Poets Talk: 5 Questions with Wirndzerem G. Barfee

Konya Shamsrumi: What is the process of writing a poem like for you? Is it a lot of hard work or easy?

Wirndzerem G. Barfee: I am more of a spontaneous writer, a pagan of instincts who prays for visits to his inspirational shrine to caress the surprising flash of an epiphaneous muse. In short, my creativity feeds on revelatory moments: it suffices that the click be ignited by an intriguing image, place, face, word, line, song, etc. that evokes the fresh and unusual meaning, feeling or mood – and the process is unleashed.

I hardly engage in scientific and tediously drafted compositions, though there is a bit of craftsmanship in the case of post-corrections administered to the primitive piece. But the essence is: if it doesn’t inspire from the onset and drive a deluge of emotions, senses and images, I start feeling the whole process belaboured and the tedium sets in and I tend to abandon or shred the piece. It becomes unreal to me when the muse doesn’t come in whorling in a whirlwind and hurling its diamonds at me. I must be possessed before I can be healed by writing. And it’s also only then that I can heal you and the next reader with authentic poetic potions.

Konya Shamsrumi: Please describe your sense of identity in this or any possible world in imagery or metaphor?

Wirndzerem G. Barfee: If I would describe myself as lent to my creative identity, I would say I am an “Apostle of Polemics” spiced by an aesthetic commitment to that polemical purpose. This is operated through a poetic dedication to resist erasures by the prevailing hegemonic narratives and dynamics of our contemporary world. My works engage this resistance through overt and covert strategies. So, I am kind of aesthetically and politically militant in my poetics for the most part.

Konya Shamsrumi: 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?

Wirndzerem G. Barfee: Such life-saving poem of mine, amongst a good number of others, for now, would be Gods for Sale. This poem engages the collapse of our ancestral religions, the tragic collapse of our spiritual identities and the erosion and waste of all the tangible and intangible wealth as well as the rootedness that goes with pandering your own religion to borrow another man’s own, especially that of your enslaver, colonizer or oppressor. Forget the religio-capitalist posturings of individual salvation (of your Lord and personal savior), African religions are communitarian and rooted in collective and generational salvation. There is no universal God or religion except Truth and Love, that all modern religions preach but none practices.

So, I had to save myself and my like with this poem by exploring and edifying my audience on some of the agendas driven by this alienating narrative of most hegemonic religions. In same logical line it calls for our return to our own ancestral religious mythologies and develop them like the other religions did to evolve.

 Gods for Sale
 
They raided our most sacred shrines, 
 Caught a sentinelling god, 
 Tied him up like a bundle of wood, an idol, 
 And stood him on the market square 
 With a price tag around his neck.
 
They auctioned him to strangers 
 Who mocked the age of his colored teeth,
 And offered derisory prices over his head.
 They pushed his chin up with a mischievous finger
 And laughed at the primitive marks on his face.

 They were us - strangers to our own soul fire, 

 And the captive deity was our god. 
 Like supercilious tourists in our own land, 
 We wanted to buy him, dress him up 
 With rags and give him a mean sacerdotal
 Watching our farms and frightening away 
 The birds and rodents that make war on our crop.

 Our god is a captive god, a slave deity 
 Whose spiritual farms now lie fallow 
 As we till with foreign mastery, hoe and song, 
 The new farms of new gods who don't recognise 

 Our voices, faces, names and souls
 When we sing, pray and do incantations.

 There he stood, the sacred wood from the sacred forest, 
 Ancestral wood from whose pith our ancestral godsmiths
 Hew out deities in silent confinements 
 And blew hot breath into their lungs worked by
 The sweltering bellows of unquenchable furnaces. 
 Now we of all and amongst all like lost tribes, 
 With a sneer of curses call them man-made gods!

 Weed, like rough beard on the face of fanatics of most sinister temper, 
 Has covered the road to ancestral shrines with creeping thorns. 
 The spiritual apprentices have moved 
 From monks to pimps now meddling in the auction 

 Of the bearded meat stuck to loose hips at wrong's streets 
 That wind only to lose their way in a bag's ass! 
 We long lost the way.

