Editor’s note: Nigeria as a nation is sick and is in dire need of a healing. Daily the media is fed full with disturbing stories of killing, cases of defilement, kidnapping, electoral violence and a dwindling economy. It won’t be out of place to say that all we see these days only depict a future so bleak.
Some many cases linger in the courts but justice is a dilemma that for too long has plagued the Nigerian masses. The innocents have no say while the guilty ones pay their way out; the masses have lost faith in the judiciary.
The “gods” (spiritual and temporal) are sozzled, they have had their fill of tears and blood used for libation. Women and children daily make fertile pleas to barren “idols” but help remains far from their dwelling places.
Faith needs to be rekindled, hope must be restored, it is in a bid to satisfy these needs that Naij.com has brought together the finest of poets from Nigeria, to react to the pressing situation of Africa’s most populous nation. They say this giant of Africa cannot continue to walk on chop-stick legs.
There words hold the potency of balms to soothe wounded spirits, their verbs could be forged into missives to win the war against injustice. These are to spur actions, guided actions that lead to the highly anticipated transformation in this country.
In this inaugural poets react series, you will find solace in the well crafted works of fellow Nigerians, speaking the consciences of the high, the low; the little and the mighty. Nigeria must be whole again, enjoy these works which soon enough you will realize does not only speak of our experience as Nigerians but the experience of humanity as a whole.
LISTEN
Listen.
That night I walked away from
Your queries and accusing eyes,
The flap-flap sound of my slippers
Played rhythms to the lone tone of
A toad in the dark;
I cried, paused, and cried some more.
Listen.
My luggage is heavy with clothes and complaints
My new accent is penance for my sin in London’s winter.
It sits on my tongue in discomfort, like one sits
On a chair whose leg is broken and shaky.
And who knows, my forefather’s gods might have
Shed tears the size of Agulu Lake; vowing to twist
My tongue back to shapes of riddles and proverbs.
Listen.
There’re more tales in the eyes
Of a lady I met in Leytonstone;
In the voice of a baritone for whom operas
Are bittersweet politics;
In the playfulness of a lad at Robin Hood School;
In the bottles of beer that formed affections in Stratford;
In the laughter of Kim Cheng whose English is Chinese;
In the mind of my professor during a minute of critical thinking;
And in the underground stations where music boards every train:
Listen.
There’re more truths
In the politics of dying and survival;
In the way death commands attention;
In the nod of a lad whose yes means no;
In the anguish of a writer whose ink is dry;
In the bulala of a soldier whose love is cruel;
In Fela’s saxophone whose riffs are prophesies:
Listen.
Listen to the belly of that child
Whose meals are stolen;
His yawns and tears are testifying:
Listen.
Listen to the pains of a sister
Whose star cracked on the altar of rape;
Whose shame, names, blames are badges
For this terror that tears the soul;
Whose voice is shut when voices speak:
Listen.
Listen to the anguish of a Grandpa
Whose pensions are paid in heaven;
Whose fruits of labour are laid
On the tables of men whose motorcades
And sirens stir more dusts that blind
The eyes of a people:
Listen.
Listen to the breath of a brother
Whose shoes have walked a thousand miles
In search of a job that fetches a little or none,
His stories are no news in a land that lends no ear:
Listen.
Listen to the silence of an uncle
Whose life is taken by the potholes that rule the highway
Whose death is one more name in the register of those
Whose martyrdom is a dent on a flag that forgets its own:
Listen.
There’s a poem in the sound of nothing:
Listen.
© Echezonachukwu Nduka 2015
Echezonachukwu Chinedu Nduka (born July 19, 1989) is a Nigerian poet, short story writer and musicologist
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Nduka’s poem Etude won the Bronze Prize at the 4th Korea-Nigeria Poetry Feast. In 2016, he emerged Winner of the 6th Korea-Nigeria Poetry Feast Prize for his poem Listen. One of his spoken word poems titled We Wear Purple Robes is a reflection on terrorism in Nigeria. His poems have been published in several literary journals and anthologies including Sentinel Nigeria, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Kalahari Review, The Bombay Review, Saraba Magazine, Praxis Magazine for Arts and Literature, BrittlePaper, Tuck Magazine, The New Black Magazine, Black Communion: Poems of 100 New African Poets, From Here to There: A Cross Cultural Poetry Anthology, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, The Solace of Nature: An Anthology of International Poetry, The Bombay Review: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry. Some of his poems have been translated into Norwegian, French and Arabic.
