Banji Ojewale
The Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), who gained the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991. Concerned about what he perceived as a decline within the high quality of spoken and written English in American society, Brodsky proposed that books of American poetry be positioned alongside Gideon Bibles in motel rooms. His reasoning was compelling: “Poetry is perhaps the only insurance we’ve got against the vulgarity of the human heart.” His proposal mirrored a conviction that poetry may restore a measure of ethical and linguistic refinement to on a regular basis life.
More than three many years later, Steve Obidi, a Nigerian mental, communicator and pastor, assigns poetry an much more formidable process. In Eternal Truth, he sends the style in pursuit of what he calls the “Most Excellent Eternal Truth”, with the intention of bringing its liberating energy to Nigerians and readers in every single place. A member of the Editorial Board of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry (DCLM) and a PhD holder, Obidi approaches this enterprise with the earnestness of a person who has immersed himself in a formidable physique of data. One is reminded of the acquainted literary conceit of ransacking half a library to provide a single guide.
His assortment attracts, typically obliquely, on biblical personalities and their deeds, Greek mythology, Nigerian and worldwide politics, environmental crises, human struggling, bereavement and the odd predicaments of existence. Beneath these diversified topics lies a conviction that sure elementary truths elude superficial remedy. Poetry, in Obidi’s estimation, provides a method of bringing them into sharper focus and alluring the reader to ponder their implications.
For the poet, fact is neither relative nor negotiable. It is a singular, enduring precept to which he has pledged his allegiance. In the opening poem, which bears the gathering’s title, he remembers the encounter that modified his life:
You beckoned and graciously hugged me.
Disarmed, convicted, I submitted
Thenceforth to be your devotee…
I signed as much as defend the Truth…
The encounter is offered as a conversion, an acceptance of fact as each a private self-discipline and a public obligation. The poems that observe are, accordingly, written with what the poet describes as a bleeding pen and a coronary heart wracked with ache. In “The Tipping Point”, he insists:
We should inform the reality, even at gunpoint
For intrinsic in fact is one thing that units free
If solely we may swallow our pleasure and with fact agree.
The traces set up the ethical urgency that drives the gathering. Truth calls for braveness, significantly when its pursuit threatens private consolation or exposes collective failings. Yet the energy of this conviction additionally presents a problem for the poet: how does one rework an ethical place, nonetheless sincerely held, into poetry that persuades via its imaginative power somewhat than merely via the burden of its pronouncements?
Obidi is at his most attention-grabbing when he permits a human predicament to complicate his ethical certainty. In “The Mad Lady”, for occasion, two worlds seem to occupy the identical area with out understanding one another. The lady is dismissed by sympathetic bystanders who assume they perceive her situation. The poet asks:
She scorns on the ignorance of
Sympathetic bystanders…she’s misjudged
Who can persuade her that
Something has gone improper?
The poem exposes the gap between appearances and actuality, suggesting that even well-meaning observers can mistake their assumptions for data. Its questions are significantly pertinent to a set involved with the issue of recognising fact amid the clamour of competing perceptions.
“A Bouquet of Queries” takes a wider view of human bewilderment, analyzing the persistence of need in a world seemingly wealthy in sources and mental capability. The poet sees smart women and men in every single place, but their knowledge seems powerless to rescue society from deprivation or restore its dignity. The paradox remembers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated traces in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, in every single place,
And all of the boards did shrink;
Water, water, in every single place,
Nor any drop to drink.
Obidi’s model of the predicament finds expression in a pointed query:
Why will we ask, “Where do we go from here?”
When no one stated he’s going wherever?
The query activates the absurdity of a society that speaks incessantly of progress whereas showing unsure about its course. It is a promising second within the assortment, though the poem’s power is determined by the reader recognising the irony beneath its apparently conversational phrasing.
Elsewhere, the poet’s urgency typically spills into the shape itself. In “We’re the King’s Brothers”, the traces run on with out punctuation till the eleventh juncture, making a breathless motion that appears reluctant to pause. The impact could also be learn as an try to embody the urgency of the poet’s mission, although such formal selections should finally justify themselves via their contribution to the poem’s which means.
