As the Muse Prompts

As the Muse Prompts

By Okechukwu Uwaezuoke, ThisDay 07.10.2005 Encounter

A poet of a long-standing experience, Ken Ike-Okere calls himself. "I've been in the circles [of poets], I would say...It's one of my life passions," he adds.

Indeed, the book The River Died might be his first published collection of poetry but the Masters degree holder of Theatre/Media Arts and Journalism already has several of his poems in anthologies. Among these anthologies are Austin (Texas) International Poetry Festival Anthology and Moondance Journal in France. He also featured at the Houston International Poetry Festival.

It all began -- his bardic vocation, that is -- in his university days. He had then written a couple of poems. Not serious poems, he quickly explains. But those were his first, albeit unsteady, steps in poetry.
And the serious poems? He cites two catalysts to his initiation into serious poetry. The first was his falling in love for the first time. Is there not some aphorism to the effect that everyone becomes a poet with a touch of love? The olive-complexioned literary artists recalls that he wrote up to 20 poems within three years. Impressive. And impressionable. "I guess they're right that love is the greatest feeling in the world," he laughs.

The second catalyst came with his awakening to a new spiritual experience. It was one that rocked the very foundations of his previous beliefs. To his hitherto unanswered questions, which partly bordered on the whence, the whither and the wherefore of his earthly existence, he found coherent and credible answers. And...he soon crossed the threshold from belief to conviction.
All these happened in the early 90s. Sometime between 1991 and 1992, to be precise.

But his environment! Was there nothing about it that influenced his creativity? his interviewer wants to know. There is. He mentions his home town Ezi-ala in Imo State.
The afore-mentioned catalysts seemed to have projected him back to his early childhood years. He was then growing up in Kaduna, he explains. But he was opportuned to make frequent trips to his highly cherished roots. "I didn't know I imbibed a lot of impressions that period."
The catalysts besides his creativity also triggered off the consciousness of his "Africaness". This reverberates through all the poems in the entire collection.

He picks up a copy of the book and reads one of the poems he titled "Nne Nne". It evokes the "special bond" that existed between him and his grand-mother. So special, he assures his interlocutor, that he always looked forward to returning to his beloved Ezi-ala. He was the only grand-child, who spent time with her. Hence he could learn so much from her that he could never have learnt from his city-based parents.

Is it his reading or the poem itself that makes so much deep impression on the listener?
That is difficult to establish. Perhaps, it is both. And without any hint of immodesty, Ike-Okere says that each time he recites his poems, people always wanted to know where they would get to buy his collection.

That was before the publication of his book. It was presented on Friday, June 24 at the British Council premises in Maitama, Abuja. It was so highly regarded and received that "the very first edition ran out." Among the enthusiasts, he continues, were people who ordinarily could not relate to poetry. Some even voluntarily came to ask for copies to send to their children's schools and wondered why it is not yet a recommended text in the school curriculum. They must have discerned some values in the collection.


Indeed, this amiable poet had consciously set out to impart three sets of values through his poems. The first borders on cultural heritage, which is akin to a clarion call to everyone to be rooted in the values embedded in their respective cultural spaces. He describes the poems coming under the section of the book titled Reflections as merely spiritual poems with Igbo imagery. In writing them he was making a deliberate attempt to impart cultural values that would serve as a bridge across generations.


The Igbo language, he laments, has been listed by the United Nations as a dying language because fewer and fewer people are speaking it. This, he blames on the fact that many children these days are estranged from their culture. There are some, according to him, who have never seen live chickens except on the television screens. "It's alarming, very, very alarming to everybody who has any little sensitivity in him."

He calls for a cultural regeneration. Not a wholesale embrace of everything that is cultural. For culture itself is dynamic. He only accepts the good things of his culture. Those things he can safely recommend to his children...And his most accepted poems, it seems, are those that hark back at his Africaness.


He also consciously celebrates the value of the word. In his poems, he tries to show the efficacy of the power of the word. Words if employed aright will help to create more pleasant terrestrial conditions for humanity. He also makes the effort to imbue the poems, albeit written in English, with those primordial qualities that would have triggered a portentous effect on the Igbo listeners. Thus, he hopes, the human language can be regenerated as a bridge for communication.

In his Author's Note, he writes: "Near the crystal clear waters of Ogo-chia stream and the murky grey Imo River, I learned the ceremony of speech in the Ibo language: of proverbs, metaphors, and alliterations; also of similes and puns; fables and myths. A good speaker was one who spiced his speech with a healthy dose of all these elements."

Lastly, he uses his poems to impart spiritual values on his audience. His new convictions have imparted in him new recognitions, which seep through his poems. Even then, he does not discard the props of cultural images. He reads yet another poem titled "Apparition", which he says alludes to the those things that hinder the human being from attaining his goals. "I try to use strong metaphors...to convey this," he says.

He retells the story of the Light-Envoys to this part of creation in the poems "Stranger I" and "Stranger II" but with a cultural ambience that the African can identify with.

Ike-Okere owes the gripping quality of his poems to his readiness at whatever time and place to put down any inspiring thought that strikes him. This experience he captures in the poem, "The Muse". He responds to the strong urge to put down these poems as they assail him. Some demanded to be put down on paper even when he was driving. He complied by pulling over. He is usually overwhelmed by sadness whenever he fails to respond to these promptings.
There is also a conscious effort on his part to dwell on an issue for long enough time for it to mature into something he could share with others. This was the experience he had with a recent poem he wrote on the recent Apo killings, which is not included in the present collection.

Though he feels fulfilled each time he puts down his thoughts in a poem, he has never been in a hurry to publish. He, for instance, took his time with the poem "Incantation" and in the process expunged some concepts, which in his opinion are distorted. He subsequently replaced them with the ones he could relate with given his present disposition.

Then his immersion into his Africaness means he read a lot on Igbo mythology with the benefit of the hindsight from a superior knowledge. Igbo words like "chi" and "igwe" opened up their possibilities to him.