Niyi Niyi Osundare

Books by Niyi Osundare

Songs of the Marketplace (2006) / The Word is an Egg (2005) / Pages from the Book of the Sun (2002) / Two Plays (2006)

Thread in the Loom: Essays (2002) / The State Visit (2002) / Midlife (2005) / Moonsongs (1988) / The Eyes of the Earth (2007)

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Niyi Niyi Osundare

By Lee Meitzen Grue

the name breathes a song
we are learning.
A life with the breath and depth
of a strong table: Handsome and useful.

A green bottle loosed and twirling in the ocean
rolls up on this riverbank,
within
a poem like music,
no translation needed.

Niyi, you are your country
and you are absent,
its negative space calls for you.
You’ve left words like cornmeal
for your people to follow

Your country calls,
Niyi, Niyi Osundare
I am missing you .
I know you sing of my beauty and my pain.
Where are you?
Does some other woman make your bed?

Forget her.
Sing only of me.
Sing to the woman’s children,
but sing only of me.
I am your beautiful mother.

Niyi, we know your home calls you,
but this too is your home.
Flood waters could not wash you away.
Tonight we celebrate you with ritual: candles, sage, sparklers,
with many glasses lifted too many times.

We celebrate you as someone who arrives from great distance,
as a man who arrives from the stars.

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Grue photo by Phyllis Parun, photographer

posted 17 April 2007

A Response

Rudy,

May peace flood your heart today.

It has been a very busy weekend down here in Lagos. I have this morning thoroughly enjoyed the poem on Niyi Osundare by the New Orleans poet, Lee Meitzen Grue. I suppose it had been written earlier, or has it just been written?

I couldn't help feeling jealous that someone is pleading with Niyi to stay put in exile, saying that though Nigeria beckons on him to return, New Orleans cherishes his presence on its land. Can you beat that?

Well, that has been our plight for many years now. Majority of Nigeria's best minds and original thinkers are all in exile, because the horrible conditions at home grow worse with each passing day.

We are stuck with an insufferably incompetent junta, whose inferiority complex drives into thinking that these writers and great minds are its greatest problem. And so, it hounds them into exile, and we lose them to other climes.

Chinua Achebe, for instance, is out there in New York even at 76! This was a man who had always cherished living in his country, and contributing his thoughts and ideas to further its progress.

There are many others like him out there scattered in Europe, Asia and the US, where their persons, talents and services are duly appreciated.

The April elections have brought no hope to Nigerians. President Olusegun Obasanjo, in an election adjudged the worst in the nation’s history, has imposed on the nation his anointed candidates who will not ask questions about his massive looting of the nation's resources.

Power supply continues to be withdrawn almost the whole days in the week, and so how can a writer function in such a terrible environment?

I will scan some pages of Osundare's Moonsongs and send them to you. I always find Niyi’s poems very delicious.

You sure will love them.

Have a nice day

Ugochukwu

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Niyi Osundare, who was born in Nigeria in 1947 and is currently a professor of English literature at the university of New Orleans, is considered the greatest living Nigerian poet. Most of his books are published in Nigeria; The Word is an Egg, his latest collection, appeared earlier this year. Just recently, two books of his, Pages from the Book of the Sun: New & Selected Poems and Thread in the Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture, were published in the United States by African World Press. His work has been translated in Dutch, German, Korean and French, and has won many literary awards, such as the Noma.

posted 24 April 2007

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update 8 July 2008