My poetry is a reflection on the intimacy of evil – Ogaga Ifowodo
Ogaga Ifowodo, (Ph.D) taught poetry at the Texas State University in the US before he took up appointment as the commissioner representing Delta State in the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC. The renowned poet and author of several poetry collecti
What is the sensation like being on the shortlist of the NLNG Nigeria Literature Prize, especially as the announcement of the winner draws nearer?
That I might be the winner - but is that a feeling or sensation? Just that the wait will soon be over, I suppose.
There were criticisms of the longlist for the 2017 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature. But the critics have gone silent since the shortlist was announced. Do you think the criticisms were fair to start with?
I never followed the criticisms, which, I understand, were mostly on social media platforms, so I don’t know which might have been valid and which were totally misplaced. At any rate, I’m glad to know that the critics have ceased fire since the shortlist was announced!
How important is the prize to poets in Nigeria considering how much poetry, as an art, has suffered in the hands of both poets and those who read them?
It is not clear to me how poetry has suffered in the hands of poets themselves, not to mention those who read them, but I’m quite certain that the prize is important to poets as to Nigerian literature in general. Literary prizes are a way of validating writers who, more often than not, labour in obscurity, and sometimes penury. The attention that a prize brings to a writer - and in this instance of the NLNG prize, a poet becomes by the same token attention to his or her work. And literature, to the extent that it is a socially produced thing and so reflects its society, its world, can be one of the more enduring ways of empowering the poet’s more humane vision of his society.
Your book, A Good Mourning, plays on an everyday expression but in a wickedly witty manner and the poems in the collection are at once introspective and playful as they tackle serious issues. How hard was it to work this playfulness into the collection?
Considerably hard, because one has to be careful not to let the ludic or playful moments take away from the solemnity of the experiences and thoughts that form the subjects of the poems. In each case, the extent of playfulness was determined by the experience or impulse of the poem in question. I’m afraid this makes it seem very practical, as if one can know, before or even while writing, the precise extent to which humour would be a vehicle of giving fuller expression to the thought or feeling that spawned the poem. I guess the difficulty lies in listening to one’s inner ear and ensuring that any playfulness does not make the poem tone-deaf to its inner or inspiring reality - by which I mean the experience of the poem as grasped and re-presented by the poet.
What was the inspiration for the collection?
The core poems of the collection are differing instances of my reflections on the intimacy of evil. At the personal level - that is, of the dramatis personae - the title poem, which is about the June 12, 1993 political catastrophe, recalls the tragic drama of betrayal by a friend. I think I more explicitly explore this theme in “A Rwandan Testimony” where a traumatized friend tries to confess to murdering his childhood friend and her two children before an imaginary truth and reconciliation panel but is led to the conclusion that evil or what menaces the world, that which “secretes the slow brooks of bitter blood” resides in an “auxiliary organ hitched to every heart.” This thought began in my mind when I visited the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1999, as a guest of the German PEN Centre to that year’s international PEN Congress in Warsaw. One of the poems in an anthology of poems written by inmates which I bought there expressed the view that if Auschwitz had been in England, there would have been willing English men and women to do the biddings of (the English version of) Hitler. And, of course, there have been many books A Good Mourning. on the phenomenon of ordinary, supposedly innocent, citizens as collaborators in the evil of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and other horrendous persecutions of stigmatised groups and communities. Usually, it is a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, who betrays him or herself first, and then humanity. Having published my reflections on the Auschwitz visit in the poem “Where is the World’s Most Infamous Plot?” about four years after, I knew that I would return to that troubling question. In the result, the tragedy of June 12, 1993, provided the unhappy inspiration for the collection.
In that regards, how important do
you think poetry is to the preservation of memory especially of a struggle like June 12, which you touched on in your collection?