Odia Ofeimun: The Writer And His Society

By Dan Amor

When it dawned on me recently that my boss, Odia Ofeimun would turn 70 today, I was confused. I was confused not because I didn't know what to write about my master or how to write it but about which one to write on. I asked my humble self: should I write about the poetry of Odia Ofeimun, or should I write about Odia Ofeimun's language and philosophy or about Odia Ofeimun and his aesthetics? 

*Odia Ofeimun

Indeed, I was really confused, for it is patently difficult to write about a griot whose life experience cuts across almost all facets of human endeavours. As a polyvalent genius, Odia is grounded in almost all the major contemporary schools of critical theory: from analytic philosophy to reconstructed Marxism, from poststructuralism to postcoloniality, and from feminism to recuperated phenomenology.

Besides having started life as a factory boy, news reporter and civil servant before gaining admission to study political science at the University of Ibadan, Odia also worked as a teacher, as an administrative secretary in the Federal Public Service Commission, as private (political) secretary to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, leader of the Unity Party of Nigeria in the Second Republic before joining the editorial board of The Guardian. He also studied at Oxford University on a Commonwealth fellowship. Returning to Nigeria at the crisis over the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election believed to have been won by the multi billionaire business mogul, Chief MKO Abiola, he wrote columns for The Guardian On Sunday, the Nigerian Tribune, as well as contributing to many other Nigerian newspapers. He was the chairman of the editorial board of A.M.News, TEMPO and TheNEWS magazines.

Odia Ofeimun is the author of more than 40 works. His published collections of poetry include: The Poet Lied (1980), A Handle for The Flutist (1986), Dreams At Work And London Letters and Other Poems (2000). His poems for dance drama, Under African Skies (1990), and Siye Goli - A Feast Of Return (1992), were commissioned and performed across the UK and Western Europe by Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble in the early 1990s, and his most recent poem for dance drama, Nigeria The Beautiful, has been staged through major Nigerian cities to wide acclaim. In 2010, Ofeimun received the Fonlon-Nichols Award for literary excellence and propagation of Human Rights, which was conferred on him by the African Literature Association.

But combing through the entire gamut of Odia Ofeimun's creative, critical, journalistic and intellectual writings which happens to be the focus of the Odia at 70 festival on the theme, Taking Nigeria Seriously: A Conference In Honour Of Odia Ofeimun, I wish here to ruminate on Odia's contribution to African literature and his aesthetic value to the Nigerian imagination. In fact, it is possible to distinguish three distinctive though overlapping phases in the criticism of Odia Ofeimun and his work. The first centres on the validity of Ofeimunian gorilla foci in his work (whether poetry or prose) as an adequate rendering of the African experience. This phase began with the first critical evaluation of his works by the late Prof. Harry Garuba in The Guardian Literary Series in 1988.

To quote Garuba: " 'The Poet Lied' begins with the poem "How Can I sing?" This poem, acting as some kind of introit to the collection, sets the tone of all of Odia Ofeimun's poetry. Evoking a "landscape of putrefying carcasses in the market place, he asks, how he can sing. Feeling muzzled by the morbid of his anguish into "a garland of subversive litanies". The entire corpus of Ofeimun's poetry never move far away from this intense awareness of decadence and a seething animal passion defines his commitment to eradicating this." The great acclaim accorded 'The Poet Lied' tended to legitimatize Odia Ofeimun as a major Nigerian poet and writer. The second phase followed the publication of 'A Handle For The Flutist' (1976) and 'Dreams At Work And London Letters and Other Poem' (2000).

The emphasis now was less on the social and ethical acceptability of his poetry and more in his political and philosophical ideas. The third follows his dance drama and cultural tours of the U.K. and other European countries, which accentuated his looming stature as an international literary personality and African cultural ambassador. From the first phase, discussion on Odia Ofeimun and his writing has often served as a vehicle for cultural and literary polemics. Although scholarly criticisms that would seek to confront basic issues and assumptions in the interpretation about Ofeimun's life and writing are scarce, no thanks to intellectual laziness on the part of our army of literary scholars and critics, few Nigerian writers, except, perhaps, Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, Osundare and Saro-Wiwa, have occasioned as much criticism or commentary in the Western press which reveals more about its moment than about its ostensible subject.

From 'The Poet Lied' to the present, an opportunity to examine Odia Ofeimun also has meant an opportunity to press the claims of a particular view of the African imagination and a specific concept about the nature of poetry. But Odia Ofeimun is more than just a poet. To study Ofeimun is to receive an education in the ways in which art and society interact when an artist devotes most of his career to attacking the prevailing assumptions of his society. Some of us were not born when Christopher Okigbo was alive and did not have the privilege to know him and to learn at his feet. But I was an apprentice writer under Dr. Sina Odugbemi and Odia Ofeimun and I can comment on them convincingly as my mentors. Those of us who celebrate Ofeimun not merely are praising a writer whose works move us. We also are seeking to cast Ofeimun in the symbolic role of the trailblazer whose willingness not to ignore or openly challenge the conventional beliefs and genteel codes of a stultifying social order in the African experience has opened a way for others. If Ofeimun's feet were heavy and brutal, it was because he has had a mountain of resistance to scale.

If his works appear to lack "beauty", it is because the concept of beauty has degenerated into a belief in mere surface grace and polish. But no poet in Africa and the world at large can be more polished in aestheticism than Odia Ofeimun. A multitude of revolutionary, often complex and contradictory, currents of thought and feeling swept over Nigeria in the 1960s and the social upheavals even resulted in a shooting war. It was this development which men of creative genius caught up and gave lasting expression in literature, philosophy, music, and art. Indeed, by their writings and their examples, the philosophers and men of letters in particular as often directed as they were directed by, the revolutionary forces which surrounded them and of which they were a part. The individual roles they played in the progress of that momentous period cannot easily be exaggerated.

It was this that sharpened Ofeimun's tentacles and critical sallies as a revolutionary writer with a fighting spirit. But Odia is a complete writer who does not suffer fools gladly. If members of the older generation of our writers were in love with illusions, and looked at truth through a glass darkly and timorously, Ofeimun roars at absurdities. The artist, tongue-tied by authority and trammelled by aesthetic and moral conventions, selected, suppressed and rearranged the data of experience and observation. The critic, morally subsidized, regularly professes his disdain for a work of art in which no light glimmers above "the good and the beautiful." Ofeimun's generation is fearless and is freeing itself from illusions. Yet, the first step towards the definition of Ofeimun's special contribution to our literature, our world, is to blow away the dust with which the exponents of the new realism seek to becloud the perceptions of our readers.

The impressive unity of effect produced by Odia Ofeimun's works is due to the fact that they are all illustrations and expose' of our crude and naively tragic and violent social order. His art, with its bewildering masses of anger, is a ferocious ocean of argument in behalf of the brutal wickedness of our thieving ruling class. To the eye cleared of illusion like Ofeimun's, it appears that the ordered life which we call civilization does not really exist except on paper. In reality, our so-called society is a jungle in which the struggle for existence continues, and must continue, on terms substantially unaltered by law, moral and social conventions. As you savour the piquant aroma of your birthday cuisine and exquisite wine in a society that has refused to heed your prophesies, here is yours sincerely saying: Happy birthday, my mentor.

*Amor in a commentator on public issues