Poetry
Poems
John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo · 1961
Synopsis
Forty short pieces in which the water country recurs ceaselessly: night rain on a hut roof, a dancer from Agbor, the water deity Olokun, the abiku child who dies and is reborn to torment its mother. The longest goes back from the slave trade to European domination and reproaches its own people for having let it happen. Another holds the city of Ibadan in five lines of rust and gold.
Context
The volume, fifty-one pages long, came from the small press of the Mbari club in Ibadan, which the same year gave Christopher Okigbo his first collection. Most of the pieces had first appeared in The Horn, the student magazine that their author had founded, and in The Beacon. Ivbie, written under the influence of négritude, caused a stir among professors and students alike, and its hostile reception says a great deal about what the colonial milieu could then tolerate. Critics have reproached this first book for its technical borrowings from Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot, while sparing the pieces that do not bear their mark.
Who it is for
Fifty pages in English, with no French version. It is better to know the abiku, the child who dies and returns again and again to the same mother, and Olokun, deity of the delta waters.
Prizes and reception
First book by one of the three founders of modern Nigerian letters, with Soyinka and Okigbo. Reference works hesitate between 1961 and 1962 for its publication.