Ikechukwu
E. Asika
Lecturer,
Department
of English
Anambra State University, Igbariam
Campus.
Anambra
State- Nigeria.
Abstract
Over
the years, there have been arguments on the role of art in society. Some
critics with apt knowledge of Western literature and the quality of their
several art works tend to argue in favour of art for art sake but it is a fact,
however arguable it may be, that a dekko on the bulk of literary works produced
in the African continent are products of the artists’ vision and creation as
part of their duties and debts they owe their societies towards achieving a
more prosperous and beautiful future. These artists concern themselves with
issues greater than their common and private interests but of general and
communal interest of their societies. Poetry, one of the genres of literature
has become one of the formidable ways through which writers and artists
criticize and attack their societies in the hopes of correcting and instituting
a more ideal and idyllic society of their dreams. Several poetry collections
exist not for private exotericisms of the poets but for the betterment,
liberation, and emancipation of a greater number of the people all for humanity
sake. This paper selected the two volumes of poetry by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo,
Hearts songs and Waiting for Dawn. The purpose is to study how the poet used
the avenue of poetry to defend the cause of her people. The paper highlighted
critically the class consciousness and struggle between the upper and lower
class which draws attention to the collections as Marxist literature. What
ought to be done to bridge this wide gulf and restore the sanctity of humanity
and equality of life from the view point of the poet is one of the major
thrusts of this paper.
Introduction
Literature is a means of self-expression, a mirror which reflects the
societal mores and values through which we could obtain a glaring picture of
society in transition. Literature has became an integral part of any society
for it has become one of the trusted avenues through which a society could be
well appraised and judgment passed all geared towards making the given society
more viable, lasting and productive. Poetry, one of the genres of literature
has become a worthwhile .and dependable tool for literary criticism. Poetry
entertains and delights the mind but over the years it has found its best
application and usage as a weapon, a tool for criticism with which poets mock
and satirize societal actions, values and attitudes in the hope of correcting
and instilling in the people, right and ethical moral values which in no small
measure will institute a more harmonious, idyllic and tension free society as
well as engineer a more appreciable peaceful co-existence among individuals in
society. It is the nature of poetry and its poetic composition that accords it
this privilege over other genres of literature for in the words of Ikiddeh
(1982):
… Poetry has an
intrinsic quality, which commends it as a handmaid to revolutionary action. Its
evocativeness in language and brevity of form make it the ideal medium of the
revolutionary artist in a hurry, first for communicating those impressions in
the hope to elicit corresponding emotions from the audience (167).
Poetry fulfils the task of reaching the
mind and evoking memorable pictures which force one to have a re-think not just
because of its evocativeness created by the artist but as a result of its tacit
nature. The message of poetry often comes to us, moments and moments after the
first reading and it is in these moments that its revolutionary impact envelops
us and imprisons us. Typical of every society is the presence of many forms of
vices, problems and evils peculiar to the society which militate against her
growth. Just like an Igbo proverb which advocates that the monkey’s hand should
be removed from the soup pot before it turns into a human hand, a situation
detrimental to the people involved, so has literature continued to decry all
forms of evil and dehumanizing practices as a way of removing the monkey’s hand
from the soup pot of society. Poetry has embraced this task of social advocacy
and exists for the purpose of social reformation, re-orientation,
re-habilitation and re-education that must be done. This role of poetry
transcends and breaks all chain of arts for art’ sake to embrace in all
entirety art for humanity sake, the humanity of people the poets hope to
redeem; the humanity whose problems and shortcomings the poets express in their
poems.
The
argument for art-for-art sake had ranged over time in literary criticism which
tries to frown at sociological novels and literary works as having too much of
the society and reflecting little of humanity and one will wonder what is
society if not men and women that exist in it.
