My Artistic Vulgarization
Apocalypse is the recrudescence
of vulgarization and vulgarity in a given period of society. The very acts of
vulgarity makes facts vulgate for the vulgar and in this is embedded the
freedom of expression which in turn society always have their rulers seeking to
suppress this basic human nature because it results into speaking the
unspeakable as deemed by the authority: for instance I fitly call Edward Snowden
‘Adam’ and the information he released the vulgar which is ‘Eve’ or ‘Iyemoja’
in tune or analogy to my play ‘Adam and Eve and the Marriage God’. The issue of vulgarity in art, my art for one
in terms of some of my poetry pieces came nagging at my mind this morning, and
this was as a result of an advert I had read on the internet the previous night
before I had gone to sleep, and the advert was a demand for poetry submissions
and the body making the call stated that they would not acknowledge poems with vulgarity.
I have no intentions of submitting my poems to them given other factors
concerning submissions, because one which is foremost, is that it is
circumscribed to university/college students which numbers me out but I became
particular about vulgarity which they were particular about in the submissions
of the poets or would be poets, and it negates that vulgarity in poetry is bad;
this is wrong. A poem could be vulgar and of bad taste just like when you put a
couple of seasoning cubes instead of sugar cubes in a cup of coffee therefore
given an offensive taste, but then a different and approved taste when the same
seasoning cubes are used to make omelet, but to be sincere with you, it as a
result of what we have been accustomed to in taste due to what has been built into
our sense of taste overtime although certain things are timeless most
especially with truth and justice, but then it would appear nota common-sensical
step out of the way to start using seasoning cubes for drinking coffee, because
one of the definitions of vulgar is ‘a lack of taste’ that is not being able to
define what is appropriate. One thing of note also is the phrase common sense,
common sense is dictatorial because it is popular in saying that ‘common sense
dictates’ and what is common has to do with everyone and it is orthodoxical, the
tradition, therefore tradition dictates which is why a break from it is what
opens new grounds, so I decided to discuss vulgarity in my poetry although I
wish I could make brief allusions to D. H. Lawrence or Ovid but I have not read
them well except for few excerpts of theirs and appraisals of the kind of
writers they were.
First and foremost existence is vulgar,
society is vulgar and this is the seat of freedom of speech, two vulgarity
amounts to vulgarization of the suppressed or repressed basis, and three the
vulgarity of my poetry stems from vulgarity in denial in a popular religion such
as Christianity which is the censored genesis of the structure of the Bible according
to Moses, and before anyone, Plato et al, Prophet Moses is the first to
cohesively by his thoughts made into a spiritual way of life propound the
philosophy of beauty, the school of philosophy known as aestheticism which is a
discovery made out of our vulgar human nature, but in the growth of society which
in tandem advances in the establishment of morality it naturally appears physiologically
your ‘vulgar parts’ are to be meant out of sight and psychologically this is
interpreted also in terms of what should be uttered in public, but given our
animal natures certain pressures would not allow a man and woman be without the
expressions of the vulgarity, yes it is vulgar because it is common to everyone
and everyone is vulgar so down with elitism. This censored or suppressed
vulgarity of a religion such as Christianity can be termed its closet theories,
which misinterpretedly is relied upon by lots if not all mysteries and
religions, which has amounted to the promotion of female gender discrimination
in societies and male chauvinism. Break limitations on women and the will of
society will blossom with liberty. The limitations on women are ingenuine
patriarchal fears of feminine vulgarity which is entrenched in their being free
and correspondingly transliterates to the relationship of the rulers of the
land and its people.
The vulgarity in my poetry is a
way to keep up with the varying forms of vulgar leadership and vicious states
of things in the Nigerian nation in relation to my being and the being of the
vulgar that is the ordinary man who makes the majority, and the vulgarity in my
poetry or writing is trying not to let the vulgar leadership get away with
their vulgarity, this is talking about both spiritual leadership and political
leadership because from yore they have never being separate that is why in our
courts of justice ample room is given for taking oaths with the elements of the
spiritual, so my vulgarity extends to both in my redefinition of the orthodox,
a redefinition which actually is an endeavour in ostensibility . A point I am
trying to make in relation to the afore mentioned advert on the internet is
that in poetry there is always room for the vulgar or vulgarity, and it can be
in good taste to which end I discuss my
poetic vulgarity.
