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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 413-417 Uche Peter Umez, Dark through the Delta. Owerri: Eduedy, 2004; x+40 pp; ISBN: 9783714600 Charles Lock's insightful account of the activism and distinctive prose style of Ken Saro-Wiwa, "Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Pollution of English", contains a citation of Saro-Wiwa's prison poetry that may well be a pivotal passage in understanding his appraisal of the Ogoni situation as well as his own fate as his end drew near: Ogoni! Ogoni! // Ogoni is the land / The people Ogoni / The Agony of trees dying / In ancestral / Streams polluted weeping / Filth into murky rivers / It is the poisoned air / Coursing the luckless lungs / Of dying children / Ogoni is the dream // Breaking the looping chain / Around the drooping neck / Of a shell-shocked land. (qtd. in Lock 335). The temptation is understandably urgent to endow the above words with the gravity usually associated with a dying man's words. Awaiting trial and execution in prison, Saro-Wiwa may have offered here a distillation of his thinking on the lot that awaits him as a person and the Ogoni as a people. The movement of his thoughts is from sheer dependency to hope. The pollution of the English word "agony" permeates both the land and the people, all echoing in agony; indeed, the homophone derived from sounds from different languages — one African, the other English — functions to suggest the perpetuity of suffering by foregrounding a misleading inherent interconnectedness between "Ogoni" and "agony." But in final prophetic lines suggestive of the murderer's gibbet on which he would soon hang, Saro-Wiwa equally evokes Ogoni as a dream of eventual triumph. [end page 413] However, almost ten years after the death of Saro-Wiwa the title of a recently published volume of poetry from the Niger Delta, Dark Through the Delta, reveals that that dream still remains just what it is: a dream. Uche Peter Umez's Dark Through the Delta is essentially a threnody. Like most poets of his generation, Umez is primarily concerned with the enduring social ills that characterize the Nigerian national life. Indeed his models are apparently the Old Testament prophets consumed by a passionate concern with social injustice and the miserable lot of the poor. He sheds a powerful but compassionate light on the many inadequacies of the national life that threaten to make Nigeria a pariah nation. The poem, "Among the Ruins," tells the "tear-wrenching tale" of the wastage of human life by the representative insensitivity of the Nigerian leadership (2); "Riot in Lagos" dwells on the abortion of dreams of democracy and the ruthless suppression of protests against injustice by a tyrannical recourse to violence (3); if "The Beggar's Ditty" subtly indicates the abiding presence of corruption in the national experience (4); "Kudos to the Heroic Looters," deals not only with the characteristic misappropriation of public funds but also the cynical exaltation of the looters (1) just as "Spin of Fortune" (32) and "Politicks" (33) comment on the systematic impoverishment of the masses. In "Season of Election" (34) and "Bloody Race" (35) Nigerian elections are presented as awful beastial contestations for power in the primordial jungle where the art of statecraft, politics, degenerates to polytricks. The examples are legion; the portrait is total and gloomy but always unmistakably Nigerian. In Uche Peter Umez's poetry, the varying snapshots of the national life systematically add up to a coherent and telling enveloping vision. However, Umez's special focus on the Niger Delta is both keen and sustained. "Glimpses of 90s," placed just before the title poem, "Dark Through the Delta" identifies "corruption," "poverty" and "oppression" as the distinctive features of the nation in the 1990s. The poem also recalls three dates that constitute the pre-eminent milestones in the country's history in the decade in question. The first date quite significantly is the date of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa: "Nov. 10, 1995 / What fatal flaw spurred on to death's lock / Orpheus of the oppressed Delta stock? (7). Moreover, beyond offering a general reflection on the incarceration that is the abiding lot of the activist, "Caged" (27) makes oblique allusions to Saro-Wiwa's experiences: On the drab floor like drained refugees / Some sprawl, others huddle up, / Spirits defiant still, against / The grimy and sweaty wall … // Perhaps if the West growls loud / enough a measly few would / be spared from death. (27) [end page 414] Umez certainly alludes to the historical failure of the Commonwealth Heads of State meeting at Auckland in November 1995 to intervene effectively to save Saro-Wiwa and his eight co-defendants, a failure numbered among the organization's most crucial. "Dark through the Delta," though, is of course, the poet's most sustained meditation on the lot of the Niger Delta. The poem is a shirring evocation of the mood of continuing cynical despoliation. The first three stanzas of the poem in painting a haunting scene of utter decay and abandonment depict a way of life, a civilization, that is virtually being wiped out: I see the canoes all cracked / heaped up debris / like the scant ashy houses on the shore; // nets frayed and flung away / like tattered clothes; // axes, hoes, sickles and cutlasses / neck-deep in mud / and rusty with neglect. (8) Flared out of existence, life recedes, and the sombre lack of human presence marks the highpoint of the devastation of a people, genocide. In the next two stanzas, the focus in on oil flaring on the land, the river and the sky, Umez's apocalyptic vision of the obliteration of an entire ecosystem: the river languid with grime, / the farms in barren