BY EKANPOU ENEWARIDIDEKE
The exceptionally gifted writer, Ebi Yeibo, has vowed not to abandon his vocation as a poet however the wind howls and spoils the eye of the sky, bringing in its trail egbesucal rain. In line with his avowal – this man whose roots spread to Ayamasa and Ayakoromo towns in Bayelsa and Delta States – has emerged with another collection of poems entitled Shadows of the Setting Sun. In this collection of poems which comprises 34 poems, Ebi Yeibo draws attention to the barbarities daily let loose on Niger Deltans despite their natural endowment of crude oil, the likely karmic consequences of this suppression, the desirability for the evolvement of a dependable problem-solving mechanism and the emerging revolutionary thoughts of independence in the Niger Delta as a panacea for the deliberate underdevelopment of the owners of the crude oil that economically sustains Nigeria as a nation. The poet Ebi Yeibo systematically sheds his vision in his collection of poems in the following permutation:
SHADOWS OF THE SETTING SUN
The land and the river of the Niger Delta polluted by the forces of exploitation (the Federal Government and the Multi-national oil companies), the people are impoverished, without a dependable source of livelihood. Despite all these problems, the enemies are tantalizing them with stories of readiness to tackle and address their problems. The poet sees the fast approaching darkness of underdevelopment and the lies told to deceive and calm them down. To escape the darkness of hopelessness and chart a safe path for themselves, the poet calls on Niger Deltans to revolt against the darkness which is sure to swallow all.
‘How can the snail
Walk away without its shell?
O let us tear through
These shadows of the setting sun
As an implacable landlord
Tugs at the waistline
Of a defaulting tenant –
With the single-mindedness
Of Armstrong’s mission to mars-
Not the nervy resolves
Of grovellers in the yoke
Blind to the yolk
In dark enclaves
Or carriers of blunt axes
Falling apart at the sight of the enemy,
Like a convoluted adulterer caught in the act.’
SCRAMBLED SUNLIGHT
Portrays power-wielders and politicians who lead life of affluence nibbling at the general purse while the Niger Deltans (the ordinary people) are confined to slums. With subsidy removed, these politicians have grown more sickeningly exploitative and manipulative in their destructive dance of larceny, mercilessly depriving people of their entitlements – as they only luxuriate in ‘singing darksongs in a fleshy morning’, in ‘severing The patent greenery perfuming the earth’ and eerie rhetoric of a vague moon wrapped in bridal cushions …’. In satirical tone the poet adds that all politicians are viewed potentially as developmental saviours, even the visionless, purblind and dim-sighted ones who have nothing to offer.
‘O every politician on the podium
They say, is chosen by God
To cut hitherto untrodden paths
To hoist the national flag
In the precincts of the simmering sun
Even shriveled old ones
Who cannot decode
The dialect of age.’
BROKEN COVENANTS
Politicians are persons with deceptive sugar-coated mouths who promise light and bring ‘charcoal-dark nights’ upon the people; politicians are purveyors of darkness, overarching shadows, disappearing mountains, potholed paradises, fuming flames and effervescent bubbles who break their covenant with the people once they mount the throne of power. This is why the poet does not need to be reminded of the insincerity, unreliability and moral decadence of politicians.
‘O who dares remind us
Prevaricating patriots
Breed overarching shadows
Disappearing mountains
Potholed paradises
Tall toasts of tramps
Fluffy fuming flames
Effervescent bubbles?
Who dares remind us
A broken covenant
Like cornered Christmas
Is a malignant clog
To inky communal grace
A dark tattoo indelible
On the impregnable skin of time.’
THE SLUMBERING SUN
In a world of ‘dew-draped forests sucked dry and the sun suffocated by visionless and corrupt power cabals, where the ‘rainbow’ is threatened by ‘nightly clouds, and ‘wanton winds’ ravaging the earth like ‘a caterpillar’ upon virgin forests, the poet seeks reconstruction, positive reversal and reordering.
As imagistically communicated, the picture is that of a country sucked dry, deprived of development, by visionless, unpatriotic, corrupt and unfeeling leaders. To the poet, it is a moronic and stupid people who destroy and suck dry their own country through selfishness and corruption. He is desirous of a way out of the asphyxiated sun but wonders if it is possible in the midst of the stench in the land. A bush mango is a tree that begets wealth when positively exploited or tapped but the survival possibilities of this tree have been ruined by moronic power-wielders. So for the poet the leaders that hinder the progress of Nigeria are in fact idiots, morons, who have perpetually deprived the land of transformational sunlight:
‘Only a moron messes up
The precincts of a bush mango tree
He patronizes, in full season
Ruffling the calm of the cloister
Ticket for possessing a prized inheritance
Ticket for passing a prized wherefore
Triggering soulful tantrums
And a flight of all that is life
A dehydrated hag depositing debris
Of worn-out soul
In the lugubrious tale
Of a slumbering sun.’
The poet sees Niger Delta independence via protest and confrontation.
