Equal Among Peers
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Chiedu Ezeanah has for over a decade and more of not publishing a debut collection earned the singular distinction in Nigeria of being accepted as a bona fide poet ahead of others with many volumes of published verses. To say that his first collection was eagerly awaited by the literati, from poets and novelists to literary journalists and newspaper columnists, is an understatement.
Consequently, the publication of Ezeanah’s The Twilight Trilogy was the literary event of 2005 in Nigeria. The collection more than lives up to the promise that Ezeanah held out to the keyed up public. Here is poetry that flows seamlessly with lived life. The words bleed. As in Dambudzo Marechera, author of House of Hunger, we find in Ezeanah a thoroughgoing commitment to art as being. Ezeanah interweaves a delicate line of sensitivity and actuality. He is pluriversal in the interrogation of other poets – ancient and modern, vintage or contemporary. The allusive trope in the Ezeanah scheme of rendering inheres in the sophisticated evocation of riffs from distinguished bards as diverse as Seamus Heaney, Rainer Maria Rilke, Derek Walcott, Arthur Nortje, Osip Mandelstam, Wole Soyinka, Tchicaya U Tam'si, Rabindranath Tagore, Harry Garuba, Sylvia Plath, J.P. Clark, Rabearivelo, Yesenin etc. When Christopher Okigbo famously said in Kampala, Uganda he would not share his poetry with non-poets it is as though he had in mind a futuristic poetic date to cherish with Ezeanah at Heavensgate!
In “Endsong”, the title poem of the first book of The Twilight Tragedy, Ezeanah invokes the wounding lines of Mandelstam as a peg for the soul-journey into the twilight:
- Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom...
let us glorify the twilight burden of power,
Its unbearable weight.
It is Ezeanah's lot to be the voice of a generation beat into shape by the civil war, military dictatorship and compromised democracy. Wrenching lyrical poetry from the violent politics of the day and age is a task Ezeanah accomplishes with relish, as he sings in “Endsong II”:
- And here he is:
A dream-seeker
In a malevolent dusk...
In the charged spirit of an age of surprise encapsulating diverse polarities, from the mundane or absurd to the sublime or otherworldly, “Endsong” starts with an apocalyptic vision of home in the heart of the civil war in the poem “16 Miss Ross Street, Ogwashi-Uku, 1969”:
- White mists of piecing chill under crossfires
Swim the garden-green plight
Of Granny's orchard of bounties
- And a child recalls between stifled shrieks
Shivering Granny's prayer...
For the precocious poet, life literally starts as war, and the reader is perforce gripped by darkling images from poems with suggestive titles such as: “Nightfire”, “Funereal Orchard”, “Journeys”, “The Garrison I”, “Trans-missions”, “The Garrison II” dedicated to the indomitable 1990 coup-maker Gideon Orkar, “The City of Tents”, “The Paradise of the Sun-Man and the Night-watchers”. The question is resounding, indigestible:
- How much of stone
Can a child digest?
The section “Facing the Music in the Air” branches out into the sub-sections, namely, “Excerpts from The Book of Matthews & Forgetting” and “The Gunman & The Visionary”, grimmer verses of a “Country of Trickster-Generals and Presidents”. The tragic death of heroes such as Dele Giwa, MKO Abiola and Bola Ige is juxtaposed with the infamy of mutants like General Babangida and Sani Abacha:
- The blind General steals the nation blind
Fills the world's vaults with his name: A-B-C-H-A!!!
In “A Republic of Harmonies”, the sub-section “Vistas” depicts a poet of quest:
- I search through the shores of memory
All the waves and towns and tongues I met
Sing the throes and charms of lives and loves
In a vista of endless quests...
We get to see the poet in different guises and places: “Air-borne”, in “Lagos”, at “Ibadan”, at “Ikogosi”, in his native “Ogwasi-Uku, March 1984”, and “Under the Dogonyaro Tree”. Here Ezeanah is not unlike the late great French surrealist poet Paul Eluard soaring over paradise and gulag singing, as limned by Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The poet gives voice to elemental humanity in “A Dream of Harmonies” and “Republic of Harmonies”:
- Let rabid critics contend on metrics:
Poetry, like Republics,
Should only exist
If harmonies endure in it...
“Song of the Samizdat Fighter”, like W.B. Yeats “Easter 1916”, showcases the poet's meeting of leaders of the June 12, 1993 democracy movement in Nigeria, notably, Olisa Agbakoba, Chima Ubani and Ogaga Ifowodo in the latter's bedsitter in Surulere, Lagos as a foreground to mourn the passing of the revolutionary Chima Ubani who was killed through a State-arranged road crash in 2005. Ezeanah deploys call-and-chorus lore to telling effect, singing:
- In search of harmonies, I've traversed dissonances.
In search of beauty, I've traversed the ruins.
Ezeanah is the quintessential poet of harmony. As he gets more anthology space in the years ahead, he is destined to become a major poetic voice of the postcolonial empire writing back to the centre. He marries beautiful diction with referential resonance, making poetry that stirs on page and stage. On the evidence of The Twilight Trilogy, Chiedu Ezeanah is in the first rank of poets anywhere.