By Daniel Agoons, Literary Critic | Email: Daniel.agoons@gmail.com
Every day, we hear, with fright and horror, of horrifying destructions to Mother Earth. Thanks to social media and global TV networks, we watch in horror as our planet is buffeted by wild winds, torrential rains, tsunamis, earthquakes, and landslides… that bring destruction to our home, Mother Earth, and our lives and property. It’s like a canvas that paints a gloomy future! We seem to be heading to a precipice, and one further step may lead to a chasm.
This reminds me of the desperate environmental child continuously chopping the branch on which he is sitting. He does so out of ignorance and despair. Ignorance, because by chopping down the branch, he is actually heading for a crash! Despair, because his livelihood may depend on chopping down the branch! Can he create a balance? What’s the future going to be like?
We can classify our environment into different types: the biophysical (the physical, natural environmental), man-managed (referring to natural environments, such as lawns, parks, and hedges), man-made (referring to houses, bridges, towers, roads, which make use of materials from the biophysical environment), social, cultural and spiritual environments (that determine our interactions with the biophysical environment).
The almighty God created a balance in the environment. We have the example of the water cycle. A perfect balance! Let’s shut our eyes and consider the water cycle for a moment. The imbalance is caused by us humans, and we see the negative results.
Is our future completely hopeless? Ekpe Inyang provides a resounding answer: “No!” I enjoy the structure of this poetic collection. It reminds me of an old Korob adage that a lost hunter traces his steps to the point of recognition, assesses his whereabouts, and then charts a new path that leads him home! That’s what Ekpe Inyang has done in Tastes of Nature. As a real master craftsman, he divides Tastes of Nature into five parts.
Part 1: Nature’s wonders
Let’s return to the analogy of the lost hunter in the great Korup forest. And I am doing so for two reasons. First, Ekpe was born in that forest and worked tirelessly to protect it as a staff of the WWF Korup Project. The forest became a great source of inspiration to him. The second reason is to draw parallels with the hunter. The hunter wisely assesses his surroundings. He tries to figure out where he is. Some elements of nature could help him: streams, the sun, topography, the undergrowth of the forest, the canopy…. If it is in the heart of the dry season, things may become more complex. Even the flow of brooks may be invisible. The hunter has to resort to external factors to determine the flow of a brook by throwing a leaf into it. In this way he will, with certainty, follow the course of the brook downstream, confident that the brook would flow into a larger stream that he might recognise and gbamm! He would chart his way home!
Ekpe Inyang sets the tone with the opening poem of Part One ‘Our new home?’ A rhetoric question! He pictures a heavenly body from his humble position and, while referring to technological advances by man who has been seeking to find life forms outside our planet Earth, and the futility of the effort, Ekpe explores a series of situations and challenges the heavenly body, most likely the planet Mars, to answer him “boldly”: “Are you ready to be our new home?”
This is the question that we must all answer. Permit me to rephrase Ekpe’s question: do we have another home besides Mother Earth? Is life possible outside Mother Earth? Ekpe provides a resounding answer, once more, “No!”
If life is not possible outside Mother Earth, then this collection of poems is very welcome. It calls on us to examine what we are doing on it and what we can do to make amends.
The efforts of scientists to find life forms in other heavenly bodies contrast sharply with the perfect harmony of ecosystems and the positive effects on humans. In ‘Wonders of Nature’, the rotation of Mother Earth gives rise to day and night, provides many environmental services to man, and a comfortable home. The wonderful balance leaves us in a state of euphoria, and we join Ekpe to admire how Nature is:
churning out silver notes
like snowflakes flying in the air and
gathering to produce melodies of gold
that create wonders of nature!
Our home, the Earth, is a capsule designed and protected by an external force that can’t be destroyed even by breakaway steroids! Ekpe encapsulates this in ‘Steroids’, but our actions destroy the earth from within. Before Ekpe Inyang shows us how we destroy our home from within, he delves into a description of its different tenets to draw admiration and appreciation from us. That brings us to Part II: In Praise of Species!
There’s an aphorism that states that you cannot protect what you do not know! Take the owl, for example! We consider it a bird of ill omen and shiver in fear when we hear it hooting at night, afraid that it is a harbinger of ill tidings! Can we wish to protect this bird? No! But after reading ‘The Owl’, we see things differently. Ekpe describes this bird of prey which can spot its prey thanks to its excellent eyesight and the fact that it could turn its neck “almost three hundred and sixty degrees, to see all around and about you” to eradicate our homes of “rats that would have invaded/our homes in large numbers.” Owls play an important part in the food web and in trophic levels: energy transfer. They provide essential environmental services, including pollination and seed dispersal.
In ‘The Bees’, Ekpe Inyang describes the human predicament: the disturbance and destruction of our home. The bees are social insects which are well structured: the drones, workers and queens performing different roles and fulfilling and guaranteeing their very existence. But see what the Queens and drones do:
“But came a time when Queens and Drones/Employed some Spiders to build webs”.