Hiram
It is haram to learn how to read
a poem in Maiduguri
words are fishes that own the mouth
of a volcano
whispering their intention to
burn a river
heating its rhymes
bullets
still the river
eyes cold in flames
and water cannot move
after losing all understanding
of how to crawl on its stomach
of how to see the girls
who were seasoned away under the nose of soft-gunned road-blocks
there is a fire in the stomach
what can extinguish
what makes water know its kneel
Saddiq Dzukogi
Saddiq M Dzukogi is an award winning poet, a rising voice in the literary circle in Nigeria. He boasts of two poetry collections; Images of life (2004) and Canvas 2011 – shortlisted for 2012 ANA POETRY PRIZE). He was the maiden winner of ANA/MAZARIYYA TEEN AUTHORSHIP PRIZE for poetry back in 2007. Sunbeams & Shadows, is due for release this year.
BLACK POPE
For Kelechi Obi
The last time I watched TV – chopped
Heads, desiccated,
Like those fried fish we used
To buy from that red kiosk to augment
Garri for lunch—these heads,
Piled up in a street of Maiduguri.
Flailing cars fleeing from terror crushed
Them into liquid. I wonder where the
Headless bodies are – could they have
Been sumptuous delicacies
For vultures? Their flesh wickedly peeled
By honed beaks, their families
At home, waiting at door mouths
Forever?
Maybe you could bequeath
The rest of your life to God—
Become a Catholic priest—your penis
Castrated by the Holy Spirit. Isn’t that
The dream you always dreamed
Before you read the no-sex clause?
Under perforated palm-fronds,
Where sun passed through the holes
Scattering warm stars on the ground,
The picture of a black pope glinted
on your lips.
At the National Cemetery in Abuja,
A Catholic priest prays over
A barrage of bodies, firewood
Lit by the fingers of local terrorists.
Survivors surround the steep grave’s mouth.
You clench a bunch of flowers,
Crying, praying. My friend, listen—
It is time you gave your
Sperm to God.
D.M Aderibigbe
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D.M. Aderibigbe is a 2014 graduate of University of Lagos, studying history and strategic studies. Currently, he’s an MFA in creative writing candidate at Boston University where he’s a BU Fellow. He’s also received fellowships and honours from Oristaglio Family Foundation, Entrekin Foundation, Dickinson House and Callaloo. His poems have appeared in major American and British journals. He’s chapbook In Praise of our Absent Father was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. He lives in Boston, Massachussets.
How Memory Unmakes Us
(for the Buni Yadi boys, February 25, 2014.)
It will take a cinematographer’s eyes,
mine will not do
I admit
and she will need a button that makes and unmakes
memories. Perhaps with her we will go
into that morning again:
Light
dim light actually
the brown of night as it lifts away,
love-sized cupboards in neat rows, we zoom into
shoes and sandals, buckets and hostel bunks, beds
and snores and the kids, 12 year olds or 13 or 14, boys,
spread like peace, asleep.
Some pouting like girls in liquid dreams, others
clutching to the bed for once safe and far from the bully.
Ibrahim too, a half-smile on his face, shy even in his sleep.
His ‘’to do for the Day” sketched on his palm: I will call mummy,
solve some Maths. Will tell Fatoumatou I love her like Lucozade today.
If she starts giggling that way she does,
I will run away.
For a moment our camera pauses, shifts focus and travels up
the wall to a gecko sticking out its tongue like some black
foretelling.
We zoom back to our boys—within that half of a minute—
But there are no boys now. Only ash and screams and
the flailing of arms. The beddings on fire, the buuum
duuum of bombs, the animal calls and howls of the
Militias: Jihadu! Jihadu!
Some of the boys scale the window to sure death,
their weaker friends crying names, reaching out hands
out of this dream of fire. Some writhing on their beds, burning,
too shocked to die.
We are trying to pause the camera now, bidding
the cinematographer to please press the button that unmakes
memories. We are fidgety. Caught as we are between seeing and unseeing. We
are trying to walk out of that morning, muttering to ourselves that we
will walk back to discover
the fire had only been a mishap of seeing. But it is not.
There is a singe and hiss of bodies praying their last,
the unritual twisting of boys and their names into a mess
of flesh. And the clang of death, our death.
The unbelievable fact of history that the sun came out later
that day.
*On the 25th of February 2014, insurgents broke into the dormitory of a boys’ secondary school in Yobe in the early hours of the morning with bombs and guns and arrows. When the smoke cleared 59 boys and their dreams had been killed. The Boko Haram sect later laid claim to the tragedy.
