By Chukwuma Ajakah
In a rare show of collective grief, celebrated and emerging poets within and outside Africa, present a synergy of voices, mourning the demise of Pius Adebola Adesanmi, a foremost Nigerian academic, Professor of English and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada who died along with 156 other victims of the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 which crashed in Bishoftu after leaving Addis Ababa International Airport on March 10, 2019. The artistic voices are harvested in a collection of poems titled, Wreaths for a Wayfarer.
Published by Daraja Press, Canada and Narrative Landscape Press, Nigeria (2020), Wreaths for a Wayfarer is a 259-page anthology that features selected poems from Pius Adesanmi’s own collection, “The Wayfarer and Other Poems” as well as over 100 other works of contributors from Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Africa, Botswana, Bahamas, West Indies, Canada, USA, etc. The anthology is broadly structured into four parts, subtitled Wayfarer, Requiems, Homecoming and A Selection from Pius Adesanmi’s The Wayfarer and Other Poems. Contributions from Anu’A-Gheyle Solomon Azoh-Mbi and Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith serve as Postlude 1, “A Prose-Poem, a Tribute, and a Wreath for Pius Adesanmi” and Postlude II, “When and If…”
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Wreaths for a Wayfarer opens with an Introit by Niyi Osundare titled, “Coffin in the Sky” which revolves around the unfortunate circumstances that surrounded the gruesome death of Pius Adesanmi on October 3, 2019. Presented as an elegy, The Introit conveys a tone of mourning which resonates through the entire collection. Coffin in the Sky is characterized with run-on-lines, revealing the impact of the tragedy: What song can one sing/ About that fruit/ Which came down/ Too early, too unripe/ How do we pen a paean/ For a promise/ So cruelly spilled in the noon-/ Tide of a sky undone…/ And the ashen anonymity/ Of the slaughter field / Its ruinous rainbow/ Its Golgotha of broken dreams…/ Whose hasty Science launched this coffin/ In the sky of our joy/ To whose capital advantage do we owe/ This saga of endless anguish…/ We are too tired/ Of burying our best…
Adesanmi’s poems-preceded by the tripartite, “Wayfarer”, “Requiems” and “Homecoming”, constitute Part IV of the anthology and includes the following poems: The Wayfarer, Ah, Prometheus, Odia Ofeimun: The Booms Take Flight, To the Unfathomable One, Message from Aso Rock to a Poet in Exile and Entries. The contributors whose works are featured in the collection include popular and budding poets such as Funmi Aluko, “Harvest IV” and “Wayfarer”, Afam Akeh, “Monster”, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, “Light Dims to Shine Forever”, Manasseh Gowk, “The Eagle Has Fallen” and “Farewell”, James Tar Tsaaior, “This Poetry”, Tola Ijalusi, “Cloud Coffin” and “Looking for the Dead”, Gbenga Adesina, “What My Father Said on His Deathbed”, Olabode Segun Michael, “Now that I Know Young Birds Die in Flight” and Kennedy Emetulu, “A Pius Flight”.
Although each entry primarily focuses on the same subject matter, some of the poems are particularly striking in terms of form and reflect the poet’s unique style in realizing poetic aesthetics. One of such verses is Chuma Nwokolo’s three-stanza poem, “How to Keep the Wake for a Shooting Star” which has each of its 29 lines attractively designed to appeal to the reader’s sight as the poet experiments on graphics.
In the foreword to the seminal masterpiece, Africa’s frontline poet and prolific writer, Odia Ofeimun describes the anthology as “a literal barnstorming of emotional identification with the dead.” Ofeimun further reveals the sense of loss, ensconcing the global literary community at the exit of Pius Adesanmi: “Only a year before, preternaturally accident-prone, Pius had survived yet another horrid motor accident during a visit to Nigeria that left him after time in hospital and therapy with a bad limp. Now, his death was having an international fare, a widening loop of grieve from campus to campus, city to city across Nigeria, Canada, Europe and America, across Africa’s many diasporas, and spooling a comity of mourners and sympathizers all keyed into a worldwide eruption on the social media. In the annals of the travelling world, few outreaches, after a crash, ever galvanized as much fellowship and outpouring of fellow feeling…”
The imagery of wayfaring rivets in most of the poems as the authors engage it to portray the central theme of life as a journey. The motif of the collection can be gleaned from the “Introduction” where Nduka Otiono reveals: “We decided to call the anthology Wreaths of a Wayfarer, inspired by the idea of laying symbolic wreaths at the funeral of the author of The Wayfarer and Other Poems. The spontaneity and finality with which the title of the anthology…came to me easily contextualizes the circumstances that produced the anthology. With the uncertainty about the possibility of a funeral at the time…laying virtual poetic wreaths for the author…appeared to me as a natural sequence…Wreaths of a Wayfarer is, therefore, the collective “wreaths” laid by a dispersed community of writers unsettled by the untimely loss of Adesanmi.”
According to the co-editor, the archetypal image of the wayfarer depicted in the title captures the enormity and breadth of the losses: “Beyond the focus on Adesanmi, the anthology represents, on a wider lens, a tribute to all those everyday people engaged in quotidian transnational movements that rule our lives in an era of rapid globalization.” Otiono further reveals the identities of a few other casualties of the plane crash, saying: “These poetic wreaths are not only for Pius Adesanmi, but also in honour of the other victims of the disaster that included a nine-month-old child; a Kenyan man who lost his wife, daughter, and three grandchildren; a Canadian family comprising three generations-Kosha Vaidya and her husband, Prerit Dixit, travelling with their two teenage daughters, Ashka and Anushka, and with Kosha’s parents, Pannagesh and Hansini…”
In a typical African society, the funeral of a great man does not only call for lamentations, there is always room for entertainment and feasting. Conversely, Wreaths for a Wayfarer encompasses poems laced with diverse techniques, including those that entertain the reader with humour, music, dance, and drama beyond the conventional borders of dirges. James Tar Tsaaior’s “This Poetry” for instance, is meant to be accompanied with ritual drums while Sunny Iyke Okeigwe’s Agadaga Iroko (Giant Iroko) is a praise poem, fraught with humour, rendered in Igbo and translated into English: The Giant Iroko who climbed the climax of his carrier/ Had an accidental fall neither friend nor foe can forget/No one least envisaged the enmity of air and heights in this transition/Because they shook hands warmly with you/ Only to fly swiftly, to sweep life away like kite and hawk…
The readers will be treated to a feast of dirges, lyrics, ballads, and odes as the poets converge from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. Wreaths for a Wayfarer, is a conversation of congenial minds, on a phenomenal subject matter that calls for collective grief: The untimely death of a friend. The editors, Nduka Otiono, Graduate Coordinator, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and Uchechukwu Umezuruike, Vanier Doctoral Scholar, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, allude to the possibility of a second volume, admitting that they had sifted the published works from an avalanche of submissions: “We received submissions from 257 writers, comprising established and budding poets across the world…we could not plant all the seeds in this volume…”
The anthology features emotive blurbs from renowned academics and professionals: Obiageli Ezekwesili, former Vice President of World Bank (Africa Region), Harry Garuba, Professor and poet, University of Cape Town, South Africa, Olu Obafemi, Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (FNAL), Obioma Nnemeka, Chancellor’s Professor, Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA and President, Association of African Women Scholars (AAWS), Toyin Falola, The Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin and Odia Ofeimun, Poet and former President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).
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