Perhaps the best way to begin a discussion of Lasisi Olagunju’s Forest Flowers (published by Kingsmann Graffix Limited, Osogbo) is to go directly to the anthology. For the general reader, although obviously not for a trained critic or stylistician, the lack of an introduction/preface or blurb on the back page may, of course, seem quite daunting.
However, as this is probably the first reading on the work, it may not be out of place to make a few helpful comments. But then, let’s go into the first stanza of the first poem in the anthology, Forest Promises:
The forest is like porridge
The dead, the living meshed
In alluring promise
Of course, if you have read Christopher Okigbo’s ‘Hurray for Thunder’, especially the portion where the poet says ‘Today for tomorrow/tomorrow becomes yesterday,’ you may already have formed a picture in your mind of Olagunju’s mindstyle here (For starters, mindstyle, rather than worldview, is used by linguistic stylisticians for reasons we need not go into here).
Right from the beginning of Olagunju’s expose, contrasting pictures are interposed in a complex spotlight. If, indeed, ‘the dead’ and ‘the living’ get meshed in alluring promise, then we had better watch out. The poet goes ahead to say: ‘The forest sings/and dances cryptic steps/ of the creeps, the towering’ and that ‘The forest is the sea\feeding the bald desert/or the desert waters the swamp?’ And there, you have the first poem in its entirety.
Should you be led to expect, given the general critical trend that we find in the works of contemporary Nigerian poets like Remi Raji or Gbemisola Adeoti, that Olagunju’s Forest Flowers is yet another protest poem detailing essentially the contradictions of our contemporary society, you may read the ‘forest’ here as being the Nigerian society itself, an ugly stretch of paradoxes.
That is, of course, given the context of writer-as-crusader. The point may perhaps be made, however, that Olagunju’s Forest Flowers, given the metaphysical temper which runs through the pages, is more of a philosophical exploration of existential issues than a statement of political dissent, which is not to say that dissent is lacking. The Forest, therefore, may be read as the entire world, in part the global community, itself.
In Forest Flowers, Olagunju’s vehicle is metaphor worked through a paucity of poetic lines. Indeed, Forest Promises, the 9-line opening poem, is representative of the entire poems in the anthology: short, cryptic, pointed and probing. ‘Forest Flowers’, then, is a poetic metalanguage, with a crypticness hardly detected in Nigerian poetry.
In ‘Tears’, the following 8-line poem, the persona addresses the current economic ruination in the country( witness, for instance, the present murderous drama in the banking sector where people previously considered high and mighty have been shown to be chronic debtors and famous bank directors shown to be common crooks) as embodying tears beyond the “cries of labour rooms\and the wailings of bleeding virgins’’ but actually “tales of general rape\howling holes in silent souls’’, which is a metaphoric depiction of the general ruination of the country by its leaders.
Thus if what one knows of the poet, that he is a serving governor’s Special Adviser is any reference point, the truism that the poet is no friend of the politician is immediately manifest. Indeed, the poet would seem to suggest that the Nigerian society, plagued by murderously criminal leadership, has only just begun its tears.
Although what one reads is critical realism rather than revolutionary aesthetics, critical realism can, as Lucaks, cited in Udenta (see Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literay Process, Enugu, Fourth Dimension), be an effective partner in the business of socio-transformative criticism. But ‘Tears’ is immediately followed up with ‘Marketplace’, an exploration of a common Yoruba philosophical concept.
If “the whole psychic atmosphere of African village is filled with belief in …mystic power(John Mbiti, African Religions and philosophy), the market place, in Yoruba lore, is even more so, as it is a metaphor of the world where everyone buys and sells. (see also Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, 1976). Asks the poet persona: ‘Will all early pockets with happiness filled?/And all latter sacks profit gained?
Of course, naturally, Abiola Irele’s conception of orality as a matrix of the African imagination which is borne out through transliteration, transfer, reinterpretation and transposition(Irele, 2009, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.58) holds true in this case.
In ‘Monkey’, the persona again burrows into Yoruba ancestral lore: Are we wise that say\the monkey is idiotic\Even as it rumbles the forest\And in its pouch hide its treasures?’(p.4) while Faces continues the thought not only that life is a volley of contradictions but that wisdom is shared and intertextual : In the armour of the great\you see holes of defeat\ In the rag of the mad\smells the scent of wisdom’(p.11), and Shangai, even though it dramatises issues of mutual racial mistrust and politics, is just as critical of Chinese cuisine as it is celebratory of Chinese transport.
Thus, while Shangai’s roads are, for the visiting Nigerian poet, ‘a dream in sanity\…marriage of peace\in the highway of unbelief’ with ‘Every soul on the road of tolerance,’ the poet persona nevertheless considers Chinese cuisine rather base and animalistic: “What land thinks you no man|Stuffing your throat with goatleaves’. No doubt the persona, while relishing the orderliness of Chinese society, nevertheless laments the absence of akpu and /or other ‘proper African food’.
This question of cuisine clash is, I believe, largely unaddressed in African literature. And in ‘Dogs of Frankfurt’, in spite of the condemnatory language in which the poet robes white supremacists, he still manages to pose a perplexing question.
As he puts it: ‘If only the white hogs know \my home is heaven\…Then you thought you heard them say:\Why leave hell if it is heaven?’ Thus, the criticism, in the Soyinkan\Clarkian spirit demonstrated in, say, Jero’s Metamorphosis and America, their America, respectively, does not spare anyone, yet its metaphysical(and here we do not mean “magical’’) import should perhaps not be overlooked.
Let us now return to a critical point. In ‘Examining Canonisation in Modern African Literature, Tanure Ojaide makes the point that contemporary African writers such as Tess Onwueme, Chimamanda Adichie, Zakes Mda, Calixthe Beyala, Sefi Ata, Helen Oyeyemi(see ‘Examining African Literature’ , African Literature, 2009) and, one may add, Helon Habila “tend to steal the spotlight with the advantage of big publishers, promotion in the media, and money involved’, as ‘ most African writers winning international literary prizes tend to be living in the West.’
This, of course, tends to leave out writers such as Olagunju, published by local presses, which suffer from “poor editorial staff, poor quality of books, and weak distribution network, which keep “many of the published works from circulating beyond their regions of publication.’’
Although a perusal of Forest Flowers reveals the unimpeachable quality of its editing—the author himself holds a First Class Honours in English from Nigeria’s most respected university, it is doubtful if Forest Flowers will gain the universal acclaim it deserves in record time. One quality of the printing which deserves mention is the cover—it is of the highest possible standard.
There are, in the anthology, the usual homages to loved ones and departed legends, but the admirable ease with which the poems, in general, probe the fundamental questions of existence in a Cartesian methodological skeptical framework(Rene Descartes, the legendary European philosopher, finds knowledge only after doubting every doubtable fact, hence ‘methodological scepticism’) and in alluring, indeed seductive language may prove, ultimately, its most most crucial selling point.
(This review was written in September, 2009).