By Ernest Ogunyemi

If Nigeria ever happened to anyone, it happened to John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (1935—2020). He was the type of poet to thrive in an environment where he is unbound to an allegiance—to state, tribe, or ideological position—beyond language and the insights language allowed him get out of his experience.

Clark-Bekederemo was an eccentric, content to be basic in an age of diverse, at times dubious propensities. I like to think of him as an English Ijaw-man (in his work if not in his life); he shared much with those whom Michael Echeruo described as Victorian Lagosians, his prose carrying the inflated tone that marked newspaper articles of nineteenth century Lagos. He took what he could from the English tradition without shame or complaint and put it to good use. In an interview from 1964, where he responds to a question about the use of the English tongue in an African writer’s mouth, it’s obvious he’s disgusted.

Andrew Salkey had asked if he sees “any inherent contradiction in this linguistic link, is there any embarrassment when you sit down to write a poem?” Clark-Bekederemo replied, “No, no I don’t find it an embarrassment at all. In fact, I think it is a great richness, a great point of contact and inspiration that so many people in such very distant lands can get to understand one another in one language without the need for an interpreter.” 

Salkey, unrepentant, wouldn’t leave the plastic fish in his hands alone. “I like this poem,” the man said of “Ibadan,” and added, “J.P. Would you say it was your own voice or is it half and half?” (Meaning, is this half Nigerian, half English?) To which Clark-Bekederemo said, “I don’t know whether that’s a compliment, Andrew, but do you mean by half and half the image is mine and the language is English—my subject is Nigerian, the largest city in Africa, Ibadan; and then the language I use describing it is English. If that’s what you mean by half and half, then I would say ‘yes’. But this is my own single voice coming out, and then I would say there is nothing half and half about this poem.”

Commonsense: Clark-Bekederemo had more of that, it seems to me, than many of his contemporaries. He was not an intellectual powerhouse like Soyinka and Achebe or Echeruo, nor did he have the creative genius of Okigbo (who was too gifted for his own good), but his ability to put one and one together saved him from the cheap matters of the law and allowed him to concentrate his efforts in the best place: in shaping a voice for himself, a voice able to bear what he had lived and what he was living through. That commonsensical individuality cost him (during and after the Nigerian Civil War) but a poet has to protect his faith—what he sees, how he sees it. It feeds his fire.

1.

Clark-Bekederemo’s style, as many have pointed out, has something of W. B. Yeats in it. His genius, in his finest poems, was for true subdued feeling, actual life, carried in and allowed to stir through the solidity of the line, a sensual sort of wooden music.I think he got all that out of Yeats. Other poets have it but Yeats has it in the way that our poet has it. However, even on pain of death, he could not, much unlike Yeats, get actuality out of a dream (he tried and failed in “The Imprisonment of Obatala”); he had no particular gift for it. As herealised—his work gradually became more steeped in the physical world, more (not a good word) accessible—his achievement would be trim, if he had adapted that aspect of Yeats’ influence.

The years that got collected in Poems (the comeliest fruits reappeared in A Reed in the Tide—a freer, better book, though also harbouring a batch of superfluous poems) were years of dreadful imitation, in some cases; of obscure dialogue with myths and mythic monuments. As already noted, Yeats. Then there’s T. S. Eliot (see passages in “Ivbie,” his false, ambagious comment on colonial wrongs). But perhaps the most conspicuous influence in this time was Gerard Manley Hopkins. In “Ibadan Dawn,” “Variation on Hopkins on Theme of Child Wonder,” “On Faith,” “The Imprisonment,” you don’t have to strain to hear him gurgling Hopkins. The enjambment of thought, his obsessive use of the hyphen, elliptical speech, uneasy phrases, analogic thinking (in “Outside Gethsemane,” for instance) are all Hopkins, but badly appropriated Hopkins. Sometimes he uses anachronistic phrases to supplement the stylistic tics: “Ama, are you gall bitter pent? / Have paltry pittance spent?”

