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| Prof. Remi Raji |
Professor Remi Raji can’t help champing at the bits. Aside being a poet of repute in Nigeria, he presides over Africa’s largest writers’ guild, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). He is also the Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan. Raji’s poetry has appeared in Nigerian and foreign journals. Also a performance poet, he has performed in South Africa, the US, the UK and Ethiopia.
He is the author of seven poetry volumes, including A Harvest of Laughters (joint-winner of the 1977 Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Poetry Prize and winner of the Association of West African Young Writers’ VOCA Award for Best First Published Book), Webs of Remembrance, Shuttlesongs America, Lovesongs for My Wasteland, Gather My Blood Rivers of Songs, and Sea of My Mind. His poems have been translated into international language: French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Croatian and Hungarian. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Scholar to Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. He was recently engaged him in an interview at the University of Ibadan on his writings.
Your debut poetry volume, A Harvest of Laughters, was published in 1997 to national and international acclaims. What went into this remarkable offering?
Well. It was a debut in print but not the first ever debut. I first wrote a collection of poems as my final year project. In 1984, I took a course in Creative Writing, and one of the criteria for passing was for you to come out with a creative work of yours: either a collection of poems or short stories or drama skits. So, in 1984, I came out with my own debut, but it was only for grading by my supervisor, Professor Niyi Osundare. Some of the useful comments he made were very useful to me in coming out with a debut that came to international limelight, that is, thirteen years after.
The original debut was –I am telling anybody for the very first time – entitled Vision from the Void. I think only one poem from that collection survived in bits and pieces for the 2-3-year effort as a creative writing student. I even changed the title. To be modest, I was practically well formed a decade after I graduated before coming out with that [award-winning] collection. It took a lot of perseverance, patience and training overtime before coming out with A Harvest of Laughters.
A renowned Nigerian scholar-critic once said that there is little to choose between your poetry and that of the previous altar-native generation in terms of style and contents. What’s your take?
Literature is about tradition and every effort made by the writer to bring their own talent. Critics are free to choose their words either carefully or carelessly. Those who have worked on my poetry and who have also had occasion to read my works, have particularly made that difference. If you are referring to Professor Tanure Ojaide [and “the copycat generation” remarks], he has actually known better now the difference between Remi Raji and Wunmi Raji, because, at the time he was making that comparison, he was making a comparison between, say, Niyi Osundare and Wunmi Raji, whereas he was actually referring to me. And I have said it several times that, not only because we came from the same culture, he was also a master, and there was no way the influence of Niyi Osundare wouldn’t not rub off on me, just as I have had influence on some other poets who are coming. But you cannot say, because of that, I was a copycat. Influence is different from imitation. You need to go through, if you are not just an armchair critic, to be able to distinguish between one poet, one writer and the other across generations.
There is an overwhelming Yoruba Oriki influence in your poetry. What’s the relationship between the past and the present in deploying this medium?
It doesn’t take any effort from anyone who is versed or fairly versed in the Oriki tradition to do this, even if it is the Oriki of his own lineage. You only need to learn and extend further other citations or verses in the Oriki tradition. But taking the Oriki almost hook, line and sinker and translating into English does not make a poet to be original. So, you have to be well aware of that tradition –there are people who are well versed in it. So, if you then have to do something original, you have to go beyond the traditional concept of the Oriki tradition in the Yoruba culture and literature. What I do is to veer off from just one line or verse of one Oriki and turn it around and extend upon it. So, extension distension, reformation and adaptation are very important technique in individualizing or giving a voice that is original to that tradition.
“Song” recurs in the titles of your writings vis: Shuttlesong America, Lovesong for My Wasteland and Gather My Blood Rivers of Songs. Is there any connecting metaphor?
There is a whole lot of connecting metaphors in the idea of song, because there is very little difference –it is a matter of metaphoric difference between song and poetry, because poetry is a song of the heart, and it is very crucial that even, if you don’t have rhyme scheme in the manner of the traditional western poetic tradition, you have rhythm that is hidden, that is even almost latent within the lines of your poetry, that, in fact, some of my lines, if not almost all the whole poem, is actually composed with a sense of drumming or syncopation, that what you actually read is not only poetic but song-like. And that’s why a number of my poems have been transformed to pure songs. poem, is actually composed with a sense of drumming or
I remember either in 2001 and 2002, Chuks Okoye, a dramatist and erstwhile head of Theatre Arts Department here, took from My Lovesong for My Wasteland, forty-five verses representing forty-five years of Nigeria’s independence, turned each of verses into songs that then came alive on stage. Essentially, that collection was composed with a sense of stage and song.
So, the idea of song (“Orin” in Yoruba) is very closely related to poetry (Ewi), because what is embedded in poetry is song, and that’s why it is not just reflected in the titles of my collections, but even in particular poems. In A Harvest of Laughters, there are sections of songs: “Wind Song”, “Rain “Songs”, “Love Songs”. What I have done in My Lovesongs for My Wasteland is to extend what I have done in my first collection.
Does that mean you write with performance in mind?
