THE POET AS A VERITABLE SON AND SCION OF THE WORD: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL REVIEW OF MUBARAK OLADOSUS MIND MANTRA By Prof.

R. Adebayo Lawal, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria

A Review of Mubarak Oladosus Mind Mantra on the occasion of the Public Presentation of the Book in the University of Ilorin Auditorium on Saturday, the 6th of April, 2013.
PREAMBLE: OPENING THE DOOR TO THE MUSES MIND Mind Mantra, Mubarak Oladosus first literary brainchild, is a voluminous 114-page collection of 92 seminal poems dripping with palpable passion which oscillates fairly judiciously between pain and pleasure, anger and laughter, despair and hope, commendation and condemnation, all bonded thematically by the dream motif. The alliterative title foreshadows a metaphysical sensibility and promises a profound spiritual ambience, since the human mind is at once the seat of the ego and the super-ego, the locus of passion and cognition. The word mantra deepens the spiritual import into both religious and metapragmatic realms. After Opening this metaphysical door symbolised by the title, I gained further preliminary insight into Oladosus musing soul through the Foreword which is a part-quote from the Glorious Quran (Ch. 26: 224 227). This chapter, aptly entitled The Poets, proposes an eclectic and comprehensive poetics, a literary theory which can be summatively regarded as the nugget of the substance of all existing theories of literature and criticism. The Almighty Allah cautions undiscerning humanity in concise, precise and eternally memorable words: And the poets It is those straying in Evil Who follow them. Seest thou not That they wander distracted In every valley And they say What they practise not.

If the Almighty Allah had stopped just here, then poetry would have been considered to be a decadent, self-indulgent and evil art. But He proceeded to an exemplary exemption and antithesis to the foregoing: Except those who believe, Work righteousness, Engage much In the remembrance of Allah And defend themselves only after They have been unjustly attacked And soon will the unjust assailants Know what vicissitudes their affairs will become. Therefore, beyond literary mastery and excellence in form and function, including didacticism, a spiritually committed poet, and indeed any creative artist seeking eternal relevance, must in addition, be a morally worthy model and a spiritually wealthy mentor. This explains why the Almighty Allah provides a pointed exception to self-serving, vainglorious artists. This implies that poetry and indeed all creative engagements are acts and arts of piety. As such, the poet is not just a pious exemplar but also a devout rememberer and reminder of Allah and His countless signs. Poetry being also a potent instrument of avant-gardism, the poet cannot be anything less than a vanguard of justice. Poets must therefore deploy their art and crafts for struggling and striving both proactively and retroactively against all brands of injustice. Using this quranic poetics as a critical template for evaluating Oladosus Mind Mantra, it would appear immediately that the poet has set for himself and indeed all creative artists a tall, herculean and somewhat impossible order. However, in the first 2-poem section of the collection (captioned Intro, which I interprete as simultaneously signifying Introduction and "Introspection), the poet implicitly acknowledges his short-comings but not after introducing another philosophical perplexity which is at once metapragmatic and phenomenological. In the opening poem I am word which I consider as Oladosus signature oeuvre, the poet christens himself word, son of word and smith of words in reclining scabbards who is no Socrates, no Wole (Soyinka), but me and me. Right from the outset, therefore, the poet craves individuality of voice and vision, imploring the Only One to allow his blissful dream come true! in spite of his limitations as a dreamer, wordsmith and son of word. The metapragmatic can be subsumed within the phenomenological and the former would serve to illuminate and elucidate the latter. As recorded in the Bibles Book of Genesis 1 : 1, in the beginning was the word, the word was with God and God was the Word. The word represents Allahs creative command, and everything created from Allahs prototypal word ( theword), i.e. His divine command, is a word, a mere manifestation and instantiation of the word. 2

The Primal Power and Original Energy behind the creative command is The Word, which is Allah Himself. In its characteristic function as the Last Testament that is saddled with the task of resolving contradictions and clarifying confusions in earlier over-revised scriptures, the Glorious Quran explains this metapragmatic and phenomenological perplexity in fewer but picturesque and eternally memorable words: They say: God has begotten a son Glory be to Him. Nay, To Him belongs all That is in heavens and on earth. Everything renders worship to Him To Him is due the primal origin Of the heavens and the earth When He decrees a matter, He says to it: Be And it is. (Quran: 116 117) In essence, therefore, we are all, in metaphysical and phenomenological terms, products of Allah, through His original word bestowed on our progenitors, Adam and Eve, and down in a descending order to their countless offspring and successors to the present generation of humanity. But in a physical and more immediate sense, the poet, Mubarak Oladosu is son of word in a multiple perspective, the father being a trained teacher, a popular Islamic preacher and a language scholar of repute; in sum, a veritable word-worker! Furthermore, the mother is also a trained teacher, a language specialist and as the poet nostalgically affirms, in the poem In Cairo with Maa, I remember, holding your hand on the street of Cairo Was that me dreaming of the magic of holding a biro? You taught me rhymes and read from story books You played cassette of poems of children classes and

groups

Mubarak Oladosu is thus a veritable son and scion of the word in physical, intellectual and spiritual terms with Allah as the Beginning and End of the verbal continuum.