An amative spoke turns in the early poems. And Eros can be poetically fecund, as in “Olokun,” where the goddess, spun by that spoke, is transformed into a honey-pot. The poem is phasic: amorous, sacral, maternal—she finally “lifts us all beggars to her breast.” (Breast is a common word in Poems, rhymed in one with “So ripe with joy for the blest.”)

Why did he fail to include this poem, which ranks high among his poetic productions, in his book of selected poems from 1981, A Decade of Tongues?

One of two possibilities. I assume he was bothered by heresy: “I am jealous and passionate / Like Jehovah, God of the Jews” likely offended some people, or he thought it would. The lines make me uncomfortable, yet I think they are great. The entire poem recalls Elizabethan poetry, the passage in question recalls Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”:

“I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.”

The second reason may be that he thought of the poem (with its “thro’”) as being out-of-step with the times, belonging to a bygone era. And he must have been aware of the unfaltering influence of Marvell’s poem on his own; he wanted, in his selected poems, to preserve what he considered truly his. Serious as the influence is, “Olokun” is not derivative, and it remains one of his most anthologised poems for good reason. For the sensuousness of its prose, its fine progression, that nearly plangent richness of tone, the glad pulp of its phrases (“the sable vehicle of dream”), nobody will touch “Olokun” anytime soon, and no one has.

The other bosomy poems fall behind that for “the good maid of the sea.” Libido frees sense, let’s sensibility flow in all its lavish muckiness and malarkey: i.e., “Agbor Dancer,” “The Year’s First Rain,” “I Wake to the Touch” (written during his time as a Parvin scholar at Princeton, based on a dream he had about screwing an American woman?), his “Two Views of Marilyn Monroe” (written in the States, too), and “Girl Bathing.” The “naïve quality” one reviewer of A Reed noted is clear in these andhis other American-experience poems.

2.

Clark-Bekederemo left a note that credits “Girl Bathing” to a Monet painting (“This poem arose with a viewing of Monet!”). All searches have proven futile. The actual painting the work leaps off of appears to be Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Bather Seated on a Rock” (1892). (It might also be another Renoir: “Young Girl Bathing” [1892] or “Seated Bather” [1914] or “Bathing Women” [1916], etc.)  He probably saw it once and mistook Renoir for his friend. The wonder is that the error has lasted so long. Abiola Irele mentioned the poem in his introduction to the Collected Plays and Poems: 1958—1988 but said nothing of the matter.

“Girl Bathing” gives a plot to the painting, builds a “tale” around the scene, moves the still life. The two girls, though, do not fit. Renoir’s girl, fine-limbed, is peering into the water, a hand on the rock, the other holding her hair. The Ijaw-man has “a basket of cassava” close by, which is as unlikely in the French landscape as are angels in the landscape of Yoruba mythology. The woolly cloth on which she sits, “her underskirt” in the poem, is compared to “calyces [lapping] a corn.” Just the right image, one that further adjusts Renoir’s girl. “The erect and rearing breast” is equivalent: in Renoir, the hand that holds the hair keeps a boob out of view. The “porcelain skin” at the end is Renoir’s young woman’s skin. It’s an uncertain poem (he wants to make her his own and remain faithful to the scene), ruined by too many frills: “unguent” and “lambent” and “the fresh / warm smell of her flesh.”

Add “For Granny,” “Fulani Cattle,” “Horoscope,” “Flight across Africa,” “Three Moods of Princeton,” “The Leader,” “Emergency Commission,” “His Excellency the Masquerader,” “Cave Call,” and the very short poems: “Tide Wash,” “Pub Song,” “The Water Maid,” “Return of the Fishermen,” “Ibadan,” “New Moon,” “Streamside Exchange,” “The Outsider,” “Cuba Confrontation,” “Las Palmas”—these are (excepting “Streamside Exchange,” “Ibadan,” which rank way higher) third-tier, tokunbo-grade poems. But they are poems.

3.

