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No session of modern African poetry is complete without a
reading of the poem titled ‘Ibadan’, by John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. It is
certainly difficult to escape an encounter with this poem, it being one of the
most anthologized poems ever to come from Africa. It celebrates a city which
is, and was, the champion cradle of literary culture in Nigeria.

The tribe of Nigerian writers recently inaugurated what promises
to be a movable feast in celebration of one of their most gifted in Kiagbodo, the
poet’s place of birth – a feast which then moved to Lagos and is expected to
cast anchor in Ibadan, the physical space that inspired the poem.

Bekederemo’s oeuvre is substantial, copious and varied. Once he
started to write approximately 50 years ago, he never stopped. In the entire
body of his poetic output however, one poem, of five mercurial lines, stands
out for its imagery and energy, its memorability and brevity. The poem also
stands out for being the most definitive poem on any city on the African
continent. In one burst of imaginative efflorescence, a poem of concentrated
power came to be, and to set the standard for poems aspiring to geographical,
intellectual and emotional precision.

Constancy

Why does this particular poem so succeed? We may never really
know. But perhaps because it is a mesh of discernible principles and
techniques, modes of seeing and of thinking, we may essay an explication. I
will argue that the poem succeeds ultimately because it is true. Poetic truth
of the kind I have in mind has been exhaustively treated and defended by
practitioners and critics of the craft from Shelley to C.S Lewis. It suffices
to say that in 50 years, Ibadan the city has remained its running conurbation
of a self, now rust, now gold, a star-crossed creature of the kiln, a child of
the tropic sun. Ibadan the poem has remained as constant as the Northern Star.

The poem, upon first reading, presents itself to the mind of the
as a photograph. But it is more, much more than still photography. It is a
product of a cinematic imagination. In spite of the compressed form of its page
presentation, it is charged with heteroclite energy in every syllable.
Run/ning. Splash. Flung. The sprinter Usain Bolt and all his ancestors come to
mind… watch the golden burrs latch on to them, from Bubastis to Sokoto, in
ultra-slow motion.

To borrow the language of physics, the poem appears as a scalar
quantity, with evidently measurable (and apparently miniscule) magnitude. In
actuality, the poem behaves as a vector. It is a vehicle capable of traveling
in multiple directions.

Opinion varies on whether this poem is a lyric or an epic. There
are powerful arguments and rebuttals on both sides of the opinion divide,
arguments which the poet appears to anticipate in the central binarism in the
poem itself. Another excursion to the field of physics proves useful in
essaying a plausible explanation of the phenomenon of Ibadan. For a long time,
physicists differed on whether light was particle or wave. Eventually it was
realised that light is actually a particle/wave duality. While direct
transpositions rarely work, I submit nevertheless that the enigma of Ibadan is
in reality a lyric/epic mesh, it breathes the air of both realms and the
geographic space it represents bears this witness out as true.

Immortal poem

Bekederemo, within the first line of Ibadan, harks back to
Homer, Chaucer, Basho and Pound – and blazes forward into a space that the
present generation of poets can confidently claim for its own. In many ways,
Ibadan is Bekederemo’s hugely successful optical experiment. If today
contemporary poets on the continent see with greater clarity, they ought to
acknowledge, with gratitude, the prism of Pepper Clark.

The poem challenges the oft repeated cliché that the map is not
the territory. Where the map is mere cadastral representation, no doubt, this
may very well be the case. But the power of poetry lies precisely in this: that
it is always more than words and the accumulation of words; always more than figures
and their combinations. Poetry defies equations and the very extremes of
topologic computation. When Pepper Clark wrote Ibadan, not only was an immortal
poem born, but a city also ascended to its place amongst the cities of the
world. Africa got its own city equal to Madrid, Tokyo, London and New York.

These are concepts which the merely photographic cannot
generate, cannot contain.

Bekederemo’s mind is superbly suited to accommodating these. His
is an estuarine frontier, elastic and deep. It is a littoral expanse in which
both flora and fauna lay equal claim to saltwater and fresh. It is a realm
annotated with buried treasures, a psychic space of bare and peopled islands.
See that mind at work in ‘Agbor Dancer’ and ‘Night Rain’.

Lyrical

This poem is one reason why, in a generation that produced an
Okigbo, a Soyinka and an Okara, J.P Clark was rated the most lyrical of the
poets of his generation by the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is one reason why,
today, when I teach creative writing, I never lack an exemplar worthy of the
continent.

Because Ibadan, the city, was settled by gregarious rebels from
all over the old Yoruba nation, its hills were both havens and look-outs. For a
long time, there were little de-militarised spaces and it was a city of the
gauntlet in all the senses of that word. Ibadan the poem contains that essence
of the challenge thrown.

Ibadan, the poem, is a feat of poetic intensity capturing the circadian
rhythms of a continent’s cultural capital in five fluid lines. It is a worthy testament
of a poetic mind at the height of its powers. Today, in my own 40 year to
heaven, I can better appreciate why, in his earliest interventions in my
artistic education, my father, himself a mature student of literature, set
before me the examples of a J.P Clark and a W.B Yeats. Both poets have written
splendidly, but I live in Ibadan, not Dublin, and, green with envy as any poet
should be that Bekederemo wrote Ibadan first, I am glad that he did and that
because he did, I can set a poem of my own city as standard before my children.
And urge them on to gold.