REBRANDING
Poetically painted is the canvass of a country where the powers-that-be, power-wielders, suppress Niger Deltans, determined to snuff life out of them developmentally and otherwise. However the determination to do this through suppression and nibbling at the national cake, the encumbrances of the people cannot be swept under the carpet, not even the protest of the Niger Deltans against suppression typified by bonfires here. Attention here is drawn to the capacity to break the wall of suppression/suffocation through determined protests and become victorious over the forces of suppression, as the poet points out that the oppressors have been defeated through confrontation and protest. With protest and confrontation, Niger Deltans can become victorious because with the ‘blithesome bonfires’ and confrontation mounted by Deltans, the oppressive forces cave in shamefully.
‘Then suddenly
The stars spring again
To their God-given size
Scowling, confronting the septic singer
Of hallowed heights
To a bemused world.
O the hunter of hallowed heights
Is hunted down
Like a sprouting seed
Severed from her roots.’
Niger Delta can get her independence via protest and confrontation.
DARK LYRIC
Deprivation walks deadly upon the face of Niger Delta turning the inhabitants into layabouts who lazily whistle away their encumbrances. Whistling and walking like a bedraggled book, the poet gives them direction on how to overcome their burden. All over the Niger delta is a deception of the people with lies; stories of conquered people in tyrannical claws bemoaning their fate; a land where no development project is allowed to sprout and transform the people. Niger Deltans have been besieged and developmentally caged by the government despite their prodigious oil wealth. They have become marionettes to the oppressors who manipulate them at their whims and caprices. For the sprouting of a better tomorrow, the poet calls on Niger Deltans to revolt against the oppressors and end the deprivation as lazy whistling in the forest would not solve their problems.
‘O sow your sweat
In motile dew-drops of dawn
For only hot, steamy sweat
On a famished farmland
Fills the pit of a scrambled inheritance
Bursting upon tomorrow’s promise.’
THE LINGERING SHADOW
The Niger Delta region still harbours cries of pain, discontent and protest because there are still diabolical and tyrannical moves geared towards underdevelopment and sunlight-elimination . Despite the sacrificial efforts of some Niger Deltans who fought and died for the sprouting of developmental sunlight, the atrocities are still piled up against Niger Deltans. These man-made atrocities perpetrated in the Niger Delta by government are barriers to the development and happiness of Niger Deltans virtually reduced to the status of fatherless children. To the poet:
‘These tales with eerie roots
Flying in the horizon
Wilder than searing storms
Wilder than hungry lions
Build steely barricades
Against the satiation of the soul.’
APOCALYPSE
With wrong policy-formulation and policy-implementation, bomb explosions and the resultant numbing carnage, with truth tendentiously reversed and killed in the service of politics and the illuminating path shirked or avoided, Nigeria is likely to disintegrate. The Niger Delta deprived of development and polluted by chemicals and fumes, Niger Deltans exploited by soldiers at checkpoints, privileged leaders glued to the politics of stomach-infrastructure development, feeding only on the flesh and leaving the bone to the aborigines, Niger Deltans will revolt against their oppressors. With the roaming corruption and mindless looting of the general purge in Nigeria, the poet will grumble and protest in critical voice. No matter the conspiracy, Niger Deltans will not be defeated as they will carry out a bloody revolution and cleanse the land of all suffocating impurities and become independent – at ease to live out their lives according to their own dreams.
‘Like Saul’s blood bleached
On the thoroughfare to Jerusalem
Our mortal dream will cleanse
The concourse of clouds
Clogging the fluttering flags
O pull us out of this dry pit
Like Joseph, the dreamer
Let there be an earthquake
And white messengers roll back
The stone from the sepulchre’s door,
Like Christ’s resurrection
Let us soar beyond
Pricking primordial boundaries
On royal wings.’
ECLIPSE OF THE RAINBOW
(for Amnesty)
The amnesty showered on Niger Delta freedom fighters is a deception, conspiracy, designed to bring the activists under the control of the Federal Government and create avenue for middlemen and surrogates to amass wealth without addressing the developmental problems of the people which form the basis for the agitation. Now that the agitation muscles of the fighters have been deceptively calmed and caged with the amnesty offer, and the problems that necessitate the agitation are still unaddressed, the poet is poised to turn poetry into an instrument deployed to castigate and chastise the Nigerian Federal Government until a solution emerges.
‘So now that Egbesu’s* husky chants
No longer rule the waves
Now that Egbesu’s red stripes
No longer adorn the head
Of this heady and heedless brood
Bold as the sun at midday
Ferocious like a brooding hen
Hurling all in their way
Like the implacable hurricane
Now a stammering clan
Of discordant tunes
Now cold and servile
Like one whipped
With a woman’s cloth
The verse of the griot
Must vent the vitriol of vipers.’
