By Olukorede Yishau
Why do men rape minors and women? Why do the high and the mighty derive pleasure in taking advantage of women who seek employment under them? Why do people in power abuse their positions of influence? Why has our value system changed so much? Why has hatred replaced love? Why are there paternity frauds? Why do we prefer war to a truce?
This world of ours is filled with questions that we need answers to, yet the answers elude us. It is baffling why we have to go to war when history has shown us that no war ends at the battlefield. Always we return to the truce table.
The bulk of us agree that there is an all-knowing Being who created heaven and earth. He is known by different names: God, Allah, Chineke, Chukwu, Olorun, Olodumare and thousands of others. It is to honour Him that we have religions. But we fight because of Him. We claim one religion is the true religion, we say one religion is evil, we say that religion is bad, and on and on we go about boasting about our position on how best to worship God. We even go to the ridiculous extent of fighting for God. How on earth can mere mortals fight for God? Just how? We say someone deserves to die for blasphemy. We turn ourselves to God’s ambassadors and warriors and we apportion punishment to those we feel have gone against God. Why can’t we leave God to handle the situation? Why are we judging on His behalf and sentencing supposed offenders?
The inequality in this world is so much that while some people have nothing to eat, some have so much to waste. Their waste bins are filled with leftover food capable of doing something good to the body of the poor. Why do some have so much and others have almost nothing? Why?
There is also inequality of leaders with empathy. Some countries have leaders with milk of human kindness and others are unlucky to have beasts in the seats of power. Because of this challenge, the bulk of the world is in trouble; there are wars everywhere; there is an abundance of poverty here and there, and there are diseases and deaths where there should be health and life. Also because of this challenge, roads that have been supposedly fixed with billions are riddled with potholes shortly after. When it is election season, you see these men of deceit parking by the roadside, buying corn and eating like commoners.
I am also baffled about why policemen have become tax collectors as though they are on the payroll of the revenue authority. I was flabbergasted some days back when I saw some policemen on a rainy afternoon wearing raincoats and busy harassing drivers. They just could not stay away for the rain to go.
These questions I seek answers to are impressed on me by ‘Questioning Voices’— Olalekan Ajayi’s collection of poems. Aside from raising these posers, the 153-page collection also examines what COVID-19 has made of our world. The poet wonders when we will be able to shake hands again, have a warm embrace, stop hearing news of deaths, and when fear will no longer rule our hearts and minds.
Almighty America also gets some punches from the poet for some of its peculiarities. He remembers how a border control officer renames him Lincoln because he could not pronounce Lekan. He is ‘amazed’ neighbours are strangers in America and ‘disturbed’ when he is seen as speaking in tongue when he actually greets in English. He writes about seeing despair, hate, fear, men who engage in what beasts abhor, and caged souls in the land of the free. He also raises concerns about what is considered sexual harassment, wondering why “a smile to a maid with lesser melanin” can be read as molestation.
Ajayi, in this collection, offers himself as the emissary of voices desperate to be heard. He also presents in free verse a series of questions the society needs to answer. The poems capture our everyday experiences in areas such as politics, religion, relationships and so on. The revolutionary streak in the lines is unhidden, not even by the fluid narrative elegance. The poet’s writing is layered with images of nature. His chic poems play with the absurdities of splendour and gruesomeness, inferring that they are not contraries, but proximal.
The poems are free verse in form, but their frugal, measured use of techniques, such as repetition and rhyme, make them musical and deeply emotional and thus appealing to attentive readers. Ajayi’s consistent use of powerful images, startling similes, and witticisms do the poems a world of good. Some lines meditate on how even the most trying issues can be understood in new lights. The poet’s elasticity and readiness to comprehend issues guide readers appropriately.
Ajayi’s poetic tribute to Tolulope Arotile, the female Air Force pilot who died after being hit by a driver reversing a car, is fitting for an amazon. The poet mocks death saying Tolulope’s exit at 24 is actually a rebirth for the “sky-warrior”.
The Air Force has named a remodelled Pilots Crew Room at the 115 Special Operations Group in Port Harcourt after her. Since Arotile’s demise, according to the naval authorities, no fewer than 12 female officers are undergoing flying training to become fighter pilots.
Although she died early, but because she lived for the right cause, forgetting her will be difficult. That is the point emphasised in Ajayi’s tribute in verse. We need to live for the right cause!
My final take: We came into this world naked, we will leave it naked. Someone had our first bath for us; our last bath will also not be our responsibility. We arrived in this world weak, we will leave it weak. We came into this world with no dime; we will leave with absolutely nothing. Therefore, why do many of us try to appropriate the world when no one has ever succeeded in doing so?
*Yishua is the author of In the name of our Father and Vaults of secrets.