In
the wake of this argument an in support of ‘art for art sake’ Onoge Omafume
reports that it is the intervention of this kind of criticism that forced
Achebe into his self-doubt into saying and arguing that perhaps what he writes
is applied art as distinct from pure in one of his famous quote on what he
hopes his novels would communicate. The Nigerian critic Dan S. Izevbayi is the
most sophisticated advocate of art for art’s sake criticism. According to
Onoge, he, in 1971 acknowledge without apparent regret the sociological
conditioning of the colonial milieu which informed the birth of literature, but
hoped that a literature with a ‘suppressed social reference would develop so
that non-sociological criticism could in fact advance (466). According to Dan
S. Izevbaye as quoted by Onoge (2007):
With this new
emphasis in criticism, that is the suppression of the social reference of
literature as a significant influence in criticism, it may be easier for
critics to pay greater attention to the literary work itself … The social factor
was important only because the literature itself was largely sociological. As
the literature becomes less preoccupied with the social or national problems
and more concerned with the problems of men as individuals in an African
society, the critical reference will be human beings rather than society, and
the considerations which influence critical judgment will be human and literary
rather than social ones (466).
However, impressionable this argument
will sound, society is man and people and a man cannot be fully understood in
isolation of his society, neither can the personality of an artist, his message
and vision as a writer be well underscored if the socio-cultural milieu that
gave rise to his literary work are not put into consideration and well studied.
The work of an artist is best studied and appreciated with an apt knowledge of
the society, the people he writes for and the turns and twists in the society
that gave rise to such works. Understanding a society and the events of the
time is a step towards the direction of accessing and appreciating the value of
a given work of art in its place and time. Abiola Irere (2007) in support and
justification of the sociological approach which views literature a part of art
for humanity sake writes that sociological approach:
… attempts to
correlate the work to the social background to see how the author’s intention
and attitude issue out of the wider social context of his art in the first
place and, more important still, to get to an understanding of the way each
writer or each group of writers captures a moment of the historical
consciousness of the society. The intimate progression of the collection mind,
its working, its shapes, its temper, these and more are determinants to which a
writer’s mind and sensibilities are subject, to which they are responding all
the time and which, at a superficial or profound level, his work will reflect
in its moods and structures (468).
This argument obviously supports and
lends credence to art for humanity sake, for in understanding of the social
background that gave rise to the work of art, we understand how a writer
responded to a particular moment and issues in the annals of his society. We
can fully access the part of sacrifice an artist makes not for himself but for
the society; his pains in capturing the agonies, problems and events of the
time which has a lot of role and contribution to the shaping of the future of
the society. These art works exist for the humanity sake, and it is this
existence and link that we study in the poetry of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, to
see how she sacrificed her personality and interests and employed her vision as
a patriotic poet to decry and agitate for equality and more befitting
environment for the peasants and downtrodden in her society.
Marxism
and Marxist Consciousness in Literature
Marxism
is a critical tradition that seeks to understand literature from the
perspective of the historical materialism developed by Karl Marx and Engels
that is, as a changing form of material production that participates in and
illuminates the process of history. Marxism according to Maynard Solomon as
quoted by Chidi Amuta is the symbolism of dialectical conflict of drama of the
unity of opposition, of revolutionary change, of matter and man in motion
constantly transcending the moment pointing into the future (504). Marxism in
other words is an ideology developed by Karl Marx with which he tries to
explain and draw attention to the class struggle, the political, social and
economic gap between the upper class and the lower class; the super structure
and the base structure, the capitalist and the bourgeois class against the
proletariats, the poor and peasant masses. This ideology encapsulates the
yearning gap and glaring injustice between the producers of the labour, the
class of the peasants and the less privilege and the owners of the labour, the
capitalists and the bourgeois and seeks to address these problems which
constitute in part the problems of any gainful and meaningful society. Marxist
philosophy pays attention to the class struggle and draws attention to the
exploitative scenarios of the class struggle, in the hopes of reversing the
system and entrusting a greater portion of society wealth in the hands of the
producers, the peasants and lower class and not in the hands of the capitalists
as it is, the possessors of these wealth who wield and control them at ease to
the detriment of the producers, whose situation is still far from better.