THE BLARING BARD
Portrays python (the totem of Tuomo) moving leisurely on the bank of the river unaware that her glorious days when she is worshipped by devotees are gone; unaware also that River Forcados has been polluted by crude oil so much even birds do not perch on the beaches. When the environment suffers pollution and other impediments to dream-realization, the poet has the duty to trumpet these environmental atrocities, even with a shabby cloth tied round the waist. Here the poet announces to the world that, though the Tuomo python sports or frolics gaily on the fast shifting shoreline of Tuomo, River Forcados has been polluted by crude oil.
‘In a tattered waist-cloth
Fit for an old woman, water dropped
The true bard blares his florid vuvuzela
Opens the eyes of the world
To the floodgate of fumes and flares
Reeking the air
Hounding the home
Clogging the creeks
Soothing the green garments of the earth
The true bard bares
Ghastly gods and cloudy galaxies
On the road to the new Jerusalem.’
GODFATHERS
This is a picture of tired statesmen poised to chart a progressive new course for the society without first getting ride of their old selves – old selves bound to endanger the new crusade. Charting a progressive course demands spiritual cleansing of all types of impurities followed by realistic pursuit of realisable goals. For a true path created, the past must be a guide but this drawing on the past as a basis for true change is lacking in the transformation moves of the statesmen. This is why the poet alerts the statesmen to the primacy of spiritual cleansing using the past as a springboard. The poet is skeptical about the transformation attempts of the statesmen as it is devoid of the ingredients of success. The poet sees provocative, horrifying, monstrous, misguided, unrealistic and meaningless the transformation moves of the statesmen – transformation moves that would achieve nothing but only beget more monsters and ridicule – as the future cannot be created without a scrutiny of the past. The poet’s skeptical satirical tone in the portrayal of the statesmen’s transformation is glaring:
O the humble hinges of transformation
Come with a salty swing in the horizon –
The past is a springboard
Not a cockpit, or salve master.
The humble hinges of transformation
Minimize the margin of mishaps,
Without inhibitions, imperishable
In the teeming laughter of waves
Exploding the soul into the sinewy arms
Of a satiated universe.’
SUBSIDY SCANDAL
Crooked godfathers and their agents and corrupt, crooked, kleptomaniac and visionless legislators in National House of Assembly are the diabolical forces who deprive Nigeria of the nectar of development and growth through their corrupt practices of senseless wealth-acquisition. Unable to protect and place the national interest above their selfish interest in their legislative national assignment, the country is deprived of sunlight of transformation and delicious fruits. People empowered to guard and guide the nation to the path of growth have become its agents of darkness, as their corrupt negligence has empowered and incentivized the invasive advance of ‘misty clouds’, ‘scorpions’ and ‘evil spirits’ which are inimical to national development.
‘O the crowd of crooks bristling with radiance
In hallowed chambers, quenching buzzing fireflies
In the night, spreading darksome garments
On the sizzling face of the sun
Bounteous heavens harbouring
Funerary shadows as sentinels
Strip us of soulful flames and tasty fruits
Like a primed phallus and infertile orifices
Or delectable flowers and doleful tombs
Or torn loudspeakers and discotheques
Despoiling the beauty of a ballerina.’
The legislators are too corrupt, negligent and impotent to function as sentinel empowered to stop any mindless, wanton invasion of the national interest and by any means.
A BAWDY DAWN
There is no hope of survival for Niger Deltans in Nigeria because they have been deliberately caged and confined developmentally away from developmental dawn as there are waiting lurking leeches and burning suffocating fumes in their ‘dew-draped forests. Dawn-deprived, they have become scrawny, scraggy, emaciated and pale like kwashiorkor-stricken Somalian with no prospects of dawn because dawn itself carries horrifying images like the dawn of Okere prisoners.
‘Where otherwise dew-draped forests
Sleep on the same place
With swelling fumes
Grim like Esuku Uburu*
Bringing forth dreamers
Flapping wearied wings
Against the walls
Of a well-choreographed confinement
And a clan, gaunt
Like a kwashiorkored Somalian
On the screen.’
BLACK COBWEBS
Starvation, whirlwind insensible to threshing for new product, manipulative sermons/lectures, ‘lurid winks, suave syllables’ for the bamboozlement of girls, and insincere decrepit statesmen still in free flow in the country in the name of politics suffocating developmental radiance, Niger Delta is still caged, under-developed and incarcerated beyond all hopes of victory and glorious dawn by fellow blacks in power.
‘O stretches of shimmering shadows
On a crystal plain
Suave syllables meant for damsels
For path between legs
Or expired statesmen
Still holding court as godfathers –
Awful petals of politics –
Only fetter mortal flight.
The devil’s imprimatur-
A testimony to the churlishness of churchgoers;
Black cobwebs hobbling
Etchy tales of triumph
And the leafy laughter of faithfuls
In the glare of dawn.’
