paper is witness to the lone-mind
These words file out on the dirt of road
to stop nerve-wreaking waves of despots;
they are the charms worn before battle. (“Before our God”, 28)A Gathering Fear specifically gets across as a work whose emergence is in the spirit of
“daring the beast” (Stewart Brown 1995: 58). It was indeed a moment of the articulation
of a desire to thrive against the military dictatorship of Babangida whose pattern of rule,
going by the typology of Laura Chrisman (2004: 188), falls into the category of
“dominatory formation”. That is, the regime threatened the sense of belonging of the
people, as the professed spirit of nationalism and patriotism which the military claimed
informed its intervention in power was only to the extent of protecting the “interests of
the bourgeoisie”, [and] necessarily sacrificing or ‘ignoring’ the interests of the ‘subaltern’
groups” (188). Naturally this situation does one thing to the nation: it threatens its
collectivism and the myth that sustains such collectivism. Nonetheless, the poet begins
with an affirmation of confidence in the idea of the nation despite all odds. Therefore, the
poet declaims:
I am bound to this land by blood
That’s why my vision is blurred
I am rooted in its soil
And its streams flood my veins (“I am Bound to this Land by Blood”, 11)Here is an unequivocal declaration of a commitment to the space of the Nigerian nation,
not least because in this collection both land and nation are used interchangeably. It is an
expression of a strong belief in its existence despite the ugly experience of its recent
history; an experience which then had threatened the nation with total disintegration. The
Nigerian Civil War was the said experience. Although his ethnic group Igbo suffered
most during this war as it was branded the secessionist group, the trauma and the
humiliation of defeat did not preclude identification with the subsequent integration
process and aspiration of a united nation. Besides, his poetry resonates within the context
of that generation of Nigerian writers whose milieu of birth and growth witnessed, one
way or another, the devastation of the war and the subsequent determination to prevent a
repetition of such apocalypse, having witnessed both “the horror and the passion” of it.