Published Book or Work by:
|
An African Eclipse |
 |
| Published by Handel Books Limited | | 2000 |
| ISBN: 978-05202-8-5 | | The sun shall not wait on your/Drunken dream/While you revel behind/Your barricade...And fondle your/Many mistresses....Fine speeches and stale state/Declarations/With presidential pretences/On your face....
An African Eclipse chronicles the drumming of local prodigal sons who lost the vision of the founding fathers of the continent by their own misdirected energies, so the poet seems to say in this second collection of poems. For Ce, here is that other stage where the action becomes 'the run of history.’ The Nigerian and African flora and fauna are clearly discernible.
| |
Poetry
|
| |
| 1 comment |
You must be logged in to add a comment |
| From: Progeny Int (progeny_int@yahoo.co.uk) |
2006-02-07 |
It is true that African poetry is always in the service of society, not of necessity, but from the aesthetics of its original existence. Poetry is not merely the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ In Africa, it is a calculated, creative response of talent to environment. The poetry of Chin Ce reveals shared experiences in addition to singular vision and destiny whether collective or personal.
An African Eclipse appears like a song, overly direct, and bristles with contempt, while the poetics is so full of conviction. Yet the overall threnody of the African Eclipse qualifies as a modern African dirge poetry in all its aesthetics.
The prologue comprises a single poem ‘Farewell,’ wherein the poet sets the tone for a new direction. ‘A Farewell’ takes a decision on this visionary direction.
But I have taken now the day is bright
(the shining light of
Soul lights) the other route.
We may assume that this is a parting of ways, from old to new. It is the ‘old ways’ that Ce confronts us with in this poetry. Like a traditional bard, the poet in ‘African Eclipse’ mourns the atrophy of Africa’s future. It is the truncation of hopes for a great black African nation by the ‘generation without a soul,’ in other words, an accursed Mafioso. The poet-mourner puts the responsibility on military and civilian collaborators in national politics.
The tendency to load the enemy with all kinds of negative images has become a continuing tradition with most poetry of lamentation. Nigerian politicians are vultures, and their military turncoats are reptiles. (p. 7) In any case, the military are the precipitators of the eclipse. In ‘Darkness,’ the poet leaves us in no doubt of the vicious wheel of counter military interventions which the nation was made to revolve. ‘All borders closed’ is only but diplomatic ‘blundering in the dark.’ (p. 11) Metaphorically, this darkness is similar to the benumbed feeling of total loss and desolation experienced at the instance of death. In other words the country is dead politically.
'time only crawled/.../and who began to curse?'
In this rhetorical humour the poet admonishes the Nigerian masses (whom he indicts as being passive) to ignore or refrain from giving support to the meddlesome interlopers: ‘Let us stretch and yawn/like late risers of early morn.’
Probably the most acerbic lamentation of political corruption can be found in the four-part movement to the ‘Eclipse.’ (pp. 16-19) ‘The sun shall not wait…’ begins the poet, in admonitory locution to a (typically Nigerian) president who barricades himself in office and is now alienated from his people. The image of time which does not wait but hurtles down the decline is ominous of impending doom:
'Time does not stall/It hurtles/Dangerously down the decline/And every penny must be paid...'
Past and present Nigerian leaders, as the poet bemoans, have been intrinsically self-serving. The president, in his ‘drunken dream’ of office accoutrements fondles his mistresses behind the primitive seclusion of his estate. In some cases, all he volunteers are mere speeches and unoriginal public declarations. To his retinue of sycophants, he offers bacchanal feasts and medals of service, which the poet-mourner scorns as ‘dog medals around their necks.’
In contrast to this affluence are the wretched people: ‘bearers/of the land’s loads.’ Of course such sights as ‘bony heads of children,’ and homeless street dwellers are safely shut from the view of Nigeria’s number one public official who does not see very much from his seat of indulgence. Apart from empty slogans, Nigerian leadership further insults the people’s intelligence with human rights violations: torture and murder by corrupt police and uniformed security personnel.
'Cries of torture and murder/Sweep the Streets/Where your mad dogs roam...'
The poet in the manner of a visionary, warns of dire consequences. ‘Time,’ is no ‘respecter’ of persons. The style of rendition, presents time as the great leveller: that which equalises the imbalance among men, nations, and races. ‘Every penny must be paid,’ is the refrain that warns the abusers of public trust of the consequences to come. This may be in the form of civil disobedience-
'the day your requiem is sung/In your face picture patch/Of what a crook has done this land...'
