Tempests at ANA Kano

Suleiman Zailani

"Jalla Babbar Hausa" is a popular epithet for the physical vastness, rich cultural tradition and the enviable intellectual heritage Kano always enjoyed in the annals of history. Such prestige is apparently not confined to its much vaunted immensity, but indeed manifests as a fertile ground for the emergence of an outcrop of talented young poets from the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Kano State chapter, arguably the most burgeoning and active creative writers forum north of the Niger. The association, which made its debut about three years ago, has by now swiftly assumed a resplendent image of an intellectual melting pot for young creative minds  university students, lecturers and the interested citizenry. This motley group of literary enthusiasts meet once in a month to share and articulate their innermost thoughts and visions through the medium of literature in English.

My desire to comment on the association stems from not only the fact that I happen to be a member, but largely due to my observation of the palpable ferment and the electric atmosphere generated in the course of the session where poems, plays, articles, short stories and other literary works are presented by members of the forum. In this article, I shall highlight what seems to me to be the most memorable outpourings from the event; the setting, the excitement, the poets and their poems, the writers and their articles, the spicy accounts and anecdotes that make the forum a lively theatre for the manifestation of literary activities.

The poems of Faruk Sarkinfada and Ismail Bala Garba personify the general pattern of the poems presented by most members. The former dwells on the dualism reflected in nature and the latter celebrates life without any philosophical bent using the medium of multi-thematic poems. In the poem, "I Care," Sarkinfada emphasizes again his dualistic conception of the world:

So does go life (sic)

With outcomes in pairs

My sandals are paired

And both I must wear.

Victory and defeat, sadness and joy, beautiful and ugly, heavens and earth, paradise and hell, even right and wrong, acceptance and rejection, constitute some of our dualistic perception. The end of the poem is however remarkable:

With the shoes I wear

My feet are not bare

All I declare

Oh damsel I care

What seems interesting here is that the philosophical significance (dualism) mellows when the apogee of its expression ends in a rather trite disclosure of a hidden affection. Still, we may extend this dualism to other areas of life as a basis for gaining insight into life and the decisions critical situations may compel us to make.

Ismails profound introspection, "When the Night is Deep," muses;

 And the labour lingers on

I sometimes wish

To get hold of this stupid poem

By the neck

And tie it mercilessly

To anything around

And give it the most

Cruel of all tortures

Till it chooses to

Surrender itself

To my whims.

Here thoughts intensify, the ideas are tugged and twisted, beaten and hammered into shape, followed by release; and the poem yields its fruits. On focusing on a single theme, the poet displays an astonishing clarity of Vision and Verve in the sequential expression of his ideas. My objection to multi-thematic poems, so typical of his work, is that they usually turn out to be multiple imagery in search of ideas and meanings from the perception of the reader.

In a gathering such as this, writers seize the opportunity to launch missiles of their own against fellow writers over some point of disagreement. To banter one another about the joys, disappointment and vagaries of love and to moot solemn topics of cultural, religious and national interest in their creation. Here, like porcupines at war, the peevish, the upright and the nettled fire salvoes at each other with the pen as their quills when offended. One writer composed a rather prurient parody of a Nursery Rhyme in the following form:

Mini Mini Mini skirt

How I lust for what you cover

Up above the knee so high

Like a flower round the thigh

This sparked off a controversy about the poets need to adhere to principles of moral propriety and provoked a riposte from the puritanical ire of an equally imaginative and redoubtable poetess:

Bawdy / Bawdy / Bawdy / poem

Crave my friend for what you offer;

A stain in the mind, so Beware

Of the blazing flame ablaze.

Still unappeased, our nimble but prudish bard, Umma Abubakar, goes further to posit her vision of the proper poem, in the verse gravely titled "Modest Poem":

Modest/ Modest/ Modest/ Poem

How I long for what you offer

Spiritual purity, celestial bliss

Eternal peace, everlasting joy.

A bit of literary jousting emanated from Aisha Zakaris rather torrid response to the correction of her poem "Correction" by Muhammad Jameel. For Aisha declared rather sullenly:

For I love my pen

More than I love you

And if you have to rectify the inadequacies of her poems you should:

Correct me

But dont wisely

Make it gentle.

But Jameel, it appears, was not compliant. For didnt he write:

Should you love the pen

More than the heart in your heart

For loving the pen more than

The moon seeks to brighten

The sky of unionship

May impregnate the relationship

With emotional imbalance.

Enraged, though unruffled, Aisha warned: "dont be an opportunist". So away from me you encroaching Marauders. My heart is no refuge for man. My pen is all I care. Well, several weeks later, Aisha co-wrote a poem appropriately titled "You" (if I may say so) with a male poet of high repute who is also a member. Her part reads:

You are the image I would like to paint

So that Picasso would look like an amateur.

Mark my words: the pen as an independent entity is beginning to be relegated to

a second fiddle. It is now used to write a song for the apparently persistent male. Never mind poetic coincidences. For "as one coicidence goes another crops up". Never mind me too. For such saying actually sums up the story of my romantic life. Furthermore, the pen seems to me to be merely a piece of slender stick, though filled with an ink, that springs to life on paper though filled with an ink, that springs to life on paper only with the infusion of ideas from the writer to wax strong, wise, mightily and deadly. The monthly session is never without its ludicrous episodes that draw a smile whenever I ruminate over without it. I recall a members gaffe on his notion of a short story. His short story or rather "long short story" was about five pages long and the lines, all singly spaced! By the time he was half through his reading, you could hear his laboured breathing, his shirt drenched with sweat despite the air-conditioned hall, and the entire audience bored stiff from the interminable drudgery of his "short narration". Similarly, another female writer who I am made to understand lectures in the same department in a university with our "short story" writer, has despite her highly remarkable talent for short story also developed a penchant for the "long short story". Such antics are usually exposed whenever one observes the listeners, struggling in their effort to sustain interest by the studied attention on their faces. Another gentleman from an area called Giginyu in Kano just loves to write poems. And write he does. However, on so many sessions, members used to observe that his poems are rather prosaic and he should endeavour to draw the fine distinction between prose and poetry. One time, a member insisted half jokingly that his writing was actually "prosaic prose".

And so it happens on every last Wednesday of the month. Writers eager to crow their skills and with suppressed excitement to celebrate their literary output. With constructive criticisms and guidance from literary buffs in the persons of Dr. Saleh Abdu, Malama Binta S. Mohammed, Dr. A.I. Tanko, Dr. Mustapha Isa and our dear Yusuf Adamu presently on a doctoral studies in the United States of America, the forum is now a veritable centre of intellectual activity where cross-fertilization of ideas, criticisms and counter criticisms always invariably reach a crescendo in every session, with each member itching to say a word.

From such causeries, the influence of some writers over others can be discerned. One usually hears about the emergence of Ismail Garbas school of poetry (I am getting green with envy). You can also notice the members upbeat, at the end of every session, with joy on their faces as they disperse to eagerly wait for an entire month for another round of literary encounter. The ongoing events by the Association of Nigerian Authors, Kano State chapter, give one the confidence to asseverate that slowly and surely, the taciturn griots up here are beginning to pick up their flutes, shake off their fetters of shyness and with modest mien, warble their songs to the eager ears of the audience of the Nigerian literary scene.

Zailani resides at No. 34A, SMC Quarters, Unguwar Dosa, Kaduna.

E-mail: szailani2000@yahoo.co.uk

Tempests at ANA Kano
by
Suleiman Zailani