Sam Omatseye is a multiple award winning columnist and an honourary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. He has published two novels, The Crocodile Girl and My Name is Okoro. He also published three volumes of poetry, Mandela’s Bones and Other Poems, Dear Baby Ramatu, and Lion Wind and Other Poems.
Scented Offal
We could swear that our loins never
Joined
From old times
In the rhythms
Of dances
Or in accents
Or in songs
Or in the patterns of the village square
Or the way kings hollered
In the marketplace
We could deny the hue in which our ancestors clothed their Gods
Or mourned
Or let libations drop
Or in the rains
Or the pithy moments of surrender
To the unyielding wills of prophesies
Even if we forswore our bonds or embraces
We could never deny the blood they spilled
Out of gourds of war
The blood of our brothers
The saliva of sisters
The teary treasure of friends
The blood that answered the cries of slaughter
Our blood, flowing with zest
And intoning in gushes
The voices that are ours
In this blood we saw the cousin
Who is us but who is not
The blood of the Yoruba spliced with
The arteries of the Afemai,
The jugular of the Igbo speaking half-accented Fulani
Suddenly we turn blind with our bold faces
By lying about our blood ties
We inhabit a brood of denial
In that dawn of independence
The bards wept over a deflowered shoot
But the rythms and the songs inspired
Wiggles of multi-ethnic ectacy
Show me your Itsekiri dance
Or show me the Ijaw minstrel and I will see
The lineaments of Yoruba beauty
But for so for us
We have inaugurated a confusion
As though ancestrally ordained
We joy in a babel more comfounded
Than when the Old Testament propounded
Many tongues to excite a lonely race
But we are born from
The snap and flare of conflict
In blood shed and shared
We fought for land and brides
Fierce and fuzzy like prides of lions
We cowered kings of fellow kinsmen we named foes
Slaves fell who became fathers under our eaves
They bore girls craved by kings
Loins teased slaves into freeborn royalty
Bonded yesterday, blue blood thereafter
So fluid was our kinship
We never were a race until war made us
We wrestled into one
Even the Yoruba
In the nineteenth century
Dueled into brotherhood
Kiriji, Latosa, Ekitiparapo, Kurunmi
Made myth out of spears and fears
The Bini never bowed to a foreign invader
But drew majesty out of travesty
To mark
Their place in the pantheon
Historians call it massacre
But the indigenes
Who fell because they marched
Rename it resistance
Though futile
They wove pride out of their pyre
Not far away
Inch by inch
Nana inked his Itsekiri print
In blood and strife
They all fought for a country they
Did not know grew limbs
In sacrifices
Dripped as blood
Dribbled on maps hourglass shaped.
From their rapine spears
What can we say of the warriors of Jukun
With eyes and skins skeined in
The lore of warriors
When Nigeria came
The tribes embraced with averted faces
Suffocating bear hugs
Nigeria was not even known then
No one named it
Nor craved for it
They did not even own it
Its fruits were
Nourished in foreign ether
White hosts hoisting guns with a god.
Y.J. ITOPA
YJ Itopa, a poet and journalist hails from Ihima, Okehi Local Government Area of Kogi State. Itopa wrote the song to mourn an Ebira sibling of his, Adinoyi Ojo-Onukaba, who died last month in an inexplicable armed robbery attack on his return from Abeokuta where he attended the inauguration of a presidential library owned by Nigerian Former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, his friend and associate.
Lament for Arrow Onukaba
The world had seasoned the arrow with holly poison
And was luring the lair with fair stalking
O death has plucked the laurel from the quiver?
Owner of plenty powerful plays
You also have furnished the field with bejeweled
Journalism
A playwright that sired works of luminous plumage for which
Kings visited you with royal staves to hail your name as hallowed
While Gods’ divine feathers are hoisted in your crowded crown
Owner of a mighty mind
For our planting
You have sought the sun to suckle the seeds we spread
And for our night to be benign to night
You became kind like a sky
Seeking the moon to make a lasting lantern
And this gave you The Fire fly in a sullen sky medal
A mighty man of bounteous missionary bone
You have swollen the sea
To cool the canal
To spread her countless tentacles
To make verdure of a miserable meadow
For which you are now the
Oasis of a flaccid flora and fauna
The world had seasoned the arrow with holly poison
And was luring the lair with fair stalking
O death has plucked the laurel from the quiver?
Humbled by sincere civilisation
From your toothsome travels around the world
You returned to meet in every vein a deadly decay
And this decay you stubbornly fought to
Plant your banner saddle on the sterile polity of the land
Was it not with the speed of light
They turned your flaming flag to shamed shreds?
And the pieces
Looking like useless pile in a tailor’s shop?
I remember how they kissed their coffin:
To vote for a man of panting pocket is suicidal
He had worked with many wealth weaving looms
Around the world
He had formed a federal government with people of power
And sat with the most opulent
And saw where wealth was born, bred and
Drained in sky-piercing silos
Yet he scratches the soil for miserable grains like a compound cock
To vote for a man of panting pocket is suicidal
Who will teach this Onukaba the saint
To know the election here is bargained and bought
Cheaply like weevil owned bowls of beans
A trade where the highest bidder buys our conscience
Bidding us a four year old farewell
Who will tell this Onukaba the saint?
Is it a crime to serve without blemish
Is it a crime to work for welfare of citizens
Is it a crime to plant good tree for morrow’s men?
You had always wondered before you left the quiver.
The world had seasoned the arrow with holly poison
And was luring the lair with fair stalking
O death has plucked the laurel from the quiver?
O death of many killing devices
In our case today you came
In a formidable form
In the form of armed robbers, the owners of all our roads
In the form of an escaping car veering off the road
With a mission to end a golden life returning from knowledge hunting
He saw your sign and sought safety in the bosom of a far flung forest
Yet….
Some deaths are dressed in naked mystery colour
A bare termite has eaten the grain and the hoe
The world had seasoned the arrow with holly poison
And was luring the lair with fair stalking
O death has plucked the laurel from the quiver?
I wonder why we know our heroes when we
No longer can see our heroes
When idols are dead
Onto the spreading arms of the sky we hurl our
Heroes’ songs drums and dances:
We regret we didn’t make a sincere son the king
We have invited a ruinous reign on our head
We have used our needle to sew our shroud
We knew you were the ideal arrow in the bow of God
We knew you were sublime in thoughts and deeds
We have gone to war without armour
Killing our conscience on the altar of quick but baited gains
Ah! The fish has swallowed a homing hook
Onukaba is gone
The quiver is emptied of a prized possession
O the arrow is gone and the sky has sorrowed
Drowning the earth from sole to scalp
Mourning with thunder clap
Mourning with flashes of lightening tears
The mother has halted her tears for the one she felt beholden to
To travel home in peace and peat
The arrow we seasoned for the lair is gone
And we wept till the end of time
When we see the savanna, o come and see the savanna
When we behold its beatific hills and their jubilant ants
When we wonder how the ants mould their mud for the shelter
When we wonder how the ants sink the stream for the hill work
Then we know Ihineba remembers every grain of His sands
The world had seasoned the arrow with holly poison
And was luring the lair with fair stalking
O death has plucked the laurel from the quiver?