Personal Reflections on Niyi Osundare, Oríkì Praise Tradition, and the Journey Motif in If Only the Road Could Talk

I devoted part of Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories to a discussion of the Yoruba oríkì panegyric tradition and the works of Niyi Osundare. In the book, I analysed how Osundare uses the oríkì genre autobiographically to represent himself, his family, his friends, community, and nation. In this paper, I explore Osundare’s auto/biographical engagement with the Yoruba oríkì panegyric tradition in relation to travel and the various cities he visits and writes about in If Only the Road Could Talk. Osundare succeeds in the poems in representing the different cities he encounters, including Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, Cairo, Alexandria, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Berlin, and London, in terms of their panegyrics and critique like the traditional oríkì poet does. Osundare ultimately transports the oríkì tradition from its Yoruba origin to an international trope to unite various cities in the world and to put them in a comparative relationship. I also explore the interactions between the biographical representation of the cities and Osundare’s own autobiographical stories within the stories of the cities he writes about.

A discussion of Osundare’s If Only the Road Could Talk can be contextualized within the Yoruba panegyric tradition, to which I devoted three chapters in Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories. In the book, I wrote a chapter on the place of orí or head as ordinary and metaphorical head in relation to the praise tradition as well as on four foundational texts on the oríkì tradition, namely, Olatunde Olatunji’s Features of Yoruba Oral Poetry, Adeboye Babalola’s The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala, Karin Barber’s I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oríkì, Women, and the Past, and Toyin Falola’s In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation. In a second chapter, I discussed the overwhelming use of the oríkì tradition in Nigerian music. The third chapter on the praise tradition was on how Niyi Osundare has used the praise tradition for auto/biographical purposes in his writings over the years. This paper continues my work on the praise tradition in relation to Osundare’s poems, and I will concentrate on his book If Only the Road Could Talk.

A popular definition of the Yoruba oríkì is provided by Karin Barber in I Could Speak Until Tomorrow. Barber defines oríkì as:

As I noted in Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies, ‘Oríkì are not always praise poems in the sense of lauding their subjects. They are often very critical of their subjects. Also, the history of various Yoruba communities is taught through the oríkì of the town or those of its most prominent citizens’ (10).

One very significant attribute of the oríkì genre that is germane to my current discussion of Osundare’s work is that it could be composed for inanimate subjects. As I mentioned in Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiographies and Life Stories, Adeboye Babalola ‘gives considerable attention in The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala to the oríkì of animals and inanimate objects like trees and crops in the environment. Babalola’s examples of oríkì to animals and plants include praise poems in honour of the duiker, the elephant, the bush fowl, the domestic fowl, the iroko tree, cassava plant, etc. (19–22, 87–116). The oríkì for plants, animals, and the environment are particularly important because many people and communities take personal and lineage oríkì praises from animals and communal natural endowments like rocks and rivers in their communities’ (36).

What Osundare does in If Only the Road Could Talk is similar to Adeboye Babalola’s representation of the oríkì of nonhuman subjects in The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala. Osundare in If Only the Road Could Talk assembles the oríkì, epithets, and the panegyrics of the various cities he visits like the traditional oríkì poet. The poems in the collection are, therefore, largely biographical about the cities, landscapes, and seascapes Osundare writes about. An interesting twist to Osundare’s biographical representation of the cities, landscapes, and seascapes is that he weaves himself into the poems such that many of them are both autobiographical and biographical. Osundare, in line with the oríkì tradition, also offers some subtle criticism of some of the cities he adulates. Osundare structures his representation of the cities he visits around the journey motif, as shown in his subtitle for the book: ‘Poetic Peregrinations in Africa, Asia, and Europe’. The poems in the collection are about cities in Africa like Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, Cairo, Alexandria, Buea, Assilah, and Volubilis; Pacific cities and countries like Taipei, Malaysia, and South Korea; and European cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, Paris, Toulouse, Ljubljana, Stockholm, and London.

