Most likely in our column this week we would have touched on some other salient aspects of poetry if it was not for a friend who stopped me in my tracks fairly recently.
And this is no other than Alfred Mukanaka who is usually keen to raise a red flag if and when a need does arise. Such friends who keep you on tenterhooks must be respected because they raise concerns that may be beneficial to all.
The issue he raises is about a poem by Mukumbutwa Lisimba called ‘Mufulira,’ which as readers would recall, was not critically reviewedbut merely given general comments.
Mukanaka is rather dissatisfied, so he questions the credibility of the imagery in one of the stanzas and expresses a kind of discomfiture to the alleged distortion of gramma in the verse. Which, it seems to me,is an important concern although this is a matter we have dealt with before but one worth revisiting nonetheless. It would perhaps serve as a reminder to our readers of one Sisyphus, the wisest and most prudent of all mortals, we are told, condemned by the gods to roll the stone up the mountain ceaselessly.In order to shade more light on imagery we turn once againto Lisimba’s poem which we have just mentioned and present itin its entirety and subsequently investigatea few more poems where imagery is used to help us respond adequately to Mukanaka’s concerns genuine or otherwise.
We moan the brothers
Who vanished like captives in the battle
Whom the raging foe overpowers
Puts to a savage death.
The cracking darkness swallows;
They lie in the debris
Unrescued, shroudless, faithfully
Beside their rusting tools
We pit them,
The poor who died for us
In our midst
Beyond our reach
To hide space heroes
Who lift their coffins to Neptune.
Red tears fell empty,
The cry sunk deeper than the spade
Stuffed with mud;
The crumbling cavity would not echo.
Spirits of our ancestors
Will condemn our greed for gold;
But time changes: dear fathers,
Were you here today
Would you not feel mad?
Would you not mimic the giant steps of the West
To pant behind, thirsty, hopeful?
Would you not nudge the young ones
To capture the jewels of the moon
Or abandon your own
As we have ours
To deep holes of death and wealth?
Mukanaka pours scorn on ‘red tears’ in this poem. He further suggests that ‘red tears’ should mean ‘blood fell empty’ and if that is the case, he wonders, which gramma we are using!Firstly, poetry employs its own language quite apart from the conventional standards of gramma. If there is a place where gramma is ruthlessly disfigured it is in the world of poetry. Let us take a second look at the stanza—in line one of the third stanza Lisimba refers to moaners whose‘red tears’ fall empty. What is it thatthe poet was thinking about, one would ask:well no doubt there is both a twist of language and thought.
True, tears are color blind as my friend suggests. But that is if we leave it there. It becomes a different matter, however,if we employ the element of association where eyes of a moaner are completely red as a result of much moaning. And because tears fall from the eyes the poet’s imagination alludes to this association, which a casual reader would easily miss. I do hope this puts the matter to rest in this paradox of broken gramma.But there is a lot more that can be confusing. In stanza two the last three lines are baffling. The speaker-cum-poet, in referring to the dead, says the dead are beyond reach and that they even mystify space heroes who lift coffins to Neptune. The question is: who are these space heroes and why and how should they lift the coffins to Neptune?Poetrycan stretch our imagination and get us thoroughlytransfixedin its beauty. We would have gone on to consider the last stanza but let us turn to J.P. Clark’s poem ‘Death of a Weaverbird.’
SHOT,
At Akwebe,
A place not even on the map
Made available by Shell-BP,
A weaverbird,
Whose inverted house
Had a straw from every soil.
Clear was his voice as the siren’s
Chirp with no fixed hour
Of ditty or discourse …
When plucked,
In his throat was a note
With a bullet for another:
I am in contact with the black- kite.
At the head of a flock I have led
To this pass.
How can I return to sing another song?
To help start a counter surge?
In Clark’s poem just like in Lisimba’s we are still looking at the subject of death. In one, it is a mass grave underground in another; it is death at the battlefront. Clark moans a weaverbird, who is said to have died at Akwebe, an unknown place for such a person of Okigbo’s stature, one of the finest poets Africa has ever produced. In italicized lines Clark quotes from Okigbo’s collection of poems, ‘Limits.’ Let us examine the imagery in Clark’s poem: take, for instance, the title of the poem itself, weaverbird. One would ask the question: why would Okigbobe referredto as a weaverbird? The answer is readily available from the houseshe built, or rather the poetry he wrote which accommodates every straw from every soil.
Weaverbirds are about the most ingenious creatures that God ever created. Hanging on the branches of trees over streams or grass it is unmistakable the kind of calabash-shaped, gourd-shaped nests they can put together. And they do this using every twig or grass they come across. Those who know Okigbo this is an apt imagery because he would collect images from every corner of the globe including his own birth place which explains how difficult his works could be sometimes.
One has to be familiar with the origins of his straws. Okigbo was also a town crier and when plucked there was indeed a note or bullet streaming from his throat. But see how intelligently Clark uses Okigbo’s own words to ask questions about his ability (or is it his inability?) to sing: how can I return to sing another song/To help start a counter surge?In the same breath, Okigbo says that he is in contact with the black-kite, what do you think he is referring to? Now, it would do us good to look at Jack Mapanje’s poem from ‘Of Chameleons and Gods.’
Master, you talked with bows,
Arrows and catapults once
Your hands streaming with hawk blood
To protect your chicken.
Why do you talk with knives now,
Your hands teaming with eggshells
And hot blood from your own chickens?
Is it to impress your visitors?
There is, I am made to think, an avenue to the poet’s mind in blurb to the collection of his poetry. The Malawian poetsays that he was attempting to find a voice in order to hang on to some sanity; and further quips that this is why ‘the product of these energies sometimes seems to be too cryptic to be decoded.’ Sometimes African writers find themselves in difficult situations and in order to communicate they use cryptic images.
But that is another matter; for now, see how the poet is torn between the two situations. Here is a master wavering between or seen to waver between two diametrically opposite situations. On one hand, the master seems to have been caring for his own and would do anything possible to defend the chicken and its eggs while in another his hands are teaming with hot blood and eggshells. What has changed, we may care to ask.
I urge the reader to once again pause and think through the many ways poetry is written. Reflect on the poems presented here to see how imagery communicates meaning and how writers use language to communicate in countriesruled bydespots and tyrants. –ofpoetspoems@gmail.com–
