The autobiographical impulse is clear in the book, especially as we see pointers to the circumstances of his birth, nurture and familial conditions. From its dedication to his elder brother Alhaji Abdulmumini Denja Abdullahi, it is evident that the author of On his Turf is connected to folks who render service to the community. — Mabel Evwierhoma, Review of On His Turf II
A LIFE of creativity is one that is difficult to shackle. It escapes like the fumes of smoke from tightly shut doors of encumbrances and limitations. Creativity manifests and is. It exists and is what it is, across forms in time and space. A focus on the creativity of Denja Abdullahi facilitates a scope that may transcend individual capture of his views. A panel of this nature may result in each contributor’s encounter in one or more areas of his metier. Art is long, and the time span it has taken to manifest and continue to manifest cannot be captured at a go, as each interpretive incident is a fusion of different stipulations of familiarity with the work(s) in question.
Going the way of Denja Abdullahi’s creative inclination is recognition of his literary output, first as experienced first-hand, as reinterpreted and as perceived along socio-political indices of community, citizenship and nationhood.
A sense of community or gemeinschaft and impersonal duty to a system, gesellschaft remain in evident display in what we come across in the creativity of Abdullahi. The encounter shows up generically, but seeps through what has been captured in his service in literature, citizenship, brotherhood, communality and the continued proof of the ceaseless truth by Hippocrates, ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’. The length of time between Denja Abdullahi’s art is between five years to nine years and almost a decade. This shows that, like many artists, his works mature over time before they appear in print.
Poetry
- Mairogo: A Buffoon’s Poetic Journey around Northern Nigeria (2001)
- A Thousand Years of Thirst (2011)
- The Road to Bauchi and other Poems (2019)
To wit, Abdullahi’s poetry is rooted in the circumstances of his mental and physical milieu. This framework is consistent in the poems he has birthed. He pursues the necessity of the freedom of thought through the various tropes of his poetry. It is this quest for liberty that one alluded to in referring to smoke fumes that cannot be constrained, because it is determined to prove its existence by the evidence of its being. The creative vortex in each effort is a way of creating the meeting point of the poet, poet-persona and the many threads that eventually become tapestries of thought.
The sustenance of his personal interests has been shown to collide with group efforts or national ethos in some areas. In The Road to Bauchi and Other Poems, the four sections are indicative of the poet’s intense energies at being ‘sent’ or transferred to an outstation of lean human and material resources required for his job, courtesy of the dictates of his job, or the whims of the ‘mad mullah’. Being far-flung to Bauchi from Abuja bears an air of disciplinary or penal bureaucracy, but from the act is the collection of experiences fragmented into ‘Bauchi Poems’, ‘Haiku Poems’ ‘Of People and Places’ and ‘Receding Song’. In Bauchi Abdullahi regained his fecund literary voice.
The harvest of thoughts and tunes in the collection arrays culture, bureaucracy, history, religion, domesticity, morality, geo-politics, masculinity, politics, femininity, architecture, landscape and sundry issues in defiance of official punishment posting and relish of divine opportunities that surely appear in such punitive period. Poems like ‘Tafawa Balewa’ (p. 18), a town, refers not just to the location, but is evocative of the first Prime Mister of Nigeria, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, already referred to by Denja Abdullahi in the poem “Invocation from the Ribat’ (p. 10) as ‘the golden voice’ (l. 25). ‘Yankari’, is about the disordered ‘afterthought’ game reserve in Bauchi State that needs proper oversight. In ‘Dass Rocks’ (p. 20), the poet contrasts foreign religions and ‘heathens’ and unconsciously says the settlement is cuddled by the physical space of the so-called heathens.
The human angle and posture in the collection boasts of interaction dynamics that span the stealthily furtive to the openly discursive across different spheres of quotidian life. The prefatory caveat preceding the poems that “Some of the poems addressed or dedicated to seemingly female personas are merely serving as muses with no intended or realised amorous dealings involved”! (p.6). Such sanctimonious morality or piety is unnecessary in an artistic enterprise. The universe of the poet is full of make-believe and imitative notions that suffice as illustrations, mental configurations, virtual humanity or spatiality and not the real. If this were genuine, many writers would be in the gulag of social sanctions and even physical custodial or detention centres for (un)conscious immorality. We all remember the Romantic Poets and their exploits in writing about nature, passion, sentiment and illogical or unrequited love. Is it possible to have ‘seemingly’ female personas? Even as open as ‘The Ever-Pouting Girl’ Munachimso poem (p. 49) is, the reader should be allowed the liberty of unfettered response to any work of art, because, to every reader should be his or her attained meaning. The poem ‘Love Found at UI Gate (p. 51) also makes reference to feminine bodily attributes that do not rein in amorous affection. This claim is open to further analysis as it comes between the true flow of the creative impulse and its (re)interpretation. The haiku poems are reminiscent of such endeavours by Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Akachi Ezeigbo, Ibrahim Nureni, Barnabas Adeleke Emmanuel Abdalmasih Samson, Precious Oboh and many other Nigerian poets who have ventured into the Japanese art.