Naming is a very central issue in oríkì studies. On almost all occasions, whoever or whatever is being praised is eulogized through naming, which is a typically meaningful and illuminating process among the Yorubas. Several attributes of the praised are identifiable in the different names used in the panegyric process. This importance of naming for eulogizing subjects is responsible for the name adopted by Osundare in celebrating his encounters with Lagos, the former Nigerian capital city, the wealthiest and the most densely populated and cosmopolitan city in Nigeria, and the headquarters of Lagos State. Osundare foregrounds Eko and Lagos, the two names of the city in the poem titled ‘Eko’ (9-13):

In presenting his encounters with Eko/Lagos, Osundare uses repetition, which has always been a major tool in the hands of the oríkì poet. The lines that are repeated throughout the poem and serve as a refrain are Arodede maa ja o/Aromisa leegbeleegbe (The one that hovers precariously without dropping/Billowing eternity of water). This repetition throughout the poem establishes the image of Lagos and creates its looming magnificence throughout the poem. The lines in Yoruba also make the poem musical, and of course musicians have always used the oríkì genre to praise their subjects, as I discussed in Chapter 3 of Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories (41–56). The fact that the song/refrain is in Yoruba is also important. It indicates clearly that the Lagos speech community is not monolingual. It is multilingual and foregrounds the importance of and consistent use of Yoruba language in the community even in the postcolonial era. The repeated refrain also shows the call and response musical pattern of the poem. This is a format that is often employed by the traditional artist to include audience participation in performances. The use of Eko – which is a name from the Yoruba language of the indigenous people of Lagos – in the poem also functions as part of Osundare’s effort to thematize precolonial history and write back to the colonial naming of Lagos and the colonization of the region by the British.

Osundare also uses the autobiographical I in the poem to give further agency to the Eyo masquerade by bringing out his voice. What is equally significant here is Osundare’s clever conflation of the I to include himself and the whole community in the Eyo celebration of Lagos and its culture. The staff that the Eyo masquerade carries attracts attention by Osundare as the Eyo claims that the staff is not owed to any forest. It is primordial, and it is the staff that the Eyo uses to part the waves of the billowing ocean in Lagos and to create a space for itself in the community of cities as follows:

There are some other notable lines that serve as praise and epithets for Lagos in its duality in the poem. Lagos is the ‘Cause and the curse.’ It is ‘saint and sinner.’ (10) It is where ‘Lust ripens into love’ (10) with ‘night angels, (11), ‘politicians winged fables’ (11), and ‘magic and maggot’ (11). Lagos is the centre for different religions – ‘the venal Hallelujah of Pentecostal noises/the soporific Allahu Akbar of sword-wielding Saracens;/God, the Blackman’s Nemesis, his drug, his dragon,/watched countless prayers crushed by pagan waves’ (11). Lagos is about prosperity with the contradictions in ‘a god called Money:/its crown is gold, its sword reckless like a drunken pirate’s’ (11). It is the home of ‘Masks and magic’ (11). It has ‘Room for all comers/promiscuous like a marketplace’ (13). It is ‘heavenly hell with choir of slipping angels… face too wide for a partial mask’ (13). The poem concludes by celebrating the sea in Lagos in the repeated line that conflates the two: ‘The Sea is Lagos; Lagos is the Sea’ (12 and 13). Osundare’s representation of Lagos in its duality either in its names or its inhabitants, history, and activities, recalls the use of duality for representation by Derek Walcott in his poems, particularly Ruins of a Great House and Another Life.

Osundare has two poems on Egypt, titled ‘Cairo’ and ‘Alexandria’, in If Only theRoad Could Talk to commemorate his visit to the country in 2003, at the beginning of the second America/Iraq war, for the African Literature Association conference. These two poems are particularly significant to me because I was with Professor Osundare on that trip, and I saw much of what he saw in Cairo and Alexandria. While in Cairo, we visited the national museum of Egypt, where we saw some excavated royal corpses and the Sphinx. We also went into the pyramids at Giza. In Alexandria, we visited the library of Alexandria. These visits were part of what inform the panegyrics of the two cities in the poems. Osundare represents Cairo as the city that swirls. It is where ‘[t]he stars are singing,’ where ‘[t]he moon’s fingers rap the tambourine/to a talkative delight’ (17). It is where the lotus ‘bats its eye/On the ledge of/A sprawling swamp’ (17). It is the city where ‘[h]ouses swarm/like seeds/in a fertile pod’ (17). It is the city with ‘Pharaoh’s golden swagger’ reminiscent of the achievements of Egyptian Pharaohs, many of whom were buried with gold. It is the city where the past joins the present apparently in reference to the past glory of Egypt, including the monumental pyramids that we visited when on that trip to Cairo and the famous ancient library in Alexandria.