SOBERING
The poet sees betrayal by fellow brothers for pecuniary purpose, unsuccessful attempt by Northern Nigeria to claim the crude oil, despoliation of the Niger Delta by oil, the massacre of Niger Deltans by Federal Armed Forces and the deliberate underdevelopment of the region in Nigeria. Unfairly treated and dehumanised as Niger Deltans by the Nigerian government, the poet sees germination of hope in dark outlines. His hopes emerge from his sight of the tethered goat eating the dead eye of sugarcane and some indistinct clouds roaming the sky. These sights seem to have communicated to the poet a hope only he can decode and decipher.
‘But I have also seen
The tethered goat eat
The dead eye of surgarcane grow
Dark clouds in the skyline
Herald stately sunshine
Prompting the precipitate euphoria
Of a long, sobering shadow
Cast away with all sinking snags.’
THE WILDERNESS
This is a criticism of Nigeria’s pathological forgetfulness and historical amnesia. With independence and crude oil at hand, Nigerian leaders have abandoned genuine promises of development and national growth, only thriving disgustingly on pranks, lies and corruption. Pre-occupied with wealth-stockpiling in vaults. The nation can be fertilized developmentally only with genuine pursuit of the ideal dreams and promises of transformation, not corrupt wealth-accumulation, abandonment of development promises and ‘pretentious poetry’. By implication, if what Yeibo has been giving us is a meretricious poetic regurgitation, his own prescription for a great Niger Delta, a great nation, are meaningless. The following lines corroborate the decadence of the Nigerian leaders, their abandonment of the promises of a great nation and the poet’s quasi-cautionary prescription.
‘Heralding a misty morning
Swelling with guilt by the day
In vain vaults and poisonous pranks
Covering every leansome promise
We strain to conjure in the horizon
With loaded chaff and debris.
O hidden treasures of the wilderness
Lie in soft dreams of dew
On an expansive greenscape;
Not on sunny graveyards
Or hanging heaving harvests
Or even pretentious poetry.’
UNFORTUNATE VIRGINS
In a land stricken by starvation where farmers experience famine even in healthy seasons, a land where poets see and bemoan in strident voices the squalor and poverty plaguing everywhere, the poet deploys poetic blandishments, empty poetry, deceptive poetry, pretentious poetry, to lure six virgins into bed and amorous relationship with him. A poet who, ideally, should be a guide for his generation, has now turned an iconoclast – an agent of destruction.
‘Somewhere along the river road
A sizzling connoisseur, a crown
For divine craft, lays ambush
Catches the ears of the cruising virgins
With poetry of sprawling harvests
On the hilltop, painting a mosaic
Of rainbow moments, with pearly passion.’
By this action and pretence, the poet has desecrated and diminished his art, vocation, in a world where:
‘Where farmers famish in wholesome seasons
And poets profess syllables of squalor
In voluptuous valleys and crevices
In the magisterial unction of the muse.’
REMINISCENCES
The emergent picture is that of a poet in the incurable grip of the fever of nostalgia. The childhood days of the poet have memorable markers – the moment of plates-and-pots washing on the bank of the river, engagement in game of hide-and-seek and wrestling in the river and on land, going to school with pockets laden with tapioca, groundnut and palm kernel, the flinging of neighbourly opponent on a backless bowl and disappearance for two nights for fear of being beaten by Timi, the opponent’s elder sister famed for beating hefty men at will, plucking of oranges by the house when his younger sibling Ayolo gets her navel accidentally stuck on the spikes on the trunk of the tree, her miraculous survival at the dispensary when treated and many other activities. Recalling his childhood experiences and escapades, he maintains that this memorably simple and pleasurable world is gone, unappetizingly supplanted by JTF soldiers who routinely terrorize and burn down clans. Murderous soldiers and crude-oil-polluted river have killed the hitherto existing pleasurable childhood joys in the Niger Delta.
‘Now, we play hide-and-seek
With the haunting presence
Of red-clawed JTF*
The wrestling funfare too is gone
With the dark bowels of the river;
Only a rattling bout with rumours
Of clans always razed down, remains.’
BROAD WALKWAY
Corruption walks everywhere: from offices to places of worship, it is the stench of corruption dominating everywhere. The poet is angry at the way corrupt people shamelessly flaunt their booty with pride.
‘Those who pillage the public purse
Like pythons swallowing incandescent stars
In covert chambers, sending
Light on eternal exile,
No longer walk with cat’s secretive paws.’
Appalled by the arrogance of corrupt people who flaunt their wealth shamelessly, the poet expresses desire for this phenomenon to be wiped out. Whether it is God, spirit, Egbesu or Americans he expects to end this rot, we are not told. The poet dodges the ‘hows’, ‘whos’ and the ‘whens’ of his desire to end this decay. Could this be another brand of the poet’s ‘pretentious poetry’ designed to instigate a revolution he has no desire to lead, or to be part of? Listen to him:
‘O pluck us down this shadowy loft
Vain man bestrides, like the king of termites.
Pluck us away from the unwholesome truth
The flames of currency, like sanctified incense,
Cast away a demon’s curse,
Like the elixir of a steam-bath of herbs
Under a thick blanket.’
