A towncrier's pain

The poet in Ogbowei's Song of a Dying River enters in the fashion of an Old Testament prophet - blunt and uncompromising. He is a verbal militant, forward and aggressive in his righteous outbursts, pointing accusatory fingers at and naming the names of those involved in the rape of the "dying river", his personified Niger-Delta.

‘Song of a Dying River' which is the title of the collection as well as the title of the first poem in the collection, opens with an extended simile in which the poet compares the condition of the Niger-Delta people to that of a lover mourning the exit of her beloved. "Two disoriented dolphins" apparently beached and left to drown in "our oil-clad creek"; two "cold" cormorant (this poem rocks with the intertextual echo of a poetic conversation across generations in its evocation of J.P.Clark-Bekederemo's ‘Night Rain', of the child which like a fish doped out of the deep bobbed up bellywise) and finally, travellers bombed out of the sky, Lockerbie-style.

Here the poet tries to capture the sense of loss and destruction that fractures the otherwise stable life of his people. He delves into the world of music for metaphors to explain the dissonance that steals into the otherwise harmonious notes of the guitar that become "querulous" while the "tremulous notes of a shy tenor sax/reach beyond the courtyard..."

Like in Lindsay Barrett's ‘A Memory of Rivers' in which the singing river becomes angry, Ogbowei's poem points in the direction of how the injustice perpetrated against the long-suffering people of the Niger Delta will eventually lead to and "explode" in anger, with the people asking questions and demanding answers to their state of manumission amid much wealth. And such questions as will be asked will be hot and aggressive, calling for violent action where, assumedly, no answer is provided.

What follows this is that the former "paradise in the sun", the homeland of the people that has become jailhouses (p.28) that is full of strife (p.68-69) will slip into "savagery"; the river will become ravenous, "torrential muddy" and "shovels away/the caving shoreline" (‘patience's portly prince').

The can for such rape of a people's natural patrimony is laid squarely on the head of "the owl of owu", former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is elsewhere in this collection (see ‘for gabriel okara' and ‘the leopard of owu') variously referenced and caricatured as the "the leopard of owu" and the "potbellied balogun", Balogun (the warrior) being Obasanjo's traditional chieftaincy title in Owu, his hometown.

In spite of their age and long experience ("hoary heads") as statesmen, the likes of Obasanjo are presented as lacking in wisdom and only good at fanning the embers of discord. "...the bawling infant's dream", the poet says "reveals hoary heads/dexterous drummers/dancing down a bruised boulevard/to discover a new dawn/in the mambo massage/where potbellied balogun/squanders police pension funds/on plump prostitutes." There is a hint of pun in the word ‘balogun' which might also be a reference to Tafa Balogun, the disgraced former Inspector General of Police convicted for misappropriation of funds.

The overt political tone of Ogbowei's lines and their location in contemporary experience is given added resonance in ‘for jomo gbomo' (p.51 and references to other militant leaders like Asari Dokubo, Ateke Tom and Oronto Douglas, etc), the fire-eating spokesperson of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta or MEND, the umbrella body of the ‘reintegrated' militant groups of the troubled region.

Here the poet sees his people as "little foxes", mere fodder, yes - the proverbial grass that is caught and suffers in the crossfire ("this sport of kings"), between two elephants, in this wise MEND and the pacifying force of the Nigerian state. In spite of his support for the militant response of his people, the poet always manages to represent them as the little underdog faced with the wily, hectoring might of a repressive adversary, an enemy that is determined to ride roughshod over them.

Perhaps as a consequence of this representation, he extends the world of his criticism from Nigeria to include other despots around the world, known traducers of their peoples' rights and freedom: Radovan Karadzic and Robert Mugabe et al.

Despite the concentrated repetitiveness of their thematic thrusts and thus the monotony that follows such thematisation, Ogbowei manages to convey a sense of the Niger-Delta as a paradisiacal region taken over and corrupted by an invading horde, mere treasure hunters without thought for her future.

If poetry could put right what has been made wrong, capture the agony, pathos and anger - the sheer ugliness of man's destructive impulse, Song of a Dying River is fitting parchment for the struggle for such enterprise - the emancipation of the Niger-Delta as well as all other deprived regions of the world.