furrows / and flint-hard; // sky up, soot-flecked clouds / and preying kites / hovering / above that noxious flare … hovering / darkly. (8) Umez's own reading of the text of the "burgeoning pollution" draws attention to "the intricate machinery of oil greed" (8). It is, however, precisely in the poet's failure to engage fully with the intricacy of this machinery that sets the ideological limits of the work. Dwelling on the failure of the Commonwealth to intervene meaningfully in the Saro-Wiwa case, Lock points in the direction of the relentless pressures of the globalizing economy (338). Citing Ken Wiwa a year after Saro-Wiwa's death, Lock remarks: The executions of 10 November 1995 drew the world's attention to the scandals of Ogoni in ways reserved for martyrdom. Yet as Ken Wiwa reflected one year later, in November 1996, though many promises were made, and noble intentions voiced, little has changed. Shell has continued its propaganda campaign, not — one must insist — only on its own behalf but on behalf of the western world, that civilization which has always built its foundations on exploitation. It is too easy to blame Shell's [end page 415] managers and shareholders; it is more salutary to acknowledge that everyone living in a developed society benefits, materially, from Shell. (337) Frantz Fanon had earlier written: "European nations sprawl. Ostentatiously opulent" (26), remarking that that opulence was however scandalous having come "directly from the soil and from the subsoil" of the underdeveloped world (76). In Umez's evocation of the polarities between Africa and the West, "Of the West and Africa," this perspective is surprisingly lacking for a poet concerned about "the intricate machinery of oil greed." This lack of ideological mediation in Umez's representation of international politics and economics has a corollary in his representation of the national politics of oil. Technically, Uche Peter Umez is not from the Niger Delta. For hailing from Obiakpu in the Ohaji/Egbema Local Government Area of Imo State, he is Igbo rather than Ogoni, Okirika, Degema, Brass, Opobo. His geographical location in the map of Nigeria hence foregrounds the politics at the heart of cartographic practice in the country hitherto unexplored. Under General Obasanjo's military regime (1976—1979) in a punitive cartographic project, some of the oil-producing areas in the Igbo-speaking South East had been excised and placed in Rivers State. Some of Umez's Egbema kith and kin were dislocated by arbitrary lines on a map, aimed at marginalizing further the Igbo-speaking South East that was at the heart of the Biafran rebellion. In Obasanjo's current democratic dispensation, the national discourse was for long dominated by impassioned contestations on whether oil producing areas in Igbo land, like those in the Niger Delta, should be beneficiaries of the Niger Delta Development Commission. Dark Through the Delta does not quite lead us through the intricacies of Nigerian oil politics. Umez's demonstration instead is that, in spite of ideologically inspired lines drawn on maps, oil-producing communities in the "Niger Delta area" are victims of the same ecological degradation and exploitation and so speak in syllables of dolor, articulating a degree of suffering that transcends arbitrary boundaries. The poet's diagnosis of the ailing body politic lays the full burden of frustrated nationhood on the leadership of the country. Nigerian leaders are as selfish as they are greedy and insensitive; they aspire to perpetuate their tenacious and feverish hold on power. In "Giantitis, or the Afflicted," the groans of the nation under misrule are set in relief: "the Giant grovels / under the constrictions of misrule"(10); and in "No Honey Flows Here" the poet presents a dismal society incompatible with an oil rich country, a creation of an irresponsible leadership: [end page 416] Where oil streams rich in some villages / while the indigenes languish in soot and sickness // where esteemed lords hoard public wealth / even as the people groan in acerbic anguish // where those chosen to lift the lamp of hope / create gloom of ghosts and ghouls everywhere // no honey flows here… / just the undying bitterness of a land shackled. (10) Typically, on the other hand, poets, martyrs, the dehumanized poor masses are in the salvation army, embodying the undying virtues capable of redeeming humankind. Thus, if the poet laments the lack of Nigerian equivalents of "Mandela, Nyerere, Neto, Lumumba in this land" (15), there are poems dedicated to Christopher Okigbo, (Steve Biko), Gani Fawehinmi whose will to persecution and even self-crucifixion the poet exalts as the ultimate redeeming grace; their readiness to lay down their lives for the consummation of "the idea" saves the poet from despondency. Throughout the collection, then, Umez consistently demonstrates the possibility of extracting a harvest of beauty even from anguish. The final four poems of Dark Through the Delta are thus affirmations of hope. The dream was only threatened, not truly dead: there was a dream once dead. / But lo, springing up a new / like some herb of stubborn roots / is the dream flowering in this frail dawn. (4) Yet the affirmation is in the poetry itself, still a dream. For in reality, it is dark yet through the delta. And it is in drawing attention to this, that Dark Through the Delta makes a vital contribution. References Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth. Tr. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 Lock, Charles, "Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Pollution of English." LiteraryResearch/ Recherche littéraire 17.34 (2000): 334-50 Umez, Uche Peter, Dark through the Delta. Owerri: Edu-Edy Publications, 2004
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