What Clark-Bekederemo needed was a subject, a situation, that appears simple but one that could accommodate a complex emotional quality. He is at his best when he has this. From the early period, his finer tones: “Abiku,” “Night Rain,” “Olokun”.

One of the truly complete poems in Nigerian literature,“Abiku” is fervently humane. The man took a “character” and renewed it by ridding it of all its mystery, furnishing it with blood. No horror in the poem, only heartbreak. No judgement or condemnation, only persuasion. Rage is there, a hurt that is like rage. It makes a case, takes the death-loving child out of the category of myth and situates it in the realworld. It’s a poem about poverty, and it does not appear so because poverty is not to him something to romanticise or bemoan. “True, it leaks through the thatch / When floods brim the banks,” the speaker says, and we get it because of “Night Rain”.

And the bats and the owls
Often tear in at night through the eaves,
And at harmattan, the bamboo walls
Are ready tinder for the fire
That dries the fresh fish up on the rack.

A description of low-life par excellence. (The ever-fresh vitality of the language, the loaded charge of “ready tinder”.) Clark-Bekederemo figured the whole child dying and returning thing as an economic—a class—problem, without denying the reality of the myth (wisely, he tookit for granted). The poem transcends the myth for this very reason. It’s a discerning poem about what it means for a woman to hurt:“For her body is tired, / Tired, her milk going sour”. Raised by his grandma, he wrote wonderfully about the mother figure,was attuned to her. His women thrum with being. He compares the mother to “tide and markets”, time and its pulsations, in the strangely packed “Streamside Exchange”. In “Night Rain”, she barely shows up but is the doing of the poem.

Even though the mother, who has to bear and bury, is the quick limb of his hurt, he recognises the pain of the child, this vagabond of a child. He tries to understand, he tries to create a context for understanding. “No longer then bestride the threshold,” he writes,

But step in and stay
For good. We know the knife scars
Serrating down your back and front
Like the beak of the sword-fish,
And both your ears, notched
As a bondsman to this house,
Are all relics of your first comings.

In “No longer then” is a lover’s cry, verging despair. “For good”: the lowering of the blade.

To reconcile the mother and the child, that is the goal. And he believes it can be done, by persuasion, by baring. (He would employ the same approach in Casualties.) He shapes a home from the mud of that faith; paints the Ijaw country without a fleck of paint—the colour comes from that same mud. A rugged life, this life he makes from mud, but also a true life, and an oddly radiant one. “Abiku”—by all means a great poem, and having few companions in Nigerian literature—is dense with life, lyrically efficient.

“Night Rain” conveys Ijaw country; gives something of life (the mother and her dutiful love); reveals that genius for immediate(“the run of water / That like ants filing out of the wood / Will scatter and gain possession / Of the floor”) and exaggerated simile (“Great water drops are dribbling / Falling like orange or mango / Fruits…”). A visual stunner, I think its portrait of innocence is potent. The lines “I have bobbed up bellywise / Like some fish doped out of the deep”—the comic train of the sound, the cartoony feel of the image—recall “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop. And “[a]lthough it is so dark,” he writes,

I know her practised [sic] step as
She moves her bins, bags and vats
Out of the run of water
That like ants filing out of the wood
Will scatter and gain possession
Of the floor. Do not tremble then…

It’s a typical image: a mother moves her things “out of the run of water”. But it seems to me thatit gets at the work a woman does to keep her life and “things” undamaged by a visitor she often has not invited, and how this work is done in a dark one hears only by care.

In spite of its strength, “Night Rain” goes on too long and thrifts away its final breaths, breaths Clark-Bekederemo should never have taken. The lines that follow “That wet of wings may not fly”, attempts by the poet to summarise, dissipate the intense clarity of the vision. The poem ends long before the poet agrees to stop.

4.