Obidi additionally turns his consideration to the results of humanity’s disregard for fact. “Lost Opportunities”, “Denial”, “It’s All Over”, “The Zeitgeist”, “The Famished Earth”, “Man and Time” and “Tears” ponder the injury wrought by human folly, missed probabilities and the refusal to confront uncomfortable realities. “Tears”, regardless of its brevity of simply 14 traces, evokes a span of human expertise that appears to succeed in throughout centuries. Here, compression turns into an asset, permitting the poem to recommend greater than it explicitly states.
The assortment doesn’t ignore the COVID-19 pandemic. In “A World on Pause”, Obidi revisits the worldwide suspension of odd life led to by the outbreak. Yet the poem’s closing motion factors past the speedy disaster in the direction of a extra everlasting reckoning. The pause it anticipates shouldn’t be merely the non permanent interruption imposed by a pandemic, however a finality that lies past humanity’s energy to regulate. In this studying, the poem’s non secular message is that the world’s obvious permanence is an phantasm, and that human beings would do effectively to organize for what lies past the acquainted order of existence.
Some of the poems grouped beneath “Aspirations and Assuagements” provide extra promising cases of inventive expression. “My Beloved”, “Moonlight Concourse” and “Dream Fulfilled” reveal a poet prepared to stretch his traces and discover the chances of lyrical motion. There are echoes right here of Christopher Okigbo, whose subtle imagery, musical cadences and experimental dealing with of poetic kind helped form trendy Nigerian poetry. Obidi’s longer traces distinction with shorter ones, typically creating a way of imbalance that mirrors the fractured world he seeks to painting.
The assortment additionally makes room for dirges wherein the poet mourns departed family members. These elegiac passages lend a extra intimate dimension to a piece in any other case preoccupied with ethical and non secular propositions. They culminate in “The Sacred and Symphonic”, a poem that returns to questions whose solutions, within the poet’s conception, are to be present in Eternal Truth.
But what, exactly, does this fact entail? In Obidi’s ethical universe, it entails an unyielding energy of character in a society more and more tolerant of ethical compromise, along with the willingness to defend one’s convictions at private price. Such steadfastness rests on religion in a God who embodies fact. The assortment’s underlying proposition is that humanity’s predicament can’t be resolved by materials progress or mental ingenuity alone; it requires a metamorphosis of character.
This is an formidable burden for poetry to hold. Obidi clearly believes that odd prose can’t adequately convey the gravity of his message, and that poetry, with its capability for compression, metaphor and heightened expression, is best suited to the duty. Yet the excellence shouldn’t be at all times so clear-cut. A poem’s ethical seriousness doesn’t robotically translate into poetic achievement. At occasions, the gathering’s insistence on its message threatens to overshadow the imaginative work via which poetry makes that message compelling.
It could also be untimely to pronounce on the total measure of Obidi’s poetic presents from a single assortment. But literary historical past provides ample examples of writers whose early work proved solely the start of an extended journey. Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe and Okigbo, amongst others, reveal the risks of treating a author’s current output as the ultimate measure of his prospects.
Where, then, does Obidi stand? His work shows a curious mix of arresting verse and prose-like passages charged with rhetorical vitality. He appears equally relaxed with the 2 modes, although their coexistence sometimes creates formal difficulties. “I’m Just Me”, for instance, might need benefited from the extra sustained self-discipline of the standard heroic couplet somewhat than its association in four-line stanzas. The query shouldn’t be whether or not a poet ought to observe standard kinds, however whether or not the shape chosen serves the poem’s expressive objective.
Ultimately, Eternal Truth is a set pushed by a conviction that ethical renewal begins with an uncompromising encounter with fact. Obidi desires his readers to look past the speedy sights of worldly existence and study the ideas by which they reside. Whether each poem succeeds in changing that conviction into memorable verse is one other matter. Yet the gathering’s earnestness is unmistakable, as is its want to make poetry an instrument of private and social transformation.
If Obidi’s poetic journey continues to be unfolding, its vacation spot seems clear sufficient: a society wherein integrity shouldn’t be an inconvenient advantage however a situation of human dignity. His problem, as a poet, is to make sure that the language carrying this message possesses the imaginative energy to endure past the second of studying.
• Ojewale, a author, relies in Ota, Ogun State
