By Yinka Fabowale
Nostalgia and Tears F’Orile is a newly published collection of poems by Lola Fabowale, a fast-rising Nigerian-Canadian writer and poet.
Published under Kraftbooks Limited’s Kraftgriots series, the anthology, the poet’s debut, reminds of Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Prof Wole Soyinka and renowned South African writer, Dennis Brutus’ huge love for their two countries – which is intertwined with their lives and finds expression in their works particularly Soyinka’s epic ‘I Love My Country I no go lie’ (Opera Wonyosi) and ‘A Troubadour I Traverse’ one of the poems that put Brutus, a journalist, poet and anti-Apartheid campaigner into global literary reckoning.
Both works are direct declarations and affirmation of their affection.
While Brutus saw South Africa as a mistress and himself as a Knight in her defence, Soyinka’s ‘I Love My Country I No Go Lie’ was a parody of his lifelong engagement with Nigeria, featuring “the good, the bad and the ugly “sides, though with a preponderance of the latter.
Fabowale’s ‘Nostalgia and Tears F’Orile’, is very much in the same direction.
It consists of both sad and sweet songs in which the ‘young’ poet plaintively paid tributes to what the country has going for itself – the rich and illustrious histories of its disparate peoples and cultures and immense abundance of natural resources and incredible energy, talents, quantum and quality of its human population, particularly the youth!
It’s, however, also a lament of how all this has been carelessly, recklessly and even wilfully been ignored or wasted, leaving the country prostrate, underdeveloped and in perpetual crisis.
Fabowale, a social policy analyst, blames a conspiracy of factors for Nigeria’s woes: bad, irresponsible and unresponsive political leadership, corruption and enduring influences of colonialism and imperialism by the West which, she notes, have tended to disorient the populace, threaten to obliterate the integrity of the traditional ways of life and thereby injured national pride and capability. In ‘Nepa o’, she castigates the political elite for encouraging thuggery instead of quality education and employable skills for youths:
“…Myopic leaders/
With debauched will to seize, not share, powers!/
Whose greed empties the public purse into overseas vaults/
As they dehumanize youths that’d be at school by default/
Into thugs who maim, maul or kill electoral opponents/
Or vandals who if skilled, ‘d build or repair components/Which they steal instead..”
Drawing illustrations from precolonial era to the present, she contrasts Nigeria’s destiny with those of other countries, arguing forcefully that it can match any of the advanced nations if only it would get its acts together. In ‘Thirst of a Crush’, she humorously debunks Western myths about Nigeria’s potentials and accomplishments:
The poet exhibits similar attitude towards her adopted country, Canada. While she celebrates the alluring beauty, advanced pace of development and cosmopolitanism of this great country that has been her second home for more than four decades, Fabowale calls attention to certain issues—poverty and racism—in that society which could taint its record as one of the best havens to live in the world. In ‘Eyesore’, she “calls homelessness [I]n a land as rich as Canada, an “eyesore of a dinosaur…””. She challenges racism, deploring: “Why a Caucasian patient/ would ask for a White/Instead of the Black Physician tending her?”
The portfolio of 38 exceedingly evocative poems has three compartments, each containing an average of 10 poems. Here, with her literary talent, Fabowale bakes a delicious dough, grills a sizzling steak, with sweet-sour tastes for the reader to chew \on and savour.
Apart from the profundity of her thoughts, there is so much to be said for this work especially with respect to the simplicity, elegance, clarity and flow of the poet’s language and expression in conveying her message.
Fabowale makes her reader to see, feel, touch and share her feelings, emotions and views with the incredible artful way she creates and deploys words to paint living, vivid pictures of her experiences and argues her opinions with such intellectual force and conviction. The cosmopolitan lines fused with traditional imagery she employs in poems like ‘Winter in Ottawa’ will resonate with her Nigerian audience as those in her Western environment with the surfeit of familiar themes, issues and experiences they explore and the choice albeit accessible diction employed to thread and unpack them:
This is one work that not only unveils Fabowale as a new, promising African literary voice in the Diaspora but also deserves a place in the curricula of academic institutions at both ends of the world for the distinctive universality and yet culturally peculiar treatment of the subjects