Marxist ideology encourages a revolutionary spirit, a call to the people to
rise and stand for what is right and take back what belongs to them as the only
reasonable way to foster history and achieve posterity.
In the words of Amuta (2007):
To seek to
transcend the limitations of the various formations of bourgeois criticism of
African literature is to quest for a politically engaged, ideologically
progressive and dialectical theory of that literature. In this quest, Marxism
has been palpably and critically implicated not only because it represents the
finest crystallization of dialectical thought into a social and political
proposition but also because it encapsulates an ideological proposition in the
context of which progressive forces in Africa are engaged in the struggle for
negating the legacy of neo-colonialism and frustrating the designs of imperialism
(504).
Marxists reject the system of labour
that makes a given set of people ‘the hands that produce’ and confers on few
others ‘the hands that eat’ to put it in the commonest term. As believed by the
Marxist critics, the society belongs to the people as well as its wealth and
resources and any aberration from this natural way ought not to be allowed to
pass unnoticed but an equal to task struggle should be given by not one but
all, to liberate and free the wealth of the society and maintain a state of
equilibrium that will ensure a collective and unified growth of all people
irrespective of class, colour and gender. According to Onoge (2007):
Marxist critics
have always insisted that in class societies, this contingent relationship of
intellectual production and consciousness on material economic relationships is
mediated by the class structure, by way of class interests and class
psychology. In class societies, culture, art and literature take on a class
character. Literature in such circumstances is fully implicated in the class
struggle. It can either evince a consciousness that seems to conserve the
society on behalf of privilege interests or exude a revolutionary consciousness
congruent with the objective interests of the oppressed class which is engaged
in the struggle to change the social status quo (472).
Several African writers have embraced
the ideological stance of Marxism to fashion and create their works based on
the class struggle and conscious effort of the less privileged and to question
the very institution of wealth concentration in the hands of the capitalists
with which they hope to repossess their wealth and equate their gains to their
loss of sweat. Prominent among these writers as regards to fiction are Ngugi Wa
Thiongo, Osumane Sembene, Fetus Iyayi among others. In poetry the list seems
long but few among them include the likes of Odia Ofeimun, Niyi Osundare,
Tanure Ojaide, Nimmo Bassey, Akachi-Adimora and the host of other Marxist
poets. These writers have turned their artistic visions to draw our attention
to the sufferings, the poverty, agonies, exploitation, victimization and
oppression of the peasants and the less privilege masses by their capitalists
over lords, the bourgeois that constitute part of the super-structure of the
society. These writers demand for the alleviation and betterment of the lots of
these common people who ought to be the real owners and controllers of the
wealth they produce. At the same time, they encourage some revolutionary
measures among the classless people, a struggle in whatever form to balance the
scale, achieve freedom and sanity and decolonize themselves from all forms of
injustice, poverty, suffering, exploitation, oppression, denigration,
victimization and molestation. This will usher in a new, orderly and more
humane future devoid of class struggle and class consciousness. As Ngugi Wa
Thiongo (2007) asserts:
What is
important is not only the writer’s honesty and faithfulness in capturing and
reflecting the struggles around him, but also his attitude to those big social
and political issues ... what we are talking about is whether or not a writer’s
imagination leap to grasp reality is aimed at helping, or hindering, the
community’s struggle for a certain quality of life free from all parasitic
exploitative relations. We are talking about the relevance of literature in our
daily struggle for the right and security to bread, shelter, clothes and song,
the right of a people to the products of their sweat. The extent to which the
writer can and will help in not only explaining the world but in changing it
will depend on his appreciation of the classes and values that are struggling
for new order, a new society or more human future, and which classes and values
are hindering the birth of a new and hopeful. And of course it depends on which
side he is in these class struggles of his time (478).
Thus, literary writers, who embrace the
philosophy of Marxism and blend their works to such direction, seek to
re-define the social order of the control and production of labour and wealth.