Gbenga Adesina
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Gbenga Adesina, poet and essayist lives and writes in Nigeria. His poems interrogate love and loss and the miles and more in between. Some of them and his essays/reviews have been featured or are forthcoming on Harriet’s Blog on Poetry Foundation, Jalada, Premium Times, Open Society Foundation blog, Brittle Paper, Africanwriter.com, Soar Africa (OSIWA anthology of new African poems) and others. He was a 2015 Open Society Foundation resident poet on Goree Island. This poem is part of his forthcoming chapbook, Painter of Water, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani; published by the African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books, New York (in the New Generation African Poetry Boxset) due out by spring 2016. He was shortlisted for the Prestigious Brunel African Poetry Prize in 2016. Follow him @Gbadenaija
You Will Never Live Life Here
I am from a country where living is a community service,
And the dead are never quite at rest.
See! You will never live life here;
Not in the manner you crave.
No! Not even close by any stretch of the imagination.
The men pour frustration at the bar.
The women cook rebellion in the kitchen,
And the children – they dream of Santa and snow.
But the world here is different from the ones in fairy-tales.
The weather here is both rainy and hot.
And when grey hairs show, and the staff is stirred,
You will look back to see the stranger you have now become.
For you have never lived life here,
Not a day as yourself, but as a blind man led by others.
First you were born into a world of Tradition,
Then baptized with waters of Religion,
Your tribe became your true identity,
And your nationality – a foreign conspiracy.
You must go to church on Sunday.
You must go to mosque on Friday.
You must not question your elders,
You must not question God, and his minions.
You must attend nursery school.
You must attend primary school.
You ought to have a WAEC certificate
And a University degree if you’re lucky.
It doesn’t matter what you want to be
A doctor or a lawyer will do just fine.
You should be married by 30 if you are a Lady.
You should be married all the same if you are a man.
You must have babies, if you can.
You must adopt babies, if you can’t.
And when you are trapped in that marriage;
Chained by the rules of society,
And you look your first child in the eye,
Carry it in your arms, and hear it cry,
You may not know it yet;
But that’s the dying cry of your free self.
For you have only existed, you are yet to live.
And now you will never live life here.
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Chukwudi Okoye Ezeamalukwuo is a published poet and a graduate of Geology, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria. He discovered his passion for writing, especially for Poetry while in the University. He is a founding member of Ink15 Literary Group. He is a blogger and the editor of Ink15.wordpress.com. His collection of poems titled “The Words of My Mother” was published early this year by Bahati Books. His poems and articles have also been published in several online publications, including Kalahari Review, Sentinel Quarterly Magazine, Brittle Paper, African Writer among others.
MADE IN CHINA
Buried dreams wear mirrors in their grave
They split with solace like this child:
Wear frugal wings, fly through
Dark ages, through Khaki-Men And Blockades
Through Six Boots Stained With Blood
To watch future scenes before they are shown
But what use are future scenes
When dreams are
Made in China?
Buried hopes wear mirrors in their grave
They split with solace like this mother:
Wear head gears, dance through
Sacred grounds, through BringBackOurGirls
Through Ibadan Forest-of-Horror
To sow future seeds before it is night
But what use are future seeds
When hopes are
Made in China?
Buried truths wear mirrors in their grave
They split with solace like this father:
Wear eager hearts, hew through
Shabby oaths, through PayOurPension
Through Some fathersAreStillUnemployed
To pleat future talks before they are done
But what use are future talks
When truths are
Made in China?
* In Nigeria and probably in Africa or anywhere else, when something is said to be made in China, that thing is either fake, or has poor longevity , that is, it can be spoilt or damaged easily and quickly.
Wale Owoade is a Nigerian poet. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spillway, Chiron Review, Vinyl, Cordite Poetry Review, Apogee Journal and Radar Poetry among others. He is a recipient of 2015 Tony Tokunbo Poetry Silver Award. Wale is the Publisher and Managing Editor of EXPOUND: A Magazine of Arts and Aesthetics, he also founded and interviews at The Strong Letters and the Creative Director of Bard Studio.
Peace Lilies
I’m that rose-ringed parakeet, perching on the branch
of the morning. I’m small and ring-necked, hungry
for cedar nuts, refusing to fly, refusing to drop down
from my Southern twig, refusing to devour the gorgeous
berries, still loving the Northern knot of sparrows,
and brave shimmer of hummingbirds singing.
I’m a black cormorant maybe—yellow throat-patch,
aging voter. Most of me is the land, a part of me
is the longing for it, and some of me is undecided.
