And His Literary Engagements @ 80
Always wanted it, cut and glazed
For each other. We shall descend
Into the bowel of the earth, two
Diamonds, formed of earth’s ashes
We shall reach the skies, fuse
And burn our ancestors out! (44-45)
What this confession throws up are lingering imagining of what the future held for the world that the writer may have stumbled upon while journeying in the higher realms. His accentuated visions of the transformation that will take place in our world without actually seeing the reality of globalization in the terms that the world witnesses presently strikes a note of significance. His idea of the perfect meeting place for African and Black lives did not envisage that ‘two diamonds’ will actually become Ryan Coogler’s vibranium, the super gem of existence, transformation and development in Blackpanther many years after Uka’s odyssey in the Western world. This therefore signposts the prophetic vision of a writer who felt the heartbeat of the black world, where the real black persons will always come home no matter where they are ensconced at the moment. In Thehunt forsugarbaby and Aharvestofants, Kalu Uka’s drama extends its tentacles to many dimensions including stretching into the realms of prose and the poetic.
While appropriating the story for Aharvest ofants from Chinua Achebe’s Arrowofgod, he retains the classical determinism of the Elizabethan poesy by sculpting lines that reads better as poems but matures and swells in drama in Ahuntforsugarbaby. Words take on very elevated state and exude a rare exuberance expected of kings but this yet again confirms that in the hands of Kalu Uka, words are kings and are treated as such: “The sun is beset by clouds/dust rears tentacles”(5). So a read through his plays presents tragic but cataclysmic drama of existence nu- anced by the flavour of the African universe. Dust competes with clouds and affirms that Earthisearth (1972). What all of these produce is completed in Colonelbenbrim,a fictional factualization of the oddities and realities of a dark episode in Nigeria’s political life, the Biafran war or the Nigerian civil war. But here again poetry rears its head in Grace’s poem but before this, an Epigraph that rears the fangs of Khalil Gibran’s poem adds sense to the direction that the novel will go. In a straight jolt, “… Iamlike thee,/oh,night./iwalk,darkandnaked/on theflamingpath/whichisabove/mydaydream…”( i) summarizes the pitfalls and catacombs that awaits the leftovers of the national space. The poet in Kaku Uka rather than his claim to drama ascends before you each time and wherever you turn in the deep forest that is his creative nest. It is in this dense abode of letters that you meet Returningonthewayout:collectedpoems (2003).
Herein referred to as Returning, this is a collection of the archetypal “Ukaen” poetry. The calibration of Eliotian spree into lines that strike like thunder and knocks the unwary leaves you with a feeling of dated numbness and some excitement that tames your perception and reconfigures your perspective. Are poets out to torture or liberate? This is the question that strikes you again and again as you encounter Returning. For example, Overture 1 , which is dedicated to the dead and particularly to a Chris, surges with ‘ Grounded seedsinearth/areturning,turning/into apparitions/dancinginthedusk”( 88). The odium of a bitter experience mixes with the calamity of a painful passage stares you in the face and reminds you of the terminal overtures that daily beckons on humanity whether we like it or not. That state remains a constant in a radius not far from all human beings creating a structure for fresh imagining of “this earth and us.”
Kalu Uka’s philosophical perspective crystalizes and emerges boldly and profoundly in his November 23rd, year 2000 inaugural lecture at the University of Calabar. Titled ‘Creation and Creativity: Perspective, Purpose and Practice of Theatre in Nigeria’, here Uka exposes his context as a scholar in search of a permanent identity. He highlights the temerity of his practice in a complex space where changing tides keep introducing new paradigms that reshape his views and methods. He therefore finds himself bemoaning his classical upbringing while also applauding the appurtenances of his present context. In his words, ‘We of a certain generation, (were) nurtured before this internet age of computers (so, we) embraced a continuum of traditions that is a fusion of pure, pristine traditionalism through a transition into modernism and now into postmodernism” (7). The obvious could be discerned in the career of a scholar caught between two worlds, two eras and thinking systems and yet survives and flourishes in both. The imminent localization of his thought in a neo-classicism that acknowledges God, advances and embraces new thoughts and yet acknowledges the functionality of the indigenous canonic context. In this scholar-intellectual, the source (the creator) nurtures the idea (creativity) and produces a world of beauty justified in what he calls ‘elementary facts of the way things come into existence.’ This is a creative space adulated by divine promptings but given shape by the constructivism and genius of man. It is this world that affords us the space and opportunity to encounter a very seasoned scholar who gave so much in his heydays and yet still maintained the urge to give more even while returning on the way out. We salute this great example of a well nurtured mind, committed teacher, speaker, writer, orator, father, thinker and a rare dispenser of knowledge.
• Dr. Inyangis of the University of Uyo and is the General Secretary of Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).
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