Sule Emmanuel Egya
What role could poetry play in a continent such as Africa bedevilled by critical social problems largely caused by misgovernance? In what ways might poets keep their sanity while confronted by these social problems? These questions might have inspired the title poem “Gone Bananas” in John Ngong Kum Ngong’s new collection. In this poem, the poet-persona writes of his friend who
has wholly gone bananas over the need for a song that keeps the mind in the cage, away from all state affairs and bent ways of leaders (3-7)
To attempt to keep one’s mind from “state affairs,” for poets who are naturally of intense emotions, would amount to taming a raging sea. Poets are poets, in other words, because they are incapable of being quiet not only about “state affairs” and the “bent ways of leaders,” but also about anything at all that can stir their emotions. They are also poets because, more than anyone else, they are what the new historicist scholar Stephen Greenblatts calls “brilliant improvisers” (15) endowed with the ability to invent a marvellous language. I mean they use words we already know in a new way. The poet Ngong in this collection asserts himself as one incapable of being quiet, one whose mind cannot be “in a cage,” after all he is endowed with the intense emotions, but also with a marvellous language to convey his emotions.
Gone Bananas is a collection of forty-four short poems that are as brilliantly lyrical as they are socially engaged. A unique feature of these poems I would like to draw your attention to is that they do not shout their social engagement. They do not try to spoil your day with chronicles of bizarre “state affairs” that will leave you grumpy. That is because they are not the handiwork of an amateur poet with the tendency to create more noise than beauty. They are instead the startlingly lyrical lines of a mature poet whose every line, every word, in fact every syllable is pruned and neatly fixed in the right place to construct the image-house of poetic discourse. Yes, I think of this poet, Ngong, as a master bricklayer who builds images that allow us to see the consequences of the “bent ways of leaders” and yet soothe us with the sheer brilliance of poetic rendition.
The poems are thematically varied. You will encounter in them this poet’s view about the art of poetry, about finding oneself, about the courage to live in these perilous times, about love and bonding, and so on. The poems are also about wounded souls, about those who wound souls, about the pain of countries sinking, about those who plunder and sink countries, about
turning earth into hell, and so on. The poems are incisive and critical in some cases. In other cases, they are soothing and comforting. And yet in other cases, they are tickling and exciting.
Poems such as “Come,” “Turn this Bend with Me,” and “Move On” invite troubled souls to commune with the poet-persona on how to pull through the perilous times. The strong and assured voice of the poet-persona in “Move On” to the troubled one says:
I will not give up though
in these moments of fear.
Covid deceit and storm
have misgivings planted
in the heart of my soul
to kill my self-esteem.
The song I love to sing
clots in my mouth each time
Carrion walks in head raised
in this season of death. (15-24)
The allusion to COVID-19 in this excerpt suggests that this poem might have been written during the pandemic, a period that could best be described as a “season of death.” Aside from the controlled rhythms of the lines above, which indicate a composed mind in times of crisis, the message of this poem points to the poet’s philosophy of poetry. Poetry, in this poet’s estimation, is a relatable craft – both as a signifying rendition that is accessible, and in the ways in which it relates with the social realities of people in society. This poet, in other words, writes in an accessible, lyrical, touching style about real people who live around him, with whom he interacts, and on behalf of whom he feels compelled to poetise. He writes as one of them, writing himself into their lives, and constructing hope for them. In the last lines of the second stanza of this poem, he admonishes them to “Move on watching the stars / dance in a darkened sky / their flame dim not blown out” (12-14). The people’s resilience must be like the stars’ who no matter the darkness of the sky would not “blow out.” People, in other words, must learn to endure crises the way the stars survive a dark sky. The sense of courage and resilience one gets in “Move On” is, in my thinking, pervasive in the entire collection.
The optimism that Ngong constructs in this new volume might be not only its strength but also its weakness. It could be misconstrued as suggesting that people should survive by fighting their own demons particularly in times of existential crises, which some of the poems suggest are caused by the “bent ways of leaders.” One might not be wrong, therefore, to think that the collection fails to offer the possibility of resistance. Or, if it does, it is rather in a muted manner that could fail to inspire. Regarding this point, the poem “I Urge You” is instructive. The poet-persona advises younger ones to soldier on, to “Struggle with the monster in you” (6). Fighting back is primarily about fighting oneself, not fighting them. It is about struggling
with oneself to survive in a dog-eat-dog clans” (20). If, as one might conjecture, the poet is interested in people having to deal with their own personal attitudes rather than confronting those who despoil their land, then the collection misses the opportunity to inspire a powerful sense of political resistance, which is needed in, of all places, Cameroon, the poet’s country.
But this weakness should not detract us from enjoying the collection. It might indeed not be any real weakness since the poetics of dramatizing the “bent ways of leaders,” which the collection does quite well, is itself a form of political resistance. In terms of form, the collection is a stellar structure of lucid images, of controlled metrical lines, and of short stanzas that give the poems a hymnal quality. As with every artistic work, our attention should be drawn more to the form than the content. Ngong’s poetics is absolutely worthy of the attention of every intelligent reader of a poem. Readers, I strongly believe, would have the best poetic experience with Gone Bananas the way I have had.
Sule Emmanuel Egya,
Writer & Professor of African Literature and Environmental Humanities, Department of English,
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria.