DESIRE
For an emotionally parched soul, ‘a throbbing touch’ pacifies and relaxes it just as a developmentally parched land is soothed by the descent of visible transformation, but the desire of the Niger Delta for transformation cannot be appeased because crooks have taken over strategic points in the government dishing out deceptive sermons and obscenities. In churches, mosques and royal traditional institutions, it is these crooks that hold sway, increasingly bringing within their stinking fold even persons hitherto intransigent and critical of the rot. Recruited and baptized, the savior patriot and bulbubs have struck an uncharacteristic silence in homage to hollow homilies of crooks over the land. In this land, biblical directional codes are immorally reversed in veneration of decay and exploitation. With these structures erected against the developmental aspiration of the Niger Delta by the Nigerian Federal Government, the poet wonders how these structures could be mangled for the satiation of the desiring thirsty soul of Niger Delta when we are all patiently watching the unfolding drama of deprivation and hopelessness.
‘So crooks are coronated royal majesties
Minarets bear swollen wings
In the ominous skies,
Glistening like gods, poised
Like pythons ready to pounce
While parrots and bulbuls
Woven into the matrix,
Only nod their heads
Setting forth a dumb heritage
Under a common course.
But how can the patience of the python
Turn out the curse
The wind spreads and echoes?
Where is the soil to bury
The desire of oppressed people
In flare-infested forests?
Where is the axe to break
The ironwood of hope
Even at the bottom of the sea?’
THE OUTSIDER
Now that Niger Deltans, endowed with crude oil, are still conspiratorially condemned to a life of crumbs while capons from arid lands are enjoying the wealth of the oil, unfairly exploited and treated as outsiders while capons from arid lands sit wekebu over the crude oil pot, enjoying it to the fullest, Niger Deltans should revolt and cleanse the land of these undesirable elements and claim their honey-pot or live forever with unfulfilled dreams.
‘So let outsiders crush
The company and capers
That hold steam in the memory
And witness thunder on hilltops
Descend as footstools;
Let outsiders cleanse the dark countenance
Bearing birth-pangs of celestial light
Caulk the cracks on their cravings
Smuggle a deep-throated smile
And witness a crocodile, bruised,
Depart withering foreshores
For unfathomable depths of the sea
In the phosphorescent chill dawn.
Or remain with sighs of street urchins
Stillbirth smiles of dreamers
At the fringes of a marooned moon.’
COLD BLOOD WALKED THROUGH MY VEINS
(For the death of Democracy in Nigeria)
Democracy is dead in Nigeria because it is selfishly twisted to take uncanny destructive paths by ‘demagogues’, ‘barons,’ ‘butchers’ and ‘tenders’ depriving the country of its dividends. However, in a rather strange upsurge of optimism from regions beyond trace, the poet envisions the sprouting of divine solution unknown to the killers of democracy. Maybe, the poet has suddenly seen the death of the killers of democracy in his clairvoyance. This garment of a magician, a seer, a prophet, donned by the poet sounds so mystical only he can explain because he says confidently that:
‘But, like regenerating dust,
Divine pathways sprout on walls
Of confinement, and even coffins,
Invisible to owl’s eyes
Or eyes of stone-hearted gods
Whose dark breath reaches not white light,
Like a measly child tiptoeing in vain
To steal fish from a lofty rack.’
DARKWATERS OF THE DELTA
This is a critique of the Nigerian Federal Government and SPDC over their manipulative approach or methodology adopted when there is a reported case of oil spill in the Niger Delta region. When a marine monster is smoked out and caught by camera in Mexico gulf as shown on Alja Zeera, when Obama moves swiftly over a reported spill in US in the midst of global criticism and outcry against the perpetrators, the Nigerian Federal Government, in collusion with SPDC, manufactures claims of sabotage and uses soldiers to harass poor Niger Deltans while River Forcados and River Ramos are polluted with crude oil. Fed up with the demonstrated insensitivity of the authorities, militants move militarily against the oppressors, resulting in a gun-to-gun confrontation between Federal Government soldiers and Niger Delta militants. Rather than use technology to solve problems of oil spillage in the Niger Delta, the Federal Government diabolically uses technology to kill Niger Deltans to protect their selfish interest and capital when they should take a cue from Obama and Mexico gulf.
‘Now witnesses to the smudge and stench
Militants mount malestrome
And grenades and guns score the goals
Where whetted tongues
Worked like watery sperm
For countless seasons.
Now who does not know
A plastic rainbow is painted
In distant sky
In long eye-catching strokes
To blunt their bulging belligerence
And, again, protect the capital?’
A STRUTING SYMPHONY
Monsters, cartels, strangers, who own oil blocks have taken over the Niger Delta region, enjoying the crude oil while the aborigines (the owners of the oil) are abandoned to suffer. Since the plunder of the Niger Delta goes on unstopped, the poet would not be intimidated by prophecies of ‘thunderstorms; ‘sandstorms’ and ‘fierce lightening’ from profiteering arrogant prophets over his caustic lines. To the poet, no one can stop his critical poetic voices as long as cartels plunder the wealth of the Niger Delta.