To Denja Abdullahi, “My style right from the beginning of my writing till now has maintained a consistency of commitment to the functionality of the literary arts” (Litreview; Par 6). Again, he calls his poems ‘topo-poetry’, geographically and context-based poetry. This point is affirmed in The Road to Bauchi and other Poems.
In A Thousand Years of Thirst, Abdullahi continues the expedition into the millennium imagery that created the hurried approach to computerisation, innovation and other forms of technological intervention in and control of human endeavour. This is evident in the journey across international or intercontinental spaces of experiences that became worthy of being penned on paper. One recalls the ominous ‘millennium time-bomb and other clichés that propelled Nigerians to hastily embrace computerisation, or upgrade the ones already in use by civil servants and the educated elite, mainly. A millennium is 1000 years and this collection, suffused with the poet’s ancestry, attempts to capture past familial and political issues that stray continuously into current matters of concern and disquiet. In between such weighty matters are emotions incumbent and prospective. These passionate sentiments in A Thousand Years of Thirst are also in four sections like The Road to Bauchi, but more poems engage with the audience in the latter collection. In all, 76 poems expose the universe of the poet, his life as a wandering minstrel, the rediscovery of his voice and therefore purpose and the crowning of the creative expedition with African love songs. The pleasure in the text are also found in the graphic illustrations that make communication and meaning easy.
Drama
- Death and the King’s Grey Hair (2014)
- Chants in a Cemetery (2025)
In his drama, the need for transformation and continuity is dominant in the use of inter and intra-communal politics to drive amity and coexistence in peace not just in pre-colonial setting, but contemporary sites. Death and the King’s Grey Hair is not a recent play, having been staged in 1995 and 2015, a year after its publication in 2014. This initial pattern of time and spacing of his creative works are evident in this trajectory. Since 2014, there are several productions of the play across several enactment stages within and without Higher Educational Institutions in Nigeria. The seeming conflict between death and the grey hair of the king plays out in the desire for rulers that are young and with brevity of reign on the ancestral throne of Shakaga. The king must not outlive his subjects (p. 12). The demands of governance must wear him out so that he dies within a short time, according to the 4th Wiseman. To Otolofon, another Wiseman, the fifth of all the seven men with wisdom, “It is the presence of grey hairs that terminate the rule of kings in our land” (p.13). No society accepts vengeful governance or illegal tenure elongation. Africa seems to be an arena of governance by longevity. To the Voice: “… a very long life on the throne makes a king a tyrant” (p. 20). People’s power, mass power of the critical checks and balances to governance, is never impeded once set in motion by the queries that propel them. The people ask: “… since when has tyranny been allowed in this land”? … “Must we all sit down and allow the king to turn us into slaves in our own land”? (p. 25). The play like many royalty drama, or plays of the ‘beaded curtain’ exposes tyranny and unpopular governance.
Where in his poetry women are mainly objects of beauty to be gazed at with male eyes, in Death and the King’s Grey Hair, Woman, becomes the active and proactive member of the community. The kitchen has no restraining power against their activism and communal agency. They remind the land of the irresistible power of women “no weapon of violence or power can stand that which the gods have given to women … ” (p. 26). The play ends with a poetic rendition, capitalising the playwright’s cross-generic approach to writing. Gabisi’s son ululates:
The battle may rage with mountains of death
But someone will always remain to tell the story.
After all is said and done,
The word will remain to outlive all things.
Wisdom is the pride of man;
A land in the hands of the wise
Shall never go astray.
Those entrusted with power
Should not get drunk from its fumes
Those who are not with it
Should watch with wide-opened eyes
The people will always outlive all evils.
Beat the gong with festive frenzy;
Blow the trumpet to high heaven.
Caress the drum like a fond friend;
Call the flutist to commune with the wind.
Mark this end, mark this beginning. (Pp 55-6).
