March 19, 2010
The most sweetly painful and painfully sweet part of the fact that you have just turned 60 is being hit by the realization that those of us in the generation of Nigerian writing and intellection that you have made your constituency will no longer be able to slam ‘Odia’ on your head the way we have done all these years! We are now all in our thirties and forties, scattered in Euro-America like frozen china in the snow.
The most sweetly painful and painfully sweet part of the fact that you have just turned 60 is being hit by the realization that those of us in the generation of Nigerian writing and intellection that you have made your constituency will no longer be able to slam ‘Odia’ on your head the way we have done all these years! We are now all in our thirties and forties, scattered in Euro-America like frozen china in the snow. You have always been our Odia: just Odia. But how do you go about slamming Odia on the head of a sixty-year-old? I woke up this morning thinking I may have lost Odia! For when next I see you in America – our meeting place since I left Naija – how am I going to be able to slam Odia on your head while reeling from your characteristic attack on something I might have written that you think is pure trash?
Age is unfair! An entire generation of your literary family – those of us that you shaped and nurtured – must now make adjustments! We hovered around you, Harry Garuba, and Professors Dapo Adelugba, Niyi Osundare, and Femi Osofisan in those heady Lagos-Ibadan decades of the 80s and the 90s that are now so crucial to Nigeria’s literary history. While Professor Adelugba was always just “Baba”, it was not possible for us to go about slamming Niyi and Femi on the heads of Osundare and Osofisan – except behind their backs! We could do that only with you and Harry Garuba.
Except that in Harry’s case, you had to call the ‘Harry’ softly – almost with janded fone - to reflect the gentle and unassuming nature of Harry Garuba. That left Odia which we could slam on your head with all four compass points of our mouths and with paraga-sodden voices because we ‘owned’ you with unrivalled naturalness. You gave too much of yourself to us for any distancing honorific to work or jell. Egbon Odia? Mba! That didn’t sound good at all. Bros Odia? Tufiakwa! That was not good either. Uncle Odia? Nope. Besides, there was already Uncle Bola Ige in our Lagos-Ibadan literary circuits. There couldn’t be two Uncles in that restricted literary fold.
And so we had our Odia. How did that happen? Odia, you did not just write poetry and op-eds in newspapers; you did not just go about giving invited public lectures all over Nigeria, you invested hope and your whole being in an entire generation of Nigerian writers. You were already so famous then: we were nobodies setting out, happy whenever the occasional poem was published anywhere. Yet, there you were, sleeping on the same foams with us wherever sleep ambushed us on those endless nights of beer-aided (you didn’t drink) literary jam sessions.
The Lagos crowd would come to Ibadan – Ogaga Ifowodo, Obi Nwakanma, Akin Adesokan, Maik Nwosu, Toni Kan, Angela Nwosu, E.C Osondu, Unoma Azuah, Promise Okekwe, Toyin Adewale, Maxim Uzoatu – because they perhaps had stumbled on some new book by Milan Kundera or Czeslaw Milosz that we in Ibadan hadn’t read. And the Ibadan crowd – Harry Garuba, Remi Raji, Nduka Otiono, Sanya Osha, Omowumi Segun, Chiedu Ezeanah, Sola Olorunyomi, Lola Shoneyin, Charles Ogu, Nike Adesuyi, Nehru Odeh, Niyi Okunoye, Diran Ademiju-Bepo, and yours truly would be waiting for them in ambush, hoping that those yeye Lagos people hadn’t read some new novel by Salman Rushdie, Gunther Grass or some new hard theory by Paul Gilroy. Ah, those endless arguments over beer and the endless cigarettes – for those who smoked! It was a dangerous thing to approach this group if you hadn’t read vastly in literature, philosophy, history, and politics.
Then you would make your irruption, Odia! Did you always have to irrupt? Do you still irrupt? Your 18th century Volkswagen beetle car, billowing smoke and doing unprintable damage to the environment, would announce you. The story is told that you eventually threw away that car that made a Molue bus look like a limo when the ten-year-old son of a niece of yours saw the car and changed his mind about wanting to grow up to become a writer! If Uncle Odia’s rickety car was all a writer’s earnings could guaranty in Nigeria, the boy didn’t want any of the poverty!
Your irruption was always bad news! Just when everyone was getting carried away by their assumed erudition, who wanted the one man who has read every book to appear and spoil one’s show? For it is easier to pass through the eye of a needle than to name a book that Odia hasn’t read twice! And you would settle down, ask for a bottle of water, and begin to beat us all into shape – trashing somebody’s new poem here, dissing somebody’s new short story there – but always with suggestions for improvement after the koboko.
Ah, your koboko, Odia! I got it first in 1993 after completing the manuscript of what I thought was an excellent volume of poetry. I had the ‘misfortune’ of running into you after printing it out in IFRA. You grabbed it from me as is your wont and announced casually that you were on your way to Lagos. One week later, a rude knock on my door woke me up at night. I asked where you were coming from that late in the night. You shoved my manuscript in my hands while brushing your way past me into the living room: “you foolish boy! You think you have the right to inflict this nonsense you call poems on Nigerian literature? I came all the way from Lagos to abuse you. I hear you are even trying to enter it for ANA. Don’t insult us o. Yeye boy. Is this how to write poetry? Abeg, wetin you get for house? I’m hungry jare”.
That’s classic Odia! The one who would make you give him your food after abusing you in your own house! We ate and you kept me up all night, reworking each poem painstakingly. By 6 am, you were on your way back to Lagos to give some talk somewhere. You hadn’t slept! The manuscript you travelled at night from Lagos to Ibadan to help me rework all night would later win the ANA Poetry Prize. Every member of my generation has variants of this anecdote: their own personal versions of your total investment in their careers. You built your books but, most importantly, you built and are still building people. Now you are sixty! But you know what? You will always be
Odia!
Culled from: www.234Next.com
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });