The void of an ideological premise within the current generation appears to have been filled up by the recently published, ambitious work of Umar Abubakar Sidi’sThe Poet of Dust. The collection is a grand statement of the arrival of a sage with a refined consciousness that both instructs and prescribes a sense of direction and purpose for the generation. Sidi’s work is a grand theorization of poetry, representative of the ideological motif of the emerging generation both in its experimentation with style, form and language. A trend E.E. Sule describes as the “exogenous aesthetics” because of the generation’s obsession with and romance of foreign aesthetics and metaphors. It is a collection reminiscent of the “Euro-modernist” tradition. Published in 2019 by KONYASHAMSRUMI, the collection can best be described as a contemporary poetry dictionary. It is assured, confident and invocative of a philosopher’s imagination. Like Osundare’s Poetry is, The Poet of Dust is a poetry manifesto of a generation lurked between post-modernism and tradition.
Sidi is magical, unpretentious and radical in his conceptualization of poetry. It celebrates the allure of the poem. It equally teaches, elicits and mocks the philistine inquisitor. Through the employment of different poetic forms and styles such as allusion, lyric, metaphor, imagery, allegory, symbolism, witticism, amplified by a sturdy narrative technique that sometimes calls to mind elegant prose, The Poet of Dust manifests varied influences drawing largely from Arabic, Greek and unapologetically imitates loosely classical English epics poetry such as Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, especially with its intricate metaphorization of the poet as “man and dust”. This is true of the collection, in the opening poem, The Peninsula of Poets, the persona alludes to the seven characteristics of the English epic, which he refers to as “The ABC of poetry & the 7 articles of a poet’s faith” (9) and we are also introduced to the uniqueness of the epic, which is the celebration of iconic or historical figures or events. We see how the poet introduces Adonis, who in Greek mythology was the god of beauty. The image of Adonis is a recurring decimal in the collection. The book’s title suggests that man was made from sand! So, if the poet is of dust, then to dust he shall return. Thus, even the poet with his grandeur is mortal and all mortals are made of dust.
The Poet of Dust as meta-poetry. A Meta poem in simple terms is a poem written about poetry. However, Sanchez Torres as cited in Arturo Casas’ About Poetry and Performativity defines Meta-poetry as ‘those texts “in which reflection on poetry is the organizing principle” of the poem.’ This presupposes that meta-poetry is chiefly concerned with poems that celebrates the poet, discusses the art of poetry and or beauty of the poem. The collection clearly defines itself as meta-poetry, its ambitious definition of poetry and the poet in almost all the poems fits into Torres’ definition. The collection is divided into two parts: The Poet of Sand, and Poetic Manifesto. In the poem “Instructions to a Poet” the persona doles out instructions to the poet thus implying what should constitute the guiding principle of the poet. He calls for the poet to adorn himself in the garb of consciousness and set the agenda for a revolution. The persona enthuses in stanza four of the poem thus:
Poet. Awaken. Rise
Rise against the litany of letters
The innuendoes of I
The villainy of V
The obscenities of O
Rise against lies
Against the alphabet of lies (19-20)
Just as it has been stated at the beginning of this exposition of the collection being a poetic manifesto, the second section of the collection does nothing but idealizes about the ideals of a genuine poet as well explains the quality of a bad poet. Like Osundare, we see in The Poet of Dust a social consciousness that seeks a return to the golden days where poetry and poets more than being mere purveyors of vacant aesthetics, were deep thinkers, philosophers and rebels who used poetry as tool of resistance and social justice. In the poem, “In Lieu of a Preface”, the persona posits in the opening stanza:
We need poems with the skin of porcupines that will prick the bodies of poets, pierce their skins, sting their consciences and force them to cough out poems about beauty, rascality and emasculation of lies
We need poems of steel and manacles that will seize the ram-shackle captains of the community and cast them in underground dungeons beneath the rocks (43)
The poet persona seems disappointed in the new generation for their lack of guts and the dearth of consciousness in their poetry. The persona reechoes his disenchantment with the contemporary poet in the poem, “This is not a Poem this is not a Prayer”:
Today, the poet cannot sing,
A self-appointed Soldier of God
And his vest of bomb has just
Detonated in his box of voice (47)
The persona equally has some words for those he regards as bad poets in the poem, “Things Poets Do” in which he ridicules the laziness of the new poet and his aversion for depth and the mechanics of a quality poem. He submits thus:
“Bad poets define poetry as the aesthetic amalgamation of words to evoke a waterfall of bliss”.
There is no escaping the paradoxical and sarcastic tones of the persona in his rumination of the affairs of poetry-land, upon which he is presiding as the master.
And in conclusion, it suffices to posit that Umar Abubakar Sidi’s The Poet of Dustbelongs to the neoclassical class of Tade Ipadeola’s Sahara Testament, Ikeogu Oke’sThe Heresaid, Amu Nnadi’s A Field of Echoes, and Ahmed Maiwada’s We Are Fish whose experiment with form, craft and style is grand. They are energetic in their bold re-invocation of the classical tradition of European form and aesthetics. Of course, if we have no tradition of our own to advance, emulate, or perhaps, cannot create our own, there is absolutely no wrong in impressing on the tradition that gave rise to our modern written literature. Sidi’s work deserves to be read for its own merit, because it is good.
Paul Liam is a poet, author and writer with several critical articles to his credit.
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