The most suitable way to express an
obscene situation is obscenely if you want to be understood by many, that is
the vulgar, the ordinary man you know; I had refrained from this pattern of
being plain and to write poetry for poetry sake in a private voice at a time
when I felt I wanted to play an illusive sort of absent mindedness from the
Nigerian situation though present in the Nigerian situation, and I had gone
ahead to write poetry which could be defined as hermetic, but as time went on
my mind’s absenteeism could not keep up with the ignoring of the very situation
all about me, for the Nigerian situation finally got to my absent mindedness,and
what choice do I have to respond to an unjust and obscene scenario of
politicking of presidential, ministerial, senatorial,spiritual et al leadership
that worsens the individual’s life by the minute. For instance I, as an
example, being a degree holder in my entire life, have not had the opportunity of earning up to
twenty five thousand Naira in a month since I have been born;it is not that I
have not done any job to earn me beyond that,but given the obscenity of the
employment predicament in the country, this is what I am landed; one of such
examples was when I worked as a literature and economics teacher, teaching from
JSS i to SS iii, with a private establishment, and I earned N15,000 a
month.This is nothing but an obscene and vulgar manifestation of under
employment, and given my artistic temperament how the hell do you want it fitly
expressed when I decided stand at a point of making myself somewhat clear to a
large audience, most especially the leadership of the president, ministers,
senators et al who are nothing but thieving phoneys, except I chose to go
hermetic with a poem and it means I have chosen not to raise my voice in writing
poetry per a poem.It is a choice being a private voice which is the sort of poet
I have assumed for an appreciable while in my career as a literary artist.But
how do I raise my voice without being vulgar when I am in a society that has
been structured in a way that I as a writer is more than likely never going to
get published in the traditional paperback form such that my ideas would not be
heard like I don’t have the right because I am financially backward,
financially clubfooted and belong to the vulgar, the ordinary man you know; but
then so many thanks to the the social media and the e-book thing and a great
many thanks to the internet hero Phillip Emegwali, I am an eBook published
writer easily available to the public after my efforts at self-publishing .
Vulgar, in one of a number of its definitions, is defined as a way of language
with the ordinary people who are the majority, in other words it is in
vulgarity that a voice is found to make opinions and views and feelings well expressed
by the ordinary man who is among the many suffering to the heavenly good of the
few ostentatious rich. It is in vulgarity that the voice of the ordinary man is
well heard.
Under the watch of a minister of
petroleum, in not more than four years, nothing short of 5 billion dollars is
unaccounted for in the name of being the servant of the president, yet we have
the writer I and a million host of others who in an entire day cannot have for
to eat victuals worth more than four-hundred naira. I can even visualize people
railing that that amount of N400 is exaggerated and that I should
downsize it to the reality of the average Nigerian; this I know, but I want us
to do a little mathematics on the hyperbole of four-hundred naira by
multiplying four-hundred naira by three-hundred and sixty-five days: this gives
us one-hundred and forty-six-thousand naira, that is the limit to what the
average Nigerian has been made to find nutritional sustenance for body and
sanity of mind in an entire year, yet we had a petroleum minister who bought a
jet that demands servicing worth over millions of naira per annum and you tell
me,having given you a hint of my plight and knowing the pains of the populace,
that to express my thoughts when I chose not to be so hermetic anymore I should
be less than obscene. I use the minister of petroleum as an example of the
attitude of other offices of leadership, and more so, the treachery about
petroleum is a major bane to us and also because in a poem I had hinted
vulgarly, which was gossamerly disguised, at a serving petroleum minister who
afterwards rose to chair OPEC, where I asked in the poem ‘do you still ooze
blood?’ The truth is that I am loftily obscene, and my obscene loftiness is
given the institutions I subvert because largely these institutions are the
bedrock of most institutions in the world, and this is the popular and orthodox
religious institution in any given society. It is natural for you to see a
major amount of the rich behave in a la-di-da fashion, or if these rich are not
well educated, this affected way of behavior is upon their children to display,
and it is the natural thing for the common to be vulgar and the la-di-da as
always look down on the vulgar, and it is only normal that the poor commoner
