Kola Eke's Poetry as Equipment for Living Nigerians (2)
In calling Kola Eke's poetry "equipment for living Nigerians," what exactly does the Glitterer have in his gleaning, glimpsing and glittering mind – poetically and scholarly speaking? Anyone who wishes to analyse 1967 and Other Poems may follow him to see and accept that "equipment" is employed characteristically in a pleasant manner to mean "formula" – that is, Kola Eke's "formula" for living Nigerians – which is a very pleasant way of saying that Kola Eke was moved by a high sense of poetic order to compose this volume that should help his compatriots to drive themselves out of the horrors of their near Holocaust country. This is a hard and bold remark to compose and construct here. But it is what it is – even though the gleaner-glitterer may be accused of mis-reading or misinterpreting the poet and his intention(s). Yet this reader and examiner of Kola Eke is insisting and will even more than insist that 1967 and Other Poems, because it is the work of a dense and exquisite humanist-poet and poet-humanist who understands perfectly the conflicts and clashes between ethnic groups, classes, individuals and diverse groups in the Nigerian society, what is being critically observed here cannot but be critically observed.
Kola Eke's equipment, his formula, for living Nigerians reminds the glitterer of Kenneth Burke's (renowned American poet, literary critic, scholar and philosopher – 1897-1993) – whose "strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socialising losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolidation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another" – are contained in his works – as equipment for living. Kola Eke devotes significant portions of his creative energies in 1967 and Other Poems to contents that enable this inquirer to recall Kenneth Burke as he has hereby done. Our incipient poet whose unique voice will be widely recognised in no distant time selects from the beginning to the end of 1967 and Other Poems particular subjects and topics – impure subjects and topics – that will inspire and incense patriotic patriots to purify the land not from the stand-point of pure poetry, however.
Kola Eke's sentiments in the poems, in varying degrees, are those of a humanist-healer or healer-humanist. He employs ugliness not licensed by society and humanity as a formula, the equipment, the medicine, the ideal and real medicine the country and living Nigerians need to rescue them from the fallen present. His 1967 to 1970 Nigeria's civil war poems detail horrifying human rights abuses and living conditions of Nigerians, civilians and soldiers, in the war zones and outside the war zones. They were horrifying, to say the least, and to put it very mildly. In dwelling extensively on the 1967 to 1970 civil war in the present time Kola Eke warns his living compatriots not to return his country your country my country our country to another huge graveyard era. Nigerian's truly horrifying problems and conditions of the inglorious civil war years are still in existence in our twenty-first century contemporary times.
Kola Eke writes with painful unhesitations about our chronically ill country where banditry and kidnappings and other vices and ills have succeeded the extremely foul civil war years and period with distinction. In this wise, the poet dwells in the realm of pure irony and immaculate satire. He is honestly fearful that living Nigerians, especially the perfectly oppressive oppressors in government at all levels, pretend not to be aware of the dangers of the path and road they and all of us travel. Our government people have consistently show-cased their "War Virus" everywhere about us. And this "War Virus" has birthed. "Brutal war [that] Has increased Temperature of looting Public properties." The "War Virus" was purposely created, and sinfully and evilly so, to satisfy the greed of those in political power who were always (and have always been) interested in accumulating material wealth – the "Public Properties" – of our commonwealth. Furthermore, their "War Virus" brutality is akin to that of the character of a person with classic cruelty in his mien and bearing. Their "War Virus" is the virus that has turned them into a child in power, whose sweetness in the power he possesses induces perfect acts of cruelty in him. If the child can be forgiven, the adults in power who have alienated living Nigerians cannot be so treated without qualms.
Clearly, the "War Virus" of our perfectly perfect powerful personages in power "Gave birth To arms and ammunition Temperature increases in the Rate of hired killers." The "War Virus" also "Created fertile soil For the re-marriage Of already married Women." Living Nigerians must be persuaded and convinced to put an everlasting halt to their "self-inflicted wounds…/self-inflicted injuries" – which include murderous infidelities and forced and false marriages, unforgivable criminal atrocities, that the master-minds of the "War Virus", and gallivanting war lords and infidels, unleashed (and still unleash) on the land. As a truly patriotic person and poet, Kola Eke acknowledges his country's flaws. Through his poetry and the equipment he is providing – or, better, that he has provided – he is determined to make his readers embrace his ideal and reality with a burning feeling of patriotism. Is he building castles in Spain? As a modern Nigerian poet, his idealist aesthetics needs to be examined side-by-side his sensuous truth of the reality he espouses.
The glitterer wishes, at this point, to state that Kola Eke's invigorating pile of subjects or themes in 1967 and other Poems informs the perfect pile of long sentences employed for the discourse in the attempt to link the glitterer's thinking and the trends in the poet's equipment mode and medicine for living Nigerians. There is truth in this utterance and other utterances here. As the American novelist, and Father of American Literature, Mark Twain (1835-1910), famously informed us long ago, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