THEMATIC PREOCCUPATION OF THE POET AS SAINT, SINNER AND SAGE

Mubarak Oladosu presents in Mind Mantra an intense introspective search through lonely, passionate and painful dreams into the inner meaning and essence of human existence. In phenomenological terms, life is not a stage but a tale, a dream, the true meaning of which is not the outer material appearances in events and history, but their rational essences and, more importantly, their spiritual quintessences.

The poet raises passionately and philosophically, through burning imagery and an eclectic diction, the state and status of man in the unfathomable and interminable void of time and space. In so doing, however, he tacitly and implicitly acknowledges the constraints imposed by the biology, psychology and sociology of his person and personality, as well as the history and texture of his education and general upbringing. Mind Mantra is sectioned into six parts, namely Intro, Devotion, Reminiscence, Musing, Forlong Songs , and Defiance, which I do not perceive as being structured to reflect thematic or thought development/progression. Apart from the first introductory section, each of the other five parts portrays despair and hope as the two inseparable colours of life, with pessimism, unfortunately, seeming to gain an upper hand. In the introductory poem entitled Ilorin, the poet situates his poetic mission within the strengths and shortcomings of the ancient city of his upbringing, where saints, sinners and sages abound. In the (con)fraternity of the pen, there is telepathic affinity and individual poetic concerns often converge on the altar of artistic altruism. And so it is with Ilorin in Mubarak Oladosus Mind Mantra and in Adebayo Lawals Music of the Muezzin (in press) in which I portray Ilorin as: Ancient city of renowned iron-grinders Confluence of three conquering cultures The first, ancestral The second, occidental The last, oriental Mubarak Oladosu, an eminent product of this trimorphous cultural confluence, has drunk copiously from the three corresponding streams of wisdom, which imbue him with a balanced sagely and saintly vision which, however, does not preclude him, like all sages, saints, and even prophets, from being a sinner. The sage in the poet ponders in Under the heat of life on his loneliness in his private room of introspection as he soliloquises on divine dictatorship and terrestrial tyrannies which constrain and limit human hopes and aspirations. However, in Let not the rain beat me, he presents rain as symbolising Gods blessings in abundance. In Stale sanity, just like in a few other politically motivated poems in the collection, Oladosu lampoons the inept and deceitful leadership whose Oral dreams do not go beyond the mouth. Such leaders as symbolised by Jona, This Luck in This President, is he ours?, lack any clear concept and vision of human development and their befuddled thoughts hardly transcend materialism, graft and rabid self-indulgence. Borrowing from Jungian psychology, the poet lambasts these rulers and ruiners of men and matters as having no clean dream of a noble and edifying future, advising them to always sleep on clean thoughts so as to dream clean and big. He laments rather despondently but quite pungently: I heard This luck Can bring no good 4

He looted our treasury To secure his tenancy In Gods of naira, self-serving rulers, as is the bane of Nigeria, are portrayed as: Sacred mad cows The gods of naira Spreading their disease In brigandage and terror These rulers are thus portrayed as being afflicted with the mad cow disease which is as contagious as it is destructively dehumanising. In Decline the hug, the poet presents his visionary resolve not to sip from the madness infested mug of corruption, preferring rather to stand tall and be the different being. The poet-sage carries the political satire into the international arena as he condemns the now proverbial arab-jewish rivalry and internecine war of attrition in the poem with the shrewd and scathing title of Semites as termites. Similarly, the poet employs tongue-twisting pun to project another related message, i.e. that political celebrities and monstrosities have in common the lust for power and privilege and this he has achieved dexterously by exploring and exploiting the phonotactic affinities and possibilities inherent in their names: Before Obama had bin The lads had bin And they all werent sad of their damn Hosni Barak is one: Ehud Mubarak is two Obama bin Ladin Saddam Husseini Obama They carry the Muskets of what? Do they carry the muskets of their own infamy? My rhetorical question begs the poets own summative rhetorical question. As the poets struggles to reconcile vanity with immortality in his existentialist search for meaning and sense out of life, he condemns in Poisoned Petals the on-going democratisation and liberalisation of sex as an act and as a cultural symbol. He decries the materialisation and carnalisation of love as a token of modernism and neo-liberalism. In the same vein, in Living without living, the poet survives for a world in haste and waste, a life in a mad rush, a rat-race in which every-one is becoming a slave to the pocket, sentenced to the market: No time to dream my days in cradle And fantasize ahead if Ill have a coffin? What is this life if Im slave to my pocket; I have no plan to plan for rest?

