Title: The Hate Artist
Author: Niran Okewole
Genre: Poetry
Publisher: Khalam Editions
Pages: 67 Pages
Reviewer: Femi Morgan
The title of this collection of poems captures the conflicts of the artist in a millennial age, an age where art is largely beginning to lack a genuine voice because it is stifled by the forces against artistic and philosophic freedoms. I have decided to review some poems which form the first part of the tri-segmented work, to explicate the ideas of the poems within the short space.
The Hate Artist opens with a poem, ‘The Word Shop’ which equates a bookstore to a supermarket in a cosmopolitan landscape, where the groceries are words, ‘letters stud cookies in cabinets’. Yet words serve the clandestine purposes as the user can be in search of ‘con words, cum words/Words in a cone of ice/Cream with caramel dripping from the edge’. There is violence against the ‘Key Words’ of humanity, a hint on the attack on the freedom of the text.
‘Lost Poems’ is more than a poet’s narrative of the poems lost in transit, it is more about the transits to which history has been reconstructed in such a way that unknown parts of history are filled with conjectures that eventually become sacrosanct. The poem presents a ‘black monkey’ trying to find out the truth behind the walls of western reconstruction. The poet resurrects the discourse that the civilisation of the popular Helen of Troy has Ethiopian and Egyptian roots, as argued by some scholars. Therefore, within that which we know as pristine historical facts there is loss. It is the trademark of this poet to extend classicist names to present discourses, to visit history and philosophy in the paths of his verse and to postulate extra-textual ideas.
The title of the poem ‘Caliban’ is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Caliban is a subhuman persona who is uncultured, lacks knowledge and worthy of enslavement, depicted as a black slave to his white master Prospero. The poet clarifies his extension of Caliban, with the negative depiction of Africa and Africans from classical times through the vehicles of literature down to popular film culture. He creates a post-colonial argument that the depiction of Africans as brutes has a tendency to reward with Academy Awards while it continues to establish a psychological reality of the Whiteman as the cultured other.
‘First Breadth’ is a poem that celebrates the birth of a child, probably to which the poem is dedicated to. A child is born innocent, free from the ‘webbed capillaries’ of his mother, his first cry is a champion cry of the endless possibilities of the future. ‘Or a rock guitarist/Or Cape Town Heart Surgeon/Or an Earth Institute Don Winning Laurels/For a blueprint on ending poverty’. The poem fondles with hope amid the tensions of Weapons of Mass Destruction and rising inflation, which situates the poem in a timeframe that does not imprison the child.
Some of Niran Okewole’s poems need research for one to have a full comprehension of them. Readers who read poetry on the surface may begin to suffer from dyslexia if they choose their usual reading mode with The Hate Artist.
Okewole brings to his poetry an encyclopedia of ideas. In ‘Dropped Names’ he pairs Adler, the renowned psychotherapist, and Brecht, the Marxist playwright, in a narrative portraiture of many icons weighing their place in history. The poet tries to evaluate how these names and the ideals they connote shaped history or have fallen short of the clarity that would have made the world a better place.
‘Zarathustra Blues’ tells on the life of a renegade, a life of a writer whose life revolves round other writers. The writer is in a self-imposed monastery with a ‘Pentium II Carcas’, where the infrastructure remains unpalatable. The writer’s role in the world is to subvert long-held notions through a strong will to question it. It was Fredrick Nietzsche who asserted that we must “hammer” all ideas and doctrines that bind us, realising our full potential as human beings. In extension, Nietzsche describes Christianity as problematic to nature and that the religion prescribes a passionless, less creative and less sincere mode of existence. Okewole’s poem subscribes to rule breaking of hegemonic cultures in the same spirit with Nietzsche.
‘The Elements’ is deeply rooted in the attention to transiting civilisations, from Communism to the Post-Industrial Age. It gives attention to the five elements. In the first element, Earth, the poet describes the failure of the Ujamaa, the Tanzanian socialist system of Julius Nyerere’s day due to the forces of world powers and capitalist trade.
With Air, the poet proceeds with the invention of the forge, the harnessing of air which brought about the creation and chemistry of weapons that have advanced mankind’s wealth of carnage. In Fire, similar to T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland, the poet expresses fear that the nations of the world have the ability to wipe humanity out. The poet extends this to water and speaks of the environmental flaws created by man’s modern expansionism which will result in a flood and the silence of other beings in the landscape.
‘A Voyage Around the Bar’ can be called travel writing with bottles of beer. When intellectuals drink, the tendency is to discuss on end about the past, the history of the people, within and outside the spaces of the watering hole. The watering hole is a place of intellectual refuge, a Jazzhole, from the chaos of cosmopolitanism which becomes a reference to the logic of freedom of speech, of learning and of leisure. The poetry depicts a kind of travel of conversations around landmarks of bars across the continent. It goes beyond drinking to suggest why people drink (‘Bottled Angst’) and a search for clarity.
Okewole’s mind is a mobile library of new stories and old ones, his craft is unhindered by rules of watered-down simplification that has become the new order of Nigerian poetry.
The Hate Artist re-invents and engages cultural knowledge, history and socio-political evolutions in the world. The Hate Artist also codifies simple but important events with new faces playing out old roles without knowing it.
• Morgan is a content writer and the creative director of Fairchild Media, a Content Management firm in Lagos. He is the author of Renegade, a collection of poems with an avant-garde voice.
