timothy samuel - My Blog

After surviving the monstrous gale of Hurricane Katrina which embowelled and decapitated many residents of New Orleans in August 2005, Nigeria’s poet laureate and social critic, Niyi Osundare, decided that in spite of his huge loss the disaster would not have the last word. The outcome of that rugged determination is his newly published book of poem entitled City Without People: The Katrina Poems. Written over the last five years in the characteristic style of the tireless songbird, the poems in their short forms severally weave a narrative of pains resulting from heavy loss that is general yet personal, of man’s resilience in the face of virulent hardships, and of a poet’s heart full of appreciation to those who did not leave it in the lurch. ADEMOLA ADESOLA asks him some questions about the book which he reveals is the most difficult to write of all his works

Reason for the delay in the writing and the publication of the book

Katrina was a huge catastrophe. And it left us all with a big trauma. For three whole months after Katrina I couldn’t sleep well. I was having nightmares. Up till now I’m still having those nightmares, particularly whenever I remember the scenes or whenever I dream about the manuscripts and the books I lost and of course the danger that my wife and I faced when we thought all was lost. So, it took so long to get these poems out because each time I sat to write them the pain came back. The original pain we felt on the 29th and 30th of August, 2005, and our journey through evacuation centre. We had to stay for many days without brushing our teeth without having a bath and without any shoes. We left our home with nothing, absolutely. So, it was the nature of the experience and the nature of the trauma that made this work so difficult to compose because there is no way you can write about an experience without remembering the details. And each time I remembered the details I had a terrible bout of depression and all the angst and all the terror of Katrina would come back to me. All the poems in the book of course are new and they were written between the time I started recovering from the Katrina trauma and the time they were finally gone. That was 2010. So, they took so long in coming because of the kind of experience that gave rise to them.

Actually, it’s ironic that while the Katrina poems were on my mind but I couldn’t write them, I stepped aside and produced another book. That was Tender Moment – love poems. I think that was some kind of psychological compensation, or psychological avoidance. It’s amazing the way the mind works. It was the Katrina poems that were on my mind but I couldn’t write them. So, I took out time composing love poems, remembering some of the poems I lost to Katrina. Well, I couldn’t remember any of them really. I had to compose new poems and they were love poems. It was after Tender Moment that I decided to face the Katrina monster head-on! I kept telling myself that I would not be defeated by Katrina. That was when I started writing the poem. And once I wrote the first three the other ones started coming a little at a time. But this has been the most difficult of all my works because of the experience that produced the poems.

Wouldn’t other mode have been suitable for recording the Katrina narrative?

Not for somebody like me! I’m sure you know I’m basically a poet. Ideas come to me in poetic term. Images that express those ideas come to me in poetic term. And the whole articulation of the experience came to me in poetic term. That’s at the personal level. I’m sure you also know that of all the literary genres poetry is the most condensed. Poetry is the one that is closer to the human heart and the interface between the human heart and the human mind. When you want to reach your depth as a writer, when you want to express something that is beyond yourself, when you want to express an experience and make that expression greater than the experience itself, when you want to give music to the mystery and the misery of life, you reach for poetry. I think this was really what happened to me. I also toyed with the Katrina experience in prose form, but I think I did the first 42 pages. And they are still there. I haven’t revisited them for a very long, long time. Maybe I will some day. But it was the poetry of the experience that first captured my fancy. That is why the book has come in poetic form. You know poetry also offers a certain liberty, certain latitude when it comes to the expression of experiences. It makes it possible for us to play around with imageries. It makes it possible for us to harness the depth and density of feeling in the music of expression. This is really the advantage that poetry offered me. And I took it with both hands.

I allowed the nature of the subject of the poem to influence, and in fact, dictate the kind of register that I used, that is the kind of language. The language of the work is such that readers will find accessible because I saw myself as a spokesperson for an entire city. The complex transparency of the language is there. The communicative imperative to reach as many readers as possible decided in me on the kind of register employed in the poems. Also, at the psychological or psycho-linguistic level, or if you like, psycho-stylistic level, there are certain levels of pain that dictate the kind of language in which they should be expressed. This is what I called density of feeling and density of expression. The density of feeling has a way of influencing the density of expression, or as it happens most of time, density of feeling may result in a clarity of expression. I’m happy that reactions to the poems have very, very encouraging, in fact flattering at times. And I’m happy that at the reading we had about two weeks ago in Lagos the audience more or less showed the same level of empathy with the experience and the language in which it is communicated to them. I never wanted to keep any reader out of the experience.
Experience with the publisher of the book

The name of the publisher is Blackwidow Press. They are based in Boston, United States, but they have big connections in New Orleans. I met the publisher earlier on, about a year or so ago and he expressed interest in publishing my poetry. He specializes in poetry and he does a wonderful job. One of his preoccupations is bringing poetry from other land to the attention of readers in the United States. He has so many books of poems translated from different languages in the world. So, he is a truly international poetry publisher. That is Blackwidow.

When I finished the Katrina manuscript, I considered him. I made up my mind to get this book published in the US because that is where the experience took place. I have always published my books in Nigeria. But I say this one is for the US and I’m happy I took that decision. Blackwidow took the book and within a week or two he got back to me to say that the poems are very touchy and that he was delighted in publishing them. Then I advised him to let us make the publication of this book coincide with the sixth anniversary of Katrina, which was August 29, 2011. It was a tall order but he managed to beat the deadline. So, I enjoyed working with him. He has a designer who is very proficient. He designed the book, especially the cover.

For the first time in many years I had a publisher who would notice an error or a set of errors in the book and contact the author. In Nigeria here it’s different. In fact, even when you write the correct thing many of our publishers would publish the wrong thing. I didn’t have any problems at all working with Blackwidow because they have proficient editors. These are proficient and highly educated editors. In Nigeria, because of our terrible educational system, our editors don’t have the necessary kind of education that they need for the publishing job – the thoroughness, the literacy that you must have before you can call yourself a publisher. We had this in the 1960s, 70s and up to the 80s in Nigeria. But things started going down, down. I don’t know whether there is any book that I have produced in this country in the past 10, 15 years that have not had one kind of error or another. My experience this time around is really different. That is like my experience with some other books that I published abroad. This shows that in Nigeria we still have a very long way to go.

The Nigerian edition of the book

I am hoping to get a Nigerian edition published. I don’t know which publisher is going to handle it yet. But you know this is going to be some kind of professional agreement between my publisher in the United States and whosoever Nigerian publisher is going to handle it. But certainly I would like to have a Nigerian edition. The way the book is at the moment is that it is $19.95 – $20. Multiply $20 by 160 and you have nearly N4,000. Who will buy a book of poem for N4,000? This again shows you some of the problems we’ve been shouting about this past couple of years, that the economy, particularly the state of the Naira, affects the literary culture. Books are becoming more and more expensive in Nigeria because the Naira is sinking. Our government is silently and mischievously and dangerously devaluing the national currency. They are doing that and they are also devaluing our national life with it. So, I’m looking forward to a Nigerian edition that will be affordable to readers in this country.