Message from Aso Rock to a Poet in Exile
- By Pius Adesanmi
- Published June 16, 2005
- Poetry
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Rating:
Pius Adesanmi
Pius Adesanmi, poet and critic, was born in 1972 and obtained a First Class Honours degree in French Studies from the University of Ilorin (1992). He subsequently obtained a Master’s degree and a PhD in the same discipline from the Universities of Ibadan and British Columbia respectively. He has since pursued a career as a scholar of Francophone and Anglophone African and Black Diasporic literatures and cultures. He is a two-time Fellow of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and has guest-lectured widely in Universities in Africa, Europe, and North America. He has contributed essays on literature and culture to several learned journals, literary reviews, newspapers, and edited books. He regularly serves as a manuscript reviewer for literary publications. His poetry collection, The Wayfarer and Other Poems won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize in 2001. He is currently an Associate professor of Literature at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada, and Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL).
View all Entries by Pius AdesanmiYour first coming
Loosed Ita Oko on the land
Where famished crocodiles frolicked in
Anarchy, feeding blood to sand
Your second coming
Loosed the zombies on Odi
They obeyed orders like the folk of Nuremberg
Their act cleansed by your advisors, the oldies
There should be no third coming
Return to your broilers in Ota
Chain sanguinary instincts to Olumo
We shall rid this land of slaughter
From The Way farer and Other Poems
Message from Aso Rock to a Poet in Exile
1
Your grandfather is a pain in the ass
Self-appointed flusher of imaginary morass
He held up a radio station
Screaming of a doomed nation
He raved he saw an open sore
And disturbed our giant snore
We asked him to fend death off our roads
He roamed Western capitals, croaking like a toad
2
Your father, ah, dat one was worse
Small pikin, shouldering a foolish cause
He abused his elders, calling them vultures
A so-called man of culture
He shelled Shell's dollar-spinning pipes
His lips married to his own pipe
We invited him to come and eat
He clung to a pen, clung to shit
3
You, having ventured under Northern skies
Please, remain there in your cage of ice
Oja Oyingbo, beseeched by a million haggling voices
Never notices the absence of one tardy trader
From The Way farer and Other Poems