They seek to draw attention to the exploitation of the people while demanding
for their equal right and security to good health, food and other social
amenities that will tarry with their sweats. They hope to join hands in
instituting a new social order, the birth of a new society with no class
demarcation and every Marxist writer owes it as a duty to himself, his art, his
society to join his pen in the struggle in his time and put in a word or two
all towards the birth of a classless and more productive society, the new
future.
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo – The
Poet, Poverty and the Proletariats
Akachi
Adimora Ezeigbo rank among one of the Nigerian poets that has a soft spot for
the feelings, suffering and desolate situation of the poor masses, the class of
the ruled, oppressed, downtrodden, lower citizens and peasants of the country
and she took it upon herself, in her collections of poetry to champion and
project their cause hoping to win pity and favour for them. In the collection
also he attacked vociferously our leaders and the negligence to the condition
of the poor and the downtrodden. She did not mince word to garnish the lines of
her poems with ornate euphemistic imageries and words but was as lucid and
blunt as she could be to attack our leaders as part of her contribution in the
quest to make our country more befitting society and production environment. It
has always been an issue however arguable it is that a greater percentage of
the problems of the lower citizens of the country at large are products of in
sincerity of purpose, exploitation, looting, insensitivity and all other
denizens of bad leadership on the part of our leaders who cling onto power to
amass the wealth of the country and stash them away in their foreign accounts.
This situation weighs heavily on the peasants and class of the ruled who toil
and sweat so much to energize and boom the economy of the nation but have
little or nothing to show for it. in this country, equality and even distribution
of resources though a crucial factor are discussed only on the pages of books
in obsolete and far away libraries; but it is with sadness that we continue to
witness how the wealth of this nation is still in the hands of privilege few
and how poverty continues to claim a greater proportion of the land and people.
In her Marxist poise, the poet writes to decry the helplessness and
impoverished situation of our poor and homeless people in the hopes that the
people concerned will hearken to the voice of these less privileged and
ameliorate their lives.
In
“Lagos slums” a title in Heart Songs, the poet draws attention to the people congested in
the Lagos slums
and ghettos which is a sharp contrast to the Government Reserved Areas where
top government officials and bourgeois class reside. She sings about the Lagos slum, a city of gold
and dreams and the people who reside and languish helplessly therein:
Lagos teems/ with
numberless slums
Most as old as
the city/over crowded hovels
cardboard
contraptions/in some cases
Houses on
stilts/like stilt dances
tottering at
uncanny angles…
Streets
exist/with solid structures
but plagued
by/people congestion
suffering from
humidity thralldom/power cuts
Blocked
drains/singing mesquites/making music
night and day.
(91)
The beautiful Lagos city hides under its
shinny and beautiful facades, slums that have become ‘numberless’ where the
less privileged are jam-packed with infectious stenches, oddour, mosquitoes and
diseases and the people have no choice but to live, cope and die in these
slums. The poet went on to paint pictures of poverty, human congestion,
insecurity of lives and property, diseases, suffering and death witnessed in
these slums. She notes with sadness that the people in these slums are not really
nuisances and never do well of society but are good citizens who could stand to
compete and perhaps perform better and credibly than the children of the rich
confined in heavenly reserved areas if given a chance. She believes that:
This earthly
Hell/hole in the city
hides
beauties/able to challenge
an Agbani
Darego/daughters dreaming
of a prince charming/swooping down/ to pull
them out
of captivity …
(92)
Many of these children aspire to acquire
and satisfy their yearning and unquenchable appetite for education which they
believe is a ‘passport’ to the good life in a foreseeable future. One would
wonder why these people ought not to be located, rescued and given equal
chances for more unified and codified society. It is with sadness that one
realizes that despite the confinement in these slums, many of these people have
never given up on the nation and their hands still toil in whatever capacity to
enrich and boom the country’s economy which our leaders amass and share the
spoils among them.