‘So who can bury the bile of bards
In the wakeful lines of the land?
Who can bury the bile of bards
Who cusp the shifty moon
With a million strong words
Will not let it slip
Even in the prophecy
Of thunderstorms and sandstorms
And fierce lighting.’
PEEP-HOLE
Nigeria is developmentally deadlocked because of lack of devolution of power to the six federating units for the practice of true federalism. Nigeria would be on the road to a glorious developed nation if all the six geo-political zones could become self-reliant and productive through a policy of decentralization. This is the anchor of this poem.
‘This is an emphatic proposition
To the dissonant dinosaurs
In the six divides:
Let each rise a sizable barn
For the common stomach
Even for soft and hard coin;
Fleshy tubers from the soil
Urge a farmer on , satiating
Like gulping grandma’s
Fresh fish banga soup
In a wilting clay bowl.’
Niger Delta would be better developed if there is power devolution. The problems plaguing Niger Delta and Nigeria in general originate from the lack of the practice of true federalism where each region can develop at its own pace within the available resources at its disposal.
‘O a misplaced sweat
Stings the mind, cascades
Into sleepless nights, saltless dreams
Of dead ends; like a blunt cutlass,
Brews empty harvests and instant wrinkles.’
PEEP-HOLE II
The country is dark and directionless because scorpions (exploitative, heartless, insensitive, profiteering and corrupt leaders in power) are still waging war against the general purse. With decadent leaders still in charge, supposed ‘sentinels’ ravaging the land through sharp practices, the moon dangerously barricaded, Nigeria is doomed.
‘But how does one cross a hedge
Where scorpions serve as sentinels?
Each motion to the moon
Turns out a total misstep
While stately masons
Pile up their paths
From the public pouch.’
DEEPENING APOCALYSE
Strangers sitting over the crude oil, giving only crumbs to the aborigines whose protesting voices are routinely gagged is a dangerous phenomenon the poet seeks an end to in the Niger Delta. The poet wants the oil companies and all agents of oppression, exploitation and betrayal to stop so the Niger Deltans can have access to their black gold and enjoy it in fullness without the barricade currently posed by the Nigerian Federal Government and the oil companies.
‘O let the blazing flame
Of flowstations, in our backyard
Light up the solemn fog
Tainting the open skies.
Let us carry the elephant home
In the midst of roaring lions
And overcast skies
And principalities in high places
Savouring its countless bounties.
Let us soar beyond the shadows
Of the setting sun.’
THE GAS THAT DEFILES THE APOTHECARY
The path to the development of the Niger Delta region is barricaded by corrupt, inept, insensitive, decadent and visionless leaders who plunder and suffocate the aborigines and expose them to the bites of marauding sea pirates and invisible spirits. When beatified agberos man the corridors of power in Nigeria, development of the Niger Delta becomes mired or bogged down as it is now.
‘O what meal makes the menu
When bloodless agberos* man the kitchen?
Why won’t the sun slump
Even in the scale of scraps
The divinity of her waist
Messed up with suave strangers
On the matrimonial bed,
When languid louts sit in the saddle?’
THE LAMENT OF CORPSES
It is not well with Niger Deltans because they still live on crumbs from Abuja, the wind still violent, the flow of the river still abnormal, birds still ominously parrot the hanging deficiencies of the oppressors, corpses line the river and when the insensitive leaders are still praised as great leaders despite their suffocating strategies and barbarities. When new-fangled ways are created by capons to cause more atrocities of suppression and exploitation in the Niger Delta, the poet says the Niger Delta problems still ululate for attention.
‘So how can we claim
This coast is now clear
When, like hypnotized minstrels,
We chant panegyrics of far away climes
Resonant, for languid layabouts and louts
Who eat up the stirring sun
Like a famishing dragon*
Holding lifeless stumps aloft
In the green echo of the earth
In the presaging whirlwind…’
OIL WAR
The crude oil in the Niger Delta is a curse because the owners are condemned to polluted territory, poverty-stricken, while the strangers in control live like kings in enjoyment even in the polluted creeks. Niger Deltans deliberately pauperized and exploited, and the strangers in control very ebullient and happy even in the polluted territory, the black gold has become a blessing to the strangers and a curse to the aborigines because:
‘Above, as the setting sun
Peeps through the translucent haze
With befuddled eyes
They float on an infinite pageantry
Of swollen colours, distended bellies
Even in the chemical-clogged creeks,
Careened, like River Forcados in high tide.’
DIRGE
Niger Deltans wrongly yoked into a nation with persons who occupy power and enslave them through corrupt practices depriving them of growth possibilities, the poet sees the looming disintegration of Nigeria through a thunder that brings everything down. Convinced that the expected disintegration would right the wrongs and usher in soothing ozone in Niger Delta, suffocating the oppressors in varied ways, the poet prayerfully demands this dawn:
‘See the floundering foundations
And shifting shafts of nations
Under this brooding curse
Of comrades and their hirelings
Thunder strikes the simulated sun
To pieces on the head of the world
Inflicting the entire mortal mass
With rabid sunstrokes and blindness
O let the monstrous melody
Of this dirge, exorcise
The demon in the blood
In the long night
Floating into a fragrant world-
The smell of camphor repels
Bugs and cockroaches.’