It seems good among the silverbushes to smell
what the land smells. To dust its bedded cabinets
were it a house, to make it fluid and fluent
were it language, to make it firm and lean
were it government. But it is. There’s heat here,
still the touch of my lover is warm. There’s oil,
still my lover’s lips are dry. There seems to be
an equation forever unsolved. No matter how hard
I calculate, no matter how often I swoop down
and beak the elms. The mouth of the rain is shut.
All falling leaves are moving up. Gravity is breaking.
But it’s true I might look back some day, and see
where I’ve missed and mixed it. I might look back
and watch you spring and bud and shimmer
like a peace lily and a pebble plant. I’m a fool
for landscape, and all of it is you. Dawn breaks
upon me and it’s night. Take my hand, hold me
longer, watch us walk this path together.
Play my voice like a radio in your ears. I’m part-
musical. Carry me in your arms like a child.
Let the night sleep on somewhere in the Niger,
and wake up as dawn, not drenched, not drowned,
not having to breaststroke again in the morning.
Samuel Ugbechie
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Samuel Ugbechie’s works have appeared in Sentinel UK, Wikicolumn, Elsewhere Lit, Jalada, and elsewhere. In 2012, he won the Sentinel All-Africa Poetry Competition, was a finalist in the 2014 RL Poetry Award (International), and longlisted for the 2014 National Poetry Competition. He is currently working on his debut poetry collection.
The Brutalized Band
Verse I
Crescendo
Your country tastes like the carcass
of a dragonfly
or like death dissolved in the cappuccino
Caucasians throw out of the window
of a Commonwealth office
It splatters on the lagoon, the
people of Lagos gladly bucket home a river.
Let’s eat half measures
and die in half-truths
Perhaps the cemetery is a hotel
where change is served from
champagne flutes.
Festivity drinks the Third World in one gulp
and lives happily in the Lagos blood.
Chorus
Sing, 1960.
The wings of the canary
are hinges.
They close and open
history’s pages;
Heartbroken ladies
looking for love
lost in the Sahara desert.
There is no river buried
in sand
if classrooms are not
enough, go back in time
to the stone age.
Verse II
Diminuendo
Sing to this city resting her broken elbows
on a rock.
Memory now, is a spine
peduncling arms to touch moonlights
in hell’s lengthways.
How can one live in a fireball?
Put on the sea as a duvet the Sea gulls sing
I will wrap my soul with the Atlantic Ocean.
Verse III
I have been swimming in a flood
swimming in and out of a pogrom
looking for my life, a gold-dust
floating away with the garbage in
flotsam and jetsam
ten thousand hands on the Hail Marys.
Let me be the love held in a valley
full of changes that bear flowers.
Yet, the river broke my soul.
The rivers of benzol broke my benignity.
Verse IV
A Church of songbirds
Sing about the death of a weeping dog,
Chibok.
Last year God seasoned virgins
with gunpowder without warning.
This year religion raped heaven
in a market square without caveat.
The bloodstains are advertised on billboards.
Moneylenders are standing below
stock market
waiting partially for pricetags to be
tied to the corrupt beetle
partially for parliament that has gone bankrupt.
Sing about the secretaries to a sorceress’
government always mixing the future
with hallucinogen tablets.
Verse V
Lilting
Sweepstakes are juices I love to drink
resting my head on my cashmere pillows
my eyes on the chandelier lights I have
lost in a dream.
The ceiling sometimes is a theatre staging
great events in clinical colours
I lie, unloved.
My wife is sleeping in a dross
her breath complains about my gamble
at cards on which are her heavily scarfed
heavily wrappered images
on which are pictures of our hungry
kids throwing their school bags against study
crashing the library.
The sound is the music of all that I have lost
a country and a home wailing in Greek
and gabble.
Chorus
Sing an evergreen
alto for the lianas
climbing flagpole
the stem on which answers
to the questions
plumbing the depths
of our green and white
colours fly.
Verse VI
Sing along the sirens that pollute
the twin towns of music or parroted
pidgin and of the ptarmigans caged
in a murmuring bass.
Tyranny or motorcade, a psalm is a
short journey from rockbottoms
( through pontoon bridge)
to the buddlelas paradise.
Chorus
under pontoon
bridge flows
the fullness
of the earth
Verse VII
And by daring the praying mantis
we too, shall come to limelight
so sing to these crazy demons sacking
rockhouse.
If you do not believe Jesus
is the son of a carpenter
sex the miracle he performed on
Jonathan
child whose goodluck charm shod
in his naked soles broke the
monkey’s skull
for tricks flying on heights
or sex the memory of a donkey.
