AUTHOR: EBI YEIBO (Ph.D.)
PUBLIHSHER: MALTHOUSE PRESS LIMITED, LAGOS
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2019
PAGINATION: 125
REVIEWER: AMATARE MOZIMO
“What are poets for in a destitute time?…
But they are, you say, like the wine god’s holy priests
Who fared from land to land in holy night.“
- Culled from Holderlin’s elegy: “Bread and Wine”
Introduction: l’art pour l’art
Why do poets pen down poetry? What is the aim of poetry? Is poetry the mere scribbling of words on paper and arranged in lines and verses or imaginative words spoken spontaneouslyto convey a sensational message for the writer’s or reader’s delight? Or can it go both ways? Is poetry an activity for leisure and entertainment or need it have a moral obligation to transmit a message through carefully scripted lines? Must a poem have a message to make meaning or can content be muffled and oblique to give way to form and artistic structuralism as its aesthetic import?
These posers take us down memory lane to that age long macabre dance between the twin concept of “Content and Form.” Must literature be socio-politically didactic to make meaning or should it be tilted towards aestheticismmainly? Must a work of art give solutions to societal ills before it is relevant? Must it always be about realism – to mirror the society before it can be appreciated and appraised? Should a poet’s commitment to didacticlines be downplayed at the expense of structural lyricism or aestheticism?
The great 19th Century French Philosopher, Victor Cousin, coined the phrase: “l’art pour l’art” literally meaning “art for art’s sake” to exemplify the supremacy of structural form over other external interpretation for a work of art. It simply portends that an art work can stand on its own merit and should be interpreted as such. Its aesthetic beauty in form and not extraneous content should give it meaning. Accordingly, the Britannica states thus:
The phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’ expresses the belief held by many writers and artists, especially those associated with Aestheticism, that art needs no justification, that it need serve no political, didactic, or other end. (42).
Scott (1962) attests to this when he maintains that:
Without question, the most influential critical method of our time is the formalistic. It has commanded the zeal of our leading critics…is, in fact, the method one almost automatically thinks of when speaking of contemporary criticism. (179).
White Masks: APoetry CollectionofClass and Candour
Yeibo’sWhite Masks brings the medieval debacle of content and form to the fore once again. Albeit, this time, with fresh cut throat perspectives.It is tilted in favour of the latter. White Masks is not a poetry collection for literary Lilliputians. No, it is not for the faint-hearted literary enthusiastswho take art – and poetry in particular – as a mere past time. Neither is it a poetry collection for moral pugilists. It belongs to that top echelon of literary puissance which canstand the taste time. This is due more to its poetic craft that goes beyond the scripted lines to assimilation ofitspoetic lyricisminsound, sight and taste.
That which Udenta (1993) refers to as ‘elitist’ or ‘Klitsch literature in Africa in contrasts to what Obiechina posits- in line with the Russian literary philosopher, Vladimir Baskakov – as quoted in Udenta’s titledchapter: ‘The PopularSpiritinLiterature in Africa’ is derivative. The latter characterised by “mediocrity and vulgarized specimen of mass culture, the culture of the people,” (38); while the former, in which Yeibo’sWhite Masks clearly sits astride and akimbo:
is the mass of serious, highbrow, intellectualized literature written mainly by university graduates (and academics) and characterized by seriousness of tone, profundity of thematic concerns, artistic and creative resourcefulness, and directed to the well-educated middleclass elements. It is regarded as literature of the coterie, of the “closed sages (Udenta, 1993:39).
Yeibo’sWhite Masks comprises fifty-three poems seamlessly written to flow at ease and bond in a structural whole that unites in many ways than one. The usual structure of poetic alignment in collections is in sub-divisions of poems based on thematic preoccupations. But herein, White Masks foregrounds this structural tilt by taking a clean stretch down the line from its first word to the last – the poems ascend and are only punctuated by their loud titles in bold upper-case letters. This is a somewhat sordid attraction that invites the reader’s interest. What Derrida, in deconstructionist term, better described as the sign and the signifier in Writing and Difference (1967).