The second half of the 1960’s provided Clark-Bekederemowith the best situation he was able to get as a poet. The coup of ’66 took place and what he calls “ominous music” began to play. Something remains of that music even now, and Clark-Bekederemo grasped this. He saw that the years on the heels of the Nzeogwu coup and what that coup brought about would echo in practical terms for much of Nigeria’s life. As a poet, he took no side; as a man, the possibility of a single Nigeria, a whole Nigeria, was more alive to him than any other possibility. He thought his friends credible, but he did not think that the clash, the crack, the thunder, all that dying, was reasonable. He engaged the unreasonableness of the war and maintained the credibility of his friends. His posture, his faith in compromise, made him an isolated figure, and left him greatly wounded. This was the perfect artistic “situation”. Here, you had a war that seemed easy on the surface—bad guys and good guys (the cheap narrative, at least for Clark-Bekederemo). Yet,having friends on either side of the divide, he knew a rift within himself.

“Song” is a testament to how difficult those years were for him. (Years later, in an interview, he described the time as “one of the loneliest periods of my life”.) By the time he wrote this, his language had become less rigorous, more fluent and solid. A definite equilibrium exists here between meaning and the means whereby what is meant is rendered. The precision one finds has nothing to do with how he has etched an “object” in time. The quality of the balance he achieves between the corpus of incidents (all within the duration of the Coup and the avowal of what Achebe termed “civil peace”) and his language, the imaginative work that makes the fusion of event and language itself a full, focused emotional entity (not merely a febrile one, as I take it to be in Okigbo’s Path of Thunder): that is where to set to work about Clark-Bekederemo’s accuracy. The words are not a mere conduit for emotions. In the best poems in Casualties, the words caution and cause what we feel. Analogies also give way to a symbolic, allegorical mode of thinking through the chaos of this period.

The vulture wanted a child
Six years was a long time
To be married and no child
What if the foetus [sic] should drop?
Then I shall eat it for breakfast.
What if the wife should die?
Then I shall eat her for lunch.
What if mother and child should die?
Then I shall eat both for the night.
The vulture wanted a child
Six years is a long time
To be married and no child!

The simplicity of the telling might deceive one into thinking that the process that made it possible was simple. In “The Communication Line between Poet and Public”, he describes the difficult gap that had emerged between the modern African poet and his readers. He adjusted because he needed to reach people. (Soyinka adjusted, too, but he did at a time when his poetic talent had gone.)The fact that a process that began with a clumsy poem like “The Imprisonment of Obatala” culminates in a poem like “Vulture’s Choice”, quoted above, shows serious poetic growth. Adornment and charade have disappeared: he has stripped the matter to bone. That clarity, achieved without the frittering away of energy, is both practiced and hard-won.

The great error would be to read Casualties primarily as a historical document, to try to unlock the words, to find who the leopard is and who, the elephant. (The Vulture is Nigeria, the child the Coup.) The poems are historical (for the history, see Robert Wren’s J. P. Clark) but what they express with percipience is not really history. It is, to quote one of the book’s epigraphs (from Auden), “a real historical unhappiness”.

In the streets the jungle-geared jeeps roar,
Glint of SMG, flare of mortar, tremor
Of grenades occupying ministry
And market, and like hens, men go
To bed with the setting sun, the sun
Setting over the land, afraid
It will set on their individual days.  

How to describe the movement of this stanza (from “July Wake”)? The menace of terror in “jungle-geared jeeps roar” (the soldiers, the beasts, have been let loose; the consequence is helplessness). The echoes: “roar” in “mortar,” the brilliant repetitions, varied: “the setting sun, the sun / setting…set[s].” The certainty of “It will set on their individual days”; I even hear a world turned upside down in “To bed with the setting sun” (if you take “bed” as a verb). The description of this climate of fear, of terror, has its finest point in line 4: I am not sure all of Half of a Yellow Sun gets at the sense of impotence, of despondency, of the comprehended futility of striving-against, contained in “and like hens, men go…”

Reading that poem, I feel gratitude for the preceding failures (that tryst with Hopkins). But, of course, he was influenced here, too. The rhetorical style is from Auden—before his affair with that obsolete lexicon. What Auden had in surplus was wit; Clark-Bekederemo was in short supply. He compensated for this by speaking from inside history, from within the same history that he narrated. He was thus closer to Yeats, whose political poems involve individuals rather than abstractions.