The webs entrapped and killed many bees. The beginning of chaos! A once perfect and harmonious society is set in turmoil. The workers revolt and chase away the drones and queens. Their search for a new home is futile. They are forced to return to the same hollow in the tree but get entrapped in the web they built and die.
Like this society of bees, our planet Earth is our home, and we should avoid building webs that can destroy us! Whatever we do to Mother Earth, we do to ourselves. The concluding verse is a terse warning to us:
The Queens and Drones went on and on
Searching for vacant hollow trees
Their search brought them back where they came
And got entangled in a web
This is a direct link to the opening poem of this collection, ‘Our new home?’ Like the drones and queens, searching for other planets that can support life is futile. Let’s content ourselves with Mother Earth! Let’s live sustainably within the carrying capacity of Mother Earth.
Part III: The dialogue begins
Ekpe Inyang is now certain that we know enough about Mother Earth and are ready to engage in dialogue with it to establish a common ground. However, he wants to ascertain that we are on the same wavelength with him so he provides an introduction:
The incessant dialogue between Culture and Nature highlights the difficulty of negotiating common ground. In the end, the one shapes the other, with the weak and fragile likely to be placed under stress.
Let’s see how true this is by examining some beautiful pieces in this section. In ‘Nature and Culture’ which amplifies how we should interact with nature, Ekpe Inyang echoes the need for a break in monologue where actions run parallel to how nature functions with no meeting point. He believes that:
When Nature stands up singing
Culture starts dancing, ringing
her bells of support in rare gratitude
as a conscious change in attitude
so Nature and Culture should ever
remain in great harmony forever.
In ‘The Tree’, Ekpe Inyang delves into personification and the use of the picturesque to draw empathy for the tree. The tree addresses us in a soliloquy:
I
Hear
You sulking
Day and night,
Complaining
About the biting, freezing cold,
About the burning heat, about hunger ….
The tree then reminds us of the services it provides to mankind.
In Part IV: Nature in Turmoil, Ekpe Inyang artistically creates a proscenium ache and allows us to peep into it and get a sense of how the harmonious balance in nature has been disturbed by man! In ‘Great Amazon’ he aptly describes how “the lungs of the earth are systematically destroyed” by “logging, poaching and, now, ravaging fires”. These are key drivers of environmental degradation. The lungs filter air that gets into our bodies through our noses, extract the oxygen we need and get the carbon dioxide from our system to the outside. This is how trees function. They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release the much-needed oxygen. When we destroy the forest through logging and wildfires, we become the desperate environmental child who chops off the branch on which he is sitting.
In ‘Cry of the Woodpecker,’ the woodpecker appeals to man to protect its habitat. Ekpe Inyang uses the first-person plural pronoun “we” to link the woodpecker to man as he calls on man to be careful for the woodpecker’s habitat is also of great importance to man! The concluding lines drive home the point:
…Now let’s all make a sacred place
so we can live in peace;
danger may take us by surprise
If we don’t think as one.
In ‘The Sun Flower,’ Ekpe Inyang looks at the transient nature of living things. The use of heroic couplets reinforces the naturalness of this phenomenon: living things pass away but, as Ekpe Inyang states in the prologue to Part IV, “Left alone, Nature has subtle ways of repairing itself, but with the overwhelming influence of human culture, it is always dressed in scars and fresh wounds that, in turn, expose humans to bitter experiences.”
The link between nature and man is clearly seen in ‘Nature of Nature,’ in which Ekpe Inyang invites us to “understand the nature of nature/the interconnectedness and interdependence” and how that supports our lives.
In the prologue to Part V: Putting it back right, Ekpe Inyang states: “Our increasing understanding of the nature of Nature and the daily experiences of its tastes should motivate and drive us to seek sustainable ways of reversing its currently deteriorating state.”
Many attempts have been initiated by nations in international fora to resolve environmental problems which have gone unresolved and have become ecological issues. Ekpe Inyang takes a cursory look at these fora and frowns at them. In his opinion, they are a waste of resources and, in most cases, exacerbate the environmental problems. The solution may lie in the aphorism “think globally, act locally”. There’s also a need to help other countries to resolve environmental issues.
The best solution, though, is to repay our loans now. For we “didn’t inherit this earth from our ancestors”. We are, in the words of Ekpe Inyang, “debtors to our children, born and unborn”. Let’s refer to ‘Debtors of our children’:
…The debt today we enjoy,
Often so lavishly,
Wastefully and mindlessly,
Is borrowed capital,
The future
We’ve taken as a revolving loan
From our children,
Born and yet unborn.