In his self-portrayal as poet-saint, Oladosu employs the prayer motif in a few of his poems, including I keep vigil in Sujud, to distance himself artistically and philosophically from court artists and royal 5

stooges who pander to the whims and caprices of their patrons, preferring instead to keep sujud in the ranks of divinely inspired poets fired by the noble metaphysical tenets and precepts enshrined in the Glorious Quran. His poetic thirst is assuaged by bottled up passion On the lane of divinely sanctioned mission Nevertheless, the poet is but human and, as such, pessimistic suggestions can bug and nag his turbulent mind. Beneath the searingness of his social and political satire and the lyricism of his moral and spiritual lampoon lies a turbulent ocean of personal pains and agonies. The water in Mubarak Oladosus soul appears clear, clean, serene and refreshing but the whirl-wind of human existence pelts occasional pebbles into it. It is then we are confronted with ripples of agony. In Bonne? we encounter the poet striving to take the reader into the intimate privacy of his agonising rumination over unfulfilled dreams of love and belonging. He thus re-enacts his biological agony in Familiar knock as he invites the reader to his troubled and turbulent world within. But when his seemingly imperceptible audience seem not to empathise enough, he rejects in why cast away my dreams? all greek gifts in all their ramifications however alluring and tantalising they appear. In Loiter in life, the poet presents himself as a lonesome loiterer stranded in lifes dark and dingy cul-de-sac. At the height of the poets towering pessimism comes death-wish, a poetic euthanasia encapsulated in the solemn poem entitled Stranded notes. One then wonders whether the personal philosophy that powers the poet and fires his vision is largely stoic (teaching indifference to pain or pleasure) or epicurean (preaching death as honourable escape from pain and sorrow), in spite of the enormous Islamic influence on his personality and poetry. The poet, after all written and sung, is but flesh and bone. Nonetheless, the apart from ending on an optimistic edifying note, Mind Mantra is not all grim despair and searing satire. There are moments of hilarious laughter and homely banter as captured in This President, is he ours?, If you were a star and Living without living respectively. Here are a few excerpts: (i) No time to fart, fart for fun And watch dear friend frown and laugh (ii) We ask, This Good Is of what use? He is good for his ganders But are we drought-stricken geese There are also cheering moments of audacious and defiant optimism which underscore the immutability of the human soul struggling eternally across Time, Space and Circumstance. I cannot dieand Death I dare you, which both implicate the immortality of the poet as word engraved in the soul of time, represent a bold defiance of death with a tone of cryptic finality reminiscent of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. I cannot die ought to have been the closing glee of the collection from both thematic and structural perspectives of sequencing and organisation. It is a master-piece that towers 6

above many of the other poems for the profundity of its vision, solemnity of its atmosphere and elegance of its style. SOURCES, INFLUENCES AND ECHOES A discussion of sources, influences and echoes in literary criticism can be situated within the theory of intertestuality, or, as I have been trying to develop in recent times, a theory of verbal continuity in phenomenological and metapragmatic terms. The issues of literary source, influence and echo should be located far away from plagiarism because while the latter is uncredited lifting, the former involves creative reconstruction of ideas and materials in the light of a freshly unique vision. Mubarak Oladosu has tapped freely but creatively from the three streams of wisdom Western (Judeo-Christian), Eastern (Islamic) and traditional (Yoruba oratural arts) to which he has been exposed. We can conveniently assess these literary sources, influences and echoes in terms of both the form and content of his poetry within the literary rubric of allusion and the pragmatic concept of implicature broadly classified into the three streams of wisdom just identified. (a) Islamic allusions and implicatures: pervade the whole collection and they provide the broad philosophical anchor for coming to easy terms with the poets thematic preoccupation: (i) The prayer motif (e.g. Prayer for my pen, Cupid prayer, etc) (ii) A whole section of the collection is dedicated to Devotion (iii) The concepts of pilgrimage, ankabut (a qurnic chapter), halal and haram (Islamic dos and donts, respectively), fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence), etc. (iv) Diction, e.g. sujud, Qurn b) Western (Judeo-Christian) allusions and implicatures: These are informed by his formal training western literary traditions, canons and forms. (i) Use of regular rhyme scheme (e.g. in Happy Birthday, friend) (ii) Reference to literary characters (e.g. Caesar in Shakespeares Julius Caesar) (iii) References to classical literature and philosophy, e.g. Socrates, Cupid, etc (iv) Allusion to western authors and their works, e.g. The poem A seed for all seasons echoes Robert Bolts classic play, A Man for all Seasons, while Death I dare you subtly implicates John Donnes Death be not proud. (c) Yoruba cultural allusions: These allusions attest to the deep-rootedness of the poet in the Yoruba traditions and culture, especially the oratural arts as evident in: (i) Yoruba proverbs/idioms in directly translated as well as creatively reconstructed forms either in part or full e.g. son of word; of what good is the (orogbo) nut you offer (in Why cart away my dreams?); Ekuro it was that named herself, and me her Ewa)

