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Title: A Tributary to Servitude
Pages: 81
Publisher: WriteHouse
In Gbadamosi’s debut collection of poems, the poet follows a trajectory that examines the multiplicities of pain that assail the individual and the community, and the attendant psychological corollary of the effects of that agony on the personal and the collective psyche in a dysfunctional state.
Adopting a mellow, rueful voice, the poet begins by examining the genealogy of his pain: “I did not fall from the sky/or sprout from the depths of the sea,” he proclaims in the first poem “Testament.” Having acknowledged the familiarity of his chequered history, Gbadamosi begins to emanate a note of optimism: “But I will be ready for them in a blink/having read the truth in voices of the wild and/garnered further lights for the testament of my soul.” The entire collection becomes a journey in search of that truth—a rather elusive cypher in his country’s political and economic landscape. But Gbadamosi essentially frames this journey as a personal one, a testament for my soul.
The collection captures a kind of linguistic complexity immanent not only in hollow verbosity but in the meanings and innuendos that litter its constantly keening language. The phraseology “a tributary to servitude” reveals the different branches and manifestations of bondage within our national artery, from violence to politics to economy. Each of the collection’s six parts captures the different volumes of pain that comes out of national (and thus personal) dysfunctions, like a mighty river with six major tributaries. The collection’s uncompromising examination of pain is evident in the imagery of its parts: tears, termites, a cradle in shambles, a melody for tragedy, and farewell to arms.
Nothing is ever easy when an individual decides to chart the geography of social and psychological problems and grievances. It becomes even more acute when the origins of that problem are found in the volatile history of his environment. The difficulty of the poet’s search for truth is revealed everywhere in the collection and what becomes apparent is the poet’s feeling of culpability in his own pain and that of his people: “You can sound my heart cryptically too/I, the tributary in their servitude—for I’m eager for the next act . . .”
The guilt incessantly troubles the poet’s psyche. In “Irritations in the Oyster” the guilt is explored with some poetic mastery: “I have danced to man-made tunes/slowly my feet withdraw.” The poem captures the inextricable link between a country’s failings and that of its individual citizens. “My country wobbles/fumbles, tumbles, crumbles . . . /and my waters tumble on.” Amidst the vortex of issues that causes a country to crumble and drag its citizens with it, Gbadamosi tells us that, to the supremely focused iconoclastic mind, these are not ultimately daunting—in his metaphor, these are mere irritations in an oyster—if the will to power of the populace is strong. “A force, magnetic and fanatic, invites free hands to freedom”
Yet the poet is ever confronted by another tributary of his sorrow for his country—violence. In the architecture of violence, there is the implication of chaos, war, and physical domination. Curiously, considering that this collection was written a few years before, a section of the poem, “Wings of Morning,” seems to anticipate the cycle of violence around the ENDSARS protests of 2020:
you murdered three men
built poems on their blood
you murdered nine others
embalmed them in your shrine
The juxtaposition of numbers and the metaphor of violence works to devastating effect: “murdered” “three” “blood” “nine”. Consider the poem, “Prelude to Tears”, where the poet’s search for truth yields nothing but a realisation of the long-running deceit and danger that undergirds everything around him—“if you examine the stories/and force them through a sieve/you will see as I see—/the pot was leaking before it broke.” The discovery of truth is not cathartic, it only leads to an expression of dismay and anguish; in fact, the prelude makes it easy to predict what is to come (The poet clearly understands that every event of violence, pain and privation has long historical precedence). This is why he prepares himself for what is to come in the lines that are once again devastating: “There are no bandages in here/’kerchief I will need you later/for my blood/I will need you later for my blood . . .”
The legacy of violence, both personal and environmental, comes to a head in “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” when the poet lays it squarely on the crass characters that keep the society in bondage—a line of indictments that trails from politicians to religious leaders to the common person riddled with greed. The poem is filled with a surfeit of metaphors, some of which are certainly not well-thought-out—a result, I presume, of the poet’s riotous umbrage. The same deluge of metaphors permeates the Okigbo-esque sequence, “A Melody for Tragedy,” which includes some of the best poems in the entire collection, brimming with prophetic verve and brio. Clearly, Gbadamosi is a poet of attrition, a chronicler and lamenter of man’s worst long-held instincts. Poems like “Black Orchestra” fill the reader with dread regarding its music of war. In the poems “Rain”, “Earth Tremour”, and “Elegy for Union”, the poet tells us that no society sustains the level of mutual hatred and violence in places like Nigeria and survives for too long. The end result will always be war and an incurable schism even after a forced, hard-won union. In the final lines of “Elegy for Union”, a poem that owes much to Okigbo in its rhythms, diction, and continuation of Okigbo’s train of thought in the Path of Thunder, he dramatises the aftermath with knowing insight:
The folly of the general is legendary
for he mutters at every tea party:
it was a war well fought;
this democracy, my brother
leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Gbadamosi is a poet who is not only continually aware of the weight of the past—a situation he often finds no way to escape—but also of the insistent pull of the past on the present. Sometimes he considers it a weight; at other times, he considers it a necessity that must be taken in its stride in order to be better prepared for the future. In the same despairing tone of “Wings of Morning”, he reaches for that nostalgic weight, which is primal to human nature: “Life begins at dawn/when the wrong dew sheaths/the green spear by the bank of the stream/your head must wrestle with the mists . . .”
This is not a perfect collection. There are bouts of inattentive phrasing which confuses rather than capturing careful emotion or haunting image. What especially prevails above all in Gbadamosi’s poetry is the urgency of his voice and his keen awareness of the covert and overt cataclysms that have given rise to the painful concerns of the present. In light of these, we find a poet whose words are worth listening to.
About the Author
Chimezie Chika is a culture journalist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He currently resides in Nigeria.
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