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Ogun Abibiman
. Perhaps the most striking expression of
this is in the heightened aural and performative idiom and tone that the
poem appropriates from N´egritude poetry of the
s and from Yoruba
ijala
poetry. Thus, though on one level
Ogun Abibiman
is highly literary, it
is a poem very much intended to be spoken aloud and performed. It very
Wole Soyinka
consciously builds on the axiomatics of chanted, performed oral poetry
in its extensive use of a single image, idea or theme repeated in rising and
falling rhythms in alternation. This is why, in terms of pure narrativity,
there is little movement in the entire
sections,
stanzas and
lines
of the poem. In place of a movement between unfolding historic episodes
in the confrontation of black Africa with apartheid and its legacies, what
we encounter in the poem is basically a prolonged, detailed exploration
of two moments: the present time of readying and honing the collective
will of the continent for the final battle with apartheid, a present time
very much like Walter Benjamin’s famous notion of “messianic time”;
a
retrospective time of the last great stand of the southern African peoples
against the white invaders under the rallying banner of the amaZulu
and their monarch, Shaka. For the former, Soyinka returns to “Idanre”
as a sort of prolegomenon to re-animate Ogun, but this time both the
external profile of the god’s attributes and the plunge into the deity’s
inner psychic states are expressed in much clearer, much sharper lyric
and narrative poetry:
Pleas are ended in the Court of Rights. Hope
Has fled the Cape miscalled – Good Hope
We speak no more of mind or grace denied
Armed in secret knowledge as of old.
In time of race, no beauty slights the duicker’s
in time of strength, the elephant stands alone
In time of hunt, the lion’s grace is holy
In time of flight, the egret mocks the envious
In time of strife, none vies with Him
Of seven paths, Ogun, who to right a wrong
Emptied reservoirs of blood in heaven
Yet raged with thirst – I read
His savage beauty on black brows
In depths of molten bronze aflame
Beyond their eyes’ fixated distances –
And tremble!
(
OA
,
–
)
The last twelve lines of this concluding stanza of “Induction,” the first
section of
Ogun Abibiman
, are direct borrowings, appropriately worked
over for a new context, from traditional
ijala
chants in praise of Ogun.
Incidentally, the same lines are repeated as the penultimate stanza of
the entire poem (
OA
,
). The repetition and variations on the con-
stative phrase, “In time of,” all complemented by imagery from the
world of nature, is the kind of discreet folkloricism deftly deployed in
Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
this poem to conflate myth and history and to merge willed pastoralism
with tragic catharsis in order to create the fetching lyricism of the first
section of
Ogun Abibiman
. This folkloricism is even more pronounced in
the following section, “Retrospect for Marchers: Shaka!” And not only
in the refrain which runs throughout the entire section, a refrain entirely
expressed in untranslated Yoruba words, the Yoruba cadences approx-
imating the harshly metallic and ecstatic rhythms of the music of
bata
drums. Far more profound than a tapping into oral poetic matrices in this
section is Soyinka’s recourse to a mode of poetic discourse which is alien
to the metropolitan, “British” traditions of English poetic discourse –
the use of self-addressed
oriki
or praise poems which reorder cosmic bal-
ances and reciprocities between mankind and the gods, between the
human and the divine. This kind of
oriki
pervades Shaka’s long dramatic
monologue in this second section, but it is particularly evident in the
following lines which both express the great hubris of Shaka and give it
a self-transcending communitarian ethic:
If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?
The gods that show remorse lay claim to man’s
Forgiveness – a founder king shall dare no less.
My nightmare, living, was the sun’s collapse
When man surrenders judgment over
God or man. Shaka was
all
men. Would,
To the best of amaZulu, Shaka were also a man,
A leader yes, next to the imperfect god –
Would I be Shaka if I asked less?
. . .
What I did
Was Shaka, but Shaka was not always I.
Beset by demons of blood, Shaka reaped
Harvest of manhood when time wavered
Uncertainly and mind was transposed in
Another place. Yet Shaka, king and general
Fought battles, invented rare techniques, created
Order from chaos, colored the sights of men
In self-transcending visions, sought
Man’s renewal in the fount of knowledge.
From shards of tribe and bandit mores, Shaka
Raised the city of men in commonweal.
This last, this Shaka I, crave release
From masks, from cracked mirrors in the socket of skulls.
(
OA
,
–
)
That Soyinka is very much aware that in lines such as these he could
be said to be rationalizing the megalomania and bloody excesses of the
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