aspires to the stately things of the rich which means he is seeking escape from
the vulgar majority to be among the la-di-da few, and there is nothing wrong
about that except that in a society, like the current Nigerian society, the
poor commoner is likely going to thieve his or her way to get up there either
by bribing or being involved in solicitous inducements and nefarious means like
the means of internet fraud. Quickly let me help your imagination with this
true occurrence of guy whom is financially well off but by fraud, he said before he got into
internet fraud which was preceded by a lifetime period of suffering with his
family, that of these experience one image which readily comes to his mind at
the inception of becoming an internet fraudster was an occurrence when he was a
teenager, and being the eldest he had four siblings after him, and he said that
alongside with their parents they experienced for three straight days nothing
to eat, they starved for three days, and he said whenever he remembered that it
gave more reason to him never to look back from being an internet fraudster. May
it not be well for the person who says that is not enough in a jiggery-pokery
country like ours to which the patience of millions of graduate like me has
being found wanting and to which end I wrote a poem for the sake:
The
Patient Dog (A flash
sonnet)
Fourteen
year Mumbi, her elder siblings and father
arrived
the new refugee camp, Katakuta, last night.
They
were apportioned a tent,
each
given an aluminum bowl, and were told
whenever
they hear the bell ringing it is for feeding,
so
the bell rang this morning
and
they joined the food rush.
Afterwards
Mumbi returned tearful.
Her
father asked, ‘What’s the problem?’
She
responded, ‘I got almost nothing.
I was
being patient for the rush to die.’
The
father replied,
‘What
else does the patient dog ends with
after
others had licked the meat?
It
ends with nothing but the bone.’
That is the obscenity of the
predicament of the patient in Nigeria, and how else if not but vulgar ways
could the voice be properly raised to be heard by the high and mighty the lord
in storeys of the palace. Is patience a virtue? Yes. But then in the obscenity
of the Nigerian nation how rewarding has it been to the underprivileged
majority. Since the ruling class, who are the very few, always does not desire
the voice of the vulgar to be heard aloud, they use the military machinery,
which is described as the use of legitimate force to suppress the vulgar
majority, to check against their vulgarity and the people unknowing to them is
that their sense of society is controlled by orthodox principles entrenched
into their way of life or thinking pattern as tradition which is called common
belief, and this was established and maintained by the principalities ruling
them then and now except for the change in global civilization, that few
modifications are made to keep a makeup of modernity in the given society, and
to question these principles it rests largely on the vulgar being able to
express his or her vulgarity aloud since the leadership is trying to get away
with its own vulgarity and it is obscene that the rules which apply in the
palace walls of the National assembly of the minority having their say and the
majority having their way is the other way round with them the vulgar majority
in relation to the extreme minute minority of leadership. Only the vulgar
thinking can challenge the orthodox in a society where the common wealth is
divided by an uncommon denominator to the detriment of the commoner whom makes
one of the common majority. Vulgarity is obscenity and to be obscene is to be
offensive to conventional standards and conventional standards are orthodox
standards, if I have been quiet obscene in asking ‘do you still ooze blood?’,
but am I more obscene than the very ‘me lady’ under whose watch over five
billion dollars from petroleum vapourized into the sky while a common Nigerian
in a year eats not more than a worth of one-hundred and forty-six-thousand
naira and that is the salary of some persons in a month and this is also in the
presence of the fact that the wardrobe allowance of a member of the National
House of Assembly member is five-hundred and something thousand naira per annum
and every now and then I meet people, who survive on not more than a hundred
naira per day. A number of my poems have chosen to be vulgar, this is because
in this it is able to be the voice of the vulgar and the vulgar is the ordinary
man, although more often than not as a poet writing poetry, I assume the
private voice.I had onetime given the said Okigbo response to a fellow female
corps member when she cried about my hermetic nature as a poet and I said ‘I
write for poets alone’ and in the vein of Soyinka, as I heard from a writer colleague,
I told her you can go for other books if you find mine difficult; actually I
said all this to tell her off because at the time, I was trying not to give her
some attention she needed since her boyfriend was not around.
