “Issues of the environment and climate change should always be on the front burner. They should always be a talking point and part of the conversation we have in our everyday lives on preserving the earth, which was given to us and which we will also leave for the generations that will occupy after we have all departed.”
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