Osundare’s ‘Alexandria’ celebrates the location as the city of both medieval and contemporary knowledge. It starts by describing the city as one that rose ‘from the ashes of burnt letters’ and as ‘a United-Nations of books’ (18) where ‘papyrus held History/Between its veins’ (18). Unlike the ashes of the past, ‘The ruins have risen again/On another page of the sky’ (18). He also refers to the emperors who once ruled the region as ‘fame-famished’ people who ‘[l]eft iron footprints in these sands’ (18). The ashes of the city tell ‘the tale of incendiary despot/Who darkened the ancient world/With the spectacle of burning books’ (18). These descriptions recall how the Alexandria city library was burnt twice, once by Roman Emperor Julius Caesar and the second time by Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391 CE. The library was rebuilt by the United Nations in 2002. Osundare also recalls in the poem some significant historical events in Alexandra like the Pharaohs who ‘foraged free’, the pyramids that ‘assayed consent’, and the Sphinx that ‘witnessed it all in stony silence’ (18).

Legendary Cleopatra, who was born in Alexandria in early 69 BC or late 70 BC, and her famous picture with a cobra, also get some attention in ‘Alexandria’. Osundare describes Cleopatra as ‘cobra coiffured’ (18) to commemorate her headdress picture with a cobra. According to Osundare’s lines, Cleopatra ‘held a powerful empire between her legs/Stunning the world with the goddessly/Grace of a fated beauty’ (18). This is an apparent reference to Cleopatra’s relationship with Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. She was supposed to have stayed at Caesar’s villa when in Rome on some occasions. The affair was said to have resulted in the birth of Caesarion, who later became her Egyptian co-ruler as Ptolemy XV. Cleopatra also had another celebrity affair with Mark Anthony after Caesar’s assassination.

The autobiographical poems ‘Touchdown Taipei’ and ‘Malaysian Moments’ are in the Pacific section of Osundare’s peregrinations. ‘Touchdown Taipei’ is about Osundare’s sixteen-hour flight to Taipei. The poet informs his readers of his love for language and how he learnt some words in Chinese from a fellow flyer to thank the air hostess. He also informs the reader that he travelled several time zones on his way to Taipei:

Osundare’s ‘Malaysian Moments’ is elaborate and in thirteen movements. Osundare describes Malaysia as a ‘forest of rains’ with ‘silk and laundered cotton’ and the tunku cap of ‘velvet crown’ (53) in the poem. He foregrounds the Malaysian yellow juicy mango that he compares to ‘a sunrise sky’ and ‘magic in the mouth’ (51) and Malaysian coconut of the ‘rarest juice’ for his evening rice (56). He mentions the friendliness of Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital city, which he describes as the city with ‘the golden mud’ and the ‘muddy memory’ (52). Next, he focuses on the multilinguistic nature of Malaysia by associating three of the major languages of the country with the three meals of the day:

Osundare’s lines on Malaysian oil palm are particularly relevant to and critical of the post-independence mismanagement of the Nigerian government. The ‘oil palms flourish/in tidy rows/wide-girthed/heavy-fruited/luxuriant leaves/glistening in the sun’ (58). Osundare now rhetorically asks in obvious reference to Nigeria where Malaysia was reputed to have obtained the oil palms that it went to grow in Malaysia:

This section on oil palm is particularly relevant to the ‘Eko’ poem, discussed earlier, because good leadership would have harnessed the oil palm wealth of Nigeria, and this could have been one of the achievements to celebrate in relation to Eko.

Osundare dedicates the last movement of ‘Malaysian Moments’ (xiii) to Mohammed Salleh, a prominent Malaysian poet. He endows the poet with several epithets to show his significance and major contributions to Malaysian culture and the arts. Osundare describes Salleh as ‘Poet, priest, patriot/swift-footed traveler/whose heels are wet/with many waters/poeticizing in Penang/singing in Singapore/…crowing like an/ample-combed cock/in Kajang’ (59).

