What does a woman do with her love for and frustration at a beloved country living below its potential of being a global force?
Resort to armed insurrection as did revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, John Jerry Rawlings and Thomas Sankara to force a change? Or join compatriots with radical views, fiery pens and chest of a lion like the late Gani Fawehinmi, Professor Wole Soyinka and Professor Niyi Osundare in confronting the ills and those responsible for its failure?
With no bayonet or grenade to throw, Lola Fabowale, a Nigerian-Canadian poet has jumped into the trenches along with the latter army, the impact of whose major weapon, the ‘word’ though often taken for granted, is probably more lethal and longer lasting than impetuous actions.
In her debut poetry collection, Nostalgia and Tears F’Orile, Fabowale lends hers to the strident voices of other Nigerian writers, intellectuals and activists both at home and abroad, to celebrate the richness of Nigeria’s cultures, history as well as its immensely huge human and natural resources.
At the same time she mourns the country’s failure to convert these into realizing its potential for greatness.
Though certainly not as fiery and acerbic as the older generation of eminent bards like Soyinka, Osundare, Odia Ofeimum and Ogaga Ifowodo, in her 92-page intervention consisting of 38 poems, Fabowale is no less as bold, courageous and trenchant in tone, diction and thematic treatment. Indeed, the ‘young’ poet’s menu is a blend of vinegar, vitriol served with a fair amount of wit and entertainment as oil to rub in the message and at the same time relieve the reader of the galling taste reserved for those she holds responsible for the malfeasance in the polity. For instance, in the poem, ‘Rule of Law II’, she brings up contemporary heists such as the disastrous EndSARS crisis, quipping:
“Nigeria’s existed for less than half of Canada’s age
Yet, training live bullets on citizens is the daily rage
Of sanctioned killers fuming at any who refuses to kowtow
To, masquerading as leaders, plundering, murderous turncoats.”
Fabowale is equally unsparing on issues of uneven development such as poverty, homelessness and racism in North America, including Canada, her adopted country and, indeed wherever else in the world such is reported. In ‘Eyesore’, she decries the plight of a homeless man “…[i]n a land as rich as Canada”. With the passion of a mother, she imaginatively chronicles in Mom do I go the same way I came? what must have been the final death throes of George Floyd, the African-American who met his death at the knee of a Caucasian American police officer riveted on his neck:
“That time when you gave birth to me..
Could I breathe mom?…
Or did I need someone to remove
Whatever kept me from getting some air?!
Like this enraged policeman’s knee
So full of hate.”
‘In Beyond bothered at the border’, she equally tackles morbid racial hatred some Arabs, within the so-called African brotherhood, nurse towards Black Africans:
“…In their dark blue uniforms, the tawny hue of these Moroccans
Is closer to ours as brothers than that of many an European
So is it …in a bout of sibling rivalry that,
…They rush us, mow us down to mush with hardened boots—
Stomp our doughy flesh, cudgel us to bow and shush us
Till our veins gush out a blushing libation to ancestors alien to us
Even as reeling blows brush the asphalt with the unguent while
‘Our brothers’ gloat over our ‘cuffed hands jerking in pleas against
Repeat deadly kicks…?”
Her adoration for her two countries—of her birth and adopted—is, however, unmistakable. Just as she serenades the beauty of Canada in seasons, nature and even its cosmopolitan urbanization in poems like ‘Winter in Ottawa’, she also presents the reader a spectacular view and feel of the Nigerian culture, at least that of her Yoruba stock—one of the three major ethnic groups that make up the country.
For someone who had left Nigeria and had been living in North America for more than four decades, Fabowale shows an incredible familiarity with her roots in her nostalgic reminiscences and romantic description of the indigenous culture. But, perhaps more remarkable, is her genius in immersing the audience in the midst of the cultural experience like her, through stimulation of the olfactory and other senses of sight, touch and hearing.
The people, the language, proverbs, customs, commerce, cuisine, dressing, homestead and village life all come alive in vivid colours, texture and sound within a global context in poems such as: ‘Chickens roost’, ‘Thirst of a crush’ and ‘Tests of resolve’. In Chickens roost, she paints entrepreneurial pre-colonial life whose vestiges remain till today:
“My great grandmother at her palm oil press
Beside her batik dyeing wells
Cheek-by-jowl with her pottery wheels
Though never captured on reels
Dancing Bata at Osun Oshogbo
Wasn’t a mere trader chewing Orogbo…”
In Thirst of a crush the female Yoruba protagonist, embroiled in star-crossed love with an Irish-Canadian man, laments:
“So many times, I had longed
To bring you to my mother’s lodge—
A house filled, with the aroma,
In the morning of chicory,
Fresh boiled yams and frying eggs
In the afternoon, steaming Asaro,
Ikokore or ewa and dodo, topped
With eforiro or atadidin redolent
With iru; in the evening , efoelegusi
Riddled with isapa, panla, ejayiyan…”
‘In Tests of Resolve’, another female Yoruba protagonist, in response to a liberal Caucasian man’s offer of marriage to her, prods his commitment, painting an unalloyed picture of her background:
“Would you be inured, to the buzz
Of testy mosquitoes entering holes
Of the net over the mat that’d be your bed
To the scurrying feet of restless mice…”
Nostalgia and Tears F’Orile is published by Kraftbooks Ltd with a foreword by Dr Wale Okediran, Secretary General, Pan African Writers Association (PAWA), Accra, Ghana.
Nigerian Tribune
