Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
Edited and translated by Pietro Deandrea
University of Torino, Faculty of Foreign Languages and
Literatures, Italy
Niyi Osundare (1947) is appreciated as one of the most important and
original voices of contemporary poetry in English. Thanks also to his
grandfather and his father (the former a herbalist, the latter a
farmer-composer), he developed a deep relationship with the poetry of
the oral culture of his childhood. This would turn out to be his main
source of inspiration for his poems in English.
Osundare is one of the most famous exponents of the 'Alter-Native Tradition', ie. the second generation of Nigerian poets including Odia Ofeimun, Funso Aiyejina and Tanure Ojaide, to mention a few. Though acknowledging their debt towards pioneers such as Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo, since the early 1980s the Alter-Natives have rejected the others' modernist taste for aestheticizing obscurity in order to compose more straightforward and accessible poems, marked by a socio-political commitment sometimes informed by a Marxist outlook. Such features are evident in Osundare's first three collections: Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984) and A Nib in the Pond (1986).
His following collection The Eye of the Earth (1986) marked a decisive point in his growth as a poet. The relevance of Osundare's themes is here supported by an astonishing linguistic richness and lyrical maturity, by an irreverent taste for playing with words and with the expressive potentiality offered by the English language. See, for example, the neologisms 'hueman' and 'preyers', not easy to translate. Osundare attains a fusion of politics and poetics which will become a distinguishing feature of many of his following works, and whose metaphorical language taps an anthropomorphic nature, as in the invocation to the chameleon below.
From The Eye of the Earth (1986) [...] Don the earth Don this praying mantis * iroko (chlorophora excelsa) = great tropical tree made of hard and valuable wood, also known as 'African oak'. His following work, Moonsongs (1988), was inspired by a
criminal assault that nearly killed him. During his painful
hospitalisation, Osundare's imagery grew more cryptic, with less
explicit social themes, and thus triggered off some accusations of
disengagement. The atmosphere of these lunar odes is nevertheless
pervaded by an acute sense of suffering. From Moonsongs (1988): Night after night And the moon, too busy to sleep, of the drum of the drum
Count your colours, oh chameleon,
aborigine of wood and wind
count your colours
in the rainbow of the fern
in the thick, ashen hide
of the sapling tree.
Count your colours,
oh prince of easy wardrobe,
dandy hueman who walks
so natively naked because he has
a forest of a thousand garbs.
with the preening prudence
of your global eyes.
Don the earth,
not with the millennial leaplessness
of millipede legs
not with the ireful ire
of the scorpion's tail
nor the calculating meanness
of the snail who carries his home
on every journey.
in its eternal tabernacle
wringing green hands before
an absent god
Don the unlistening forest
salaaming (instead) to the
compelling muezzin of a loud,
insistent wind.
Don this praying brood,
this school of dancing twigs
[...]
Behold, too, these preyers
in the cannibal calvary
of the forest:
the iroko* which swallows the shrub,
the hyena which harries the hare,
the elephant which tramples the grass
its legs nerveless with the gangrene
of senseless power
Tell them all the calm behind the claw
Tell them the sun
which succeeds the night.
[...]
The wind spreads out the sky
snatches fleeting dreams in tunnels
of nodding clouds,
swaying so solemnly to the summon
And with its rhythm of rocks
memory of meadows
hieroglyph of hills
with its dong-dong of dawn-and-dusk
the moon lilts and laughs,
a millennial tear standing hot
in the amplitude of the eye
The tear bursts into brook
ripens into river
then gallops like a liquid mare
towards the sea
All at dawn
when the moon is a seasoned navel
in the stomach of the sky.
Songs of the Season (1990) turned out to be a radically different book, being a collection of the poems published for the newspaper Nigerian Tribune. Similar to the fable on the International Monetary Fund published below, its lines are accessible, conceived for a wide readership and referring to widely debated issues.
From Songs of the Season (1990):
Once upon a time
When men had seven mouths
And a hand sprouted a dozen fingers
There was a land so rich in everything:
Gold wrestled silver in the belly of her earth
The rivers were quick with fish
And the plains lay fertile like undulating virgins
Then came a breed of barons, bloated like
Maggots off the carcass of seamy excess;
They grabbed the gold, cornered the copper,
Unfished the waters, and forced graceful rivers
To change their course.
They met a land of flowing fortunes
But left a desert of grating skulls.
The people shouted, the cannon answered
Prophets complained, royal trumpeters
Drowned their visions in metallic noises
The multitudes starved, the barons filled
Their nests with golden eggs.
And then a depleted quarry threw up
A chronically in-debted future...
Oh woeful times!
The bird finally hatched a marvel
Too big for its swinging nest
The village head entered a retreat
Of passionate pondering,
He summoned warlords, he arraigned his beaded chiefs:
"Just how shall we crush this fly perched
So perilously on the testicles of our land?"
The meeting gave birth
To a simmering wisdom:
The village head led his tattered crowd
To the plundering barons;
Crouching before their glittering presence,
He rattled out in a voice so brittle, so broke:
"We have come to borrow some of those fortunes
Which lie in your brimming banks,
Do us this favour, and we shall pay back
With all your stated interests."
The owl hoots out a tune
From the top of a knowing tree:
"The world is up side down like the bat of night;
How can a people now borrow
What they used to own?"
Osundare's ever-growing interest in the techniques of orality, which he has been demonstrating both as a poet and as a scholar, clearly stands out in his long poem Waiting Laughters (1990), composed for a live performance with a chorus accompanied by an orchestra. The Alter-Natives, after all, have always promoted poetry recitals in order to stimulate reactions from their audience.
From Waiting Laughters (1990):
Waiting
on the stairs of the moon
creaking up and down
the milkyways of fastidious comets
bled into speed, plucked off the vortex
of falling flares
my foot knows the timbre of fiery skies
where songs still dripping
with the sap of the wind
dry their limbs in furnaces
of baking proverbs
My song is space
beyond wails, beyond walls
beyond insular hieroglyphs
which crave the crest
of printed waves.
In his following long poem, Midlife (1993), Osundare goes back to the nature of his hometown and creates a Whitmanesque work where his longing for freedom is woven into a feeling of pantheistic communion with the universe. The passage selected below is dedicated to imprisoned African writers and, above all, to Ken Saro-Wiwa.
From Midlife (1993):
Section V, "Diary of the Sun", poem "i"
I long for open spaces
After so many seasons in the belly of a myth
Unlettered by blind legends, lost in
The labyrinthine syntax of unuttered proverbs
I long for open spaces
After the tongue's wordless wanderings
In the cave of the mouth, and lips
Which mourn the scar of keyless locks
I long for open spaces
From edicts which thicken like medieval jungles
And streets which stumble their days
On nights of adamantine orders
I long for open spaces
Like a clearing in the forest
Like a stroll by the sea
Like the bird's blue range in the amplitude of the sky
Like mountains, like rivers
Like echoes giving back the voice of talkative hills
I long for open spaces
From walls which squeeze the room with concrete claws
And doors which stiffen their hinges
Like sentries from forgotten epochs
I long for open spaces
From smiles which sting like jilted scorpions,
The hidden trap in the track of power hunters
Crimson tantrum in the festival of the knife
I long for open spaces
For a sun which springs from a sea of shadows
For the eye which unbinds the sky
In infinite visions
I long for open spaces