Omotosho: Trouble And Abiku Electricity supply

Wanderer electricity. It is the same
electricity (coming in the guise of
ECN, NEPA, PHNC, DISCOS, etc) who
dies and returns again and again to
plague the motherland –Yoruba
belief and the belief of other
Nigerians as well.
FOR a long time, Mr. Trouble opened
his mouth and he could not close it.
He was looking at Alaba his cleverer
than thou assistant and the piece of
paper he had thrust into his hand.
You presented this as a lecture at the
Adekunle Ajasin University? Not just
to the members of the Department
of English but the whole university?
You told them that the poems Abiku
by Wole Soyinka and JP Clark are
about electricity supply in Nigeria,
nothing to do with babies born to
die and be reborn? Are you crazy?
Alaba looked coolly at Mr. Trouble
and smiled. Why don’t you read the
poems instead of harassing me?
Read the poems yourself. But I have
read them, alone, together and then
alone. Where does electricity come
into these poems?
Alaba felt rather worried. I treasure
our relationship, Dafida. He called Mr.
Trouble his first name only on
special occasions. Otherwise he was
Mr. Trouble to him. Dafida, I treasure
our relationship and I do wish to
keep it. But you come to African
literature with pre-conceived ideas,
ideas that must dig into so called
African cultures, African folklores,
African pre-colonial ideas. You do not
wish to even concede that African
poets could be speaking to our
contemporary situation by using
ancient symbols. Clark and Soyinka
are the epileptic nature of our
electricity supply and they name the
phenomenon ‘abiku’. In your far
away Barbados you read the poems
and what do we have next? You dig
into colonial histories written by
whitemen out to satisfy their
fetishism of the African ordinariness
and before we know it there is some
baby known as ‘abiku’. What could
be more ‘abiku’ than our electricity
supply?
So, in the 1960s, electricity was
already behaving erratically, is that
what you are saying? That’s not what
I am saying. Poets are prophets and
prophecy is poetry. These poets
were seeing into our future and
were already calling our electricity
supply ‘abiku’. Are you denying our
poets the art of prophecy? I find it
difficult to accept your reading of the
poems. That reading is so mundane,
so ordinary, so down to earth it
denies poetry its high faluting
possibilities. Ok, ok please biko, hold
your brakes. Hear the first stanza of
the Soyinka poem: “In vain your
payments cast/Charmed circles at my
office./I am Abiku, calling for the first/
And repeated time.”
You lie Alaba. You have changed
two words ‘payments’ for ‘bangles’
and ‘office’ for ‘feet’. Alaba smiled
again. Bangles are symbols of
wealth, so they could be used to
settle debts. What the poet is saying
that the electricity supply people are
not going to be deceived by the
regular payments that Nigerians
make for unsupplied electricity.
Rather, they would not be given
anything in return, no matter how
long they stay in the offices of the
electricity corporation. Listen to the
first part of Clark’s own Abiku:
“Coming and going these several
seizures/Do stay out on the baobab
tree/Follow where you please your
kindred spirits/If indoors is not
enough for you/. . . No longer
bestride the threshold/But step in
and stay. Again, pleading with the
service to come in and illumine
inside our houses.
Again, you have changed words in
the poem. The word is ‘several
seasons’ not ‘several seizures’. You
cannot alter or change words in a
work of art as you please. That’s not
allowed. And anyway, the poets are
still alive. We can go and ask them if
they were in fact talking about ECN
or NEPA or PHCN or the new DISCOS
when they wrote their poems.
Who is being pedestrian now,
Dafida, me or you? You want to go
and ask these two busy poets about
something as mundane as the
meaning of a poem they wrote
donkey years ago? Please spare me.
So, you will go to Abeokuta and ask
Professor Soyinka if he meant
electricity when he said Abiku? You
will go to the islands in the delta to
ask Professor Clark was he really
thinking of NEPA when he wrote
Abiku?
And if they both tell you no, they
were not thinking of ECN or NEPA,
what would that tell you? Would it
tell you that I am wrong to think that
they are talking of electricity? Or will
it tell you that you win the argument
with me? Will it tell all future critics
that they have no freedom to
interpret works of art as they see fit?
You cannot even see the fun in
seasons and seizures and ceasures,
all to do with something stopping
and another starting.
Even if you discourage me, I will go
and visit the professors. And I will ask
them questions and the question of
Abiku will be one of the questions
that I will ask them. It is worth
visiting them for. You think that I
don’t know anything about Africa. I
even know more about African than
you do. Oh yes, you know all the
things about Nefertiti and Egypt and
hieroglyphics and the rest of things
from the tombs. I want someone
who knows something about here
and now, what’s happening to us,
what our poets and prophets and
professors are telling us about the
rising of the sun in the morning and
its setting in the evening and what
we have lost or gain between the
two incidents?
Alaba, life is more than getting and
spending. We need to pause and
meditate, take in the air and smell
the dew, wet our feet with the first
rains and seek to walk through
raindrops without getting wet.
And without using an umbrella or
sweeping the rain drops into the
gutter? Those are fancy things to do
but we have party-stopping things
happening to us. We are left in the
dark and can do nothing to heal our
wounds. We have no balm to calm
our fears.
Alaba, these also shall pass. We shall
find their solutions without turning
our literatures upside down. So,
please go back to the university and
tell them abiku is not about
electricity, please