(d) Other influences include the social and political events in Nigeria and Egypt to which the poet was a sensitive witness, e.g. the death of Abacha and the experiences shared by the poet with his parents in Cairo as vividly captured in When leaders die and In Cairo with Maa respectively. All these varying and polymorphous sources, influences and echoes can be employed to map the profound and robust experiences that have served as the deep ideational and stylistic fountain from which Mind Mantra had sprung to life.

THOUGHTFLOW IN INK-FLOW: THE POETS STYLISTIC RESOURCES

A close examination of the schemes and tropes deployed by Mubarak Oladosu in the creative portrayal and projection of his thematic concerns would easily confirm his sonship and scionship of the word. He has deployed words like swords unsheathed from reclining scabbards. Beginning with literary tropes, he has wielded and applied anthromorphic, synaesthetic as well as concrete metaphors to convey his message loudly but laconically. For instance, the poet has deployed vivid imagery in the form of concrete metaphors to portray his internal biological agony so that the reader can empathise with him and feel as he feels. Other metaphor types pervade the whole collection. For instance, in I keep vigil in sujud, we have Fates get fermented, He offers a new wine, You swam with swines and watered by bottled up passion, among several others here and elsewhere. Beyond the metaphorisation of experience, Oladosu has been able to judiciously blend sense with sound in a bid to harmonise both medium and message .Of all the stylistic resources at his disposal, the poet stands out as a master of alliterative pun and phonotactic rhythm which jointly cut across the whole collection, e.g.only car carcasses are calm (inWay to Lagos); A list of in-laws and outlaws (inOutlawed pictures); no time to fart, fart for fun (alliterative onomatopoeia, in Livingwithout living; we fast but you are fastidious (in Cancer II) etc Next in significance in terms of stylistic distinctiveness are the pointed and refreshing coinages/neologisms which lend individuality to the voice and vision of the poet. These include Fullish, atheistabad senilise and queendom, among others. Closely related to coinages is the use of proverbs, anti-proverbs/neo-proverbs as well as anti-idioms/neo-idioms to jolt and startle us into fresh sensibilities, e.g. (i) A tree may not make a forest But a seed makes endless seasons (A seed for all seasons) (ii After all done and said (Bush burning)

Other characteristic devices include polyphonic prose, (e.g. in she said her name was love) and the use of syntax to create rhythm and build up suspense, as in the classic case of If you were a star

CONCLUDING REMARKS
I must hasten to state that 92 poems spanning 110 pages in a single collection, not an anthology, is an ambitious over-flow, if not an outright overkill. With the right sieving and the inevitable drafting and redrafting in the process of self-revision, it would be possible to distill at least two distinct collections restructured both thematically and technically from this present volume. This revision would also serve to free a few of the poems from the muscularity of rhythm imposed by end rhymes through which meaning is sometimes sacrificed by the luxury of medium. A few mechanical infelicities of punctuation and grammar would also have to be addressed and redressed. I would like to conclude this review by stating unequivocally that the poet ,as a soaring son and scion of the word, has successfully dared death both in the maverick, irrepressible Kutian sense and in the broadest phenomenological perspective. This he has attained through the deployment of the rich and robust cultural and linguistic resources at his disposal. The review now turns full circle as we end on the spiritual note with which we started: May the fountain Of the poets pen Never run dry May the pen Gather neither dust Nor rust Amens

THANK YOU