Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment of a nation in which the unremitting surfeit of violence and atrocities
encompasses everyone, perpetrator and victim, the rulers and the ruled,
the reformers and the destroyers:
Peace. The spillage dried with time
We nibbled blood where it had caked
You lit the fires, you, and saw
Your dawn of dawning yield
To our noon of darkness
Half-way up your grove of union
We watched you stumble – mere men
Lose footing on the peaks of deities
The torch was quenched, the void
Of darkness rang with madness
Each his own priest, quick, easy
The act of sacrifice. We know to wait
We nibble blood before it cakes.
(Shuttle,)For readers who actually lived through this period of Nigerian political
history, “Conversations at Night” could be an extremely uncomfortable,
extremely bracing poem to read. This, presumably, is precisely the “pur-
pose” of the poem: an evocation of a time of evil and mass atrocities so
graphic, so stark, so strangely familiar that it quickly leads the reader to
seek somewhat dubious relief in linking these Nigerian perpetrations with
massacres and atrocities in other places and other times – episodes from
the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, of Rwanda and Burundi
and of Kosovo, episodes of unspeakable barbarities where the perpetra-
tors also strove to ensure that knowledge or memory of their crimes will
vanish with the extermination of their victims:
...Death came
In the color of foul thoughts and whispers
Fouled intentions, color of calculations
A contrivance to erase the red and black
Of debt and credit, gangrene to discolor
Records for future reckoning, bile to blur
Precision of the mind to past exploitation
A scheming for intestate legacies
Conversions, appropriations, a mine
Of gold-filling in the teeth of death
A color blindness to red standards
Which tomorrow shall uphold against
The horrors of today ()