History and the Call of Water in Romeo Oriogun’s ‘Nomad’

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines migra­tion as the movement of a person or a group of persons, either across an international border or within a state. It is a population movement, encompassing any kind of movement of people, whatever its length, composition and causes. This definition encompasses political refugees, displaced persons, economic migrants and people who move because of education or the wish to reunite with their families (IOM, 2011). The movement of people across international borders can be voluntary or involuntary; it can be legal or illegal; however, Oriogun is little concerned with these legalities, but more with the power imbalances that can motivate this movement and the effect of this movement on the migrant’s physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing. He explores migration as an uncertain miracle of flight, a hunger wracking the migrant’s body, across the waters of the Earth.

Romeo Oriogun is a Nigerian poet who was awarded the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and has attained fellowships from institutions such as Harvard University, the IIE-Artist Protection Fund and the Oregon Institute for Creative Research. Before Nomad, he published the chapbooks Burnt Men, The Origin of Butterflies and Museum of Silence. He also published the poetry collection: Sacrament of Bodies. In this latter collection, water bears a strong motif of salvation and cleansing – this role of water is expanded in Nomad, where Oriogun interrogates migration and history and different cultural connotations of water. Poetry, with its distilled imaginary and sensitiveness, serves as the perfect vehicle for this engagement, and Oriogun does a great job of this through his tender attention to the migrant’s internal struggles and his beautiful use of language.

In Nomad’s opening poem, ‘The Beginning’, we learn what the poet describes as the fear and the ritual of leaving, in the voice of one who was once tender, and loved their home city.

Leaving home is a burden and not always an easy one, and the poet paints it as a displacement from the familiar – ‘The voice of exile is the murmur crossing rivers, and sea, crossing empty roads until it washes/over a man, a baptism of loss.’ And in this condition of exile, the memory of lost ones – whether they be family lost on the journey or fleeing migrants drowned in the waves of the Mediterranean Sea – becomes something that pinches harder the farther one is from home. The traveller’s reality is filled with the mystery of a sea swelling, pushing out every dead thing: migrants, fishermen, dead animals, women murdered and thrown off slave ships (Oriogun, 2021: 4). In wishing that humans could always take off like migratory birds when the seasons change the speaker tells of ‘the river which is empty, yet mercy lives in its currents, as it moves towards other cities…/… I do not know how to choose/ myself, but the birds do. I would like to join them’. (Oriogun, 2021: 6).

The temporality of the poems in Nomad is nonlinear. In the words of John Drabinski, history and memory bear on this text in ways that sustain, enable and extend the meaning of its arguments and descriptions (Drabinski, 2019: viii). We engage with poems that gather painful relics from the Transatlantic Slave trade: ‘behind this market of oysters,/there was once a market for flesh,/in Ouidah, in rooms filled with Black flesh/in chains, branded like cattle, herded into pens…’ (11). And then the poet strings these verses into a not-so-colourful bead, accessorized and completed by present day trafficking as sexual slavery: a smuggler whose work of terror suffers in the coldness of brothels across Bamako, Tripoli, Mauritania keeps a tight leash on his girls while they wait for their bus to get fixed, his eyes ruthless as he watches his flesh commodities (8). These poems are elegiacal, a tribute to those lost to slavery, alive now as it was hundreds of years ago. As Oriogun re-enacts the era of slave trade, so similar to the irregular migration of recent years, the poems seem to have been exhumed from a different era, complete with the markings, scars and colours of a past, which are almost indiscernible from the trappings of its present setting.

It has been documented that almost 15 million slaves were transported from Africa to Europe and the Americas between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century (Castles et al. 2013). While thousands of deaths occurred in the Atlantic Ocean while the slave trade lasted, the Mediterranean Sea, being the world’s deadliest migration route, has become the graveyard of many migrants who have unfortunately lost their lives while crossing its expansesing ordinary boats and dinghies (Ogu, 2017:56). The OIM estimates that about 22,400 migrants and asylum seekers have died since 2000 in their attempt to reach Europe (2018).

There are similarities between the backways syndrome – the contemporary seeking of passage between Africa and the developed West – and the Transatlantic slave trade, top of which is the age range of most of the migrants, most of who still have many productive work years ahead of them. There is also the likelihood that many migrants survive on menial jobs in foreign lands, and they face the risk of less access to rights than other people. These make the present irregular migration of Africans into Europe and North America into a second colonization, recalling the words of Vijay Prashad: immigration is always already about mobile capital and immobile race. Colonial rulers went where they willed, and they even moved people from one colony to another; but the colonized were not to be fully welcome in the heartlands of the empire, in Europe, in the United States. If they came, they were allowed in for their labor, not for their lives (2010: ii–iii).