The
poet’s Marxist concern and disposition is made more manifest in her pidgin poem
entitled “Monkey Dey Work, Babbon Dey Chop”. In the poem, she fulfilled all the
functions of what Ngugi Wa Thiongo suggested to be the genuine task of every
Marxist writer, to identify himself in the class struggle and engineer the
workers on the right and revolutionary attitude towards reclaiming their world
and possessing their rightful possessions, a situation that will see to the
birth of the new future, a new social order devoid of exploitation, oppression,
victimization, injustice and unproductive toil and sweat. In the poem, we see
the wide gap between the bourgeois, the capitalist overlords and the poor
masses, the class of the workers and the peasants. We encounter a Marxist oriented poem that calls to mind and
brings to bare the injustice, oppression, victimization, and exploitation of
the lower class by upper class; we encounter the injustice meted on the
base-structure, the class of the peasants and workers by the people of the
super-structure, the leaders and the capitalist bourgeois, the owners of the
wealth. Our sympathy is quickly aroused and our milk of human kindness is
stirred, a situation enough to stir a revolutionary feelings no matter how little
to save the society, the people and humanity towards a new order and befitting
situation that will ensure an evenly
distribution of the wealth of the nation. In the poem, the poet sings:
Big
oga dey for office, suffer man dey
Factory de kill
himself with work/
seven o’clock in
the morning I don come
Na dere him go
tanda sote dem tire
Some
dey do over time sef, Saturday and Sunday
Public
holiday dem work sote dem tire
Minimum
wage dam get year by year, no increment
But
oga him money dey grow like tree for bank …
Na
proper victim we be, men and women
Money
no cover food, housing and school fees
Even
self we no fit buy better cloth to wear
Money
no de for pay hospital bill …
Small
thing you do dem fire you …
Na
so so risk we dey take …, life no safe at all
Why
because de owner lock him door (44).
The ‘Big oga’ locked the emergency exit door for fear
that his workers might steal his goods through the emergency door and it
happened that the day the factory caught fire, many workers were burnt alive,
because no one opened the emergency door to let the
workers out. The door was locked
permanently because of the oga’s fear that these workers will steal his goods.
What an act of inhumanity:
I
hear say workers dey shout, dey shout
Nobody
open door; fire roast dem like yam (45).
One could not help but ponder on such
inhuman treatment meted out on these workers who toil and sweat from dawn to
dusk to produce the wealth the oga enjoys. Just their safety was too much for
him to guarantee not their welfare. This and other levels of suffering and
exploitation made the persona to conclude thus:
Na
him make me say I no fit work for factory
Again,
even if you double money ten times! (45).
This is the disposition of the poet not
to encourage any factory workers, and when this is done, the ‘Big Ogas’ have no
choice than to go down and work in these factories themselves, a near
impossible task. Only then will they realize the worth and great importance of
these workers and then they can, the ogas and the workers sit on a round table
to talk about the way forward and how best to control this wealth. This is the
message of Marxist ideology, a situation that will give birth to the new
future.
In
the collection Waiting for Dawn the
tone of poverty and denigration persisted. In the title ‘Waifs and Strays of
the City’ the poet recounted a time when stray dogs and cats are noticed in
garbage bin and refuse dumps as they parade the streets of our orderly city and
forage for food. It was with sadness that the poet discovered that today, in
our cities, that it is no longer dogs and cats that parade and forage in the
garbage bin but our homeless people, beggars and the destitute, leaving no
space for the cats and dogs:
There was indeed
a time
Stray dogs and
cats/paraded the streets of our orderly city,
Foraging in the
garbage bin.
Today,
The
waifs and strays of the city
Are
children/Homeless, abandoned
Human
litter, debris/Dotted, defaced
The
boulevards, parks and gardens,
Turning them to
dumps for human flesh… (24).