There are a number of poems that can be fully realized only when performed, and there is a great deal of the poems that were written with performance in mind. It has become almost second nature to me that, even when I write prose, I feel am writing poetry. There is song embedded in it that you will say is close to the pattern of my poetry, even in the way I write prose. So, there is that sense of performance. Poetry and performance work hand-in-hand, at least in my own conception.
What’s your attachment to the aquatic symbols “sea” and “river” as evidenced in the titles of your 2009 and 2012 collections? Are we looking at palimpsest layers?
I didn’t start with sea and river in 2009; it has always been part of me. I have been close to the idea of the river. Let me also say that I see the rhythm of the river reflecting in my poetry – the idea of the tide, etc., almost close to the nature of our lives; it is not something deliberate by me – I just discovered that these things keep recurring even in A Harvest of Laughters and the second collection, and I had a lot of joy writing the poem on my encounter seeing Niagara Falls in 1999, in my first collection of poems. Looking back now, I think I have some kind of spiritual or mythical connection with the river –the river runs to the sea; I am not close to the sea but the metaphor of the river keeps recurring in my poetry, and I seem to have learned my way around it. Once again, the metaphor has almost become part of me.
In Gather My Blood Rivers of Song, you continued the appropriation of the Yoruba oral tradition, exploiting the personal lyrics. What’s the essence of this interrogation?
I always say that I started reciting poetry in Yoruba language. I used to go from school to school. My teacher would ask me to present a poem as an interlude during events. When we even went for quiz competitions, my teacher would call upon me to present a poem. I was also the leader of my group’s band. I delved into the tradition of the Oriki and the general pattern of Ewi as performed by people like Lanrewaju Adepoju, especially, because I grew up in Ibadan, and he was one of the two major Ewi exponents alongside Tobosun Ladapo. But because I encountered Ladapo first, I used to even recite some of his lines. That grew with me. It was part of me; it was not difficult for me. In fact, using between the African- American traditions of poetry, which I studied up to PhD, the English tradition (sonnet, ballad, and the rest of them), I see that all of these are present in Yoruba poetry. So, what I do is only to use the English language as a medium to be able to carry the weight of heritage forward, but without deliberately limiting myself to that tradition, I improve and gain from other traditions, and it becomes quite different from others.
In Web of Remembrance, there seems to be a conscious attempt to deploy graphostylistics in your diction by manifesting deviations at various graphological tactics, such as punctuations, capitalization, hyphenation, spacing, etc.). Is that a coincidence or a deliberate linguistic contraption?
Certainly, I had to do something different from A Harvest of Laughters, which took me, as I said, ten years to complete; and while I was completing A Harvest of Laughters and completing it, Nigeria had descended into those military-era of darkness, and I was sending out my poems to a number of newspapers. And I felt I needed to pass on a message different from romanticisation of nature –barely talking about all the political desperation and exploitation that we had that time. So, I needed to come up with a collection that would extend further, even depart from the impression of the artist of me that took it hard. That’s where people started talking about the nationalistic and political imagination of Remi Raji. At that time, I felt I was not just going to use metaphors that would provoke people either in the form of anger of form of reaction against the system (that’s for those who will read it). I also felt not only in the metaphorisation; I would also use graphic and punctuational tools. That’s where you find a poem like “This Land tickles Me”, which you can read in different ways –which uses the old Anglo-Saxon form called caesura in which I break one part of the lines from another one, and it goes on and on like that. You can also read it horizontally and vertically, even diagonally, and it will still mean something, depending on how you are going to connect. Even where you there was supposed to be punctuations, I deliberately removed it. I also use capitalization for everything.
When you use capitalization throughout –most people do not know it thought they use it –even in ordinary letter as a symbol – its implications. For sociolinguists, when you write a piece with capital letters throughout, it means you are in a state of hysteria or you are angry. That’s what I exactly did; it was a deliberate style.
You also deploy the ee-Cummings style in your poetry…
I was a student of English. Apart from studying Creative Writing, I read all the major English and American poets at the University of Ibadan, because I was taught by Professor Dan Izevbaye, Harry Garuba, and the rest of them. So, I read E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, What Whitman, T.S. Eliot, among others. I needed to popularize that tradition without taking all of their eclecticism with me. For example, if you are talking about a leader and you reduce his name to a small dot, it means he is just mortal. The other thing is that I cannot be my own critic; I cannot interpret my work. But what I consider a privilege is also a burden, because I write poetry; I teach poetry and I am a scholar of English poetry and literary tradition. So, it is also a burden, because one can likely get into a state of overwriting or underwriting a particular poem, depending on how you are able to balance one part of your critical faculty: creativity or criticism. tradition. So, it is also a burden, because one
Your works pay witness to the nebulous geography of power and traditional deification. Where does this impetus come from?
