The poems we wrote and the poems we read

I haven’t had any news of Jared Angira in a long time now. I wonder what he is working at.

I must admit though that I can hardly claim any close acquaintance or correspondence with him as a person, much as I am a devoted admirer of his verse.

To me, the most humbling aspect of Angira’s literary career is that he is one of that species of writers who excel at creativity despite their not being primarily fulltime literary professionals like some of us.

To this class belong such firebrands as Yusuf Dawood and his fellow doctor, the late Margaret Ogolla of The River and the Source, and our beloved grand sister, Grace Ogot, another healthcare  professional.

Angira was a Commerce major at the University of Nairobi, but that did not stop him from teaming up with his contemporary “English” majors, like my late friend and colleague Leonard Kibera, to edit Nexus (later Busara), the students’ literary journal, in which some of his early verse was published.

Then he went on to publish more verse works than probably any other East African writer to date, including Okot p’Bitek, and to earn such encomiums from the dons of African literature as “the country’s first truly significant poet”.

METICULOUS VERSE

What got me thinking of Angira, however, was his early poem “The Street”, which is graphically structured, visually, like a street, with the text divided into sections representing the road surface and the two pavements alongside it.

The main theme of the poem is Angira’s recurrent disillusionment with most of our post-independence leaders and their urge for primitive accumulation of ill-gotten wealth at the expense of their people. While the wealthy capitalists cruise down the streets, obsessed with their nefarious “trinity” of “Mercedes, mansions and shambas”, the pavements are crawling with the worms of the beggars and dirt-poor.

I remembered the poem after I said recently that a good poem is made up of a competent fusion of strong feelings and well-structured expression.

A great deal has been said about Angira’s passionate social concern, especially about the evils of exploitative colonial and neocolonial capitalism, the self-serving murky politics of some of our rulers, and the resultant growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

But little that I know of extensively tackles his meticulous verse technique, maybe with the exception of Bwocha Nyangemi’s brief stylistic study, submitted to Kenyatta University in 2008.

This brings me to the question of where Angira learnt or acquired his technique for his verse.

We were all voracious readers in our undergraduate days, and since we did exams only once at the end of the first year and once at the end of the final, third year, we had the whole of the second year to read what we wanted, as we wanted.

So, it’s not unlikely that Angira, though a business studies scholar, would have voluntarily read the literary texts that were compulsory for us in “English” (read literature). This might account for his technical literary competence, apart from his obvious natural talent.

The visual structure of “The Street” might thus have been suggested by 17th century English poets, like George Herbert, who shaped his “Easter Wings” poem like the wings of an angel.

Or he might have read Kyper-Mensah’s “Egg”, a literally oval poem, suggesting that love should be handled firmly but tenderly.

Indeed, these were the main models and influences under which we embarked on experimenting with verse in English in the 1960s.

On the one hand we had English verse, all the way from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot, and on the other we had our elders, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the negritudists, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara and the other Nigerians, and at home, our teachers, like David Rubadiri, John S. Mbiti, Joe Kariuki, Henry Barlow and Okot p’Bitek.

The contest between free and conventional verse was still raging in the mid-1960s, and the sobering utterance of T. S. Eliot, the most influential English-language poet of the 20th century, that a “great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse” was still ringing in our ears.

This travesty, I believe, was what I was trying to reflect in my 1969 satirical piece “The Poem”, which I visually “splattered” over the page. The point is that “free verse” does not mean formless verse but, rather, verse that, instead of just following established patterns, adopts and convincingly develops a pattern of its own that best suits what it is trying to communicate.

LIFELONG POET

Anyway, regarding models and influences, it would make a reading of the East African poets of the  1960s and the 1970s quite intriguing to try and track the influences at work in their verse. As usual in literature, we do not claim factuality, only plausibility.

Richard Ntiru’s poem “The Beggar”, for example, was obviously modelled on William Blake’s “Tiger”, while his later piece, “The Introduction”, the one with the character bearing the stentorian name of Mugabo Mugenge, was probably influenced by Gabriel Okara’s “Once Upon a Time”.

Those who had access to the Francophone negritude poets, like Senghor, the two Diops, Birago and David, and the Malgache bards, were obviously influenced by them. Charles Khaminwa’s precocious piece “A Letter to Leopold Senghor”, for example, is a startling interrogation of the Senegalese guru’s unqualified glorification of Africa’s past, while my little piece, “Whititude”, was a kind of masked attempt to stand the “blackness” concept on its head.

Among the poets who have published autonomous collections of verse from those days, the two I am most attracted to are Tim Wangusa, author of A Hymn for Africa, A Pattern of Dust and Africa’s New Blood, and John S. Mbiti, whose Poems of Nature and Faith, I think, deserves a reprint.

Wangusa, who has had a lifelong poetic career, was significantly influenced in his early writing by Eliot and the other early 20th century English and Irish poets but his later work seems to be seeking inspiration more from orature, like the imbalu circumcision songs and the popular running commentaries on historical events.

A common influence that Wangusa, a layman, shares with Mbiti, a top Anglican cleric, is the evangelical reading of the Bible, more specifically the King James “authorised” version of it.

A lot of Mbiti’s poems manifest a strong influence of the so-called Romantic poets of the 19th century, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and the others. This influence is also strong among the other poets of Mbiti’s generation, Rubadiri, Barlow and Joseph Kariuki, a heritage of the Makerere English School, with which they also infected us, their students.

But Mbiti is most in his element when he plunges into the rich fabric of biblical narrative. His “The Crucified Thief”, which my theatre friend Wasambo Were may remember us dramatising with our students in Sagana, charms the reader with its subtle working of the “thief” motif from the criminals crucified with the Christ to the Christ himself, who redeems people by “stealing” their sins away!

Talking of “thieves”, earlier this week I received a request from South Africa for permission to include “I Met a Thief” in yet another anthology. What do people ever see in that juvenile lamentation about unrequited love?