The point is if I am not offensive
what am I supposed to be in this god forsaken situation? To this end I wrote
such a poem as this in relation to the office holders at the time, a poem which
was a hint of my play ‘Adam and Eve and the Marriage God’ which at the time I
had titled ‘Adam, Yemoja and the Marriage God’ a play of principles which is a
redefinition of the orthodox story:
Sonnet number what…
Foreshadow
to the premiére
‘Adam,
Iyemoja and the Marriage-god.’
Dezeani,
riverine woman with eyes that leaves an
Afterglow
on my TV screen.
Do
you still ooze blood? You seem ageless,
I
would like to make a child by you…
Enough!
Enough?
No!
Eve
of the gods sick for me
I
with the mamba envenom your heart.
Now
let the gods go insane for this is insanity
For
you have ‘rendered’ their shrine insanitary.
Olokun-of-light
be my guide,
This
is Adam on the run, fugitive once again…
I
need an Uzi to fuck the warlord Azazi
Goodluck
fuck him two…
All
ye on death-penalty for mutiny I king of dissent
Roses
of the crescent moon I shower on you
For
now if you die you die for something…
It is the
eve of the gods towards a new day…
This poem was
written in adaptation to the play mentioned. The salvation of a society lies in
the redefinition of the orthodoxical principles in adaptation to the
contemporary by the creatively disordered, and I say I am creatively disordered
to the present state of things of crass Nigerian leadership politically and
religiously. My redefinitions in poetry is actually unearthing the ostensibles of
the ancient lores of popular religions, Judaeo-Biblical mostly, to show the way
forward in a current situation, some of these poetic endeavours are on my
facebook timeline and some poetry sites as eBooks. The spearheading towards
salvation for Nigeria from a Babylonian situation is not in the hand of the
righteous in the orthodox sense or conventional, it means uprightness has to be
redefined and this is what I do with my vulgar poetry to make the vulgar
understand the antics of the lord and those who do things as lords in the name
of the lord. Of course this uprightness is taking masked forms which make it
evil, it has to take an unmasked one, because in its masked form the lords,
that is the ruling elite, have something to go by whereby we become one because
a common evil, like Boko haram, unites us the suffering commoners with them the ruling ostentatious elites. When I
mean ruling elite it is not only defined by the political office holders but as
well include all those who would see to it that every incoming ruler is
comfortable with the status quo of our Babylonian situation. The common
Nigerian is in slave exile while at home, because he is suffering Babylonian
captivity in his home land. To this end the ostensible goal in the story of
Prophet Daniel laid on the background of other biblical expressions I captured
in a poem of which a fragment would here be published to the end of this little
article.
Virgin daughter of
Babylon
With a pure heart of
gloom
You render us
fruitionless
Virgin daughter of Babel
What have you done?
Short of righteousness
you’ve turned us eunuchs
Proph Daniel most
righteous eunuch
In the court of
Babylonian
principalities
Proph Daniel upright
eunuch
Doomed incapably to not
end
The maid’s age of pure
night
Daniel incapacitated of
virility
You were not
A rebel in the heart
I am not given to analyse my poems as almost any poet is not given but
for the sake of this I would do succinctly: this poem in implication says the
righteousness or uprightness of prophet Daniel,made eunuch in his youth, was
futile in relation to the salvation of Israel given the Babylonian predicament
at the time, and this adapts to the
Nigerian situation of youths incapacitated by the continuous corrupt leadership
overtime of Nigeria such that the Nigerian situation is one which needs rescuing
by youth and virility, that the youthful ones be rebelliously upstanding
against those whom represent everything Babylonian and not court around with
them as Daniel courted the Babylonian principalities in ruling, although the
popular notion of the role Daniel played is that religious faithfuls should not
shy away from political leadership and that they could maintain upright
standing as politicians, but then were the children of Israel comfortable as
second citizens? They weren’t, and this was more paramount in the minds of the
Israelites which made the status of Daniel as righteous effete to their primary
need. There is no liberty when humans live like slaves in the midst of plenty
in their land, this I defined as the original sin when ‘Osun’ became
vituperative against the gods in my play ‘Adam and Eve and the Marriage God’ in
which I redefined the popular notion of the story of Babel to which end I wrote
a number of poems concerning the ostensibility of the Babel story one of which
I wrote as a tribute to Moses and one to the play among other poems in relation
to the Babel tower story and in here are two of them:
SONNET 49 Babylon Babel’s tower, (A tribute to
Prophet Moses)
Babel
the slavery empire where souls did beseech their lords
Like
gods who enslaved them to build on earth a kingdom heavenly.
