Gbenro Adesina/Ibadan

Renowned poet, Professor Niyi Osundare, is immotalised with an annual international poetry festival

Some notable personalities, scholars, students, friends, family and other people from various walks of life converged between 9am and 5pm on Tuesday 26 May 2015 at the historic Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan, UI, for the maiden edition of the annual Niyi Osundare International Poetry Festival. The two-day programme which shifted to the Arts Theatre of the institution between 7pm and 9pm the first day and held between 9am and 5pm the following day was in honour of the erudite Nigeria born international poet and scholar of great repute.

The event showcased a potpourri of thought provoking activities, spiced with various entertainment shows including plays, dance and drum performances, Ikere Ekiti Oriki chant, poetry reading, and symposia. Among those that displayed their poetry and music prowess was a practicing journalist with Punch Newspaper, Akeem Lasisi who, for about 15 minutes, held the attention of the audience with his “Udeme” performance which x-rayed the reckless spending of Nigerian politicians on girlfriends.

•Osundare: Celebrated

Osundare, described as the birthday boy, read two of his poems titled, “Death Came Calling”, and “Eniyan Laso Mi”, from his latest book that took him six years to write titled, “City Without People: The Katrina Poems”, published by Black Window Press, USA, where he narrated his ordeals during and after the Katrina disaster that almost striped him naked. According to him, after staying in the attic of his house for 26 hours without food with his wife, he was miraculously saved from violent storm that killed over 3,000 people. “For two weeks, my wife and I were just all over the place. I left my house without a pair of shoes. My shirt was torn. Water has taken everything we had away. We had money in our bank, but we didn’t have money to buy food until the Red Cross and aid agencies came to our assistance. At the Red Cross centre, I was there among hundreds of other people, an ordinary man. Nobody knew this is a poet or a great professor. I was a Katrina evacuee. I didn’t enjoy the experience but I learnt a lot that I will never forget. You can imagine not having a bath, not brushing your teeth for eight days.”

Switching off from Katrina, Osundare berated the state of the country’s education, adding his voice to his colleagues, Professor Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate, and a foremost playwright, Professor Femi Osofisan to advocate a state of emergency to be declared in the sector whereby all schools in the country would be closed down for a year or so with the aim of comprehensively overhauling them for the betterment of the nation.

•L-R: VC Kwara State University, Prof. Abdu Rasheed Na Allah; Prof. Niyi Osundare; UIDVC Admin, Prof. Emilolorun Ayilari; Prof. Ayo Banjo and Prof. Ayo Bamgbose

While condemning the cross carpeting of politicians from one party to the other with impunity which according to him portray Nigerian politicians as creatures without ideology, he warned the APC-led administration against failing in their promises as well as charging Nigerians to hold their leaders accountable and ensure that failed leaders and political parties are not allowed to return to power after the expiration of their tenure. He concluded by thanking all his friends who instituted the festival saying that he would never forget them for the honour done him.

Speaking in this same vein, Osofisan, who described Osundare as a friend, a model, and a very talented poet said that the most striking thing about Osundare is his concern for the progress of the country, stressing that he could not make any speech without talking about the suffering of people. “He is concerned about the way the country is moving and deteriorating. He is concerned about the deterioration of education which has been so much destroyed,” he added.

•Egungun performance during the festival

Osundare’s teachers, Professor Emeritus, Ayo Banjo, former UIVC (who replaced Chief Femi Falana (as chairman of the occasion) who did not turn up because he thought that the programme had been postponed as a result of the partial closure of the school) and Professor Ayo Bamgbose, a linguist as well as keynote speaker, Professor Abdu Rasheed Na’Allah, Vice Chancellor, Kwara State University, in their respective speeches, acknowledged Osundare’s humility and passion for preservation of Yoruba culture and languages. They noted that Osundare’s poetry represents the nation’s aspiration, values, culture and tradition that is capable of bringing the world to Nigeria.

