‘In Wole Soyinka’s poem ‘Koko Oloro,’ I can hear small children playing and chanting. How delightful. The anaphora ‘plead for me,’ builds rhythm throughout the piece. The poem is experienced with the ear, the mouth and eyes, completing a sensory circuit. I kept asking myself several questions while reading it:

Why is this kno dolorous or mournful?

What is a kno?

Apart from lines 1 and 9, every line has three words, making this poem a neat song of evenly spaced syllables. Incidentally, we locate the narrator-poet in line nine, on a tree shoot which they call a threshold They’re binding leaves with a tree stalk, a (flower) bud, three berries into a bitter potion. It feels like a mythical process involving nature. Then the poet casts their voice and implores this ‘knot of bitters’ to plead for them. Honestly, I wish I knew why? Still, I like the not-knowing. It’s probably just child’s play.

I come with eager anticipation to the delightfully eloquent, Rasaq Malik’s work. Upon glancing at the collection’s title, I realised there would be some sort of disclosure about where the soreness or damage to a skin originated from.

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“R. M. Gbolahan is a cartographer

whose preoccupation is with mapping out the effect

of sociopolitical conflict on the landscape of children’s minds.”

 Therefore, I am not looking for a recount of factual historical atrocities in The Origin of Wounds, but for a symbolic juxtaposing of these occurrences next to the psychosocial trauma minors experience.  

The map Rasaq Malik draws in his opening poem, ‘Biography of Homeland,’ includes areas where: children wake up each morning uncertain of their safety, in its margins. I read that with Wole Soyika’s warning in mind:

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'[Y]our world needs sweeting, child' -'Dedication'

by Wole Soyinka, in Idanre and Other Poems (1967).

Both Wole Soyinka’s and Rasaq Malik’s political preoccupations emerge quite early in the collections. The backdrop to Rasaq M. Gbolahan’s poetry collection are the atrocities committed by violent Islamic extremists (Boko Haram and its splinter groups) in Nigeria. Although the poet broadens his telescopic lens to frame conflict in other parts of the globe such as the event at Eagle Pass, Texas; Jamestown 1619; El Hierro, El Dorado and the 2021 suicide-bomber attack in Northern Cameroon.

In ‘Easter’ by Wole Soyinka Christianity offers nothing the playing children referenced in the poem. Pollen has thorns, innocent children are visited by death. Pollen has thorns, innocent children are visited by death. I’m reminded of a poem by Rasaq Malik called, ‘Bury Us.’

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EASTER

Copyrighted

Wole Soyinka (1986)

This slow day dies, a wordless wilt

Shades of silence reaping

Soft frangipanes

Pollen's wings are thorned; bosoms

Too welcoming fold later chills

Take death to innocents

 Kinder these hard mangoes, greendrops

At the car of god-apparent, coquettes

To the future decadence.

Do we not truly fear to bleed? We hunt

Pale tissues of the palm, fingers groping

Ever cautious on the crown.

These pink frangipanes of Easter crop

Eager to the wind; by repetition weak

And rain's in-breeding,

One bough to slake the millions:

Decay Caulks earth's centre; spurned we pluck

Bleached petals for the dreamer's lair.

Borne passive on this gift, wound-plashes

From wind scavenger, sap fragrance for

A heady brew, I rode my winged as and raged —

As children wove frond yellow from the palm

Plucked at the core, within the spadix heart.

 “Even those of us raised on Soyinka’s writing find it dense sometimes.

A way to understand his poetry is by asking questions.”

The opposite of intense specificity is complex metaphorical language. A reader has to work harder to decode Soyinka’s phrases. A contrast can be made between Soyinka’s obscurity and Rasaq Malik’s clarity.

THE FIVE Ws

The five Ws can help us begin to understand the poem. Consider: what is the poem about?

1. When is it set?

The poem opens at the close of day. It’s symbolic- we are about to mourn the passing of things. Nature has become so cruel.

The poet uses alliteration to describe the death of frangipanis/flowers. The opposite of resurrection is what is taking place.

2. Where is it set?

Outdoors; a garden somewhere in Nigeria in the 1980s, perhaps? The poet’s observing and detailing a scene. We are told children wove yellow (decaying??) palm fronds. By the way, did you use to make palm crosses for Easter Sunday? I am Anglican and my dad Mr James, used to be a Lay Preacher.  I remember staying up on Holy Saturday to make crosses. But these crosses are damaged, plucked at the core from spadix (flowers) or a spiky heart. I can feel the kids’ fingers hurting.

