The work may have come into existence as a poetry collection, but the essayist in the poet is immediately obvious. Much like how Soyinka cannot help the dramatist in him from appearing in his works in other genres, Tares Oburumu’s style in “Flora’s Love Colony” is less that of a poet and more that of a historian trying to tell a story about Nigeria. The poet, like an academic researcher wants us to know that one cannot understand Nigeria’s present without understanding her past. The title of the work, itself is an allusion to Flora Shaw, the British writer and journalist who named the country Nigeria around 1897 , and who later became the Lady Lugard, spouse of the Governor General, after her husband, Frederick Lugard became British Governor-General of the Nigeria in 1914.
From one’s reading of the poems in the collection, one can surmise that the collection is a search for identity. A search for home. The poet believes that to understand himself, he must understand the environment in which he lives, the Niger delta where he grew up and he still lives, and Nigeria as a whole. More importantly he must remember, because remembrance helps the poet anchor his identity. Being a self-confessed student of T.S. Elliot, his subscription to Elliot’s belief that for the identity of anything whether human or geographical to be established, there must be a convergence of its past, present and future is the underlying thinking that guides the structure of the work. To the poet, understanding Nigeria is knowing that it is a combination of the good and the villainous. Hence, he says in “Dear History”(p.1)
….Then there was Fatiya & her child. Nana &
Jumbo. All the tribe seated on the hull of the song
they played. The chains moved as waves in the chorus.
& the chorus was the bridge built over the Creek Town
depths into the future. Into the past, the present &
the future.
“Flora’s Love Colony” as is the norm with Tares’s other works is extremely dense with images and motifs, in keeping with author’s penchant for examining different themes topics and perspectives from desert sands, to ships, to birds, to even grimmer ones like dead bodies. However, a motif that runs throughout the work and can perhaps help the reader to make sense of the collection is the image of water, whether via the river or the sea, water is a motif that runs through all the different sections of the work connect the past, the present and the future. In Dear History (p.1) he says
In the beginning was the Atlantic Ocean.
& the Atlantic Ocean was everything, &
everything else was the shore where Annie
Pepple, blessed by water, walked, lifted in
kingly white by trade & the landscapes swept
clean & blue into the horizon
In After Colony (p.22) He goes further to say:
Tell Bane, I breathe only by the mud & the banks of Syma,
& the rural mystic of my hut with long stakes dug deep into
the earth beneath the river. I swim with the water-lilies
streaming under it, one with the ladders slopping
from the banks to touch the waves spread by passing
boats.
Also in Grenade (p.64) He says:
It rained. It wasn’t the season of rain. It was January.
We went out with our cups, gathering the little drops
until we were full of love for the earth wet with the hope
that the leaves of September would be green again.
When the rain stopped, we became ripples, small fishes,
swimming in an oasis the ocean.
Of course, Water is a common feature of poetry from the Niger Delta, from Tanure Ojaide, to Ken Saro Wiwa, to even the likes of J.P Clark, so Tares Oburumu is far from unique in that regard, but at a deeper level to the poet, water is more than a source of life and sustenance water serves as memory, as connection between past, present and future, and also connections between the different existing realities of Nigeria. In other words, while the human characters might change, and the sociopolitics of Nigeria might feature different actors, the river is permanent and therefore it is the perfect repository of love and memory and a perfect anchor of identity.
To the poet, Nigeria is not just a geographical location, it is a combination of places, people and timelines. To the poet, Nigeria or “Flora’s Love Colony” is as much her past as much as it is her present, she is as much her various ethnic groups as she is the people who have died in various wars and insurgencies starting from when the British invaded to the Biafra war, to the Boko Haram insurgencies now bedeviling the country, Nigeria is the people that the poet has love and whom he has lost
However what makes Flora’s Love Colony unique is its own way is also its greatest weakness. While Its refusal to be boxed into a typical poetry collection is commendable, it also unfortunately signals a lack of identity. No matter how much modern writers attempt to argue that most of the elements of traditional poetry are relics of an outdated system designed to constrain the modern writer’s imagination, what differentiates poetry from other genres like fictional prose or literary essays is memorability and impact. A poet does not just use words, he/she uses them in a manner that stirs the audience/ reader emotionally regardless or thematic focus. In “Flora’s Love Colony” that emotional impact is mostly absent. It is not like the poet does not make the effort to stir those feelings, but he constantly flits between poet and essayist, which interrupts the collection’s flow and dulls the emotional impact that the poems are meant to create. His style is overly verbose and his words are carefully measured and analyzed until they lose their flavor. Like three kids standing on top of each other trying to look like an adult in a trench coat, they might make a passably good impression, but it doesn’t just feel right. The message of the collection is clear enough, but it seems that the poet keeps forgetting a basic tenet of Poetry 101. Poetry is about the style of delivery as much about the message. In the end, the reader comes away with a nagging feeling that maybe the message in the collection may have been delivered as an essay.
Tares Oburumu’s “Flora’s Love Colony” is a journey through memory, an amalgamation, of past present and future, an essayist turned poet’s reflection on life, love, and how remembrance can help establish identity.
Bayo Adegbite is a writer and editor
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