Displacing the perennial contenders was how one caustic wit summed up the emergence of three young poets who made the shortlist of the Nigerian Prize for Literature sponsored by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas last September. Of course, the wag meant it as a light joke but nothing could be truer of the last three men – Romeo Oriogun, Soddiq Dzukogi and Su’eddie Agema – standing in this year’s poetry competition by the gas company.
And now, Oriogun has won! The gas company received 287 entries from Nigerian poets home and abroad last February. With a panel of judges headed by Professor Emmanuel Egya Sule of African Literature and Cultural Studies at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai in Niger state – others are Toyin Adewale-Gabriel and Dike Chukwumerije – the list was pared down to 11 poets.
By the time the long list was published in July, there were nearly a half dozen poets who had been shortlisted for the same prize four years before, thus eliciting the perennial contender’s remark from the wag.
Though unavailable to receive the prize in person, (Oriogun lives in America where he has more freedom as an LGBT rights activist than his home country Nigeria where homophobia is rife) he linked up through ZOOM from where he read his acceptance speech to the distinguished guests late on Friday night at Eko Hotels & Suites, Victoria Island Lagos. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was a special guest at the event. He also presented the award to a representative of the winner.
With Oriogun’s win this year, it clearly says a lot about the direction Nigerian poetry is headed. In her citation for the winning entry Nomad, Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, Chair of the Advisory board, said the collection “has a fresh language and a nostalgic engagement with the themes of exile and displacement.”
Judges, critics and literary aficionados all agree on the freshness of “language and nostalgic engagement with the themes of exile and displacement.” Writing in a special issue of Next Generation for Open Country magazine last February, for instance, Emmanuel Esomnofu let on how Oriogun “wrested poetry from pain.”
A cosseted progeny, Oriogun enjoyed the privileges of one born into such affluence. He was chauffeured to and from school. But then, his parents separated forcing him and his sibs to live with their father who denied them visits from their mother. He was six when his father died. His next destination was his mother Dorcas Osadiaye, who worked as a nurse. She also hawked garri in Benin where she lived with her own mother. Life was tougher than before such that Oriogun couldn’t pay for his WAEC enrolment fees.
If losing a supportive dad at six was bad enough, the death of his mother was an unexpected blow because he was about enrolling for his WAEC when she passed on. As Esomnofu wrote in his revelatory and well-written report, “his classmates crowd-funded to buy him forms for both exams. Later, after someone who borrowed from his mother paid back, he repaid his classmates’ money. The money went to helping another student who couldn’t afford exam registration.”
“I became very unruly,” Oriogun told the reporter of his mother’s passing. Mired in such gloom and for one so young, a female teacher in his school, Mrs. Uweni, sort of brought him back to life. She, according to Esomnofu, “introduced him to poetry. He read John Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale.” He didn’t know that a nightingale was a bird but he imitated the poem and wrote his first, which he gifted to his teacher on her birthday.”
In his new discovery of English classics thanks to a caring tutor, Oriogun devoted more time to poetry like a monk will to his religious obligations. The new poet laureate had considered being a soldier and a lawyer. Drawn irresistibly to medicine, he applied to read same at University of Benin. They handed him pharmacy instead. He turned it down.
Still intent on medicine, Oriogun put in for JAMB the following year. But on the very day he was to write the exam, he wasn’t in class among the university hopefuls in exam centres in Benin. He was elsewhere, a more intimate place – his mother’s grave.
“He had lived to make his father proud, then his mother, and now both of them were gone,” Esemnofu has written. “What am I doing this for?” he asked himself. He broke down and could not sit for the exam.”
From one teaching job to another, Oriogun left Benin for Ondo state where he worked with FRSC. It was while there that he witnessed firsthand the lynching of a gay man in 2016. That was it for him! Peripatetic from a young age, Oriogun was once again on the move – this time to Ghana, Europe and finally the United States where he currently lives. He has also been writing poetry, winning some poetry prizes along the way.
One of the frequent motifs in his poetry, according to the interviewer, is water. Religion meant nothing to him at first. He turned to Olokun “the deity of the sea regarded in Benin traditional religion as the giver of wealth, health, and fertility. He would later call himself Son of Olokun, living the faith of the women who raised him. When he began writing poetry, water would be a motif.”
As any young and ambitious poet is wont to, Oriogun read poems, JP Clark’s “Streamside Exchange,” strengthening the bond between him and the deity he served. He read many others as well. He also wrote and was maturing as he wrote and then finding his sweet spot at Ibadan, a city that, at one time in the sixties, seventies and eighties, had more poets than any other city in Nigeria.
“Ibadan was where Oriogun entered the Nigerian literary scene,” Esomnofu wrote in the publication. “At Artmosphere, a hotspot, he read a poem to an audience for the first time, and they “trashed” it—deservedly, he says. Another young writer, Olubunmi Familoni, walked up to him. “Don’t take any of these criticisms too hard, everyone wants you to grow,” he said. “Do you want to be ‘a poet from Nigeria’ or do you want to be ‘a Nigerian poet’?” The first, Familoni explained, was a poet who “claims local championships but wouldn’t do the work”; the other, a poet whose work speaks to the world. At the time, Oriogun had written only two poems. If I have to do this thing, I have to do it well, he thought.”
“At Artmosphere, also, he was introduced to the Facebook poetry scene, which was big at the time. From writing on Facebook, he picked up an extemporaneous approach: he writes the poem on the spot, in no more than 10 minutes, and he does not edit; although, he tells me, he is grateful to have had very good editors work with him.”
From those tentative steps at Atmosphere, he would soon establish himself as a poet to reckon with. “Burnt Men” was soon published, receiving rave reviews from fellow poets and a BrunelPrize for the 10 poems in the collection. Continuing in his report, Esomnofu notes that “when Oriogun won the Brunel Prize, with 10 poems from “Burnt Men,” the judges described him as a “hugely talented, outstanding, and urgent new voice.” He became the prize’s first openly queer—bisexual—winner, and, even more significantly, the first openly queer Nigerian to win a major African prize. Then a tirade of attacks online and offline followed, spreading outside literary circles. Resistant to the sudden notability bestowed on an LGBTQ+ writer, some people claimed that he did not deserve it, swarmed his Facebook inbox with homophobic messages. People he considered friends, writers he supported and wrote with, joined the mob against him.”
For now as an NLNG poet laureate with a $100,000 to boot, Oriogun seems to have shut up all his critics – especially for his sexual preference. But more important is that the judges of the Nigerian prize, as open-minded as any adjudicator of literary prizes in America or Europe, do not much care for the sexual orientation of competitors.
One of Oriogun’s editors, Maneo Mohale, had all along known and recognised the genius in Nomad before the NLNG judges. “He punctures an insidious silence—one that would have us believe that queer African poetry does not exist, or that queer African poets are only imitating the West,” Mohale has written. “I think his work signals to younger generations that another world is possible, and that we can harness our various abilities to tell our own stories beautifully, dangerously, playfully, and in deep conversation with the past—as a way of ushering in a future where our humanity can be celebrated and honoured without compromise.”
About the Author
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
