Food for thought: Omatseye listens as Evelyn Osagie performs ‘Baby Ramatu’. PHOTO: ABIODUN OMOTOSO
One is particularly drawn to the accolades and the fame of a certain characteristic of a person instead of looking deeply at the multiplicity of chances, of talents and of personality. Such is the case of Sam Omatseye, one of Nigeria’s leading journalists. He is known for his fearless assertions, his rebuttals and his grandiloquent language of rhythm, sound, Idiom and allusion. Dele Akinola describes the Chairman, Editorial Board of The Nation Newspapers as a General ‘unsparingly venomous and like tompolo, a government unto himself, is always keeping his assault rifles closely in touch.’ in Camp Matori.
However, One is not quickly drawn to the consciousness that Sam Omatseye is also a poet, in fact, ONE that has reasserted his poetic belligerences, wit and also its contrasting peaceful mien inherent in two published collections; Dear Baby Ramatu(2009) and Mandela’s Bones and Other Poems(2009).Dear Baby Ramatu is a narrative poetry with four interwoven scenic sections, namely Original Sin, My Plea, Budding, The little Ones and Resurrection.The poem introduces a foreshadowing of the actions of a particular mother. A lamentation of lack of patience by the mother and lack of peace pervades the air of the work from the beginning of the carefully chosen words. Poverty begins to strut in phases of actions and inactions of the sprouting characters as the mother decides that the coming of the child is not only a compounding of the uncertainties of security but also a propagation of the bitter gospel of poverty. Conditions of women in Africa take the centre stage because Mother Ramatu is not only the narrator but the harbinger of the ill-treatment, the luring of evil flattery and the fraudulent profession of men to love them, when the only thing they love is their libido and their ego.
A Child is born out of wedlock from the unity of financially bereft families and individuals and the result is that youthfulness and the ambitious hopes are shattered for the impregnated. Amidst this forlorn hope, the narrator falls into self defence that ‘sexcapades’ are the little lumps regularly fed upon by the poor in a country feathered by rudderless leaders. While the poet persona lays a foundation for other scenes, he drops indelible marks of quotable poetic statements, eternal truths and revealing superstitions that are without doubt in the league of the likes of Ernest Hemingway, William Chaucer, Robert Greene Ingresoll, Shakespeare, Trollope, Wordsworth and Elliot.
One must note that Sam’s poetry is a thoroughly made up of precise, witty, usually metaphoric compositions of the mock-epic style, as he reveals psychoanalytic dispositions and intricacies in examining the complexities of African life, while he uses Yobe, one of the areas in the northern region of Nigeria as the miniature of the whole. For him, there is an additional burden to the indices of the economic class struggles; there are also in existent, matters of gender discrimination.
There is a rejection by the one who dropped the seed in the fertile thighs of a young girl. Without much ado the pregnancy is considered as a violation of the moral and religious codes of the people.
The use of Biblical allusions, inversions, internal rhyme, and imageries to truly depict the sacrifice of birth, hypocritical intolerance, Loss of innocence and Rejection shows that Sam is an intellectual wordsmith.
Mother Ramatu used to consider herself morally superior in her religious garb by despising people she considered not worthy of society’s embrace. Alas, the irony of falling down the steps. She has now become the champion of society’s outcasts as she claims that no cleric, no moralist has a right to permit the presiding thought of calling her unborn child a cursed one. All children are born with God’s signature on the invoice of nature. These reactions can at best be called mock epic boasts of mood swings, of confusion and of zealotry. Cleric Youssouf and his lot, her comrade in her days of obedience is now the enemy.
There is a tale of mother Ramatu’s parents, both hard working individuals who are faced with hardship. She had a moralistic father who ventured into farming on the unprofitable sands of Yobe, and an unhealthy mother who stored up her pains and her experiences of dashed hopes in the relics of a fake smile; a victim of discrimination that waves no flag of resistance. The depiction of women in the collection is of suppression and of slavish munificence.
The ‘loafer’ agrees to marry Ramatu’s mother and Joy filled the world created by the poet. Smiles are now the carved blocks of moulded sorrow but they are suddenly melted when the residence of love stunk of sadness and want, to add to the dilemma, the repented lad fled the premises. Economy determines love and how it is played, whether it will be filled with the coup plots of sadness and anxiety or with the normalcy of happiness and unity. Hope is constant, either shattered hope in empty reconstructions (of the poor) or the rambunctious hope of the rich.
She laments in serial soliloquies as the ‘loafer’s’ mother passes on. The unborn child is accused of taking the life of the loafer’s mother in its bid at the elections of early reincarnation. The environment plunges into an uprising because of her abomination. She is immediately moved by her caring mother to the cares and training of a female freedom-fighter; Aminatu.
Aminatu is a rebel who accepts a solitary life because of her stand on male domination. She sequestered herself from the phallic-society and wishes that other women embrace her course. However, marriages and relations contribute in dousing the rebellious ideologies of women, just like in the case of Baby Ramatu’s maternal grandmother.
While one is carried away by the sweet winds of intrigues, one should note that the story is also a story of the Nigerian state which cannot be told without the brutality of the military governments, the abolition of fundamental human rights, the fleeing activists and journalists, the gulf between the haves and have-nots and the nation’s continuous religious quagmire as language and symbols are deplored to hint such underlining interpretations.
The pregnant woman reaches the stage of great discomfort, where time becomes the slave master. She rests her oars on the God of Aminatu and not the God of the religious fanatic. God in Africa is not a deity of peace but a tool for tyranny, for committing atrocious acts, when in all bluntness we know absolutely no speck of the knowledge of God. Africans have become troubadours of religious violence with every rhythm of chinking cutlasses, guns and all, with every intent of wiping ourselves out of the earth’s surface. Women are however catalyst in the liberation of the African peoples, they are capable of enlightening their husbands, children and male siblings against religious genocidal pursuits and child abuse. The poem depicts the abuse of young girls who are made to hawk their guidance’s wares; this usually leads to rape, rape attempts and sexual luring of sexually immature girls. The boys are the Almajiri’s in the north, the thugs and the bus conductors in Lagos, and the thieves on the expressway. These are up-shoots of Child Abuses and unwarranted exposure of children to society’s harsh realities.
The father succumbs to parental affiliations and decides to decamp in order to deliver his daughter from the murderous marauding fanatics and this temporarily saved the day. The Grandmother dies without seeing her granddaughter, the freedom fighter is unaware of the insurgence into her territory, therefore she races to heaven through the transfer permit of death’s agent. Mother Ramatu is taken to another hut instead of the hospitals that look like whore’s spittles.
Ramatu’s mother bears her child alone and decides to put an end to the breathing presence that is ensign for loss of hope. She also wills herself to suicide, so she plants her child in the sands of Yobe. However, She is rescued, her child is delivered from death by international bodies who took her abroad. The narrative poem ends with a sense of hope from the narrator who finds solace in the safety of her child who escaped from the brutish landscapes of the world.
The collection is a well packaged, well written one. Amidst this it will take the patience of the reader, as it reels into epistolary preachments and suspense of impending doom without the caution of swift action. Futhermore, it does not totally conform to the ideals of popular Nigerian poetry, this may bring the work a barrage of criticisms. Nevertheless, it will be a largely acceptable collection depending on one’s appetite for intelligent language use, brilliant juxtapositions and psychoanalytic perceptions. Therefore, this collection can be best used in universities and other tertiary institutions because of the familiarity of such poetry. Notwithstanding, Baby Ramatu is a masterpiece that calls for peaceful co-existence, Responsible and Responsive governance, Provision of infrastructure, and Gender equality.
‘Femi Morgan.