Maybe, power. For traditional deification, I don’t understand that. Anyway, we are speaking of two things now: we are talking about mythic imagination –how I try to sustain or retrieve the cultural tradition, for instance, using Oriki, using the Yoruba language and making references, to a certain god. I think I saw the need to be involved in that cultural revivalism. If I am able to be influenced by, for instance, E.E. Cummings, Langston Hughes or Pablo Neruda –why can’t I draw from the resources of my Yoruba poetic oral tradition? That’s for that.
But power is very central. Language itself is power. The ability to convert and influence is power. If I am able to influence and convert one Nigerian through one poem over a year, that’s the essence of power. Again, you want to confront autocratic power –it is very crucial that you must confront it. Writing is not just going to be merely an exemplastic or an artistic plastic; writing must have a message. Even by entertaining, arts has its own power over the person it is entertaining.
In his review of Gather My Blood Rivers of Song, Ando Yeva describes you as a “crusader poet”. How effective do you think is the spirit of verbiage when warring against political antagonists and social ills? Does poetry really matter in an age of diminishing reading culture?
(laughs) I have a whole essay and response to that. The same question came up when I went to Barcelona, Spain. Poetry matters. It only depends on how much energy that you put into it and how much effect that it has on the listener, audience and recipient. What the bullet can do in a moment, it takes poetry several moments. But the damage of that power of poetry is far greater than that of the bullet, because there is a lot of power in the Word, just as we have the power of the Word in the Bible and Koran. There is also the power of the Word in the Yoruba incantations.
Poetry does work sometimes like incantations, but the traffic must free, smooth and fluent to help it work. If there are so many blockages due to the problem of language, it will not work. But you have to reach the innermost of the mind of the reader. I have received responses beyond the shores of this country from readers who admit being touched by this or that line, which I felt happy about. Personally, whenever I finish writing, I feel I have done something –that I have relieved the energy. It is up to the reader or listener (if I am performing on stage). But there are those who will never want to catch the energy, because they are the autocratic and deaf elements in our system.
You noted elsewhere that in your latest work, Sea of My Mind, that you just wrote “a decade of emotions” into that work. It cannot be belaboured here, I guess?
At the point that I concluded that collection, I was fagged out, because I put all my energy into the collection, reflecting even from the time I started writing poetry –from the Harvest of Laughter to Gather My Blood Rivers of Songs. It might be a slim collection, but, in it, you will see everyone of my sight and sound in previous collections of mine. I completed it after the death of my mother (the title poem is actually a poem for my mother), and I was pouring out my emotions; that’s why I said it captured “a decade of emotions”. Reflecting upon it, now that you are asking me, that collection seems to me like a threshold, a milestone or a point of transition for me. I am even afraid to do the next collection, because what am coming to do after it has to be different. That collection is a milestone collection.
There is a belief that the social media has led to an upsurge of poetasters and doggerels in the land. How threatened is poetry in Nigeria?
Poetry is seriously threatened. Poetry has become a treat upon itself in the hands of poetasters and hack poets. That’s why some of us are making efforts to encourage those really who have the talents. I receive student poets and other who want me to look at their works, and I found them very encouraging, because some wouldn’t even want you to see what they are writing; they just put it on the social media, because it is a very free space and, with a little amount of money, they can create their own websites or blogs and claim to be poets, and other people from other parts of the world who want to do an analysis of what’s going on in Nigerian poetry will go online to harvest a number of poems and use them as yardstick for what poetry is and what it is not. That’s the danger for the tradition.
How do you cope as the Dean, Faculty of Arts, and President, Association of Nigerian Authors, who is also a practicing writer? In addition, your ANA manifesto was hinged on “a systematic combination of advocacy, outreach and mentoring programme”. In practice, what are the manifestations?
I am not only Dean of Arts and ANA President; I am also a father and, maybe, a husband. So, I do all of these things. In this day, you have to be multi-dexterous –you have to multitask. It depends on how you use your time out of the 24 hours you have in a day. I know how to manage my time. While you will find other people partying from morning to night, you will rarely find me there. Writing is a solitary affair; writing is all about innermost dialogue with yourself. So, it is not difficult for me to serve as writer. Then, there is a connection between being the Dean of Arts and ANA President: ANA is about writers, and I am a writer; I am administering the Faculty of Arts –and both are about administration. I have to be at location as Dean of Arts, but I don’t have to be at location as ANA President. I have managed, in the past three years, to put virtual network in place. We also have an ANA that works without having everybody at the same building. The social media has been very helpful for me, because we connect effectively.
For the first time in 37 years, ANA will have a support from an individual to assist the association in reaching out to the largest numbers of students ever all over the country to encourage creative writing. It is into the third year running where we have been sponsoring literacy campaign for secondary schools across different state chapters. We also encourage different state chapters to go even beyond what we are able to give them to connect with other associations and secondary schools interested in writing. We do mentor in that sense also. We also assist talented writers through the new Nigerian Writers Series (NWS) to get published without the writers spending a dime. In the next one or two weeks, we will have almost the ten titles we are sponsoring. The last time this was attempted was in 1988 with the ANA Update publisher collaboration. We hope that the new administrator that will come will take it up from there and other writers will be encouraged to publish with NWS.
Source: The Sun
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