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Performance poet and Chair of the Association of Nigerian
Authors (ANA) Lagos chapter, Daggar Tolar, had a few things on his mind as he
arrived for the monthly reading of the branch on Saturday, August 14. Held at
the National Theatre, Lagos, the meeting started an hour behind schedule as key
participants, Tolar included, had been held back at the Colloquium being held
on the same afternoon at the University of Lagos for none other than John
Pepper Clark. Some would have wondered: why a clash with the bigger event
organised for Clark by the National executive of ANA? Tolar immediately
provided the answer as the meeting commenced. “We have not been involved in the
programme and detailing (of the Clark Colloquium). If we had been involved,
possibly this forum would have [merged] wit that particular meeting,” he said.

ANA matters

Tolar summarised the key issues discussed at the Clark event for
the benefit of his members, starting with ANA-specific matters which no doubt
preoccupied many in the writers’ body at the other event. The functions of the
ANA branches in relation to the national executive had been discussed by the
many state chairpersons at Unilag and; according to Tolar, the question of a
constitutional amendment had been raised, to be examined at the next national
convention, to be held in Akure, Ondo State.

The question of finances, always a burning topic was also on the
agenda. Many feel the present system, whereby ANA’s Audit Committee does not
meet with branches outside the once-a-year convention, such that there is no
real check on their operation. According to Tolar, “We have left today’s
meeting with a strong position: that we should work towards a constitutional
amendment so that we’ll have a legal framework to raise some of these issues at
the next convention.” The annual ANA awards and the possibility of using them
to engender increased participation by known writers in the activities of the association,
also came up for discussion. Therefore, “there is a thinking, whether it is
possible to have [a requirement that entrants into ANA awards must be active
members] to attract some of these persons. There is a position that we also
need to make a general appeal to known writers to see themselves as being
active members, as being part of ANA.” The challenge of how to attract active
participation by writers, inspired some debate by ANA Lagos members present
later, and several suggestions were made as to how to achieve this.

Clark colloquium

Lagos writers were also given an overview of what had taken
place with regard to the UNILAG event, organised to celebrate J.P Clark but
seen by many to have been far below expectations. “We had a series of discourse
on the work of JP Clark, and for those of us who are familiar with his
writings, he is somebody who has not been fully celebrated in [comparison] to
other icons. These questions were also raised at today’s colloquium,” Tolar
reported. The ANA Lagos chair then went into a spirited discussion of the works
of Clark, also known as Bekederemo. Touching on The Ozidi Saga and the merits
of Clark’s compassionate ‘Abiku’ vis-a-vis Soyinka’s poem of the same title,
Tolar lamented the paucity of the critical appraisal of Bekederemo’s work. Yet,
“Then there is a whole body of poems, which are common to nearly everybody.
There is ‘Night Rain’ which we are all familiar with from the syllabus; there’s
‘Abiku’. If you pick a work like ‘Abiku’…you come up with a humaneness.
Rather than take the part of the Abiku like Soyinka, we meet with a J.P Clark
who prefers to plead on the point of humanity, on the point of the pain that
womanhood has to go through, to suffer the repeated coming and going of an
Abiku.”

Unappreciated

Clark has written great works of literature, no doubt; what is
missing is the full celebration of the man, Tolar suggested, as others have
done. “What reasons should be adjudged for this?” he asked. “I asked this
question at [the] colloquium. Where do we put the blame? Do we put the blame at
the feet of literature, or do we blame it on all of us? Or is it that icons
have already been crowned – Drama, Wole Soyinka; Poetry, Okigbo; Prose, Achebe
– and we frown at crowning a second icon and so we ignore JP Clark and leave it
at that?”

The two-day colloquium held on August 13 and 14 had been ANA’s
way of attempting to redress the balance, Tolar said. Many speakers at the
colloquium had indeed attempted to answer the question of why Clark had not
been properly celebrated for his contribution to Nigerian literature. Ghanaian
poet Atukwei Okai, in his keynote address at the Clark Colloquium had mentioned
publishers and distribution networks as key determinants whether works are
available or not. John Pepper Clark’s books, many of which are out of print,
are a case in point. Tolar informed that the University Press Limited,
publishers of many books by Clark, attended the colloquium and indicated that
there are plan for reprints, a development that would allow more access to the
works. Atukwei Okai, while drawing attention to the rule of the political
economy in creating American ‘bestsellers’ lists while African works go
without, suggested a common African market as a way of getting around the
problem. “A single common African market automatically provides the opportunity
for singular published works to be able to address a bigger African continental
audience,” Tolar surmised. Secretary General of the Pan-African Writers
Association (PAWA), Okai also identified the little regard accorded to culture
and creativity by African rulers as one of the reasons why a persona like Clark
may be have been overlooked.

While Okai’s argument became the “crowning position” at the
colloquium, others suggested that the fault may lie in Clark’s own personality,
for his non-interventionist stance on Nigerian society. For someone who wrote
‘Ozidi’ an early pioneering work on the Niger Delta, it was observed that,
“when you mention the Niger Delta issue today, we do not hear his voice. So there
is a sense in which the absence of his own full intervention in the polity
outside of his literature has not helped.”

Even the ANA itself did not escape censure. Some felt that ANA
itself had botched a great opportunity to honour Clark by its bungling of the
planning for the colloquium, to the dismay of many, including the man being
celebrated.

Readings

Discussion of the Clark After discussions of the fallout of the
Clark Colloquium, the ANA Lagos meeting went into the reading and critiquing
session.

Readings were taken from four writers including Taiwo Oladipupo
Daniel, who rendered his poem, ‘Your mathematical life, our mathematical life’.
The poems ‘Admiration’ and ‘Janus’ by another Lagos writer, generated much
debate. And when it was the turn of Bob Roberts to give his energetic
performance of ‘Take My Life’, no seating was required. Daggar Tolar moved the
chair out of the way for him, to some laughter. ‘I give you a knife/ with it,
take my life/take it along with my wife/take all and end my strife…’ And so
starts Roberts’ poem. The only fiction reading of the afternoon was by this
writer, with an excerpt of the story, ‘Indigo’ from the 2010 Caine Prize
anthology, ‘A Life in Full’.

Deji Toye, a member of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA),
took the stage after the readings to give a talk on ‘The Dynamics and
Challenges of Managing Literature and the Arts’. Focusing on how to turn art
into an industry, Toye looked at the visual arts, literature and the performing
arts, pointing out ways to create a “value chain” in order to make artistic
endeavour profitable. “The art scene in Nigeria is about to explode,” he
observed, mentioning a recent article in The Economist about Nigerian artworks.
He identified similar opportunities and changes in the marketing of books (with
the advent of E-reader, Kindle and the iPad) and the home video industry.

Toye’s talk led to much spirited debate among ANA Lagos members. The meeting
closed soon afterwards, with a strong sense that writers present had not only
looked at issues affecting their own chapter, but the Nigerian literary body as
a whole. Above all, many who had not attended the Clark colloquium felt like
they had been there, thanks to Daggar Tolar’s fulsome feedback.