If
this be the gates of God the Lord must be queenly
And
the speech of God is the freedom of speech.
Mon amour know that if I had a tower to build
You
shall be the ideal model,
By
you one sees the true tale of Babel and glossolalia
Where
liberty, independence was sought from the imperialist
By
slave colonies like in Nigeria speaking diverse tongues
And
other colonies who in anarchy like in Babel fought to be free,
And
like you the dreadful beauty of the uprising
Wild
with uncontrollable ecstasy, they rise up in arms,
In
solidarity moved with the ‘watchword at heavensgate’
And
fought to give the heartless lords a wound for a heart.
You may coneive it vulgar,
all the same you are welcome. And the second is this:
To the play ‘ADAM AND EVE AND THE MARRIAGE
GOD’
That
Adam refused to slay Eve
That
Prometheus failed to snuff the life of Pandora
That
Prometheus or Adam absconded with Yemoja
That
Adam did not destroy Eve
The
gods sought revenge without repentance.
And
Adam gave the gods a wound for a heart
For
they were heartless, they were the lord, the slavemasters.
The
gods menstruated without cease
And
the ultimate crime was that Adam refused to kill Yemoja,
Adam
refused to kill Eve.
Adam
is Prometheus caught in the put out paradox.
And
Adam gave the gods a wound for a heart
A
wound that bled like a woman with an issue healed by Christ.
The
gods on flashback told themselves a fancy,
A
fancy of Perseus beheading Medusa,
Wishing
they could reverse the irrevocable
Wishing
they could revoke the irrevertible
Wishing
Adam had destroyed Eve, instead Olokun Adam slew.
Adam
rode into Babel with Eve
Adam
drove into the towers with Yemoja
Adam
or Prometheus drove in with the source of light
And
by an indescribable beauty, a mornster, an enslaved nation
Were
electrified, lightened up and enlivened
They
ran amok in ecstasy into a freedom of expression
In
a freedom of speech, and the towers
Like
breasts peaked and arranged against the sky
Was
brought to collapse for Babel tower was the tower of imperialism
The
story of the tower of Babel is the story of primal slavery
Into
which Adam rode in with the beast, for Eve was the beast.
All in all in the eyes of those
who are working in the name of the lord, I am on the precipice of blasphemy,
but I say to them you have read nothing yet. Vulgarity in poetry or art should be
meant to make existential things called divine because it is of the existential
that the poets and prophets of the Judeo-Biblical explained and expressed their
Babylonian suffering and hinting the eternal. And I part here with one more
vulgarity of my poetry actually as I have stated before an ostensible of the
bible:
Must-not-mention Name of God (Sonnet 32)
Our
Turtle doveliness with a battlefield for heart
Sing
us wild with vintage-chorus wild with nectar-song
That
I, an implanted aster with the burden of proof
In
the scarlet soul of the Infinite, beneath a blue-sky roof
At
the worship place of lightning and blood play my part
In
this macabre four stage act of a requiem song.
If
Oedipus is man and man God by surname being heaven’s children,
That
Oedipus had his mother for starters it means
The
fertile farm patch of God is tilled by the child, true,
The
queen-bee by which all is begotten, the mother.
I
black lark of paradise dare not to concur
I
telltale laden cock of the Garden fear not to concur;
The
wording for the one that fucks the child must be
The
incommunicable name of God in the Hebraic code.
Adonai
is the name of God in place of the name that must not be spoken; this is a
check on vulgarity. I thus vulgarize to an ostensible end to make true
knowledge accessible to the ordinary man the vulgar, because the ostensibility
of the Bible is actually the undoing of the ‘lord’ existentially, the painful
truth is that the poor masses whom are the vulgar have deemed it all spiritual.
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