ANA-Niger Unleashes First Spell

Minna, the capital of Niger state connotes a prism of images to many a countryman; far from just the roaring remarks attracted for being the habitat of two of the nation’s former heads of state, particularly the controversies that trail their regime; that’s in the realm of politics.

In the cartography of literature, the vibrancy of the city’s literary activities, productions and strangely talented dwellers had it drawn as the headquarters of the Northern Nigerian literatures. And, yes, the city would have snatched the national slot from Ibadan if it had had a befitting University of Ibadan to define and refine and direct its offerings. Historicity has offered the city ownership of: the first black African to have won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri; the primal star of Nigerian literature, Cyprian Ekwensi; the prolific novelist and first Northerner to lead the cult of Nigerian literature, Abubakar Gimba; the award-winning playwright Yayaha Dangana; the poet, essayist and most active administrator of the writing cult, BM Dzukogi; the poet and critic, Abdullahi Ismaila Ahmed… In a broader analogy, Niger state birthed a founding father of journalism in Nigeria and the first indigenous president of the country, Nnamdi Azikwe who is also a poet of note. And also the legend Alhaji Abubakar Imam, a Hausa writer whose magical narratives would only have the German, Franz Kafka, desirous of the Nigerian’s riveting humours.

And to restore this resplendence, the Niger state branch of Association of Nigerian Authors put together a bimonthly reading session tagged Writer’s Spell, aimed at bringing to spotlight, writing guests, to share with us the anatomy of their manuscripts.

The maiden edition had on the hot seat, the poet BM Nagidi- a deeply romantic poet whose poetry dabbles into the cupid and the metaphysical forts with such verve noticed in fellow countryman, Abubakar Othman, but unlike Othman, Nagidi’s approach of the romantic fort is done with fresh grasp and not the clichés of thematic engagement with love in the older poet’s The Passion of Cupid. Equally, the metaphysical layering of Nagidi’s poetry echoes the memorable mimesis seen in the poetry of the Englishman, John Donne.

The event slated to commence at ten after meridian of the 30th day of April was over an hour late, not out of late arrival of members, many of whom were there before the appointed time, but for expectation of more guests. Thus at the commencement, the venue, a spacious and much-ventilated compartment in the Niger state library complex which is also the secretariat of the writers’ body had on the seats: BM Dzukogi; Yahaya Dangana; Ismaila Abdullahi Ahmed; Black Africa’s pride, Ndagi Abdullahi, one of world’s most controversial scholar and unofficially the African with most books ever (yes, 500 books!); representative of the Provost, College of Education, Minna. Members of the association present were the poets and writers and playwrights: Awal Idris Evuti, Abba Abdulkareem, Al-Amin Sheikh, Opeyemi Adedayo, Paul Liam, Sadiq Dzukogi, Aisha Dangana, Nma-Hassan Mohammed, Zainab Manko, Maryam Bobi, Farida Mohammed, Balkisu Abarah, Terfa Danjuma, Amaechi O., Gimba Kakanda… Also in attendance were old members like the popular actor and filmmaker, Sadisu Mohammed; Banma Suleiman; Bala Shagabo Daniel; Sulay Nsubong, and many others who strove to grace the event from locations close and afar, many of whom are what a friend of mine would refer to as ‘sabbatical writers’. It was so wonderful to witness the presence of guests who were just making their first fraternal timeouts with the writing cult.

The official opening of the programme was conduct of prayers, and then the national anthem. These were followed by the association chairman’s welcome address delivered by his assistant, Mrs Farida Mohammed who conveyed his apology and reason for absence. With that, citation of the guest writer was rendered by the association’s secretary, Awal Idris Evuti, just after invitation of BM Dzukogi to the high table as Chairman of the event and the duo of Sulay Nsubong and Gimba Kakanda as rapporteurs.

Served with the copies of the manuscript to be knifed and enjoyed, Slaying the Wayfarer, the audience listened with keen interest as the guest read the first poem, Missing Word, which stirred first response from Banma Suleiman who observed the absence of punctuations in the poem, with Gimba Kakanda countering that the trend is forgivable as the poet seems to have deliberately neglected application of punctuations. The second poem, Bald in Folly, which read like T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of Magi, with the resonating opening, ‘It was a night of sudden realization/ With promise of continual whimpering…’ faced little critiques; but the third, Just Wondering, had everyone roaring to critique the contrast of images which Amaechi considered contradictory- a stance that didn’t go down with both Abdullahi Ismaila Ahmed and Sulay Nsubong. In the same poem, Paul Liam questioned the use of simile in qualifying a subject, elaborating that it weakened the poem. Also, Gimba Kakanda retracted his earlier assertion that abandonment of punctuations are forgivable on noticing the commas that structured this poem, hence his insistence that the poet must be consistent in his usage of punctuations, either the complete abandonment or application of punctuation because inconsistency is misleading. This was followed by the two-stanza poem, Shaman, a second stanza of which Amaechi considered inchoate, that it didn’t flow with the first. But others have different view. However, Dzukogi disapproved the use of the word, ‘pauperism’, which he said was to a cliché and out of poetic context in the poem. And then came the title poem, Slaying the Wayfarer, which was considered beautiful with its pleonastic rendering; in the poem, Hap, only the word ‘loss’ was suggested to be replaced with ‘lost’.