-or, worse still, a social upheaval. But the effect of this turn-around will be the civic act of public unmasking. ‘Every spill of blood,’ and humiliation of men, will, like the proverbial chicken, come home to roost, as it did for the despot in ‘The Epitaph.’
Historicity in African Eclipse: There are certainly other locales of the eclipse in both historical and imaginative landscapes of the poet. ‘A Sobbing’ records some other stained spots of the continent, including two other poems on the South African experience. Like the Nigerian eclipse, the South African state led by majority blacks threatens to extinguish the lofty dream of universal black brotherhood by its xenophobic aggressiveness against both black and white.
'Thunder in Transkei/
chars in Ciskei/
Burnt bleached terrain/
And remnants only…/
Broken minds and battered bodies/
Litter the trail/
After violence/
In Soweto/
This theme of the violence of apartheid proceeds to the second part. Black-against-black violence continues even after majority rule has been won. This dilation comes too soon after independence has been won on clouds of ‘thunder’ and ‘bellows.’
Other renditions in African Eclipse include two poems to Nigerian novelist, Achebe (Chinua). In ‘Wind and Storm,’ Yeatsan holocaust and twentieth century confusion come up again under the whirling wind.
Wind and storm are whirling/
In a land no longer at ease/
Many things shall fall apart/
If the poet agrees with Achebe and Yeats, it however, lies not in the apocryphal vision of the latter, nor in the clash of cultures of the former’s generation. Rather in ‘Wind and Storm,’ the confusion of twenty-first century Africa is due to the very machinations of her leaders against their own kind. Greed and avarice destroy a nation. Therefore, in the flight of an Achebean arrow, the poet encapsulates a staunch philosophic idea with virtuous artistic excellence: Man is the architect of his own downfall. ‘They pierced their own hearts,’ the poet deposes, ‘one hundred million minions.’
Social Deconstruction in “Prodigal Drums”: One of the finer points of this threnody is the critical assessment of varied nuances of his people. In ‘Prodigal Drums,’ the poet weeps for the average Nigerian youth. “Prodigal drums” represents the juvenile dereliction of moral values.
Fuff is the Nigerian emigrant to the city who soon joins in the boisterous, happy-go-lucky lifestyles of city dwellers. However, the tension of the two opposing forces of conformity and rebellion snaps very soon and predictably too. Fuff’s rebellion is uncoordinated, one-man squad, not founded on a strategic base of social dynamics, yet just enough to make a victim of the hero. No resistance to a corrupt society, such that Nigeria offers, can be successful by just one man’s indignation and physical protest. The society that breeds corrupt electricity officials, police officers, judges, etc., ensures that Fuff, one of its rebels, permanently remains behind bars until his mental derangement. The loneliness of Fuff comes across in pithy lines.
There was no one, not one/
to pay the bail/
and for nine hundred weeks/
far in the northern heat/
did the sun of the Sahara/
blank his mind in jail/
Fuff returns with obvious disability cast in a grotesque sense of humour: ‘robbed again: wad and sense.’ Later in the lament, Fuff’s misplaced aggression is expectedly both comic and pithy. His aggression towards mother and father, including a faceless society, cannot but evoke bitter laughter.
Where am I?/
the stone the builders rejected/
and by Bacchus with my machete/
shall I have your heads for dinner.
The uncomfortable resolution of the conflict is deliberate, for the tension of the ruler and the governed cannot but ultimately snap in the darkness of betrayals and misdirected priorities.
The after-eclipse in An African Eclipse: An African Eclipse is not all a lament of ‘stinging stench,’ ‘stalking hyenas,’ ‘barbarian and his boot,’ and ‘tired drummers.’ The epilogue hints at some future determination, is symbolic of an after-eclipse.
And when the wise have gone/
To face the formless/
Beneath the veil of truth/
You shall sit by the still waters/
humbled by glimpses/
Of their ceaseless trail/
The graphic smiling sun in the epilogue amplifies the concept even before the succeeding four poems enforce this hope of a renewal. More striking to the critical sensibility is how a mourner presents this sense of renewal aposterori: as if it already was. In the loud denunciations of the preceding section, none could have thought such deep sense of optimism possible. But here is the real vintage of the African lamentation that lifts the veil of sullen grief to reveal a landscape of glorious fortune.
Now the dirt/
In a million eyes are washed/
With clean drops of rain/
You shall keep watch over the earth/
And the spring that flows/
From the sacred fountain of the heart/
Culled from African Dirge Poetry
|
|
|
