The writer is a product of his own society; and the story of all great writers from ages to ages has revolved around the very environment in which they grew up. In this fascinating essay, told in an undeniable powerful prose, Nwakanma, himself, a poet, explores the arresting power of metropolitan Lagos on him and his own generation of writers.

POETRY walks on the streets in Lagos. It is in the incredible dynamic of life which enacts, like some incandescent power, the moment of each living hour: it is in the sense by which, living in this city, a poet glimpses a whole new form of life, and an alternative way in which to experience it fully. This vast, tense and bristling city, its social tendon tautly held by imprecise impulses, reverberates in the poetic propensities which she inspires.

Lying amidst a network of lagoons, from which it derived its name, from early Portuguese adventurers, in some halcyon distance, there is a very animated kind of drama which flows in the bowels of Lagos, just as the sea flows by it. That, in actual fact, can be felt in that subtle sense of perpetual motion, in which Lagos can be discerned. And motion is logistics which the poet Okigbo says is what poetry is. And motion is the spirit of Lagos. A continuous flow of humanity, trapped in the imponderable minutiae of existence: like the stretch of pilgrims from Dan to Beersheba. A going and coming that goes on forever.

I had been born in that other city, Ibadan, some two-hours of hard driving away from Lagos, and which had been celebrated by the famous Nigerian poet, John Pepper Clark, in his poem 'Ibadan'. Of Ibadan, in sharp epigram, J.P Clark had written, with unbearable love:

Ibadan,

Running splash of rust

and gold-flung and scattered

among seven hills like broken

 china in the sun.

But this had been in another age. J.P Clark was living in Ibadan in the 1960s, and was part of the Mbari crowd of Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Uli Bier, which had made Ibadan tick with cultural fervour, until the serious political events which marked that decade, and in which they were all so equi-finally involved, scattered them. But between 1965 and 1966, events moved rapidly to subvert Ibadan's creative conviviality.

It was in this period that I had been born, around Ibadan - to a generation which my friend, the poet Ogaga Ifowodo, born also at this time, many miles away in the deep riverine marshes of Isoko in the Niger Delta, has called 'the still-born generation', an echo, it seems of Wole Soyinka's description of his own generation as the 'wasted generation'.

Events had scarred the times deeply. The post colonial mood of euphoria had twisted into pessimism. The coup which Ifeajuna (although Nigerian newspapermen still attribute it to Nzeogwu) led failed, and it created a momentum of political events, the consequence of which snowballed into a civil war. The wild wind of violent events. But I was born in Ibadan, at this time, in the soul of anomie: when the heat of that social crisis, like molten metaphor inscribed my age. My mother remembers the burnings. The city had erupted into the tragic cycle of violence that had marked the 1960s. How the guardian angel of children, had saved me from death: I, a mere sapling, was lying in my cot in Ibadan. And a huge stone had been lobbed at the window of the bedroom in which I was sleeping, by a rampaging crowd in the city, smashing the glass. But, both the broken pieces of glass and the stone, fell just inches away from my bed!

The weakened threshold of our humanity, has been the single most potent inspiration, in the works of my generation - from writers like, Esiaba Irobi, Ike Okonta, Uche Nduka, Maik Nwosu, Chiedu Ezeana to painters like Olu Oguibe, Syl Ogbechie, Chika Okeke, Krydz Ikwuemesi etc; who survived the war and still live with its consequence. It has been a reaching out for certitudes, for the whorl of reason which should explain our conditions, as victims of a still violent, post-war society. The event of the war has driven many of us to the most critical conflict of our lives: we are conflicted on two important question of allegiances - to our nation, which we question because we feel like exiles in Nigeria, and to our heritage, which we question because it seems to have failed us. The poet, painter, and professor of modern African arts at the University of Florida in the United states, Olu Oguibe, captures this dilemma of allegiance in his recent essay on Biafra, titled 'the killing Fields', in the Transition magazine.

Oguibe belongs to my generation, marked deeply by war. This dilemma has been narrated, but no one yet has told the full stories, for it seems that the true chroniclers of the last war, will not be, those who fought, but it will be those who were wounded by it: these are the children of war, born mostly between the eve of Nigeria's independence and the end of the decade of the 1960s.