The poet expressed with a disheartened
spirit how beggars and homeless children litter the streets; how dry fountains
have become dry holes for copulating beggars who in the end ‘create more images
of themselves to join the army of destitute. In the end, the poet pleads that
this poem should be a clarion call to the people concerned to take these
children off the streets and behead the monster serpent before it strikes:
Let
this be a clarion call:/take these children off the street
Behead the
monster serpent before it strikes
Quench the fire
before it becomes a conflagration
Remove the
monkey’s hand! (24)
In the “Song of a Mad Woman (1)” from
the mad words of the mad woman the poet further created pictures of the
destitute, and the down trodden that litter the streets:
See
the victims of the epidemics/A depressing sight/
In
the village angular terrain
Bodies
litter the eroded ditches
Like
harmattan leaves fat for fodders (40)
In “Song of a Mad Woman II” the picture
of poverty, injustice and denial was painted out in all lucidity:
The mangled
bodies by the road side
perfuming the
air/with rotten flesh/will wake up at noon
the still rubbing shoulders/with the ghostly
ones
will reincarnate
at dawn.
Though a million
youths parade the street
trading their
lives for trifles/Though the jaw of famine
Devour the
children of men/Though chattering machine guns
depopulate our
towns and villages
Yet the truth
buried in the heart of time
reveals that you
came at the right time (42).
Amidst all these pictures of poverty and
injustice, exploitation and suffering of the people, amidst their numberless
death and boneless bodies, the poet is so optimistic that the “music of change’
came at the right time. It is these music that the poet proclaim, a message of
hope that gives strength and courage to the poor, the downtrodden, the class of
peasants, telling them to hold on; to unite in a common cause and together they
shall dethrone corruption, injustice and evil and enthrone equity, fairness, equality,
justice, peace, freedom, oneness, love and harmony, that will guarantee them
all the good things of life and see to the birth of the new future, a classless
society that Karl Marx and Engels so much dreamt and wished for.
Conclusion
In the form of conclusion, we reinforce the idea that art exist for
humanity sake. Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo wrote some poems that made up her
collections to put in a word or two for the class struggle and identify herself
in the side of the oppressed, the down trodden, the peasants and the producers
of labour. She hopes to encourage and engineer them to be steadfast and look at
the future with optimism while sending a signal to the oppressors that they
should remove the monkey’s hand in the soup pot of society before it turns into
a human hand, a situation detrimental to all involved. Akachi Adimora has
proven to be on the side of the peasants and has heed to the call of Ngugi Wa
Thiongo who frowned that even today, the African writer has often refused to
see that values, culture, politics and economics are all tied up together, that
we cannot call for meaningful African values without joining in the struggle
against all the classes that feed on a system that continues to distort those
very values.
Ngugi emphasis that we must join the
proletarian and the poor peasant struggles against the parasitism of the
comprador bourgeois, the land lords and chiefs, the big business African
classes that at the same time act in unison and concert with foreign interest.
For we cannot have a humanistic society and that free and unfettered human
intercourse is impossible within capitalistic structures and imperialism; that
true humanism is not possible without the subjection of the economy, of the
means of production, land, industries, the banks etc, to the total ownership
and control by the people; that as long as there are classes – classes defined
by where and how the various people stand in relation to the production
process, that a truly human contact in love, joy, laughter and creative
fulfillment in little will never be possible. We can only talk meaningfully of
class love achieving within classes – class marriage, joy, families, class
culture, class values, and not common humanity (481). Thus, Akachi has lived up
this role as a Marxist poet who advocates for true humanism and unified
society, where we do not talk about class, but common humanity; where we speak
not of the less privileges and the upper class but society and where we speak
not of class struggle but collective human efforts towards a more lasting
society. She has used her poetry to advocate for equality, freedom, justice in
all spheres of lives and to balance the scale of life. Until this is so, the
people will continue to struggle, writers will continue to write, humanity will
continue to bleed, struggles will always continue until victory is finally won.
Only then can the dream of Karl Marx come to fully actualization; a meaningful
African values and system will be realized and the new future will be born.
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Olaniyan
