Deep Crossing: The Horsemen and other poems.

Obi Nwakanma. AWP, 2007. $14.95
By Chris Abani | The African Tribune | May 15, 2007

“an eloquent fear. it is a terrible/animal. half sea half land…/” (from Deep Crossing)

Being Nigerian, even in Nigeria, has always been a negotiation with the complexities of identity. What does it mean to be Nigerian? A nation with a post-colonial history and arbitrarily drawn borders that do not account for the multitude of ethnicities it contains. Ethnicities that were essentially themselves, prior to colonialism, separate nation states. How does one speak to being Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa while still being true to a bigger national identity? Writers like Wole Soyinka have negotiated this somewhat successfully by being firmly entrenched in Yoruba mythology and aesthetics, but broadening them out to a larger Nigerian and even global context. In this collection, Obi Nwaknma, attempts something similar.

The Horsemen and other poems fits into a new transnational tradition of Nigerian poetry that includes voices like Uche Nduka (eel on reef: Black Goat, New York, 2007). What differentiates these voices from their Nigerian forebears is the migratory nature of their imagination and personal circumstances, factors that deeply affect and inflect their aesthetic, giving it an ambiguity that is refreshing.
In this collection, Obi Nwakanma creates a new mythology of being that negotiates the difficulties of self, nation, culture, ethnicity and the rigors of an aesthetic craft. Beyond the complexity of Nigerian identity, this poet tries to contend with being at once displaced from while simultaneously bridging a larger world culture and context that includes Nigeria, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. These philosophical and political questions are however grounded in a poetry that is muscular, robust and includes influences ranging from Okigbo, Yeats, ee cummings, and dare I say Eliot and even Li Po. They wrestle with relationships between ethics (what Nwaknma calls sacred time) and the political loss of faith (which the poet equates with an indifferent sense of national time).

/it was a room above the alcove/
in a city renewed by junipers/
and by desires…
a tongue licked through the core of my being/
…nothing triumphant in that last march/ (from horsemen)

The last line recalls Yeats’s Second Coming and Okigbo’s Come Thunder and even the now infamous September 1, 1939 by Auden, creating a poetry that is not only beautiful, but one that speaks to the idea of the eternal ethical struggle of the individual for a history of living responsible humanity and the urgency of the political moment against the empty call of empire building.

/August twenty –five nineteen eight five:/
we should have seen the shape of the rope./

These lines recall a time when coup after coup led us from the regimes of Idiaghbon to Babangida and eventually Sanni Abacha, in much the same way that Okigbo’s Come Thunder prophesied all the troubles that led to the Biafran-Nigerian civil war. However, Nwakanma’s clarion is not to prophecy, but to remember, to learn from history, to read and heed the signs that so clearly led us to infamy. In doing so, he moves beyond the sentimental and even the rhetorically political, and instead he argues that we are complicit if we fail to learn these lessons and to act from them. This is not a book about blame, about lament, but rather a deeply optimistic belief in the communal ability to re-learn how to read (and live by) sacred time and to use it to combat the negation of empty time. Nwakanma it seems has found a way to balance this struggle, to not only make meaning but to even reach beyond what is easily redemptive toward the transcendental.

Chris Abani's latest book is The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007). He is professor of creative writing at UC Riverside and book review editor of the African Tribune. To learn more about his work, visit his website at chrisabani.com.