Chorus
Sing an alto
on a broken drum
and surrealism on
threads of music
or on the banjo
the greener notes.
Verse VIII
I am riding on a white ass to the marketplace.
There, the master of our chaos stands
the nation’s flag on a fertile ground
called Grave.
Who will jump into his river of jaywalkers?
or are the children of Ebute Meta solemnly on
key?
Verse IX
Clouds of banknotes are thrown at a brand
of metaphysics read by black families
fishing north of the Atlantic.
A hive of ladies is also thrown at their elan.
Fuck riot, they screamed.
Piss on democracy,
they sing
the city to a deaf stop.
Verse X
Remount your saddle or spermseat.
For the forearms of the horse you ride
to the chaos are raised high facing
the south west.
Verse XI
To peter Akinlabi, with love.
Ibadan is a city etched on this milestone
I have stepped on.
A Rolls Royce is on heat, my exhaustpipe
or sementap dripping…
sweet is a dream after sex.
Rivers of pheromone,
do not let me hitchhike to Rust City.
Ogun fathers a choir of pigeons in Gold Hill.
Verse XII
To the goddess of iron and hill I will go.
Lovebound, to Funmilayo my lady my
landlocked sun or firefly.
You are all that I have.
Tares Banigoe
Tares Banigoe Oburumu is a poet, playwright and a lover.
A testimony: of edited stories
As soon as my breasts were ripe
juicy & firm enough to touch
and be touched with eyes
and hands of juvenile lovers
the women came with a sharp knife
to edit the story between my legs
they did the same to my sister
but as she screamed and struggled
they deleted her complete story–
a flood of blood & water gushing out
it is a common mistake, they tell my father
she is a strong woman, she is
let her stand under sun for six days
nothing will happen to her
my cousin asks how it feels to be cut
how it feels to have one’s story edited
how it feels to watch blood flow
like a river through the v of one’s thighs
and I tell her: sleep, dream, be strong
by tomorrow morning you too will testify
Ehi’zogie Iyeomoan is a Pushcart nominee, collector of autobiographies and lover of nature and aesthetics. Ehi’zogie hides his frustrations with society in manual and electronic notepads. His scribbles have received awards from the Korean Cultural Centre, Nigeria and the University of Trieste, Italy. He recently received the UNESCO sponsored Castello Di Duino poetry prize for his satirically political poem, a dead poet’s table of content. The Open Society Initiative for West Africa poetry Fellow is currently completing his second poetry collection, a spring of endless songs. He tweets @fulanibuoy on Twitter and Facebooks on Ehi’zogie Iyeomoan. Ehi’zogie is currently completing a 1-year National Youth Service programme in the troubled North of his country, Nigeria, where he singlehandedly initiated the Thinking Tomorrow project which caters for the food and educational needs of out-of-school Almajiri children.
These Corpses Must Speak Their Names
They have bobbed-up belly-wise,
Like fishes drawn out of water;
There’s a message in the white of their vacant eyes,
And we are left the riddle to decipher.
The river does not swallow
What it did not chew;
So she has rejected them
Like the fart from a harlot’s anus.
We who watch them lifelessly float drown internally,
As we drink the scene with voracious thirst like famished camels,
And let the message of fear written on their faces
Sink effortlessly into our minds like stones.
Their adept and inert swimming skills we gloat,
Those autonomic reactions, those untrained eyes;
Their rather calm behavior,
It all smells like foul play.
So I ask,
Were they passive or active in this strange task
Of burying themselves
In a watery grave without a coffin?
We question them to explain
But amnesia they feign.
The doctors claim they have suffered great hypoxia;
The matter is sapping, spent is the oxygen in our brain.(24)
But on this issue,
Sleeping dogs will not be left to lie.
For our sons are no bastards,
Only young prodigals that have forgotten their fathers’ names.(28)
There’s a vasoconstriction
Restraining the flow of truth
In their stiff veins;
But today the tree must be known by its fruit.
Though they deprive us of oxygen,
Still we shall have our justice;
For no fragrant perfumes will hold back
The stench oozing from their orifices.
Yea, these corpses must speak their names.
And though they char their remains in capricious flames,
Still we shall attain the open secret,
From the lips of their ashes.
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Soonest Nathaniel
Soonest Nathaniel is a passionate journalist, an editor with Naij.com, his poem “These corpses must speak their names” won the Gold Prize at the 4th Korea-Nigeria Poetry Festival.
The post Amazing! Corpses speak, we can’t keep the dead quiet – Nigerian poets react (photos) appeared first on Nigeria News today & Breaking news | Read on NAIJ.COM.