The Tongue of a Shattered S-K-Y: A Realist’s Poetic Fantasy.

By: Olusesan Ogunyooye

The decadence in the polity, the rot in the politics and the rusty image of Nigeria in global perception form revolutionary concerns of Tosin Gbogi in “Tongue of a Shattered S-K-Y”.

Though it is commonplace to hear that “the worst democracy is better than the best military rule”, I agree. But the truth remains that under the current political dispensation, Nigerians do sometimes, silently cry for the return of the khaki ‘boys’. 

This hopelessness, this disillusionment, this excruciating groan under the suffocating weight of a conscienceless, corrupt, purposeless and inept  leadership system are issues animated in this work.

Set in Nigeria’s current political dispensation, the title of the poetry volume is most metaphorically significant to the overall underlying meaning and message intended by the poet. In other words, the title translates to ‘lamentation of  shattered dreams’ as the tongue is functionally a speech organ, while the S-K-Y is also symbolic of the Eldorado promises that came with electioneering campaigns and return to democracy. By this token, it is almost instantaneous to understand the themes of hopelessness, resignation to fate, deception, stoic acceptance and rage that conduct the reader through this volume.

The poet preoccupies himself in this volume with an angry cry about an aborted Eldorado – a shattered dream; a novel artistic representation of what I call ‘democratic tragedy’ which could also be crooned a ‘poetic re-enactment of the brand of Arthurmillian Tragedy’; and a clarion call to challenge complacence and pitiable acceptance of our ‘democratic norm’ – what the late afrobeat maestro, Fela Kuti, described as “Suffering and Smiling”.

The poetry volume lined in four different but inter-related parts of deception and rage, frustration and repudiation, and, grudgingly, dreams and hope; split open the celebrated ‘cosmopolitanly’ designed decadence that bedevils Nigeria’s leadership life.

From the complex places of political grandiloquence, to the ‘sacred’ altars in religious spaces; from the ‘hallowed’ chambers of (jungle) justice, to cool diplomatic rooms of bilateral relations; and from the idolized morphemes of vision 20:2020, to the jarring, noise-inducing razzmatazz of transformation agenda; Tosin Gbogi exposes us to the rash of lies beatified by jaw-breaking lexicons and incoherent syntax. In all these, the reader’s eyes and mind cannot escape the pictures of rot, roguery and despair that adorn democratic governance in Nigeria.

In part one; one may be compelled to say that Gbogi’s poetry assumes an autobiographical dimension. Although he described his muse as “a scar on my neck”, giving it a tone of a weight of responsibility on him, however we might need to dig a little deeper. Of course it is worthy of note that having survived the strangulating claws of a disjointed, benighted educational system in Nigeria, the poet is one of the lucky few who could find succour abroad to school in an ideal system. So, this might just be an attempt to write hi(s)-story in verses.

Also, in the same part, we see the manifestation of a 'beastly poet' whose choice of words went gory. Words such as blood, soul, rape, umbilical cord, devil, dragon, etc glided unconsciously into the lexicon of the poet. Coincidentally maybe, there is poem in the volume titled; “I AM A BEAST”. Therefore we see two types of beasts, one megalomaniac, the other psychopathic. 

Beyond this, we must agree that a beastly system has made a beast out of its victim(s), while Gbogi writes his in ink, some stoically swallow the bile in acceptance, and others trod the path of rebellion taking up arms and indeed in the poet’s words; “(i) eat the umbilical cords of newborn babies (they die) before their first faint cries... what can (the government) their  mothers do... This is metaphoric of the brazen bravado with which dare-devil Islamic sect, Boko Haram, armed robbers, kidnappers, and oil bunkerers tear, by instalment, the fabric of a decent national life... and what can the government do?

However, the poet fails to consider followership in his work. Either by default or deliberate intention, the blame of a skewed Nigeria democratic governance is placed on the lap of a ‘ubiquitous’ government. This art of blame-trading on the leadership is insufficient because leadership and followership are inextricably interwoven. While there might be arguments that bad leadership beget bad followership; the poet as the conscience of the society must be able balance issues. For example, the heartless and unprovoked carnage on innocent souls everyday by self-styled militant groups either in the north or south is unacceptable, cowardly and despicable; for they know who their ‘enemy’ is, so why terrorize  innocent Nigerians?

Worthy of note is what the poet describes as an “omni-potent linguistic presence”; he explores this device in ellipsis, typographic cases and stylistic arrangement of the poems in the volume. Thus, behind the “context of meaning is a sub(text) of meaning”.

First, there is deliberate corruption of words by ellipsis and anagrams which the poet argued is “intended to be a pause; a silence; a caesura; a break; the twelfth station of the cross; an alienation device; a moment of reflection on the past before another movement somersaults the mind into another shangri-la of elusive peace”. This also goes further to depict the pervasive level of corruption that envelopes the land as virtually all the words in the volume are corrupted for this poetic and metaphoric effect. The few ‘uncorrupted’ ones symbolize the very scantiness of best practice, sanity and good governance in the land. ‘Airegin’, also cynically described as “the land of regal gin”, is the poet’s anagrammatic re-ordering of this country’s name to reflect it as a drunken nation.

In addition to the linguistic sensibility, the cases are lowered to depict “the overwhelming presence of pains, (which) almost invariably, has dwarfed every hope of rising... this is a grapho-acoustic strategy deployed to inscribe what i call pathetic onomatopoeia, a device through which both the shape and sound of words are made to carry the weight of human sorrows/emotions”.

On the whole, the poet has done justice to the immediate past and present of Nigeria and her deliberately structured imbalance leadership system. We must however give it to him that in a nation where hunger is munched as muse of writing, where jamborees and azonto ideas of nothingness is the only window of breath of fresh air from the asphyxiating hold of a careless, insensitive, beastly government; Gbogi stands with this work as a palladium of a connection with history, a contact with reality, and a voice, tiny though, of reasoning and new consciousness.

On the other hand, although he grudgingly dreams of a better future but it is still one interred in the gloomy soil of the grave and far into the echoing distance of silence. 

For the picture of a nation painted throughout the first three parts as bleak; for the people of a nation, of which the poet is one, depicted as beasts born out of a beastly system, and for a poetry volume with no crucible of hope and possibility, the poet is quite contradicting himself to have assumed that he can dream of a better Nigeria. At the risk of sounding like the biblical Israelites who never saw the possibility of taking over Canaan, I submit Gbogi has a nightmare, like every Nigerian middle and lower class.

With the condition of life and living described in this volume, it is difficult to have a dream; for simple logic knows that for a better Nigeria to manifest there must be political will, economic possibilities, cultural and religious understanding, and class balancing. These are still far from our national life as we still live on a ‘borrow borrow’ economy as the poet rightly highlight in this volume.

Also, the theme of vengeance in the last poem in the volume may be an hallucinatory effect of insomnia inflicted on the poet by constant broken promises and shattered hopes. For example, the recent report of the National House of Representatives on the fuel subsidy removal and the reactions of some youths against the report is one capable of eternally postponing the bliss envisioned of the poet.

I quite agree with him; we may never see what he sees as portrayed in the last poem in this volume because the monsters of corruption, megalomania, deception and greed are still potent and eating deep into our national stature. The situation in the country today is best described in one of Gbogi’s proverbs; “when the sun reaches orgasm, even the iron-coated tortoise would sweat”, therefore I am tempted to remember Alice’s delirious dream in Susan Sontag’s “Alice In Bed”- a dream born out of an utter resignation to fate; which here, I will describe as a poetic fantasy!