‘At Bertolt Brecht’s House, East Berlin’ is, in a way, a biography of both Brecht and East Berlin. Here, the human represented by Brecht is interwoven with the city of East Berlin. The poem is oríkì praise for both Brecht and the city of East Berlin. The poem is also autobiographical because of how Osundare’s own story is woven into it. It is an account of his visit to Brecht’s house and his city. The opening lines of the poem describe Brecht’s house as the setting for the poem: ‘He wrote those plays here/His cigar between his lips/His pen the sixth finger/of a restless hand…’ (83). The poem also describes the features of the house, including its furniture, whose ‘wood still raw/From the wound of the saw’ (83). The poem also pays attention to Brecht’s bedroom and the kitchen. Finally, the poem focuses on Brecht’s death and grave which Osundare describes as the ‘Last act’ in apparent allusion to the conclusion of a play. Of course, Brecht was a famous playwright, and in this case his death is the last act for him by God, the ultimate playwright. Osundare also foregrounds the landscape of East Berlin in the concluding stanza of the poem. The grave is in the ‘bowered backyard/In the midst of pundits and philosophers;/Flowers grow tall above your sleep/Petals bloom into smiles so reminiscent/Of your parting lips;/Here you rest/Now that all the world is your stage’ (85).

Berlin features in both ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ (90) and ‘Berlin 1884/5’ (91). Apart from a biographical representation of the Berlin Wall in both poems, they are both autobiographical because they recall Osundare’s visit to Berlin and his representation of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Osundare recalls the irony of the fall of the Berlin Wall and how some businesspeople profited from the historicity of the fallen wall in ‘Checkpoint Charlie:’

The infamous scramble for and the partition of Africa in 1884/1885 features prominently in ‘Berlin 1884/5’. The catchy epigraph to the poem is ‘Come buy History! Come buy History!’ from the wall seller in the poem ‘Checkpoint Charlie.’ ‘Berlin 1884/5’ is a critique of the European division of various African kingdoms and ethnicities among themselves. Osundare describes this greed for faraway lands as the ‘cruel arrogance of empire,/Of kings/queens who laid claim to rivers, to mountains,/To other peoples and other gods and their histories’ (91).

Osundare sets the tone for ‘Amsterdam’ by first identifying two of the most famous Dutch painters and showering them with memorable oríkì praises. The city ‘Goes to bed/Wrapped in Rembrandt’s canvas’ [and] ‘Floats her dreams in the watercolour/Of Van Gogh’s telluric imagination; The Ocean laughs’ (92). From the renowned painters, the poem focuses on the city itself and its planning. Osundare refers to the city’s canals as ‘fluent chapters/Of tales told by singing tunnels’ (92). He also writes that the windmills of the city ‘swirl to the sway/Of the wind, flail their arms/To the whirring tonality of its drum’ (92). Osundare concludes the poem by drawing attention to the city’s flyer and shopping bag inscription of See, Buy, and Fly by reminding the reader that many cannot participate in the advertised rendezvous of buying, selling, and flying because of different reasons ranging from immigration policies, racialization, sexism, and classism. Osundare notes that ‘There is a liberal lilt/To the laughter in the streets/Many are those who SEE, BUY but cannot FLY’ (92).

Osundare’s ‘London’ was inspired by his several visits to the city and the Summer Olympics of 2012 that it hosted. Osundare celebrates London as a city whose laughter ‘Is sometimes louder than its voice’ (106) because of the different languages used in the multiethnic city and its heightened commercial activities. He describes the city as ‘Old, never aged’. The history of London and empire building come to the fore as Osundare describes the city as ‘Once golden apple of an Empire’s eye’ (106). Osundare details some of London’s landmarks and monuments like the River Thames, Big Ben, Brixton, Westminster, Buckingham, Trafalgar, Hyde Park, the Union Jack, and the Anglican denomination of Christianity, and he gives them epithets that create a city that has affected the destiny of several other cities and civilizations through empire building and colonialism. For examples, Osundare describes the Thames as ‘Giant artery’ in London’s ‘crowded heart’ (105), Trafalgar as ‘fair and square’ (106), and Hyde Park as ‘Where Freedom fumes and frets in a corner/Ringed by the charmed circles of a complex speechocracy’ (106).

