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Yabis
in the later poems of Esiaba Irobi
By Afam Akeh
Esiaba Irobi had a boundless affection for words. He was a
believer in the infinite ability of words to make meaning.
And he was generous with his words, using them jubilantly
even in the determination of subject titles. He made words
do things, sometimes fascinating things, others of a more
conservative and economic disposition would frown at. He
wrote as he spoke, and he was a great raconteur, rich with a
seemingly inexhaustible supply of anecdotes. He dared to be
free with words, to have fun with them, and was much less
concerned with criticism and consequences in his use of
words than many poets are. He stretched the meanings of
these words, or simply gave them new meanings, deploying
them not merely as tools of his trade, but also as weapons
of war. And rage was a significant element in his poetry –
rage against oppressive orders and all social constructs
representing belief systems and thought processes he found
repugnant to his free living, truth telling sensibilities.
Here is Esiaba Irobi in ‘Elizabeth,’a poem from his
collection, Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems (Nsibidi
Africana Publishers, 2005):
Scholars of poetry, especially the Anglo-Saxon species,
always excited by intimations of sexual intercourse
in verse, will paw over these lines for centuries
trying to decipher their buried secrets, the meaning
of their meanings, their unguent subtleties
(p. 61)
And if that comment was not enough ‘poetry’ for some
sceptical reader-critics, Irobi moved even further in the
same poem to mock the credibility of such expert opinions:
Even pundits, critics, reviewers, publishers
and other middle class speculators of poetry,
perpetually intoxicated by the infinite possibilities
of the semiotics of sexual intercourse in verse,
as if it was the lottery, will conjugate the transitive
and intransitive verbs of their own fantasies, trying
to divine with their intellectual rods and designer
radars, the underground waters of our secret landscape
(p. 62)
Provocation, irreverence, what I identify here as yabis, was
a major driving force of his radicalised poetics, especially
in his later work. In the concluding words of his poem
‘Elizabeth,’ the poet celebrates the individual experience
and asserts the right of personal choice over established
orders and impositions of approved practice:
Dear reader, something more profound than exegesis
onioned the nostrils of that evening, a feeling hotter
than any fever, a trembling of limbs and arteries,
………………………………………………………..
with the intensity of what actually happens when
you live life to the lees and sing from all the holes
and branches of our bodies without the tyranny of the
intellect. Yes, like little truant school children squeezing
the juices from stolen sugar-cane stems freshly cut
from the field, we fucked scholarship that day. And
rejoiced.
We were in love!
(p.62)
I have lifted material extensively from the poem ’Elizabeth’
to illustrate the key elements of Irobi’s poetry – the
conversational tone effected by long, flowing discursive
passages by which each poem is really a themed segment from
related dramatic monologues, and his frequent knowing winks
and, sometimes, direct references, to the reader as
participant observer, some kind of witness or
fellow-traveller with whom the poet-protagonist is sharing
the open secrets and emotive experiences of what is both an
intensely personal but also collective journey. There is
also in ‘Elizabeth,’ as in much of this poet’s work, the
adoption of absent familiars as addressees, subjects or
targets of the poet’s romantic effusions, provocative
commentary, sarcasm, mockery or yabis. These characters from
the drama of the protagonist’s experience may be known
literary or historical figures or just former acquaintances
and lovers, often idealized as heroines or caricatured as
villains.
Yabis. Plural and singular form and noun of the root word,
yab. Not a ‘proper’ English term. A usage from ‘postcolonial
English’ popularised by the Nigerian afrobeat maestro, Fela
Kuti, in his recordings and live shows. In that sense of its
most popular use it means ‘a playful insult,’ ‘light-hearted
criticism’ or mockery. It is not yabis if there is no
playfulness or humour associated with the critical comment,
or if utterance is heavily formal, constructed and censored,
if it lacks street credibility, or is insufficiently coarse
and idiosyncratic. There are no equivocations, ambiguities,
postmodern uncertainties or perceptual complexities in yabis
poetry. There is particular clarity in the identification of
the ‘other’ and the ‘brother’ (or ‘sister’) in yabis
utterance and commentary, in its politics and poetics, a
practice of playful insolence traceable to traditions of
orality, including mock-poems, narratives, imprecations,
songs and ditties, by which wrong-doers were usually
exposed, ridiculed or publicly sanctioned by the communal
will during festive occasions in earlier agrarian cultures,
including the rural cultures of Africa.