3. Why did the poet write it?

It’s part of his Idanre and Other Poems collection. It a reflection on post-colonial Nigeria and state decadence and corruption.

4. Who is speaking ('the perspective')/ who are they speaking to?

Is Wole Soyinka addressing we, the readers, Nigerian society back then or himself? He’s probably aiming fire at us all. The plural subject pronoun: we, indicates Soyinka is probably addressing his countrymen/ a collective social group.

5. What is the poem about?

This poem is about death, decadence and despair. I’m showing off now with my use of

alliteration like the writer. Jesus bled on the cross at Easter, but the subjects in being addressed in this poem are fearful of shedding blood. I see fingers groping, searching for answersor probably a way out

of the figurative grave.

 "Both Rasaq Malik Gbolahan and Dr Kayode Adesimi Robbin-Coker inhabit traditions which imbue their poems with similarities to those of Wole Soyinka."

 A poem should have the power to transport you into another hemisphere, however transient that process is.  The poems of Soyinka and Gbolahan possess that ability. Rasaq’s featured poem is like an incantation whose anaphoric word: ‘praise’ is reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s classic poem, ‘Vultures.” ‘Praise bounteous providence if you will…’ COPYRIGHTED Chinua Achebe.

I read in a Newsletter by the London Magazine, that literature generally concerns itself with four aspects: love, friendship, pain and desire. I encounter that pain in the work of Soyinka, Gbolahan and Adesimi Robbin-Coker.

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Coining a poetic style and imprinting one’s signature in the arena of creative writing, depends on who you are and how you acquired language how language naturally comes to you. Dr Kayode Adesimi (Robbin-Coker) is an English Language and Literature graduate of the Universities of Sierra Leone, Oxford, and Cambridge. He is the author of “Dancing on My Way: Poems in a Foreign Language” (Sierra Leonean Writers Series, 2019).

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Using a form of self-address, the poet (see below) laments the plight of the initiated; those whom Soyinka’s idealism elude. Life on earth is combative and the poet I this piece feels he is falling short of the task at hand: ‘so many verse prints in sand, / They will perish…’

The poem mixes Yoruba mythology, biblical imagery and Nigerian cultural inferences. I am reminded of the angry Ogun (God) in Wole Soyinka’s long poem, ‘deluge…’ in Idanre and Other Poems in which Soyinka writes, ‘Your men Ogun! Your men! // Lust-blind god, gore-drunk Hunter/ Monster deity, you destroy your men!’

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One Day of Rain

By Kayode Adesimi

At the broken promise of a life-song

Vestiges of Soyinka’s estranged

idealism cruise lip wards,

Spill out:

Ibere wole, dem wole, dem wole!

Observe this flight of the uninitiated, Kayode –

The witch gun makes no sound and,

Because these bleached whisperings

Of a hybrid fogbound orisha

Are just so many verse prints in sand,

They will perish, like rootless portents.

This place hears, Kayode! We shall say

We saw, in Thursday’s mantic rain of

spittle-propelled pumpkin seeds,

Auguries of dissidence and hints

of vegetarian rancour – a dirge

For the poor in spirit (bless them)

A dirge for he whose reputation they would

Rescue from a biased Hebrew chronicle. Thus:

“Citizen Cain, Freeman of Lagos,

Whose love could only turn away and wither,

Shamefully, into bloody fratricide –

A thing to be blamed on his deity’s

Insensitive acts of preferment.”

But Kayode,

For these our last,

So

pointlessly drawn-out days

Let Ogun himself choose the Word.

Let Ogun himself say it is.

Kayode’s until now tentative

anxieties splinter, abruptly,

into fear-frayed muttering of

“What is?” and “What if it is?”

“A kind of homecoming” is

Soyinka’s last-gasp gloss

Of a poet’s trick so arrogantly

Clichéd that the embers,

quietly expiring, are startled.

As Soyinka’s embers are quietly expiring, I grope through a dark tunnel of life’s devastating wars to the other side where Rasaq Malik is shining a poetic torch on the impact of conflicts on the most vulnerable among us:

Near Bodrum, the body of a three-year-old /Alan Kurdi lies face down on the beach.

• Source: Requiem at Sea

In The Origin of Wounds, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan

All three poets have relied on a belief in god to interpret the sociopolitical malaise around them. I am waiting and observing to see if their god one who picks a side with the ‘citizen Cains’ in West Africa or a merciful god constructed in Rasaq Malik’s poem.

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