“Fertility Game”, which opens the first volume of the collection, offers insight into
resources of history and memory in addressing the contemporary challenge of dispersal.
It is essentially about the departure of a male lover for greener pastures in the West while
the wife is left alone, abandoned as it were, to the caprices of loneliness. Much as such
departure is desirable in a situation where what is termed the claim of “a rational
knowledge of administration of the human factor” (Nicolas Rose 1998: 122) on the part
of the military has failed to yield any positive result, return, if only for the purpose of
recreation, is considered appropriate. But the argument goes beyond its literal import, as
“fertility” in this context is the ultimate need for African productivity and development
which cannot be achieved creditably by being perennially dispersed without return. This
is why as the abandoned lover at home realizes there is only one way to achieve the
consummation of this fertility game, she is determined to give the name of the foot-loose
husband “to west-bound winds”; this is in order that he may return:
Come back home Agbenoxevi Come back home
Come with me to your rainbow bed
Where you and I shall wrestle again and again
All over again in that old fertility game
First played by gods in the seedtime of our Earth
Just come back home Agbenoxevi Come back home (4-5)In the above, apart from the repetition of ‘come back’ which serves to emphasize the
wish of the abandoned lover to see her partner return, we are fascinated by the ambiguity
of the ‘west-bound winds’ which on the one hand could refer to the local direction of the
itinerary of Agbenoxevi, and as well as the indictment of the West as Agbenoxevi’s
location for which he has abandoned his lover. Perhaps the reason for the insistence on
return stems from the observation that it might be necessary to consider other forms or
strategies of survival in a neo-colonial age in which “Moonchildren in their greed/ Have
eaten up our Earth” (10). Moonchildren, which refers to agents of western neo-
colonialism, often find ready collaboration in African leaders. The military was
particularly notorious for this. They were taken in by promises of aid which turned out to