WAIL SONG
Niger Deltans are a special people whom God has endowed with crude oil for their own growth and transformation. There is no justification for Niger Deltans to live on crumbs from Aso Rock. It is ridiculous for Government to adapt a methodology of appeasement and blandishments anytime the Niger Deltan agitations assume devastating proportions because such approach would not produce lasting results. Here Niger Deltans are reawakened to the reality that they should not wail because God has destined them to develop themselves with the black gold. Why wail and live on crumbs when the black gold is there for you? This is a covert invitation to revolution in Nigeria – a Marxist diet poetically prepared and garnished to inspire Niger Deltans towards taking their destiny in their own hands as a base to ‘soar beyond the shadows of the setting sun’ into the arms of a saintly sun.
‘But how can we live in caverns
Or under putrid bridges
When the owner of the universe
Made us bricks for bunkers and palaces?
How can we live in trenches
When doves fill the fair?
How can we salve a premeditated drought
Leaning on dregs and debris
Stuck in lingering sludge
Like a housefly in raw ointment.
Combing every corner on the earth
For vanishing crumbs
In scowls and howls
Staining the saintly sun?’
FOR JTF
(For E.E. Kpeke)
This is a subdued castigation of Nigerian soldiers who are wont to harass poor Niger Deltans through the burning down of local oil refineries erected to cushion the effect caused them by the insensitive Nigerian government and the oil companies notorious for their dance of exploitation and deprivation. Dr. E.E Kpeke, a lecturer at the Delta State University, dies while on pilgrimage in Israel and had to be taken to his hometown Aghoro for burial. Bound for Aghoro on River Ramos, the poet sees soldiers burn down local refineries the poor people have erected to have the taste of the black gold they have been deprived of by the crooked Nigerian government. This irrational burning down of refineries has happened in Ayakoromo and Agge where ‘ancient groves’ are entombed by military men in simulated service to the nation. The poet is perhaps surprised that the soldiers have no mercy on the poor masses using indigenous technology to earn a living in a world they have been totally forgotten in the collective conspiracy to exploit the Niger Delta region. Like soldiers at war, they act out their refinery-burning drama without a prick of conscience and human feeling:
‘In dead alert, stern men
In dark green khaki
Monitored the arson
With preemptory glee,
Like saint Obi* acting a cop.
O bondsmen in their own backyard
The aborigines gazed, hapless
As miniature refineries sired
To help their hobbled blood
Step on a crystal pathway to the moon
Went up in fiery flames.
On the ancient grove
Of Ayakoromo* too is gone
Grovelling in an artificial glow;
And what happened to Agge?*
Buried too by the same gods
Without buntings or the smallest of rites
After the brutes urinated on the corpse.’
COMFORTING THE CREEKS
This is an alert to a building revolution bound to transform Niger Delta into an independent country. Despite suffocating exposure to the ravages of environmentally polluted fauna and flora, of devastating seasonal floods, of decadent leaders nibbling at the national cake with impunity and inhuman soldiers whimisically making life hellish for the poor masses in the polluted creeks, Niger shall revolutionarily overcome all their barricades and become independent since an already dead man does not quail or quiver at interment. To the poet, the caging and the enslavement of the Niger Delta by the Nigerian Federal Government and the Oil companies can only be temporary because:
‘One day, the cage will crumble
And as steam-bath banishes malaria fever
Claustrophobic creatures, carcasses
Will kiss the blue sky
In a feisty union with the sun.
Who says a sterile stump
Never grows in dollops of dew?
Is a corpse scared of the spectacle
Of advancing grave-diggers?
The damned do not fear drowning
No lizard ever dies
Of perpetually hugging the earth.’
GENERAL COMMENTS
Clearly out to intellectually move people to heights of awareness of the killer spikes deliberately piled up against Niger Deltans and be justifiably exasperated to heights where only thoughts of revolution and independence of the Niger Delta region would be harboured and released for optimum results, even at the risk of repetition
of his themes in this collection, Ebi Yeibo awakens the readers to these issues: the lack of true federalism in Nigeria and the attendant problems, the death of democracy in the country, exploitation, oppression, suppression, impoverishment and underdevelopment of Niger Delta region through a conspiracy of Federal Government, oil companies and oil-block owners, environmental pollution of the Niger Delta territory, the deceptive methodology and non-implementation of the Federal Government Amnesty Programme as conceptualised from inception, the dangers posed by corrupt and visionless Senators, rudderless and decadent leadership at the national level and the resultant impact on Niger Deltans, military brutality against Niger Deltans, betrayal and hopelessness in the country, the danger of sugar-coated politicians, the impropriety/danger of Nigeria’s togetherness with the Niger Delta region and the desirability of revolt and independence for the Niger Delta region as a recipe for the deliberate developmental encasement of the Niger Delta people.