Abdullahi converts some latent issues and terminologies in his poetry to drama. One of such is the term ‘chants’. His recent play gets a lot of serious contemplation on the mantra of verbal communication, or conversation, dialogue and speech, between a master and his apprentice. On reading the play, I told Abdullahi that the play would have been better as prose-fiction, or a novella, given the subject matter. Prose would have made aspects of the morbid or deathly a psychological offer of the lone-reader assessment of the logicality of existence, or life. As a play, the challenges of its setting are obvious, except with the use of the Brechtian multimedia and suspension of belief approaches to easily overcome them. In the comparison of faith, sensibilities are almost assaulted as the audience would not definitely be a single faith one, in respect of the many belief systems that they may belong to. The pretence to know another faith more than the believer in it is an aspect that should have been dulled. Nevertheless, Chants is a soul-searching play on the vanity of life as depicted in Ecclestiastes 1: on the empty and fleeting nature of life, a belief which one wagers exists in other faith.
That effort in prose narrative, would also have engaged him as a full junction creative, in three of the major genres of literature, in addition to being an essayist and culture advocate and agent. In Chants, the subject matter of death is accompanied by class and a subtle conflict in religious amity that should exist in a multi-cultural society like Nigeria. The pupil-mentor liaison in a cemetery divests itself in lessons on the ways of the world in an era of crass acquisition of material resources.
Embrace of Theatre with Poetry
Theatre fuses with poetry as observed above. I aver that Denja Abdullahi is a junction creative like others Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Sam Ukala, Olu Obafemi, Tess Onwueme, Mabel Evwierhoma, and several others whose intersections of creative forces like vortices, prove a commitment to and generate love for the arts, build community strengths like this panel is doing now. It often manifests in experimentation with words seen in the early plays of Soyinka and Clark, with the dialogue of characters sounding poetic. The songs in the drama also pass for poetry from the arrangement of the lines and posture of the artist. The Road, Song of a Goat, amidst some early drama, showcased the influence of Classical drama written in verse and the plays of William Shakespeare. It is worthy to note that Shakespeare was an intersection writer, spanning sectors of the embrace between genres.
The efforts between pliers of the creative delivery of action in space and time like play directors and producers reveal this hold of theatre and poetry. Words come alive in the practical display of performed or performance poetry on stage, because of its live, spontaneous nature and the presence of the audience.
This connection may be borne out of interest, talent, or a call to duty as a professional writer. New vistas have opened before us in ANA as a result of this embrace that shows the word as central to what we do. The word is king and helps to shape lives. In Abdullahi, and from the few works authored by him that I have read, the pointed focus at social criticism through poetry and drama has connected his poems and drama. One recalls the performance of Mairogo years ago at the Cyprian Ekwensi Cultural Centre in a show of this embrace. Embodied poetry and theatre may fuse to generate further visions of creativity.
The capacity to pursue the ways of theatre through poetry and poetry though performance is an aspect of rounded artistry before an audience or when recorded for further viewing and pleasure. This has proved some of the dramatists-cum-poets or dramatists-poets to evince deep creativity that proves the African essence of fused, or total theatre. The return is preached by Denja in A Thousand Years of Thirst and is a pointer to indigenous performances of fused aesthetics.
Conclusion
To conclude my intervention, I have some questions concerning Abdullahi’s creativity: Is Denja Abdullahi a dialectical writer? To what sense can we adduce the dialectical in materialistic terms or otherwise to his drama, or poetry?
References
Abdullahi, D. (2001). Mairogo: A Buffoon’s Poetic Journey around Northern Nigeria. Makurdi: Aboki Publishers.
Abdullahi, D. (2011). A Thousand Years of Thirst. Ibadan: Kraft Books, Ltd.
Abdullahi, D. (2014). Death and the King’s Grey Hair. Ibadan: Kraft Books, Ltd.
Abdullahi, D. (2019). The Road to Bauchi and other Poems. Ibadan: Kraft Books, Ltd.
Abdudullahi, D. (2025). Chants in a Cemetery. Ibadan: Kraft Books, Ltd.
Obiahu, B. “Interview with Denja Abdullahi; Distinguished Nigerian Literary Leader” DLitreview: A World of Words. dLitreview.com/interview-with-denja-abdullahi-distinguished-nigerian-literary-leader/ Accessed 30th August, 2025.
- Mabel I. E. Evwierhoma is of Department of Theatre Arts, University of Abuja