Apart from the afrobeat lyrics and live utterances of Fela
Kuti, there are also in recent times, evidence of yabis
commentary in other strongly street and oral musical types,
such as in dub and hip hop lyrics and poetry. The work of
Esiaba Irobi may be consciously erudite in parts and mostly
formal in its use of language, may not devolve to the
varieties of patois, pidgin and rap usages evident in the
lyrics of the fore-mentioned music types, also evident in
the works of such political poets as Benjamin Zephanaiah and
Linton Kwesi Johnson (as in Mi Revalueshanary Fren), but the
Irobi poem shares with all these others the essential yabis
oppositional poetics of outraged, corrective and creative
informal commentary on experience, laced with coarse humour,
outlandish or grotesque characterisations, witty broadsides
and usually the strong sense of historical or social wrong.
There is this same yabis factor in the construction and
communication of some of the free-flowing adversarial
commentaries from the work of the African American poet,
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), for instance in his
controversial poem ‘Somebody Blew Up America.’
The words ‘discursive,’ ‘rambling’ and even ‘ranting’ may
be, and have been, applied to passages of poetic commentary
and other representations strongly determined by the yabis
aesthetic, but not accurately in the customary pejorative
sense in which those words are interpreted. The presence of
‘rambling’ or even ‘ranting’ in yabis utterance, as in many
political performance poems, is itself a statement or
modelling of the very chaotic state (or experience of social
or existential imbalance) it aims to expose and critique.
There was much yabis too in the work of the beat poet, Allen
Ginsberg, especially in the targeted ranting and unblinking
irreverence of the poetic voice in the iconic poem, ‘Howl.’
The Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera also found many
reasons and targets for his own poetic rambling, howling and
yabis in the poems collected under the title, Cemetary of
Mind (Flora Veit-Wild, editor, for Baobab Books, 1992).
As noted earlier, there is rage in the poetry of Irobi, but
not bitterness, and a creative unburdening of that lived
rage. Humour is the effective vehicle of delivery for yabis
poetry and that sense of creative ease is evident all
through the emphatic ‘violence’ of language in the poems of
his book, Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems, as
in the poem, ‘The Rhinoceros,’ dedicated to former British
minister, Enoch Powell:
I am the black rhino. My eyes are fierce,
My hide is coarse, my breath is poisonous.
My tusks are cleavers, short and sharp,
Forever smeared with blood. I feed on brains
And bone marrow and fresh ovaries and
And hot semen, and you guessed it right:
Human genitalia! I’ll eat your balls tonight!
(p. 3)
Enoch Powell was notorious for his fierce public and racial
antagonism towards the ethnic minorities in the United
Kingdom. The issues in ‘Black Rhino’ are serious. The
comical delivery is intended to engage the attention but not
distract it from these serious issues. The purposive
self-abnegation by which the poet-persona is identified is
delivered with a macabre sense of humour. Its rage is
unmistakable even as the character seems to exult in being
exactly the nightmare white supremacist prejudice asserts
that he is as a racial other. This deliberate ‘uglification’
of the self is also particularly effective in a poem as it
intentionally invalidates and violates the sense of decorum
and notions of civility and beauty preferred by the
addressee and other like-minded bigots:
My turd is made of warts and wattle.
My brain is made of dung. I stamp the mud.
When I fart, language dies in your mouth.
(p. 3)
‘The Rhinoceros’ is a dark poem even with all its humour.