As mentioned above, the first and foremost person to be saved by my poetry would be me, creator-saviour, in that my writing is both a healing function and process.

This creative therapy keeps me sane and anchored in the face of a chaotic and rudderless universe. I try to save myself from drowning in this sea of existential chaos by indulging in compositions, especially poetry, which grant me immoderate doses of poetic therapy. The other group of persons beyond myself would be Africans that have lost their roots, bearings and their souls or spirituality, in short the belief in their person and as dignified Africans.

My writing, as evidenced by the poem above, directly or indirectly seeks to save such souls by composing poetic narratives and weaving tropes that re-question to re-humanize them and re-sanctify their much-violated spaces.

Konya Shamsrumi: Could you share with us one poem you’ve been most impressed or fascinated by? Tell us why and share favorite lines from it.

Wirndzerem G. Barfee: One such poem I keep rushing back to almost like a totemic equipment for mythological living is Soyinka’s Idanre. This robust and recondite poem, yet a diligently accessible piece, to me represents all the treasures lacking in modern African poetry: the expanding deficit of ancestral mythological mooring to our aesthetic inspiration, hence a spiritual hollow that borrowed mythologies, religions and aesthetic experiences can never fully fulfill. What I love in this poem is the typically African picture with which Soyinka captures Ogun (one of my favorite and patron gods in the rich Yoruba pantheon, the god of metallurgy, fire, creativity, destruction and war – a god of very versatile, volatile and volcanic temperaments). My best lines:

 Shield of orphans, was your shield 
 In-spiked that day on sheltering lives?

This questioning of divine negligence and holding deities accountable marks a more realistic departure from the inculpable Christian and Islamic gods whose omnipotence bar them from all blame and all they receive unfairly are praises. The grateful humanization of the Yoruba pantheon (in stark contrast to the monstrous solemnity and irreproachability of our imported gods) renders that African spiritual cosmos more hospitable, palatable, accessible and even ludic:

 Ogun is a lascivious god who takes
 Seven gourdlets to war. One for gunpowder.
 One for charms. Two for palm wine and three
 Air-sealed in polished bronze make 
 Storage for his sperms

Konya Shamsrumi: What does Africa mean to you, as potential or reality?

Wirndzerem G. Barfee: Africa is a big question mark in the heart of the world when you metaphorise its cartographic essence. It is a perpetual interrogation that patterns a trajectory of re-questionings from its being the cradle out of which, to present scientific knowledge, man saw sunlight, to the dark continent from a Eurocentric perspective, to the heart of darkness from perspectives of a Conradian literary trope, to the rising hope of the world in terms of geopolitics, demographics, natural resource economics and so on.

So in both potential and real dimensions, the African century is rising and may render the Asian century very short-lived. The wars are in net reduction, economic success stories are being written, growth rates seek to double digits in a good number of countries and the youthful generations through global education, literature, art, music, film, sports and above all social media are less chauvinistic than the previous independence and post-independence generations. The ultimate consequence of these dynamics being the huge potential for uniting and federating Africa sooner than it may have been projected, especially if powers like France are coerced to un-grip their imperial stranglehold on former colonial possessions.

Wirndzerem G. Barfee is an Anglophone Cameroon writer and professional in public finance expenditure who published his successful first collection, Bird of the Oracular Verb, with a national grant in 2008. The book went on to win the 2011 EduArt Bate Besong Prize for Poetry. His areas of creative concentration are poetry and short stories and he has published in several publications in Africa, Europe and US of America. He is currently polishing another collection of poetry to be published by the end of 2020.

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Richard Ali

Richard Ali is a Nigerian writer whose poems were first published in 2008. He has served in the National EXCO of the Association of Nigerian Authors and sits on the board of Uganda’s Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation. A member of the Jalada Writers Cooperative based in Nairobi, his work has been published in African Writing, Jalada, Saraba Magazine and elsewhere. The Anguish and Vigilance of Things is his debut collection, was published in 2020. He practices Law in Abuja, Nigeria.