The session gathered a hot intellectual garb when Amaechi questioned the grammatical aptitude of the recurring verb, ‘be’, found in first lines of the first two stanzas, ‘If I be some god…’ ‘If I be larva…’ in the poem, Ditty of a Beggar Boy; Amaechi dropped that the grammars resembled pidgin but the poet Abdullahi Ismaila who is also an academic waded in and elaborated the accuracy and gave an analogy of the verb in contrast to related ‘am’, ‘were’, and ‘are’ which the poet said aren’t of same locution. In the same poem, Amaechi frowned at a concluding stanza: ‘I shall ask humbly of this/ If I die, unmark my grave/ For if I come again/ I will be a tree/’

Amaechi’s issue was with the persona’s quest to return a tree, which to him was out of logic. But, Sulay Nsubong who had been the greatest fan of the guest on the hot seat, calmed that the ‘tree’ is what the persona deemed fitter. Amaechi’s persistence stirred Abdullahi Ismaila to wade in, comparing the persona’s quest as same with the Indian philosophy of reincarnation. More poems were read before the break for refreshment; and the major debate was what Gimba Kakanda perceived as inconsistency of tense used in the collection; that there were too many, and when Sulay Nsubong argued that such could be style, both Gimba and Amaechi insisted otherwise; that the grammatical disengagements among stanzas and lines are actually flaws. During the break, the playwright Opeyemi Adedayo performed a short drama with Aisha Dangana on a grown man’s self-deceiving passion to realize the dream of making it by becoming a footballer against the lover’s rebuke that he was over-aged at thirty, to which he flaunted that he’ll start from under-15 playing category! At the end of the drama, BM Dzukogi quipped that, ‘It’s good to dream at 40, so that at 50 you end up achieving nothing!’ to general laughter.

The second session was brief but stressed by more arguments. However, the cupid in the guest was up on the bar in the poem, Esther: ‘Esther/ The riverside heather/… Esther/ The road yet to be littered/’. After the guest read a few more poems to the applause of the audience, a debate rose between Sulay Nsubong and Gimba Kakanda over a poem that the former considered excellent and tender. But Gimba, in condemning the poem, charged the guest of being prosaic in analyzing that the objects employed in the poem aren’t contrasting, that he accepted the subject of the poem, a butterfly, in allegorical sense but still the poem just read like a geographer’s narrative. In meddling into the argument, Abdullahi Ismaila elucidated the existence of registers, that a medical Doctor’s poem may carry some terms related to his field, and however dropped that despite such, when the literary terms aren’t applied, a poem become unsuccessful. On this, he called for restructuring of the poem.

In his general remark as the event rounded up, Abdullahi Ismaila commended the guest, and utterly showed his satisfaction with the poems in the collection. Equally, he commended Gimba Kakanda’s debut collection, Safari Pants, and thereon pondered a trend with the new generation Nigerian poetry, citing the given reasons for non-awarding of the 2009 NLNG Prize for literature as lack of definite direction by the poets long-listed. Abdullahi’s quest was for the new writers to chart a way forward, a direction. But Sulay Nsubong dismissed the stance as prescriptive criticism, holding that the poets must only write what they feel and not align with a cause to be relevant to the new generation. The reading session came to an end with rapporteurs asked to assess the collection. Gimba regarded the poetry as deeply romantic, and thereon called on the poet to do away with unfamiliar lexicons he considered alien to the poet’s ambience, citing the poet’s usage of words like ‘cyclone’ as inapt in qualification of the African experience, that such words ought to come in while making comparisons as in Gabriel Okara’s Piano and Drum. In his assessment, Sulay Nsubong regards the poet’s forsaking of tradition as mastery common to metaphysical poets, and that such poems are timeless and never subjected to clampdown to a particular society or people alone. And as the audience eventually poured out of the hall, it was plain that the event emitted its intent of having them spell-bound!