In several of the poems, the poet sings of place like a bird examining the wonder of new lands, often through the eyes of his past, memory or with the longing to find a way back home. ‘I have walked into where the mourning/of dolphins led to an eternal song under water/… I am always at the border of things,/always at the spot where what returns/is the emptiness of hope…’ (2021: 70). The poet bemoans loss of language, loss of culture – ‘when I said we love you, I knew I would speak these words/sitting before a fallen house, the baobabs too are going/extinct…’ (2021: 81). This lament looks back at migration from rural communities to urban centres, in search of better livelihoods – a search which leaves villages in a peculiar state where houses are empty, existing as relics – ‘Little pieces of remembrance on which their children once sat.’ In this reflection we are reminded that a greater migration now plagues Africa, the kind of migration that leads to an emptying not just of the rural areas, but one which also clears the towns of young men and women. But the greatest loss is the death of language and culture. The custodians of these cultures do not live for eternity, the young and maturing ones flee the home of their birth, leaving little or no prospects for carrying the cultures forward. As the poet asks: ‘We who have witnessed the death of language, what will become of us?’ (2021: 81).

To be a nomad is to be a constant wayfarer, one with no fixed homestead for too definite a time. It is to be haunted with the knowledge that the home one carries within can never be wholly replicated on one’s travels. It is also to be othered, a person on the periphery, different and seeking belonging in the new shores that one sojourns to. The migrant is often one who has no language for belonging, in a faraway land, walking through cities, soundless, like a bone thrown into a pit (p. 93). The sojourner is in perpetual bondage to memory, of home, of festivals and significant events triggered by specific symbols – pigeons at a park can become reminiscent of the pigeons set free as part of the Igue festival (107). Algae and earthworms become the echo of an immigrant’s childhood (108). This longing is replicated across land and sea, from Cotonou to Ouidah to Togo, Chad, Bamako, Dakar, Libya, Lampedusa.

In appraising the burden of the migrant as a being tortoise-like, moving about with their house (history, memory, language, dreams, etc.) lifted onto their back, drifting from city to sea to desert to city, one cannot help gleaning glimpses of the complicity of the systems that force people into voluntary exile. Systems that make it more appealing to risk exploitation, the dangers, the pain and the weight of movement and its accompanying uncertainty, than to stay in the familiar terrain that home is. ‘Economic crisis, individual ambitions, political and armed violence rocking many parts of Africa have substantially forced and motivated inhabitants to move to different parts of the world’ (Idemudia et al., 2020: 17). In ‘Migrant by the Atlantic Sea’, Oriogun posits that the hunger wracking a migrant’s body is movement. To remain at home is to court the complexities that abound in the familiar, the systems that suck the air from many indigenes and force one to risk exploitation, loss and longing in exile. To stay is to risk a stunting, obscurity and hunger, while to live is to move, to traverse water, air and land in search of more fertile ground, greater opportunities to spread wings and glide aloft. Hunger pushes the migrant to search for comfort and adventure, yet they are wracked by a different kind of hunger for as long as they sojourn. The choice of migration is a risk greater than many comprehend, but as Oriogun says, ‘The eagle knows the fish in water is the gateway out of hunger.’

In ‘The Sea Dreams of Us’ (2010: 95) we read:

Water is channelled through every activity in this collection, through it we see that migration is a loss of peace that triggers memory – ‘… and if I drink a glass of rum/it becomes water from my ancestral lake…/there is no peace for those thrown out of a country.’ (p. 18, An old song of despair). Further along in the collection, we read: ‘There is thirst from exile,/rivers have become ice-skating rinks./… Desire sung into a void/ is still desire and I am left/ to witness the plunder of self.’ (2021: 112). Also: ‘Again, to decolonize water is to walk into the sacredness/of rituals, meeting my mother, the long line of women/in white, all chanting, water will always lead us home’ (2021: 67).

In the eponymous poem, ‘Nomad’, Oriogun declares:

It is pertinent to note that Oriogun’s use of water is mythological. It does not stop at signalling the element, water is in different places a metaphor for nature and the capacity of water bodies to provide movement for the migrant. But greater than all this, the poet uses water as a tribute to the deity Olokun. Okun means ocean, and Olokun (Owner of the Ocean) is regarded as god of oceans and fertility in the Yoruba, Edo and Urhobo ethno-linguistic groups. It is found not on the surface of the water, but within its depths. ‘Olokun is the divinity who grants children to women. In Bini cosmology the land of the living is surrounded by water into which all great rivers flow. It is through these waters – the realm of Olokun – that human souls must pass either to be born or on their way to the spirit world’ (Nevadomsky and Norma, 1988: 187). Therefore, when the poet says above: ‘in maps seeking the way of water,/alive in a mother still waiting for a son/at the crossroads of life’, the influence of his grounding in Edo cosmology looms large, and I read the lines as suggesting that his late mother awaits him in the river of life (Okun), which is a crossroads that they will yet meet again at, when he leaves the flesh.

