THE LITERARY-POLITICAL JUNCTION: A NIGERIAN BLACK-SPOT
There's a road in Nigeria
Narrow and twisty in this hilly area.
- the greedy man's road to riches,
The mad man's road to true madness,
The vain man's road to fame,
yours too if you've a wicked dream to chase,
Or a penchant for recklessness.
Yet every once in a while a man comes singing
Along a good path from the plains with plans
For the road.
But the junction is a jarring mess.
The man loses his music, soils his dress
Breaks his heart, disappoints his bones
Cracks his skull and denounces his own.
The nameless road twists his mind
Empties his soul into the wind.
Or sometimes a Ken Saro Wiwa's -
A thunderous rhythm that cracked the sky
And the sky wept;
On that sore spot where he last lay -
A mangled man, an icon born,
Stands an invisible signpost…BLACK SPOT
Here, Africa kills its sons.
Sometimes too, a Christopher Okigbo firing off
Poetry and bullets, valor and metaphor,
Freedom or death, from Biafra to heaven
That August of sixty seven.
But Achebe, aha! Lives still on a diet of proverbs.
In his diagnosis - "the Tumour in Nigeria"
Where fits the writer: The lab or the theatre?
The scalpel on the table
Is not for the writer's hand;
the pen too needs a pair - as clean as able.
for when it gets dark in this land
The 'art of surgery' becomes a deadly metaphor
A scene gory; like nothing you're ready for-
The cutting, the slicing- all with danger fraught-
And, God! The practitioners, such a reckless lot.
Then only your pen can save us-
When heavens take leave of watch
And the skies are overcast with chaos
Political treachery and many evils such,
And the map besmirched in lunatic scrawl,
And we are lost in cyclic anarchy,
Then, the pen will point the route,
Back to the genesis, before snake and sin-
At the gates of Aden, pen will become a key
And behold, Aden delivered to us by a pen!
And once again, the poetry of praise, the critic of folly,
The constitution of future shall by pen be born-
By pen shall you bathe our past with clarity
Lest we forget!
If you must walk unto the junction, Oduwole
Know this: an easy walk it shan't be