5.

Clark-Bekederemo was, inarguably, our finest political poet, and Casualties: the piece de resistance of Nigerian poetry. He was likewise, as far as I know, our finest poet. “Poetry is less imagination than the imagination of an appropriate language,” William Logan writes. That is where we measure the achievement of the poet: does he find language that is adequate to the subject; does he convincingly and meaningfully imagine a language for that subject? In this regard, Clark-Bekederemo’s achievement is unrivalled. Employing the theme of fables, alluding to (adopting) the heave of Scripture (think of the Psalms in the KJV), his language has a heft, a resolve, a tenor without company in Nigerian literature. Through that language, he retained history and a “real historical unhappiness” the same way a word like “crucify” retains the ways of wood, blacksmithing, gruesomeness, sin, salvation, Calvary. He trusted the truth in the word.

As a political poet, he is the only thing like Seamus Heaney in our context (although one could also point to a poem like Soyinka’s “Civilian and Soldier”). Though a major poet, he was not a great poet. But like Heaney, he bore “his portion of the weight of [our] world,” knew “himself incapable of virtue or redemptive effect,” but did well to recognise “the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined”.

When I first read these words from the Irish poet’s Nobel Lecture, I could not help thinking about the Ijaw-man, who had an eye that felt and understood war’s wages, but forwent the sin that could lead one to: of sacrificing faith in the value of that which is justly imagined for the sake of that which laments without artifice or caution the evil of the world. It operates, in varying degrees, in the other works dealing with the period: Chinua Achebe (Christmas in Biafra), Gabriel Okara (“War Poems,” in his Collected Poems), Wole Soyinka (A Shuttle in the Crypt, a very embarrassing book).

6.

A few poems fall short, though what I miss most in Casualties is the brilliant intuition for fitting metaphors that characterised his better poems from the early period, even if each word is enlivened by its position in the phrase, the line, the statement, and the stanza. I recognize that for all its strengths, it is a limited book, and its limitations are obvious.

Fixed on the major players in the war, the ordinary individual is rarely contemplated. Although “Night Song” reads better without the note (it is about ordinary people, but they are named) and the witty performance of the second part of “July Wake” is casual enough. Additionally, the major players in the war were themselves “individuals.” But Clark-Bekederemo, it could be argued, took the masses as a single entity.

7.

The “Epilogue” poems in Casualties are bitter, nothing is spared his hurt. The light satirical tone of “The Outsider” and “The Cuban Crisis” is gone. Even “Letter from Kampala”, a tiny love poem, has hurt in it. I expected him to use the word “slut” in one of these poems; I was not surprised when he did.

As he wrote to Achebe, he had become “a character other”, a character other-ed by the degeneration that was only then commencing. He could not recognise, or bear, the Nigeria he saw emerging; and he could not bear what had emerged inside himself (he did some business with the Gowon regime that would appear to have soiled the moral character that is expected of writers).But, in the poems, the stain on him was only a part of the problem.

His visit to India, which he documents limpidly in “Bombay”, I think consolidated what he knew already: Nigeria too would become, soon, a place where “nothing seems new: the / Estate is cancelled out by septic slums.” He would complain weakly in the next poetry book and, tired of that, eventually resign himself to the Nigerian fate. His later poems are evidence of what this country can do to a man’s talent—how the high ambition of the half-finished golden age of Nigerian poetry came to nothing in the people who knew it. He managed to guard his head (and his lot)—unlike Okigbo, he lived well into old age and wrote those dry, lifeless poems about aging. But he was, unfortunately, unable to guard his poetic talent. The thing went to the grave. Not in the sixties as Adewale Maja-Pearce has claimed, but in the years of the Oil Boom. E

Ernest Ogunyemi is Efiko’s poetry editor