Tanure Ojaide

Jatinder Padda, editor with Read African Books, interviews Tanure Ojaide about his new poetry collection, History and its True Colors (Spears Media Press).

Jatinder Padda: In your poetry collection History and its True Colors you reflect on history through nine different movements. What led you to the themes you cover and why through this structure?

Tanure Ojaide: As an African, I must take history seriously. If your people’s lives have been disrupted by others who not only enslaved but also colonized and still exploit them, you must struggle to make history redeem itself. I am fascinated by memory of the past and what it has given rise to today, and how the future is being fashioned by our current actions. The choice of nine movements is cultural. Among the Urhobo, nine is a special number that features in rituals to signify unending. Here, history is not what Fukuyama conceives as ending, but an unending phenomenon. Among the nine movements are personal, national, international, and human aspects of history.

The dedication at the start of the book is to the memories of Patrice Lumumba, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. Why do these three figures in particular speak to the themes of the book?

The three figures are heroes who pursued ideals but were brutally killed by wicked state actors. Lumumba had ideals for free Congo that the Belgians and their allies consciously thwarted by killing him. Ken Saro-Wiwa, a minority rights and environmental activist, was executed by the tyrannical Sani Abacha military regime after being framed for offenses he did not commit. Ahmad Khashoggi was brutally killed at the Saudi mission in Turkey for struggling for human rights in the conservative kingdom. One thing unites all three, their bodies were never found, either dissolved in acid as with Lumumba and Saro-Wiwa or butchered as Kashoggi was shredded. Despite having no graves that could have been turned into shrines, these great men are forever being remembered. Killing an activist should not end his or her struggles. Here, they represent figures whose people should take on their struggle despite their untimely cruel deaths, because the struggle must continue.

The collection begins within an extended monologue as the narrator addresses Aridon, the deity of the relationship between memory/song poetry and the poet. Why did you use this device to begin a collection which examines history?

Aridon is the Urhobo god of memory and muse of poets. In the Urhobo tradition, the poet or singer pays tribute to Aridon at the beginning of his or her performance. Also, memory is important to my people, and I believe a people should always remember their experiences to right the wrongs of the past. And memory and history are related, hence I start the poems by invoking Aridon for inspiration and to sustain my reflections on different aspects of history. We need memory so as not to forget what has been done to us and others suffering the same plight. Look at the three people I dedicated the collection to! We need to remember them so that the historical disruption cannot be made final but reversed.

Could you speak about the use of folklore in this collection and in your poetry more widely?

Folklore gives identity to a people and their artistic production. How do you talk about Classical Poetry or Modern Greek Poetry without their respective folklore? Folklore gives African identify to my poetry. I use a lot of Urhobo/African folkloric allusions and references in my poetry to also relate to the people for whom I write. We share the same cultural background, and deploying folklore to my poetry makes me an African poet with whom they share a common aesthetic repertory. I am what I am, an African using African tropes and images to express myself even when writing in a foreign language. Urhobo/African folklore helps the content and form of my poetry.

Your poems cover some of the political content from recent history – from the #ENDSARS movement to George Floyd and COVID lockdowns. Why did you select the subjects that you decided on?

I did not select the subjects as such because they came to me through inspiration. As I have always said, the poet is not an air-plant but one rooted in place and time. Here time is history. A poet observes from a specific place what is happening around him or her and responds to the circumstances. The intellectual, political, and socio-economic climate of the time influences the poet. #ENDSARS movement and George Floyd are subjects in which I support victims of unwarranted oppression, persecution, and racism. As an activist poet, I must range on the right side of history. The corrupt Nigerian police brutalizing the youths must be removed and that was the struggle the police responded to with horrendous brutality. George Floyd is the symbol of continuing systemic racism in the United States and elsewhere in the West, and I condemn it. COVID lockdown was something different. I share a common humanity at the time and empathize with the casualties and those suffering because of the pandemic.

The Nigerian/West African local is blended with the global historic forces that have affected it as well as the histories of other colonized nations (India and Palestine) and lesser-known conflicts such as West Papua. Have you noticed a difference in how the collection has been received by audiences in Nigeria, in the global South, and in global North/Western countries?

Oppression, persecution, and racism are universal, and I am not surprised that West Papua folks suffer as Niger Delta people in their resources being taken away to develop other places. I show solidarity with victims of what my people also suffer from. I am only relating what many people who have been colonized or suffered racism have experienced. Such people tend to be more in the global South and the perpetrators of such things tend to be from the global North. I singled out France for Haiti and its exploitation of others before some West African countries cut their ties with the European colonial power. My poetry is in one way meant to be a wakeup call to those who perpetrate exploitation and racism. I think those in the global North should empathize with people of the global South for what they had endured in history.

The collection is imbued with a deeply melancholic tone, unsurprising given the subject matter. Was it difficult to address these histories, and how they shape the present and future, without being overwhelmed by their gravity? In particular the environmental calamities that we are only just beginning to live through.

The poet fighting various forms of victimization and inhumanity cannot be celebratory. The tone might be elegiac, and this is very appropriate. The same can be said of the COVID poems. Being from the Niger Delta of Nigeria where many multinational oil and gas companies have caused environmental degradation, I suggest ways of restoring the damaged environment to its previous state. History, for those who did not write it for centuries, cannot be a happy thing that should be celebrated. Victims and their victimizers cannot see history in the same light! So, while British slave merchants are knighted and memorialized with statues, those who were enslaved and persecuted for the color of their skins and those who empathize with them speak in a different tone.

The rhythmic style alters through the collection and within the movements. Did you make your choices on the form after settling on the substance, or did the content lead to the style of poem?

The content led to the style. I try as much as I can to reflect traditional rhythms most of the time. The introductory movement devoted to Aridon, the god of memory and muse, is incantatory, while the remaining movements are sober and elegiac. Somehow each poem’s content conditions the tone and form.

This book is a remarkable feat, covering so much historically, politically, and personally. Are you taking a break to replenish the creative juices or is a new collection underway?

Aridon remains my muse, and I have no rest from writing. I am like a dancer invigorated by the ecstatic music because as long the music goes on, the dancer will continue performing. I offer sacrifices to Aridon, and for that Aridon will always take me as a favorite to inspire! I am almost completing another collection about my childhood, and I am tentatively calling it Adult Love in the Childhood Garden.

 Tanure's collection, History and its True Colors, is available from African Books Collective. 
To find out more about Spears Media Press, take a look at their publisher page.