Maximum Trouble!
Toni Kan
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a rare breed in Nigerian literature. Poet, journalist, short story writer, and critic, he is famous and infamous all at once as a bohemian scourge of the establishment and patron saint of young poets.
Aware of T.S Eliot’s warning in his essay, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” of the manifold dangers that confront the critic who approaches a text by way of the man rather than the work, one is hard pressed to write about Maxim’s work without reference to his enigmatic and multifaceted self.
A real “ragged-trousered philanthropist” Uzoatu’s debut collection, or what one would rather call his long-awaited collection is a mélange, providing a deeply penetrating insight into the mind of a well-lettered man in love with the written word.
Maxim, as he is popularly called or Boroja to intimates, on account of his most popular fictional character, reveals aspects of his unique character that are not easily discernible in this collection that is split into five parts and which runs to almost sixty pages.
The early poems are vintage Uzoatu, brimming with his usual bluster evident from the opening poem, the title of which is a reference to one of his many cognomens, God of Poetry, where he declaims:
- “I antedate the Muses
And graven godlings of goldsmiths
From alabaster Greece to mimic Rome.”
Uzoatu’s anti-establishment and iconoclastic posture come through in the arrangement of the poems in that first section. The poems open with “Deathday” before “Birthnight” and observe that birth is aligned to night instead of dawn and vice versa for death.
The author still shocks in his own inimitable manner with lines that go straight for the emotional jugular as he writes of eating himself “with cannibals/At the birthnight banquet.” There is more shock afoot in “Kindred Spirit” where the poet battles a ghoulish figure risen from his catacomb. In this poem, Uzoatu’s diction and imagery are clear and sharp and direct to the point.
- “He came on tiptoe
Straight from the cemetery
And grabbed hold of me
By the scruff of the neck.”
But it is not all shock, as flashes of the poet’s well known acerbic wit and biting sarcasm well up at intervals to remind us, as if we needed to be reminded, that these lines were conceived in the fevered imagination of Uzoatu, the god of poetry, who claims Pope John Paul II as a fellow poet and who doesn’t fail to remind us with sassy aplomb that “Three strokes make one K.”
Uzoatu’s other guises are discernible in the poems as he invokes the spirit of other poets, excoriates dictators and speaks truth to power. In a pastiche of PB Shelley’s Ozymandias, the author offers these opening lines in the poem, “Dada”.
- “Behold the reverend Ras of Rastafarians!
Look upon the bald pate and wonder!”
We are however in for extra and more sarcastic exposition further down in the poem where he writes that “Madmen are known by their head of hair.”
In the poem, “The old Man and the Son” which is an obvious play on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” Maxim, the patron saint of young poets, presents us with a short, didactic poem that could as well have been titled “Letter to a young poet” in which he attempts to teach would-be poets that “slow and steady” actually does win the race because with time, the young poet who is akin to a “stammerer gets out his words.”
“World Poetry” is an obvious mis-step, a showy, pedantic and tedious piece of work. Uzoatu misses the point by trying too hard to show the breadth of his reading. His vast learning, command of the language and mastery of the craft are obvious without this blatant and plodding attempt at poetry. This poem does not belong in this collection.
The poems that follow are almost all below par but redemption comes fast and quick in “Poetic Ping-pong,” where the poet’s signature witticism shines through in the line “One man’s wife is another man’s ping-pong” as well as “Madness is an old man’s art.”
This “god of poetry” seems to see gods everywhere he looks. He finds a fellow god in the poem “At the Shrine” dedicated to Afro beat maestro, Fela. In the poem, the poet writes that:
- “God is a common man
A tramp on trumpet
Blowing past span and season
Into the marrow of time.”
There are flashes of unusual tenderness in the later poems dedicated to various personages. The tenderest of the lot is “Angel” dedicated to Amaka Nwakanma where the poet sings of a departed woman who “lives like sunglow/in the wake of her wake.”
Reading through this collection, one is offered glimpses into the more private aspect of a very public individual and what we get are revelatory glimpses that help us get a more composite view of this versatile and complex man, who defines himself as “the marked guerrilla” who plants head aches “in the skull of the emperor.”
The only regret is that the poems are not dated. Dates would have helped in better tracking the development of this poet’s very unusual poetics and politics.