The connection of water with origin is also apparent in the following verse from the poem ‘The Sea Dreams of Us’:

Before Oriogun, other poets have invoked water or her deities; Christopher Okigbo in Heavensgate sends an invocation to Idoto, the village river from which he drank in Nigeria’s South-East: ‘Before you mother Idoto/naked I stand/ Before your watery presence/a prodigal/leaning on an oilbean/lost in your legend’. This sequence of verses is the beginning of a cleansing, the entry into the long ritual that Okigbo’s whole collection is. And before Okigbo, there was Gabriel Okara in Call of the River Nun (1952), in which the poet, using vocabulary that is heavy with environmental and religious/spiritual significance, bears witness to the call from the river of his childhood in Nigeria’s South-South. The river Nun is the beloved water body the call of which reaches the poet persona from far away, he being a sojourner, having left the land of his birth to earn an education and a living. Still, it is the river’s call which he hears ‘…coming through; invoking the ghost of a child listening, where river birds hail your/ silver-surfaced flow’.

The call of water echoes and re-echoes throughout Nomad, as conveyor, as a stranger that knows the traveller’s strength and desires, as a force that holds their thirst (82). The sea takes the fisherman away and returns him to shore with the day’s bounty or regrets, in a boat anchored with the fisherman’s longing for sand and home. However, the migrant’s return is not so easily negotiated. Oriogun molds water into different shapes and attributes, and in the end, we see water not just as a cool refreshing liquid, not as the cleanser that it can be, ‘There is history/in the clash of waves and in water/we are reminded, every name we know/is written in a language across the ocean’ (2021: 16). We begin to believe that water is a repository of the violence of history and the unfortunate present. It was a tool of oppression as much as it is a symbol of freedom, it rises and falls, a devourer of many parts, aiding slave trade in centuries past as much as it contains the many shipwrecks and migrant ghosts lost on their way to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of North Africa. One wonders along with the author: What mercy lives in water? What is devoured in darkness?

In Nomad, Oriogun chooses to write about history and his migrant experiences with a decidedly Africa-centric outlook. Wherever the migrant turns, water, land and air surrounds them in perpetuity, one unending whole, interdependent, each element different yet the same wherever the body encounters it. Wherever one sets foot, the land remains a source of fertility, of balance, deity and provenance, just as water remains unchanging, be it free flowing or bound within land, be it river or sea, lake or ocean. Oriogun attests to the consistent nature of water in more places, ‘Here, in the midst of women dancing/ on the riverbank, I didn’t discover the path/home, I only saw a goddess, the endlessness of water’ (86). The poem ‘It Begins with Love’, opens with a fisherman’s whispered prayers against the ill omen of happening upon a drowned and bloated body – in which case water would be cause of, and the conveyor in, death. The poem then talks about how love is interwoven into most facets of life and ends with a plea: ‘Omi, spare us in death, spare us in life.’ (113). Omi here means water, a direct reference to Olokun.

‘Bini appreciation of the pragmatic qualities of the ocean provides a backdrop for a host of images, symbols, and semantic clusters concerned with wealth, fertility, joy, purity, and death’ (Nevadomsky, 1988). Another Oriogun poem where the water deity towers is ‘Lament­ation’:

This poet persona, having travelled to far places, still attempts to sing the praises of Olokun. Key points to note here are the fact that bells are used to invoke the deity, and mirrors symbolise the purity of Olokun. The speaker continues by asking:

In this piece, the speaker is a migrant son contemplating the inefficacy of rituals done by one who is adrift and unable to pay proper homage to Olokun. Water here is a lost deity, while the poet persona here is adrift in another man’s land where ‘the Priestess’s feet are lost to wind, foamy waves are without cowries’. Olokun is symbolic in Oriogun’s poems, and he is both deity lost and reclaimed, held aloft, revered in memory and verse.

In Nomad, Romeo Oriogun interrogates the past and present and shows a deep awareness and commitment to the politics of migration. Employing the poems in the book for a polemic conversation with postcolonial structures in present day Africa, Oriogun points out through impassioned verses the sad reality of the apparent unending cycle of migration, movements which are not always successful. Beyond the OIM discourse of migration – its numbers, inherent dangers and risks – Oriogun’s Nomad gives us a historic, tender and personalized look at the continuous crossings from Africa to other parts of the world. The people-drain on the continent is reminiscent of the 400-year long slave trade, but where the transatlantic slave trade was forced and violent, the neo-colonial migration of people in twenty-first-century Africa is often voluntary, and sometimes violent. The poems in this book point to the complicity of governance structures in the continent. In this we see the indictment of ancestors who sold off their people into the slave trade rolling into the indictment of present leaders. Oriogun wraps up this tale of exile within the shroud of Bini mythology, using the ocean as deity, as origin and safety, as conveyor, as gravesite and repository of history. The waters in and around Africa ebb and flow, and the citizens ebb with it, they dive into water knowing communion with the dead awaits them (2021: 105). The people are nagged by the burden of memory and loss, as the land itself droops under the weight of the drain of her skilled children. The sojourners rarely return, though, and if they can start new lives in the West, they remain there, hoping, waiting for a ray of light in the homeland. In the end, one cannot but agree with Oriogun, ‘in exile there is no revenge against home,/there is nothing, only the waiting, the slow dawn of light’ (2021: 85).