TO KIAGBODO RIVER, JOHN PEPPER CLARK RETURNS...

One by one, we shall all go! This title, which was for a tribute that he co-wrote with the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka on March 23, 2013, proclaims John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo's acute consciousness of his imminent mortality. Not that any extraordinary prescience was needed for that. Nor could it have been prompted by a premonition. Physical death, as a natural end of an earth-life, has after all been generally accepted as an incontrovertible fact of life and, indeed, as an inexorable answer to nature's call.

Talking about Achebe's passage, it had further depleted the number of the original contemporary Nigerian literature's big four – called the "pioneer quartet" in the tribute – to two. Achebe, whom Clark and Soyinka had alluded to in the tribute as "a brother, a colleague, a trailblazer and a doughty fighter”, had moved ahead of them to join the poet Christopher Okigbo, who departed this earth-life in 1967 during the Nigerian civil war, in the great beyond.

For Clark, the summon to the beyond came in the early morning of Tuesday, October 13, about seven years after. In a statement, signed by Professor C. C. Clark for the family, the Clark-Fuludu Bekederemo family of the Delta State town, Kiagbodo, disclosed that the revered literary icon “has finally dropped his pen" and "has paddled on to the great beyond in comfort of his wife, children and sibling, around him.”

Until the announcement of his death, the emeritus professor of literature and the renowned writer seemed – albeit not by choice – to have gradually receded from the national consciousness. In a manner of speaking, news about him had been swept aside by the surging tidal-wave of the country’s current challenges, bordering mainly on insecurity, the coronavirus pandemic and, recently, the nationwide protest against police brutality, extortion and extra-judicial killings, hashtagged #EndSARS. Yet, President Muhammadu Buhari alongside other eminent personalities like the Edo State Governor Godwin Obaseki rose to the occasion to pay tribute to the literary icon. In a statement, issued by his spokesperson Femi Adesina, the president acknowledged the late Clark, a recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award and “a serial award-winner in poetry”, as one of Nigeria’s finest poets and dramatist, adding that the repertoire of his published works attests to the hard work of a great man devoted to a lifetime of writing, knowledge and promotion of the indigenous Ijaw culture.

The deceased, who was the younger brother of the wellknown Ijaw nationalist and polemicist Chief Edwin Clark, was best known for his poetic offerings. Indeed, he is easily remembered for his 1965 poem “Abiku”, which explores the Yoruba concept of serial reincarnations after early physical deaths. To his credit are a 1961 collection of 40 lyrics that treat heterogeneous, titled Poems, as well as A Reed in the Tide (published by Longmans in 1965), which is a collection of episodic poems that encompass his indigenous African background and travel experiences in the US and other places; Casualties: Poems 1966–68, which was published in 1970 in the USA by Africana Publishing Corporation and chronicle the horrendous events of the Nigerian civil-war and A Decade of Tongues (published under the Longmans Drumbeat series in 1981) as a collection of 74 poems, all of which except for “Epilogue to Casualties” (dedicated to Michael Echeruo) were previously published in earlier volumes. There were also State of the Union, a 1981 collection which expresses the poet’s fears over Nigeria’s existential struggles as a developing nation and Mandela and Other

OKECHUKWU UWAEZUOKE/ okechukwu.uwaezuoke@thisdaylive.com