“The elders of time are gathered tonight  Round Eternity’s fire burning bright

Rallied together to know your score

Child don’t panic, we’ve seen you before”

THE 21st century began, it appears for African literature, with frenetic and varied poetic output from voices highly differentiated in technique, aesthetic approach and thematic concern. The voices also differ in many respects but are collectively moored, unlike 20th century African writing, which mirrored Europe as much as it did Africa, to a discernible tradition of African tropes. Prefatory comments ought not to overly generalize, however, and the offerings of Oka Obono’s debut collection Shadrach and Other Poems (Khalam Editions, South Africa; 2013) are as much about tradition as they are about individual talent.

A student of African poetry will immediately recognize in the excerpt quoted from Birth of a South African Orphan the extrapolation of private pre-occupation and musing echoed in both J.P Clark’s ‘Abiku’ and also Wole Soyinka’s poem of the same title. One of the differences here is that the voice in Birth is not indulging in any dramatic monologue like the poems referred to above. The voice narrates, moderates, is tempered as steel. The voice does not assume the consciousness of the child. What we have is a prismatic view of phenomena all too common on the continent, and an economy of emotion which suggests acclimatization or a scholar’s distance.

The ironies in the poetry of Obono are subtle and nuanced. Anyone who has been inside the Rainbow Nation, for instance, knows that the deleterious effects of the system known as Bantu education are still very much alive. One consequence of this is the funny fact that South Africans, both black and white, refer to other people from the continent as Africans. As if they were somewhat different, creatures from Krypton perhaps. But paying close attention, Obono’s audience discovers that, though far from any form of homogeneity, Africans and indeed other citizens of the world share certain commonalities which are called, for convenience, the human condition. No one is exempt. The tourist from Germany contemplating the Sphinx, the travelling French writer passing from Onitsha to Asaba at dawn, the Kenyan student on field study in Mexico, these are all elements of the new poetics which, a century back in time, would hardly characterize the poetry of poets on the continent. The lesson? The African is not where you left him. She moved on.

What might a systematic rather than a random study of Shadrach and Other Poems reveal? We do well to begin at the beginning.

“On the road again,

A silly raindrop splashes

Smack on my nose

Flattening it some more”

– Preludes

“What is the structure of an illusion?

Is it big, or small?

Does it crouch, or stand tall?

– Illusions

“I am the fish who slipped away

Through your net,

Fisherman.

– I Am the Fish who Slipped Away

These are all excerpts from opening lines from the first poem in the collection, the poem in the approximate middle and the last poem in the collection. They are preponderantly liquid, changeable as changelings, clever. The playfulness in these poems is the velvet that sometimes conceals granite. And yes, though we hardly call it rockfalls, it is only a fool that surmises waterfalls as consisting of water alone. There is much to say, of course, on an element so recurrent in the poetic practice of any poet but all in due time.

Obono plays at self-deprecation in a manner assured to throw the unobservant. In Preludes for example, with faint echoes of Wordsworth, Isaac Newton and Okigbo, the poetic persona crystallizes racial identity with the aid of an element and of course he drives it home with the force of gravity. He early introduces kinesis, poetic resistance to inertia, and the embodiment of aspirations on a journey. He is undeniably African, no chisels will ever erase the outlines of that nose as indeed happened with the couchant Sphinx. This poet is aware of physical and metaphysical dimensions of life and thought, of the power of singularity and reflection, of the eternity of words above basalt.

It is a motif that the poet deploys time and again in the body of his work. The poetics of Obono is as much against rigidity as it is against stasis. Indeed, the conclusion from the biological sciences from the end of the 19th  century is that it is not the strongest or most intelligent that survives but the most adaptable. And creativity is about adaptability as it is about ideology or fun.  Obono’s metaphysics is intriguing, he imposes geometries on chance, shapes upon illusions and conclusions from intersecting nature. It is refreshing, like a walk in the rain, but also dangerous, thunder may strike.

The unapologetic stance of the mind in these poetic creations is protean and emphatically Christian even as it is scientific and subversively methodical. Regale yourself with the last poem in the collection. In it, the reader will hear vivid echoes of the voice that first intoned that the meek shall inherit the earth. Witness the literary transfiguration of the poetic persona, from the ichthys that escaped the fisherman’s net to the bird that escaped the fowler to the child that stayed with the mother. The audience overhears a triumphalist tone which is tempered as the anthropogenic denouement approaches. The poetics here can be overly self-aware and deft for the neophyte, the shifts in mood a shade too subtle for the untrained eye. But in the enduring fact that they underscore hope, they thrive beyond ‘Abiku’ reach.

The reader may eventually come to excuse the flourishes of the soul expressed in some of the lines if they appear too indulgent. The story of the manuscript which ultimately became Shadrach and Other Poems is by itself absorbing and compelling. The poet had, over a period spanning close to a decade, written the individual poems in this collection. They were, for the most part, woven from the fabric of his crests and troughs and clearly have the texture of the times they were garnered. Then came, unannounced, a fire that gutted the office in which the manuscript was kept. Everything else burnt but the manuscript which was in an oxygen-starved drawer in the inferno. After the fire was doused, the manuscript was the only item salvaged practically intact. It had indeed come a long way.

The title poem is in this sense a re-animation of the word that became idea and thus indestructible. The greatest poets of the last century, Ceslaw Milosz among them, have maintained the validity and potency of the visionary imagination fed by positive religion and by intellectual curiosity. In this age, it has become almost anathema to even be sympathetic to religion. Yet the human condition has undeniably been advanced by it even if at intervals, the fanatic gene had mutated into cancerous growth. The amiable thing is that Obono’s poetics is stalwart, intellectually virile and constructively religious, a rare thing indeed. He brings to bear on his poetic creations the sum total of lived experience as well as fitting these with imaginative wings. The patient reader can actually see how the body of work came together in the poet’s mind, playfully, with damascene intricacy and the lightest touch of capacious philosophy. Death may be present but life won’t be denied.

Time and space will not allow simultaneous treatment of both the aesthetics and the poetics of the new work under review but it is clearly the product of a fine sensibility. There are a hundred and ten poems in this collection, the quality of the poems are uneven, they range from the excellent, supremely wrought to the so-so. But taken altogether, I, personally find myself agreeing unequivocally with the writer of the volume’s foreword, Dr. Obododimma Oha, that there is sufficient spark, crackle, rage and glow here to announce the arrival of a fine imaginative spirit in the firmament of our letters. I am glad that, like the phoenix, from the ashes rose, not the remains, but the burnished essence of a mind genuinely at work.