Tenaciously the poet holds unto this view: Now we have been terrorized, enslaved and underdeveloped by strangers (Federal Government and the oil companies) who have taken over the crude oil. Before we are totally sucked dry and swept into oblivion, let us revolt against the oppressors and reclaim what rightly belongs to us. Towards perfection and consolidation of this plot intellectually envisioned, he had to, first of all, throw at us the unsightly images/shadows emanating from the suppressed sun and then paint a clear picture that, from now till when the crude oil is exhausted as a non-renewable energy through exploration and exploitation, Niger Deltans shall remain perpetually underdeveloped. This is a reawakening call on Niger Deltans to fight for their own freedom and independence before it becomes irretrievably too late for any sacrificial salvage operation. Beyond Ebi Yeibo’s electric fish-like poetic dexterity in the deployment of language and imagery to assault the sensibilities of Niger Deltans towards pragmatic thoughts of revolution and independence, which intriguingly assumes a poetic radiance no reader can pretentiously ignore visually as it slithers like snake on the body, no matter the height of intellectual vindictiveness harboured, there are some aspects of this collection that demand critical additional commentary.
Majority of the poems in this collection dwell thematically on power rot and impoverishment of the Niger Delta. Though, sometimes thematically boring as Yeibo’s repetition of the themes of power rot and Niger Delta underdevelopment is, it shows his evocative capacity to use varying images to pursue his themes of power rot and Niger Delta impoverishment. While he strikes melodious notes of virtuosity, excellent craftsmanship and excitement in his varying images used, he strikes notes of boredom in his repetition/recycling of the themes of power rot and impoverishment.
This collection shows instances of over-communication and poetic verbosity where the poet should ideally be economical in the communication of his ideas conveyed. Economy in the use of language which often characterizes poetry is absent in some of his poems. In the poem ‘Broad walkway’ (56), the first stanza conveys the idea that those who steal from the general purse now walk arrogantly and shamelessly over the place; they are proud of their corrupt practices. This same idea is still conveyed in the second stanza and this makes the poem sound explanatory and verbose. The second stanza is irrelevant because the first stanza had already performed the task. Read these two stanzas below and look at them critically:
‘Those who pillage the public purse
Like pythons swallowing incandescent stars
In covert chambers, sending
Light on eternal exile,
No longer walk with cat’s secretive paws.
They walk with swagger on the streets
In the air, on water, and even beyond
Swelling menacingly like a python’s mouth
Before a hapless prey, damning
The fate of farting tinsels
Or salaaming scoundrels.’
Also seen as explanatory, verbose, disjointed, meaningless and irrelevant are the two last stanzas of the poem ‘A bawdy dawn’ (46) because the preceding lines have communicated the idea that Niger Deltans have no hope of survival because they have been developmentally caged and confined. This already communicated idea is superfluously pursued when the poet says in the last two stanzas thus:
‘But a bevy of brutes
Only begets a dynasty of captives;
A pageant of tempered popes
Brings forth serpentine saints
Who flaunt souvenirs of solemn sighs
Barren mountains, leansome bosoms
In hunger’s superglue grip,
Only dreaming of salving fruits
Under crystal clouds
In quite unreachable jungles.’
Unarguably, intellectually charged and striking as Ebi Yeibo’s poetry is, his inseparable commitment to portrait of power rot, deliberate impoverishment of Niger Delta, his passion for Niger Delta independence revolutionarily achieved, he occasionally sounds explanatory, verbose and superfluous in his deployment of language and imagery even after the ideas focused on had been effectively communicated – an imagistic extravagance, linguistic extravagance, alien to poetry as a branch of literature.
Worthy of note is the fact that Ebi Yeibo’s poetry is complex, but the complexity emanates from the depth of his images deployed to communicate his vision occasioned by the frequency of his elliptical structures, rankshifted phrases and clauses, his exophoric references and his use of synaesthesia. All these devices skillfully clothed with images drawn from the Niger Delta region to communicate his artistic vision in this collection are pointers to the imagistic richness of the Niger Delta; it is also a measure of the high intelligence quotient of Ebi Yeibo because only a great craftman can imagistically weave a strikingly complex poetry out of familiar words – a feat Ebi Yeibo always achieves with ease in every collection of poems turned out.
The Ebi Yeibo of the Niger Delta distinguished by his own identifiable idiolectal characteristics which always radiate his work, his penchant for elliptical structures, rankshifts, exophoric references and synaesthesia, which are willing carriers, purveyors, of his erudition, also give his work a complex colouration – a complex colouration that often frightens away lily-livered readers who are, consequently, perpetually deprived of the beauty, the nourishment and the erudition that radiate Shadows of the Setting Sun.
BY EKANPOU ENEWARIDIDEKE
Writes From Akparemogbene
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