I have been contacted by Cederwood Productions, a publisher that had taken up Silent Drummings, my first collection of poetry, to co-author a collection of poems with Tokunbo Dada. Tokunbo Dada had published his first book with Cedarwood and with many research books roiling in his head every second. He had published a book on child abuse in Africa and the side effects using the story of Shaka the Zulu as a formidable example and the publisher, then based in Osun State was impressed.
Now, Tokunbo had moved higher with a bigger purpose, he had produced Ufiala, a radio drama on the problems of Nigeria and had gone to co-produce other ones depite the fact that he had been employed as a communication enginner at the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, FRCN.
As for me, I am just an unrepentant poet and journalist that I had been and that I had retained except that I just bagged the prestigious Megaphone News Agency’s Award for Meritorious Service to the press, with Silent Drummings doing fairly well. Poetry had never successfully fed anyone in Nigeria, so let me not boast too much.
Cedarwood has opened its new headquarters in Ibadan, the traditional publishing hub in Nigeria, that was a deliverance of some sorts, When I got wind of the romantic collection, I was supposed to co-author, I began to wonder, with who?
Tokunbo Dada had grown to be a bosom friend of mine, a more mature and unselfish friend that had this creative fire, one I respected. I had written a couple of monologues in his room using his directions of how a drama should look like, we had joked a lot about women and we had also learnt a lot from our disappointments. He had told the publisher about the idea and it was bought.
The problem was that I had left the idea of writing love poems since 2005 and I had gone from the simple romantic poet to a thorough-going modernist. I had evolved a personal style after reading TS Elliot, Segun Adekoya, Dogga Tollar, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost.
Love had not been fair to me. Apart from the fact that I had had a rough upbringing as a third child, I also had a backlash of shattered and interrupted relationships. In fact, my recent girlfriend recently called off what seem to be a compassionate union. So I had begun to retrace my steps in writing love poems, stopped listening to love songs, stopped flirting, totally shut down. It was gradually. In fact I had been mulling on destroying the ones I wrote when the going was going-I don’t know whether it’s good or bad-That was when the call from my publisher came.
Another problem was that my job as a journalist seems to only allow you to think of the next story, the ongoing story or the deadlines-there is hardly any time to write two lines of poetry. The only blessing it offers is that it exposes you to the realities and hypocrisies that make up the society, through printable and unprintable discourses.
So I took my old poems out-my fiery and passionate old poems that I had purposefully dumped at the deep ends of my home’s warehouse. A look at them-they were whack, for God’s sake, I had grown up, I had grown out of it. I am now officially in a dilemma. Can I succumb this dilemma? Will I survive?
I think so, the book must go on, for the life of me, my life is poetry!