Bamgbose said, “The most important thing about Niyi Osundare’s work is that for him, poetry is not just work for reading, it has to do with performance. You would have seen that in the way he presented the Katrina incident when he started by singing along the words in the poetry. His poetry is not what you just read, it is something you act; it is actionable. He talked so much about the ways to revive our culture which has to do basically with going back to our roots and ensure that our children are taught and made comfortable in our languages. We should give the attention we give to English to Yoruba. Osundare is my student but you can see his great humility. I can’t remember any event I have been with him that he has not paid special tribute to us, his teachers. He could have said I have become a great man and so I don’t care about those who taught me. So his humility is simply legendary and I think people should copy that from him.” For Banjo, Osundare is a pride of UI, Nigeria and the whole world at large.

•Another cultural performance at the event

Na’Allah who pointed out that Osundare was among the few notable African writers who revolutionarised Africans from reading literatures of the colonizers even after the demise of colonization lamented the non-recognition of literature by the government at all levels.

He berated The Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFUND, for excluding humanity from the fields it recently made grant available to. He argued: “They made grant available to sciences, technology, and engineering and did not consider humanity fit for the research grant. They felt that for Nigeria to be great, we needed technology advancement. They forget that poetry is technology. They relegate it to the background. The greatest award in the world is Nobel laureate and the first of it in Africa was won by a Nigerian in the field of humanity. The first one was gotten in literature by Wole Soyinka and I am sure we will soon get another by Niyi Osundare. We need to make a point here that as long as we suppress poetry, Nigeria will not succeed. Poetry expresses our culture, our life, our aspiration, our vision. The only way we can succeed as a nation is to recognize that poetry is life.”

•Osundare (centre), chatting with his teachers, Professors Banjo and Bamgbose

Pointing out that Osundare is a celebrity in the proper worldview, the scholar advocated the continuity of the programme, stressing that the thinkers of our country, people who represent Nigerians, and identify with their beliefs must be brought in. “During the last election, it was clear that we had a serious war between the people and the government. At the end of the day, the people won. We won the election because of poems of Osundare who constantly reminds us of our aspiration, culture and tradition. If money spent is considered, the election would have gone the other way. Official money shared among the hegemony was Dollars. I know what our monarchs did. The election was not an affirmation of the qualities of Muhammadu Buhari but Nigerians’ determination to take back power and what belong to them. This poetry makes this possible.”

In his paper titled, “Topicality and the Visionary Artist: Preliminary Thoughts on Niyi Osundare’s Poetry”, Professor Isidore Diala of Imo State University, Owerri, described Osundare as the people’s poet as a result of his use of the aesthetics of folk art and his compassionate striving to transform the texture of the common life. He quoted Osundare as saying: “The reason people call me “Poet of the People” is that I try to resist being academicized, as it were. That was why in 1985, I started a poetry column in a newspaper, and the principles were that the poems would be topical, that they would also have some beauty about them so they are not just doggerel passing for poetry and that they would be accessible.”

•Well wishers at the event

He also described Osundare as a Humanist as a result of his involvement with a global human community. According to him, Osundare’s conception of the topical has a global breadth and such poems as “For Olof Palme” and “For the Women of Greenham Common”, demonstrate the scope of his compassion. “The poet’s characteristic exploration of typical political Nigerian experience in parables and tropes certainly served as a shield against trigger-happy but illiterate Nigerian tyrants as he claimed. Its more crucial artistic role, however, is the sublimation and transformation of the specific and the local into paradigms applicable to a larger humanity. Osundare’s aim, in other words, is to strive to bring the social under a gaze to which timeless mythical experiences are familiar. The collection, Waiting Laughter, is especially instructive in this regard”, he said.

The scholar described the Waiting Laughers of Osundare as apocalyptic in its anticipation of a turning moment in the nation’s history. It also mediates on the national condition and the representative inadequacies, delusions, failure, distractions, and hopes typical of that condition, yet it is ultimately a compelling and evocative statement on the healing processes and redemptive powers of the passage of time. He said: “Osundare is essentially a poet, rather than a political activist or even propagandist, wooing language for memorable and compelling images of transformation. He scours varying realms of experience ranging from poultry to disease in search of antithetical images of birth, rebirth and regeneration, on the one hand, and decay, dissolution, and death, on the other. His arena is infinitely larger than Nigerian politics even larger than the political.”