Richard Ali + Oko Owi Ocho. Listen to the interview here.
What is the process of writing a poem like for you? Is it a lot of hard work or easy?
Oko Owi Ocho: Writing a poem comes easily for me sometimes. But that is because I am the type of poet who writes once every year. For over four years, I have discovered a pattern that, around September to October, a mad creative spasm drives me to write. And for most of my poems except Songs for Torkwase, I work them first inside my head with lots of changes and words quarreling to fit before I write them out. So, when I sit to write on paper, they come out freely. The hard part comes when editing because I feel like every word should stand or, as the case may be, sit, in the right corner. And that is often hard work.
Please describe your sense of identity in this or any possible world in imagery or metaphor?
Oko Owi Ocho: My sense of identity! I am a village boy and a pagan carrying a city song inside his throat. I am not as sure of anything as much as I am aware that I hold the destiny of the old woman from Adoka who reincarnated me. And no one holds the destiny of someone from the last century who wouldn’t be an Africanist.
Oko Owi Ocho
If any of your poems could literarily save a person’s life, which poem would it be and can you describe the person whose life you think it would have saved?
Oko Owi Ocho: If it is to save a life in an ideological sense, it is my poem Now I Sing God into Stones and How Does One Inherit Grief. The poems could save the lives of young Africans caught between the villages they keep looking for inside cities. I believe that the feeling of homelessness—when every city rejects you—is a kind of dying. So, I have tried to save myself, and if the poem is lucky to find another whose life is traumatized by the same yearning for a home and the sadness of never getting any, then we can share in its saving power. But if saving a life is about redeeming someone from the seizure of breath, then the idea of my poem doing that has never occurred to me. Like W. H Auden wrote,
"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making…"
Although I have gotten responses from some of the people who got copies of my chapbook, We Will Sing Water, after the publication of the limited edition for the Benue Book and Arts Festival—that they were touched. But if I’ll be honest, I think they were in fact touched by the dying African soul in the age of globalisation which I channel and re-present.
What does Africa mean to you, as potential or reality?
Oko Owi Ocho: Africa means redemption for the human race. What the world sees as backwardness will be what they will return to after the exhaustion of the consciousness of being that will hit humanity. There is a cultural apocalypse, and humans will become i-humans—only slightly different from robots with how things are going. With the Western mode of thinking today, the destruction of hundreds of years of philosophizing and systems of thought is imminent. Western arrogant rationality, which tends to overhaul other perspectives has ushered every part of the world into the age of “posts”: post-modernism, post-marxism, post-truth, post-humanism, and we even hear things such as post-Africanity. Fortunately, Africa has not caught the flu of this chaos completely. And, as the overfed children of hypercapitalism and consumer culture get exhausted in their boredom, Africa will be the place of what being human looks like—albeit if the Western power doesn’t change us too soon.
Could you share with us one poem you’ve been most impressed or fascinated by? Tell us why and share favorite lines from it.
Oko Owi Ocho: I would say it is Tchicaya U Tamsi’s “Preface” in Epitome: Headings for the Summary of a Passion, translated by Gerald Moore. Although it is written as a preface to the collection, for me, it stands out. I am fascinated by the piece because of its fragmented pose, which reflects how disjointed yet meaningful our lives can be. I believe that is the mastery of Tchicaya, the ability to mean both in form and content. My favourite lines include:
These words, mintmarks to what is certainly not a poem,
can stand in place of a preface.
But, alas, I haven’t the magic skill that wins hearts,
despite all my vanity!
Poet?
No!
…
Nothing is closer to a cry than music.
Oko Owi Ocho (also called Owoicho Oko) has a BA English and is studying for his MA in Literature with focus on Theory and Decoloniality. He is the founder and team lead of Afrika-Writes and former Creative Director for Benue Poetry Troupe. He is an award-winning poet, performance artist, and scholar. He was longlisted for the Nigerian Student Poetry Prize (2017), earned an NSPP Award of Excellence (2018) for his poem “Zeyani,” and was the second prize winner of the Korea Nigeria Poetry Prize (2018). His poetry works are We Will Sing Water, and Now I Sing God into Stones (Forthcoming). His forthcoming critical books are Culture, Coloniality, and the African Being and In Defence of a Generation: Its Poetics, Politics, and Radicalism.
Oko believes in poetry for development, as he has used his poetry to speak on several subjects such as marginalisation, violence, mental health, and how culture and environment are knitted. He has used his platform to organise workshop for young adults, and secondary school students, and teach them how art is a tool for social action. Key among his interest is the inclusion of the minority ethnic groups of the North Central Nigeria into discourse of development through poetry and performance art. He is currently working on a monograph “Ecocriticism and the Decolonial Turn: Climate Justice and Nonhuman agency.” His email is owoichoko@gmail.com.
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