Osundare also brings various British achievers, writers, and inventors like Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Newton, and Adam Smith to foreground the several contributions of this city to human civilization. He refers to William Blake’s famous poem titled ‘London’ by inferring that the London he describes is different from Blake’s with the line ‘Not exactly Blake’s chartered streets’ (106). He also refers to William Wordsworth’s ‘Romantic imagination’ (106), Isaac Newton’s ‘meticulous mathematicization’ (106), Adam Smith’s ‘immortal credo’, and to William Shakespeare as ‘(good Ol’ Willy)/Still ambles along the Strand, his gait primed/To the iambic tonality of a rap-enamored era’ (106). I found Osundare’s allusions to various British achievers instructive because part of the praise for their city of London and country belongs to them. In praising the city, Osundare praises the achievers and vice versa. How Osundare brings the British achievers to the poem is like how Derek Walcott brings several writers to comment on the evil of colonization of the world in his ‘Ruins of a Great House.’ Osundare also refers to London as the city that never sleeps but sometimes snores (106). This is reminiscent of an Ekiti oríkì about Umọlẹ̀ ko̩ màrì sùn í hùn, meaning the masquerade who doesn’t sleep but snores. Osundare concludes the poem autobiographically by referencing the Shakespearean quotation from Davy in Henry IV, Part 2, Act V, Scene 3 that ‘I hope to see London once ere I die.’ Osundare’s representation of that famous quote is: ‘I saw London, indeed/And guess what?/I never died!’ (107). The saying about seeing London and not dying is, according to Osundare’s note in the poem, ‘A quip on “See London and Die”, a common jocular saying in Nigeria in those days’ (107). This declaration of seeing London and not dying recalls Coyote’s famous statement in Canadian Thomas King’s poem ‘Coyote Goes to Toronto’. After she is racialized in the city, Coyote says in the poem that she has been to Toronto, and people from the rez sarcastically say they see it:

In conclusion, Osundare graphically represents his travels in Africa, Asia, and Europe in If Only the Road Could Talk with road symbolism throughout the collection. As Osundare mentions in his preface to the book, ‘the road never forgets’ (xiii). Like the road that never forgets, Osundare remembers and recalls his encounters with different locations on his trips. The issues of memory and remembrance that Osundare emphasizes early in the book thematize the autobiographical content of the text. This is in relation to how Osundare weaves himself and his stories into the poems in honour of the different cities and endowments in the text, including a beautiful recollection of his mother’s prayer that the road that will take him to different places will always bring him back (xiv). So, like the different locations he encounters, Osundare becomes an autobiographical subject in the collection as he travels from place to place.

Like the traditional Yoruba oríkì panegyric poet, Osundare foregrounds different epithets and personalities associated with the different cities, landscapes, and seascapes he encounters to present their major attributes and contributions to civilization to the reader. He, therefore, represents the Yoruba oríkì as a common denominator to different world metropolitan centres. Some of the poems in this collection share some intertextual similarities with some of Osundare’s previously published poetry. An example is the acknowledgement and praises for landscapes and seascapes in the newer book just like in the older ones. It is in Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth and Midlife that he personifies himself and claims his descendance from Olosunta Rock in Ikere. It is in Moonsongs that Osundare identifies the differences between the moon in a wealthy location and in an impoverished setting. In the new book, the praises for the landscapes and seascapes are woven into the praises for the cities and individually as natural phenomenon like the sun, the sea, rivers, forests, and the sky are featured repeatedly in the poems. In this acknowledgment of landscapes and seascapes, Osundare dedicates a whole poem to the Pacific including its ocean (49), another to a stone orchard (101), another to the Irish Sea (108–109), and another to a mountain (121).

There is another level of intertextuality going on in If Only the Road Could Talk which is in relation to performers and writers. Osundare directly alludes to various important performers and writers and their works to show connections between them and their various locations. Prominent in this regard are references implying the art of the traditional Yoruba oríkì poet and performer in ‘Eko,’ to Ghanian Highlife Music and to the West African talking drum (9 and 14), to Misse Ngoh’s music in Cameroon and to Bate Besong’s plays and poems from Cameroon (23), to Tchicaya U Tamsi’s Congolese poems (30 and 31), to Kenyan publisher Henry Chakava (37), to Bertolt Brecht’s home in East Berlin, to British William Blake’s poem ‘London’, to William Shakespeare’s Henry IV and his other plays, and to William Wordsworth’s romantic poems (106).

A final example of intertextuality in relation to If Only the Road Could Talk is the connection between Osundare and Derek Walcott and Thomas King. The connection with Walcott here lies in Osundare’s representation of duality in ‘Eko’ and allusions to various writers in ‘London’ to Walcott’s method of providing the same contrasting representation and allusions in his autobiographical poetry in Another Life and the focus on empire and plantocracy in ‘Ruins of a Great House.’ The Thomas King connection is in relation to Osundare’s ‘London’ and King’s ‘Coyote Goes to Toronto’.