But we can turn things around. What is needed is collective effort! Ekpe Inyang becomes optimistic about this in ‘Who says we can’t?’ Big issues like HIV, cancer, climate change, renewable energy and environmentally friendly technologies can be resolved. “If we can simply change the idle “can’t”/To a big “can”, /negative thoughts to/Positive individual and collective actions,/Everything, indeed, is possible.” That’s the spirit! Remain positive and collaborate!
We can’t wrap up this piece without taking a look at style. In Tastes of Nature, Ekpe Inyang is not a coterie poet. The ordinary reader can easily understand his poems in this collection. He is the mouthpiece of many things in nature and relies on personification to drive home his point. He engages in an active conversation with nature. In ‘Bats and Caves,’ for example, he addresses the bats directly. Listen to him:
When I hear
the word cave,
I think of you.
But even out of the cave you form a huge sack
hanging from tall trees
as you in your numbers
huddle and cuddle,
occasionally flying about
so, so swiftly in great numbers…
They say in the day you see not, and I
wonder why at night you do so
perfectly, doing such acrobatic feats.
He heaps praises on the bats for their great service to the environment and the healing effect on Mother Earth. This conversational style holds our attention as we hang on to his lips to get the conclusion of his treatise. And we are not disappointed. Like parrots and other animals, bats help in pollination and seed dispersal, guaranteeing the continuity of life.
Ekpe Inyang makes excellent use of the microcosm-macrocosm theory. According to the late Professor John A. Lambo, this theory states that we can best understand the whole in the part, the many in the few and the infinite in the finite. The idea was central to most Greek thought, and especially that of Pythagoras and Plato. The world is the macrocosm, and to understand its intricate web, we have to look at bits of it. Ekpe Inyang selects parts of nature to give us a better taste of Mother Earth. The title of this poetic collection is very apt: Tastes of Nature. Using the plural form of “taste” provides a word picture of various dishes that give a panoramic perspective of Mother Earth. And when we taste all aspects of nature, as it were, we are well-positioned to preserve these recipes for future generations. We then remember the aphorism that we did not inherit this planet from our ancestors; we are borrowing it from our children. And we are under obligation to not only live within the carrying capacity of Mother Earth but bequeath a better home to future generations.
Ekpe Inyang makes effective use of the caesura. This deliberate pause in a poetic line prepares us for reflection and meditation as we anticipate the conclusion. He also makes use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. This style of writing technique captures the natural flow of a character’s extended thought process by bringing many ideas and scenes together in quick succession. This is achieved with perfection in ‘Bats and Caves’. Ekpe Inyang provides us with a description of the habitat of bats, their congregational living style, nutrition, nocturnal nature, navigation by echolocation, and their role in pollination and seed dispersal. The result is admiration for this species of animal.
The prominent foot is iambic. Ekpe Inyang uses this because it is a basic rhythm that’s pleasing to the ear and closely resembles the rhythm of ordinary conversation. This foot allows him to get into the conversational style that he defined. He even names Part III of the collection as The dialogue begins.
He sometimes uses heroic couplets, as seen in the first stanza of ‘Do you see?’ to demonstrate the harmony in nature. Before delving into describing the benefits that we derive from bees in terms of pollination and honey, Ekpe Inyang prepares us for that through the use of caesura. He forces us to see the point and the argument in favour of bees:
…I see
loads
of bees
We pause to observe “loads” of bees as they buffet flowers in search of nectar and pollen, which they use to build combs, produce honey for us, and, of course, pollinate plants. The use of questions heightens our attention to observe nature and draw conclusions! Ekpe Inyang subtly reminds us that we depend directly on nature for survival. Without telling us what to do next, we find ourselves acting to protect Mother Earth.
In the first poem in Part III, ‘Nature and Culture’, Ekpe Inyang makes a rare use of an interesting literary device, namely, the tercet or heroic triplet and the heroic couplets. In the first two stanzas, he uses the tercet and drops to heroic couplets in the remaining three stanzas. The tercet is a group of three lines rhyming together, while the couplet is a group of two lines rhyming together. This reinforces the harmony that is supposed to permeate culture and nature.
The use of picturesque is vivid in ‘The Tree’. The poem is structured like a tree to show the strata of the forest, beginning with the emergent, the canopy, the understorey and the forest floor, and each stratum provides habitat and services to different species in nature. Man is the chief beneficiary of these benefits, yet he complains incessantly! The poem appeals to man to take a detached look at himself and consider supporting the species on which he depends for survival.
Do you remember that Ekpe Inyang was born in the heart of the Korup Rainforest? His first interactions were with nature! He draws a lot of inspiration from the Korup rainforest. He refers to and celebrates the magnificent Renko rock. He is happy reading a “book by Akuren brook”. The clear waters of Akuren bring freshness to his soul, and this is a source of potable water to the local people and a muse to Ekpe Inyang!
I doff my hat to him! Please join me in applause for him!!
