Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Escape into poetry, audacity of pidgin

By Stories by Akeem Lasisi

Popular writer, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo, speaks on her new found love for pidgin, as used in parts of her first collection of poems, Heart Song.


Ezeigbo




That her latest work is a collection of poems is surprising on its own. This is based on the fact that in the past two decades ago or so that her literary trade has been blossoming, she has been largely known as a novelist and a writer of children literature. When her first play, Hands that Break Stones, was published last year, little did pundits know that her volume of poetry, Heart Songs, was lurking in the corner.

However, that is not the only surprise that multiple award winning author, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo, spurs with the new work. Nor is it the fact that the quality exuded by most of the poems is so moving that it is difficult to refer to Ezeigbo as a first timer in the poetry genre. What is likely to strike many readers is her diversifying into pidgin in one of the segments of Heart Songs. The escape into pidgin has, indeed, brought to the fore, the pervasive influence of the informal language in the creative industry in Nigeria.

"I speak pidgin whenever the need arises for me to do so," says Ezeigbo, who is the immediate past Head of Department of English at the University of Lagos. "You see, the peculiarity of our society has a way of exposing one to pidgin. The only difference is that the environment you were brought up, and one's disposition to languages generally makes the difference in terms of how far one goes in pidgin."

Ezeigbo predicates her decision to use the melting-pot code in the poems - eight of the fifty-something poems in Heart Song - on the fact that she believes it suits the subjects she is discussing in them. These include cultism, prostitution, and its cousin, adultery.

She explains, "In a way, it is the kind of audience I project that informed the use of pidgin in the poems. Well, don't forget that one of the advantages of pidgin is that it is very accessible to many people. It cuts across classes and regions, meaning that, I believe, I would be able to reach all and sundry through that medium."

What Ezeigbo may not have noted is that beyond accessibility, pidgin also harbours some stylistic sensation that makes a work enjoyable to its audience. For instance, it easily lends itself to satire and humour, the type that usually punctuate the seriousness of the music of an artiste such as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who is regarded as the apostle number one of pidgin.

Of course, while a good number of other Nigerian musicians have explored pidgin, Ezeigbo is not the first major Nigerian writer to adopt it in literary work. Among others, Tunde Fatunde had written some poems in pidgin, Ken Saro-wiwa and Mammam Vatsa equally experimented with the form.

What, however, mars the attempt of some people in this direction is that only a few have really mastered pidgin - especially in its written form. Hence, one finds some poems or stories that are supposed to have been written in pidgin badly mixed with lexical errors and English-coloured interference. But, as readers will find out, Ezeigbo manages to keep her pidgin original.

"I think before any writer employs any language at all, he or she must first master it," she warns. "You can't give what you don't have. I decided to use it because I am sure my knowledge of it is dependable enough. Yet, after I had finished working on the manuscript, I gave it to a few people to edit or proof read. Those that are good in pidgin, I called their attention to places I used it."

She would not mind producing an all-pidgin collection in the future.
http://odili.net/news/source/2009/may/12/419.html