Reading Femi Osofisan’s well-languaged mind – Part 5

The gleaner’s essay – with its indefinite and definite future which goes against the grain of the popular routine, run of the mill essay – is stretching itself to the finish line that the gleaner set for it ab-initio, although unusually so. Before it gets there, however, I wish to remind the reader, my reader, that the clusters of poems which constitute Remember Tenderness and The Jeweller of Night, in varying guises, are philosophical poems which contain and continue Okinba Launko’s well-languaged mind and the rhetorical characteristics and heterogeneous tradition of humanism. The two volumes and poems in them also mark the poet’s growing mood, from the beginning to the end, of certainty, uncertainty and unrest

Even love or friendship and their beauty, for instance, also contain the subject of restlessness and the sign or stamp of absurdity. Femi Osofisan, as Okinba Launko, is without doubt or contradiction in his serious poetic elements in the volumes which evince his influences as a wide reader; but he labours well, he labours very creatively, as required by his versatility to free himself from such influences. This cannot be gainsaid. Of course, this is one reason why Femi Osofisan is Okinba Launko, and Okinba Launko is Femi Osofisan.

Now with respect to our subject’s nom-de-plume, two of our very well-held scholars and professors who are equally very well endowed playwrights and dramatists as well as poets of well above remarkable accomplishments, tended to interrogate or query me as follows: “Your on-going critical analysis and interpretation of Femi Osofisan’s poetry appear quite lucid, eloquent, in your inimitable interpretive and rhetorical style.

The pseudonym is not really an attempt to hide (his) authorship but to diversify it as you find in European authors: Jane Austen, George Orwell, and so on. You find that the massiveness of Osofisan’s creative oeuvre gives a loop to his nomenclatural diversity methinks. The good thing is that everybody knows [about] the singularity of the diversified authorship.” Professor Emeritus Olu Obafemi is the author of this impassioned lucidity I never anticipated, I must confess. He is one of the dignified practitioners and public figures of our art and profession – whose hat-racks (and gown-racks) that are hung with decorations and distinctions have a public existence.

He does and says numerous sharp things in favour of our discipline and Academy. But on this score of authorship I disagree with him. Jane Austen, a notable English novelist (1775-1817) “distinguished by a vivid capacity for experience,” from what the gleaner gleaned from English literary history, never had a pen name. She published anonymously, and signed her novels as “A Lady” – which she used (as a pen name?) on the pages that bore the titles of her books. Why she did so is not what I want to enter into here. But she was unlike her fellow female novelist, Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), who published her novels in the pen name of George Eliot.

As for George Orwell, whose birth-name was Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950) he assumed his universally known non-de-plume mainly because he, as a member by birth of a privileged class, did not want to embarrass his parents. He did not want them to know that he was the author of the anti-privileged, that is, the anti-aristocratic novels he wrote and published at least when he started his literary career as a pro-people novelist. Femi Osofisan, our well-languaged poet wrote as Okinba Launko for the reason, the prime reason, already tendered. I hope I am not wrong for not wanting to loop the loop Olu Obafemi wants me to loop willy-nilly – even though I consider the loop to be imperfect.

Let me quote the other reader: “Sir, Professor Femi Osofisan knows my thoughts which were aired in public. He is owned by the people and not by the bourgeoisie that he always lampoons in his plays. “Launko” means “project (your voice) and sing.” Sing at whose command? Is it at the populist or the hegemonic? Except of course if it’s the honorific tag that is being referred to here. For me Femi Osofisan is no monarch’s player. None has dictated a tune for him to play. All his plays, even the adaptations, underscore that testament. Femi Osofisan’s voice or artistry cannot be at the behest of the royal court, or its will. A people’s poet versus the court poet denotes conflict of interests and relevance.”

Professor (Mrs.) Mabel Evwierhoma owns these arresting words. She is a high flying creative artist as a playwright, dramatist, poet and critic. Rightly or wrongly, by her quoted words, she seems to me to be thoroughly representative of Femi Osofisan to whom she is a protégé. She is also seemingly a beneficiary of Olu Obafemi’s mentorial guidance.

Her interrogatory view quoted above is by no means humbly accurate – artistically speaking – even though it is revealing. To underline my point, I feel the need to quote for our literary education T. S. Eliot’s critical remark pertaining to William Butler Yeats: “Born into a world in which the doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes, he held firmly to the right view which is between these, though not in any way a compromise between them, and showed that an artist, by serving his art with entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his own nation and the whole world” (134). This is what Femi Osofisan, as a royal court (or people’s court poet or both) has done, in my artistic view, as Okinba Launko whose well-languaged mind has engaged the attention of the gleaner. Any further interrogation?

At this point the gleaner sees that he should quote the pertinent words of a Minna-based very young poet, Rabiu (Excel) Kassim, who writes thrilling poems of passion: “Your series on Femi Osoifisan is very, very nice. Femi Osofisan wanted to be recognized as a playwright, dramatist or theatre man who I really admired. (I still admire him). However, little did he know that he has a remarkable place in the field of poetry: Your high and tall essay says so, and I do not say no, to your very original affirmation.”

This essay breasts the tape of the finish line – with the following quote in which Roy Pascal, an outstanding authority on autobiography, compares and contrasts Wordsworth and Goethe: “… these writers had a larger intention than the delineation of a gift. Even with Wordsworth’s narrower scope, his purpose is the evolution and self-recognition of a soul in its self-identification with mankind and the universe; in this his poetic gift is embraced and from it his poetry gains its substance and justification.

Goethe’s purpose is all-embracing: he tells of his imagination and feeling, of how and why experiences turned into poetry, but also gives a history of literature and thought, the development of his own life and thought, and is ultimately concerned with a general problem arising from his total experience, the relation between freedom and necessity, between the infinitude of what is given and the particularity of what he makes of it between conscious intention and the “daemon” within him.

In both men, the response to life is a total one, and the poetic activity is seen as a peculiar response within this larger one” (134). As I am reading these words Osofisan’s poetry radiates in my mind, and I am nursing the ambition and temptation to match Okinba Launko and these immortals.

If we intend to study or read Femi Osofisan as a well-languaged mind from the perspective of “The Autobiography of the Poet,” we may need to take a deep plunge into Okinba Launko’s “peculiar mode of experience, of response to the world,” our world, as a poet – of a really well-languaged mind.
Concluded.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.