But its rage (or deliberate ranting) is ultimately deployed
to aid thought towards a positive conclusion:
I am the black rhino. I will never be a statistic.
(p. 3)
Exile, the vagaries and loneliness of exile, including the
loss of, and longing for, ‘home,’ the uncertainties and
inconvenience of place or location also feature importantly
in Irobi’s final works, including the entries in Why I Don’t
Like Philip Larkin:
And what, you ask, was my worth here in England,
in Liverpool, this brilliant and bristling city
with its seventeenth century architecture?
……………………………………………………..
And who was I in my loft, Hope Place? A respected
scholar and the voice of a wanted generation?
Or an object of laughter for the dunces of Europe?
Was I a pearl before pigs? Or a pig before pearls?
(‘Hope Place,’ p.97)
One negotiates the debris of failed and facile romantic
liaisons so rapturously celebrated in remembrance, and
begins to realise that there is a sense of real attachment
to the stories of these many absent heroines by whom the
poet’s experience is indelibly marked. There is embedded in
the seemingly disordered yabis verbiage of the poet’s rapid
responses, the controlling creative presence also of a heart
that has known and continually yearns for beauty in art and
experience.
One of a first group of six poets from his generation of
Nigerian poets published in 1988 by the Association of
Nigerian Authors, Irobi’s poetry still bears the signature
features of his work in those formative years. In the poems
of that 1988 first published volume, Cotyledons, and in such
other early representations as the three poems, ‘Judy,’
‘Caskets’ and ‘Soniya,’ found in The Fate of Vultures: New
Poetry of Africa (an anthology of BBC prize-winning poetry,
Heinemann, 1989), the poet was already, as in his last
collection, addressing his poems to absent familiars and
romantic heroines, already showing a preference for the
loose structure and informal usage, and for engaging the
conversational tone, effecting the dramatic monologue. These
are also the creative realities informing his poem ‘Helen,
Not of Troy’ (Sentinel Poetry Quarterly, October 2004).
Irobi in his other life was of course familiar with the
theatre and with performance as a practitioner and teacher.
The uni-directional outworking of relationship between the
poet-persona and his cast of imaginary characters enables
him to flesh out his discourse interests. The reader is cast
alongside the poet-protagonist as a witness of history.
There is the sense of an abiding awareness of the theatre
gallery and its powers of critical and moral sanction or
judgement in the poetry of Irobi. His usual narrative voice
is constantly seeking to show things or tell things to the
reader-audience, and, in some cases, talk things over. This
is talk-active, position-taking, poetry, concerned as much
with its ideological purpose as with its aesthetic presence,
driven as much by issues as by craft.
In his perceptive Sentinel Poetry Quarterly, December 2005,
exploration of an important Irobi poem, ‘The Battle of
Harlem,’ Pius Adesanmi wades through the massed words of
Irobi’s erudite but relentlessly discursive poem, embracing
and milking it finally for its beneficial value not only as
art but also as documented history, another useful tool in
the cultural re-reading or unreading of official history:
Irobi puts irony and sarcasm to judicious use in his
exploration of the instrumentalization of American
minorities by the master narrative of patriotism.
(Pius Adesanmi, p.31)
Adesanmi’s study was titled ‘Esiaba Irobi’s “The Battle of
Harlem” (Ten Pre-Notes and Footnotes).’
Orality and performance are major moods in Irobi’s work.
Apart from its use of yabis and the dramatic monologue
already noted, it is also sometimes punctuated by songs, as
in the rousing memorial tribute to recent political and
personal history, ‘Horizons! Horizons!’ In the late1980s,
Esiaba Irobi was known as “the minstrel” because of his
enthralling performances at The Anthill, “a clean
well-lighted place” (Ernest Hemingway), which others might
have identified as a watering hole for the young writers,
artists and musicians of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
It was still in this role as “the minstrel,” in performance,
as raconteur, communal town crier and modern griot, that his
later poetry achieved its greater impact and fulfilled its
deeper purpose.
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