Welding worlds with words

Globetrotter & Hitler's Children

By Amatoritsero Ede

106 pp; Black Goat (Akashic Books)

Literary creation teems with polarities, and the diverse worlds of the imagination can only find sublime resolution through language. In an age of instant migration, purity of place counts for nothing. Writers and sundry artists bring to bear vistas of their old worlds to bear on their new worlds, via words of wonder and wander.

Amatoritsero Ede has travelled the continents carrying his native Nigeria along like a hunchback; his heady career including a spell as a Hindu monk with the Hare Krishna sect.

Most accomplished poets across the globe publish their ‘Collected Poems’ edition toward the end of their careers, but a certain poet, then known as Godwin Ede, bucked that trend when his very first collection bore that coveted title in 1998.

Actually, the first part of Ede’s Collected Poems, ‘A Writer’s Pains’, took the 1993 Association of Nigerian Authors’ (ANA) poetry runner-up prize in manuscript.

That first collection, published by Yeti Press, Bremen, Germany, in 1998, was divided into two parts: ‘A Writer’s Pains’ and ‘Caribbean Blues’, with the poem ‘for Ken Saro-Wiwa’ serving as some kind of breaker in the middle. It won the ANA All-Africa Christopher Okigbo poetry prize.

Ede’s current locale in Canada accounts for the first section of his new collection of poems, ‘globetrotter & hitler’s children, while his earlier stay in Germany informs the second section. The poles of Europe and North America meld into an engaging brew of metaphors and images from off Amatoritsero Ede’s smithy.

It has to be stressed from the very beginning that the ‘globetrotter’ section is a kind of manumission for Ede from the constriction of the “hitler’s children” phase, though the poet who has the Yoruba god of mischief, Esu, as his patron saint somewhat places hibernation after liberation, or more correctly, nightmare after dream!

Like the great American poet, ee cummings, amatoritsero ede is lower case all the way in ‘globetrotter & hitler’s children’.

The two sections each have 26 poems with the letters of the alphabet, a to z, serving as the titles, save for a handful, such as ‘The Skinhead’s Lord’s Prayer’, ‘Anike’, ‘The Crescent and the Cross’, ‘Rust’, ‘Speaking in Tongues’ and ‘Exile’.

The experimental sweep of Ede evinces the driving spirit of the publishing outfit Black Goat, “an independent poetry imprint of Akashic Books created and curated by award-winning Nigerian author Chris Abani”, who serves as the series editor.

The first Black Goat title that landed on my table back in 2007 was Uche Nduka’s 152-page eel on reef which completely shuns linear meaning for in-your-face percussive mellifluousness.

In the poetry of Ede, meaning makes sound not unlike Okigbo, for as T.S. Eliot writes in his epochal essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance; his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”

Ede keeps great company of master poets such as Okigbo, and then Tchicaya U’Tamsi, cummings, William Carlos Williams, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, but he retains an originality that shuns affectation.

Ede’s temporal and spiritual journeys as limned in his lines recall French poet Paul Valery’s words, to wit, “It is the very one who wants to write down his dream who is obliged to be extremely awake.” In the wakefulness of the fully lived life, the migratory poet’s Toronto progressively becomes, in different guises; Amsterdam, Prague and London.

To contain the many worlds of the poet, it is necessary to break all borders and boundaries. To find a core, most artists find that they are in need of flight. It is akin to the search for meaning in a menacingly absurd world. In Ede’s poetry, it all coheres in the breaking of all bonds of division for his democratic art: where all colours meet a rainbow democracy.

The grimmer side of things in the ‘hitler’s children’ section is livened by the introit; a mischievous subversion of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ entitled ‘The Skinhead’s Lord’s Prayer’: “our father who art in Valhalla harrowing be thine name.”

The entire section bears the ominous title ‘Not in Love’. The controversial thesis on depersonalisation as espoused by Eliot is juxtaposed with the otherness in a society that somewhat separates the poet from the poetry. Science and art are at odds in a land of hate.

Ede sees his poetry here, in a pain-laden ‘Foreword’, as “a poet’s document and testament to the xenophobia that is eating away at the fabric of an apparent democracy in Germany, for one, and in a larger EU to varying degrees.”

As if from a coven, the poet manages to find the voice that echoes James Joyce, author of Ulysses: “history is a nightmare roars joyce without voice from the abyss…” Amatoritsero Ede writes as though with his own blood lines that haunt.

In Ede’s mind, history and science bring to bear on the page truths that are burdensome. Race remains an inescapable ambit of the cosmos, and Ede is unafraid to rend the cosmos if it comes to that. His wordplay is spot on and the control over language is never indulged.

A gifted witness, Amatoritsero Ede deserves celebration.

Uzoatu, author of ‘God of poetry’ lives in Lagos.