Obi Nwakanma, Poems
Sounds of the Ages by 26 everything Films & Photos
Dr. Kevin Meehan, United States, 2018:
Dr. Kevin Meehan is professor of English at the University of Central Florida where he specializes in Caribbean and multi-ethnic U.S. literature, and climate change education. He is the author of People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange (2009) and numerous articles. His analysis of negritude and Nwakamna’s poems situates the verse in the context of Negritude.
Variations on Negritude
Born and raised in southern Nigeria, Obi Nwakanma is an Igbo poet and scholar of African and African diasporan literature. The three poems included here, “A Brief Memoir of Time,” “Child of Four Winds” and “Last Will and Testament” come from his book, Birthcry (Kraft Griots 2016), which was a finalist for the 2016 Nigeria Literature Prize. These poems capture the author’s uniquely lyrical, gnomic, and prophetic voice and represent well the themes that define the volume: ancestry, historical consciousness, the politics and psychology of decolonization, Africa’s place in a polyethnic global society, and openness to the future as the speaker’s generation passes on the challenges of life to the next generation, imagined as a child listening to the speaker’s verse.
Students and teachers will encounter these poems directly through their specific stylistic and thematic qualities, but such encounters will be richer when readers acquire some understanding of relevant historical and literary background, and thus are able to see Nwakanma as the inheritor of a rich legacy of Nigerian, Pan-African and global modernist poetic traditions. The first president of independent Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe, had been a contemporary of Langston Hughes and others figures prominent in the Harlem Renaissance before his political career. Through his association with Hughes and others, Azikiwe also became familiar with the Négritude movement founded by Leopold Senghor (Senegal), Aimé Césaire (Martinique), and Léon-Gontran Damas (French Guyana) that promoted black consciousness, cultural pride, and a push for decolonization among Francophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean. When Zik, as he was popularly known, returned to Nigeria after many years abroad as a student and journalist, he promoted literary production and the work of younger writers like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo and others along with his activist journalism and political organizing. With additional support from expatriate German professors Ullie Beier and Janheinz Jahn, who edited a literary journal Black Orpheus, these efforts coalesced in the formation of the Mbari Club in 1962 that promoted literary salons, dramatic performances, conferences, and publishing. The club, with bases in Ibadan and Nsukka (both university towns), was named for the Owerri Igbo ceremony of mbari in which a house dedicated to the earth goddess, Ala, is constructed over the course of nine months. Aft