Let me begin this essay with an open confession – by “open confession” I mean my saying it loud here about writing or speaking about this column’s present subject without difficulty. He is a man, a literary personage of distinction, whose writing span covers years upon years running into decades of verbal self-expression of longitude and latitude of dexterity. Where do I begin and end my scrutiny of Professor Emeritus Femi Osofisan – a distinguished literary scholar and professional of numerous parts that are more than numerous parts?

He is a writer who is intimately concerned with imaginative literature; he is an academic/literary administrator; he is a theorist and critic; he is a playwright and dramatist; he is a novelist, biographer and short story writer; he is a newspaper columnist; he is a teacher and mentor; he is a poet. In these listed parts and landscapes, so to say, in which we can rightly examine him without qualms,he so fittingly, so skillfully and so penetratingly distinguishes himself to the extent that we cannot or may not but see him as a literary personality whose stories constitute a story of how his imagination is kindled by experiences, that is, by happenings that were/are intrinsically insignificant and significant at the same time. What this means (to me) is that Femi Osofisan is one gem of a human being and a writer who appeals to me as a significant embodiment of our world, of our landscape, and his response to it.

Now my difficulty about writing about Femi Osofisan today should be apparent to my readers. I cannot possibly dwell on everything I have listed above – as important as they are because I really set out to view him as a poet, a well-languaged poet, of “a particularly wholesome or edifying matter of communication,” as T.S. Eliot would say. His two recent volumes of new and selected poems respectively called Remember Tenderness (Volume 1) and The Jeweller of Night (Volume 2: On Night and Life’s Mutations) represent faithfully and interestingly what Femi Osofisan (Okinba Launko – his pen name – in publishing the volumes) essentially means to me from my perspective or impression of the qualities of the poems that well define him as a considerable figure in the world of poetry and of letters generally.

In drawing my readers’ attention to Okinba Launko’s new and old offerings in this light exercise, I am not too certain if I should stick squarely to a run-of-the-mill newspaper critique or do the run of the grain on a piece of wood reading distinct in a lavish manner from the former. Which one will delight my readers – my sophisticated and un sophisticated readers – more? My rumination on the matter fetches me this answer: “Employ what inspiration fetches you to fit into the scheme of the length of time of your purpose and position at present.”

As a poet, what school of poetry does Okinba Launko belong to in our clime as his volumes reveal? Furthermore, what generation of poetry Okinba Launko’s volumes belong to – as the volumes equally reveal? What span of years do they cover or seem to cover in terms of the generations of poetry in our age and clime? These are weighty and difficult questions. I was a young man, a young under-graduate of the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria trying my hands at poetry and learning to hone my writing skills as a poet or would-be poet.

Of course, at this time the great Chinua Achebe had published me in Okike, the very remarkable journal of new African writing he founded, and which is still existing. And my poems had appeared in Poetry From ABU edited by Brian F. Downes, an Irish, and one of our under-graduate lecturers who supervised my collection of poems which I submitted in my final year as the requirement for the Original Composition Course which I was the lone student allowed and expected to offer the course.

I cannot remember at this time that I had encountered Femi Osofisan’s name or figure in the world of our literature. But something happened when the late novelist Kole Omotosho visited ABU’s English Department to deliver a lecture to us. After the lecture I remember asking him a question that bordered on the generation(s) of Nigerian Literature. I don’t remember that he answered the question to my literary or critical satisfaction.

As the editor of the students’ Departmental literary magazine, The Mirror and one of the founders of ABU Writers’ Club, I was looking for masters outside the class or the generation of Achebe, Soyinka, JP Clark, Christopher Okigbo and others – who would stir us to write what we wanted to write. My stubbornly inquisitive insistence elicited Femi Osofisan’s name from him – but the poetry of the young Osofisan did not exist for me; it certainly did not ring a bell.

Let me relate another encounter. As an undergraduate, Onibonoje Publishers, Ibadan had accepted to publish several of my poems in an anthology –in which other poets -aspiring and established ones – would also be published. Just before I graduated Onibonoje Publishers sent me their contract papers, which I duly filled, signed and dispatched to them. When I did not hear from them after a long time that was more than a pretty long time, after my NYSC year, and I was already in Zaria as a Graduate Assistant, I travelled to Ibadan.

Who did I meet there in the publishers’ office- but Kole Omotosho? He told me after hearing my story that Femi Osofisan was the editor of the envisaged anthology committed to the kind of poetry that would allow young writers/poets to use their voices to lead other younger ones the use of their own voices in an original manner.

Up to this moment, even though we had ceaselessly seen or met each other at different times, I had not raised the issue with Osofisan whose figure has since loomed large in our consciousness. (Kole Omotosho informed me then in Ibadan that Onibonoje Publishers had some publishing hiccups which I presumed was why the anthology did not eventually see the light of the day).

Now, why this lengthy tale? It is germane, from my point of view, to the matter of the generation of poetry Okinba Launka’s two volumes that are well-languaged belong to. If at the time I alluded to Femi Osofisan had not made a name as a poet, but as a play-wright and dramatist, can I, can we, regard his poetry as that of a predecessor?

And from another point of view can I, can we, regard his poetry as that of a contemporary? The year I mean in this reference to the master of drama and now of poetry after the generation of the big four – Achebe, JP Clark, Soyinka and Okigbo – is from 1975 on.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.