“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” - Antonio Gramsci


“You, who was born for poetry’s creation,
Do not repeat the sayings of the ancients.” – Anna Akhmatova

“The will of man is beyond surrender.” - Wole Soyinka

“Why is the first window that opens out on this fictional world the consciousness of an idiot?” -J.P Sartre on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury”

I
A writer’s business is to voyage into and take up commands at the threshold of consciousness; and report back freely the news of what is there. This is why the writer in any society being a freelance explorer of spiritually dense zones gains a certain license to behave differently from other people, to be eccentrics in order to fulfil the singularity of his/her vocation in the society. The definition of madness is arbitrary and at most political. The term madness fixes limits and could be exploited for alienating and repressive use; the frontiers of madness define who is ‘Other.’ The exemplary writer is a broker in madness because therein lies the powers of the new. And so when a writer accuses the other of being mad, we should ask what is his definition of madness? In the service of what idea is this definition and in whose interest is this idea?

I read with dismay Odia Ofeimun in his poem Anarch of Hubris (Sunday Mirror, 25 June 2006) deeming Chiedu Ezeanah, a younger poet, a mad, drunkard, morally irresponsible individual who mortgages resources for his wife and daughter to red-light captains simply because Ezeanah self-assertively queries Ofeimun in a soki poem, The Spinner of Dialectics (Sentinel Poetry, #43, June 2006) on why Ofeimun had to release larger doses of himself into his private life. Interestingly, their use of poetry as such flows from the tradition of the neoclassical poets: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Congreve and such use had spun brilliant masterpieces like The Rape Of The Lock, MacFlecknoe, The Dunciad. Had I not reckoned the physics of paradigm shift and boundary maintenance, I would have disqualified my mind and pen from the fray. The godfatherly overstretch is a figuration in the process the older generation employs to pollute the progressive conditions that make vigorous, serious and necessary literature viable. The new Nigerian writer even before s/he is born or converted to one is already encumbered with the triple tropes of sleaze: enfeebling tuitions, philistine criticisms and standards, and insidious paternalism.

Unfortunately, Ibadan has yielded reluctantly its esteemed place as the capital of Nigerian literature and literary criticism to Lagos which unlike the days of Ibadan, is too considerate, obedient, compliant, kabiyesi-ish, worshipful, offensive to life of significant contentions, germane to received and comfortable positions and attitudes, and more about literary politics and self-posturing than critical vitality and qualitative literary tradition. In fact Lagos is an Absurdistan where to write and to line up are synonymous verbs; whereas continual rebellion is the driving force of aesthetic dynamism. Ever since this change of seat, there has being just one man, a Don, who does not entertain questioning, whose over dozen year dictatorship coincides with the inevitable loss called ‘the lost generation’ and his own inevitable literary leanness.

Says Helon Habila: “Odia Ofeimun was probably the most influential and the most visible poet in Nigeria. He was something of a cult figure among young poets, and few poetry books were published in Lagos during the 1990s without his name among the acknowledgements.” (Granta 80: The Group). He later adds: “Some of my friends advised me to get close to Odia Ofeimun, because in Lagos he decided who won which competition.”