could only be pride to the godless!
The fleet that devoured captives
could only be libated by torturers!
The piracy of conquistadors
could only be blessed by evil priests!
In Rhine-flushed Rotterdam,
the vast port and museums
told tales of wave-borne ships.
I recalled the Middle Passage,
the blacked-out holocaust.
Ships are still setting sail
for distance seas
to wreck inland peace.
And there are ports as far apart
as Mars and America
reserved for the next fleet!
But no new ships bring back
what has been hauled away
with fire-spitting wizardry.
They can only savage more,
infesting coastlines with mines.
May Olokun break their spell^59
and dump them on the sea-bed! (16)Broadly, the poem bears out the remark about the history of imperialism and how this
history precipitates the present world order within the domain of globalization. For there
is indeed a sense in which the poem provides an incisive and concise account of
imperialism as experienced in various parts of the world and as an act of coercion
perpetrated and driven by the same form of consciousness and epistemology emanating
from the West. Laying the groundwork for the present world order, it becomes clear how
ships in the histories of imperialism are crucial to the various experiential epochs that
define these histories. This is why in the conception of globalization as closely linked to
the historical experience of “trade, colonialism and nation state”, the centrality of ships
cannot be ignored. It definitely accounts for why Ojaide weaves a web that connects the
depredation and exploitation of Spanish “Armada” to the imperial experience perpetrated
by the conquistadors of South America, and to the maritime commerce of continental
Europe. It was this that metamorphosed in its abhorrence into the climax of the “Middle
Passage”, an experience through which Africa lost a huge productive population in
59
Olokun is one of the several Niger Delta gods that Ojaide invokes in his poetry, usually for justice
intervention and revolution.