In the title of most of the poems in White Masks, one can picture life. It is this aspect that slightly gives away meaning in its subsequent contents. Carefully chosen with tactile imagery that promptly stand out as displayed in ‘of Masks and Whirlwinds’, ‘Naked Seascapes’, ‘Pagan Delusion’, ‘Sagging Stars’ et cetera. Without mincing words, most titles of the poems comprise two words. A kind of bi-syllabicmake-up that strengthens the lexical composition. The title poem, ‘White Masks’ comes handy in this regard.
FromYeibo’s poetic curtain raiser, Maiden Lines (1997) to his fifth collection, White Masks(2019), one can see that his poetic signature has improved over the years. Like old wine, it gets better as the decades advance. Whereas in his Maiden Lines,from mere titles meaning can be deciphered and forecast to the contents therein; in White Masks the reverse is the case. In as much as titles are the least giving away to meaning of the poems, in itself, it does not lay bare the true entails of the subsequent lines.
With dense imagery of flora and fauna, Yeibo delves into the philosophical world of mystic rhymes best understood in tranquillity. The words and definition of poetry by the old sage, William Wordsworth comes to mind. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … recollected in tranquillity.” To read the lines and infer meaning from the imagery is not a walk in the park. It comes with many complexities as the images get entangled in splinters of semanticinnuendoes.
The diction is taut. Yeibo ‘picks and drops’ vocabulary with pristine ease. Listen to the rhythm of these lines in: ‘of masks and whirlwinds’:
Muezzins gambol round in the borders as madibas
Wheezing in the early morning breeze
Hoisting husks and hebetude
They revel in a sandhouse, (sic) like a toddler;
Dew-draped greenery to a graveyard
Sprouting sore tales in the streets. (IV: lines 16 – 22).
The choice of vocabulary is dense and uncommon to everyday language use. Muezzins, gambol, madibas, hoisting, husks, hebetude, wheezing, and dew-draped. These are words that are bound to produce blood-shot eyes protruded beyond its sockets to get at meaning. An avid reader does not need to stop and check at every point for any highfalutin vocabulary choice. The flow of the poems and the imagery they evoke, all are pointers to decipher meaning. Without such distance from taking the words in their denotative state, the complexities are replenished with deeper depths.
The use of quatrain is one technique that places the poetry collection in its structural niche. Written in predominantly four-linefree verses with some poems alternating the flow from three lines to quatrains, the collection,at other times, makes use of couplet verses. Poems such as:‘Priest’s Pouch’, ‘Mocking the Godhead’, ‘A Festival of Long Shadows’, ‘Iron Masks’ and ‘Carnal Moons’are all quatrains that briefly but succinctly portray the poetry as being successful through its consistent lyricism and structural rendition. The number ‘Four’evokes equanimity in the readers mind. These quatrains negate any form of triteness or banality.
When the verses are not in quatrains, they are in three lines. ‘Timeless Tunes’ reads thus:
These dangling shadows
Bearing secret grudges
In the midday sun
Braid the rough edges
Of penumbra blood
The moody, miasma, into
Timeless music, ever playing
In the precincts of the mind,
Without prophecy or oblation, (lines 1-9).
Observe that to effectively create cohesion and balance, the persona uses run-on-lines to link the stanzas so as to maintain a consistent pattern of three lines per stanza. In line six which ends the second stanza, the preposition, ‘into’ had to be left hanging and the reader needs to move to the next stanza to continue the sentence. Such literary use of ‘enjambment’ with a caesura effect is deployed brilliantly to achieve a pattern; a consistent style that permeates through the structural fabric of the poetry.
Even when some verses alternate between three and four lines, it is done so flawlessly to create an ambience of fluidity and cohesion. For instance, in the poem, ‘A Resonant Void’, there is an alternation of two and three lines in the verses. Stanza One comprises three lines while Stanza Two has two lines. And it goes on to alternate the lines in subsequent stanzas to achieve a parallelism of wholeness and firmness to tie thecohesive knot.
This is also seen in ‘Black Pulchritude’. Three-line stanzas are alternated with four-line stanzas. This is so done deliberately to address the question of form and balance. It reads thus:
The owners of raucous laughter, tumescent airs,
Like a crab, wild in the spirit, numb to blood,
Enter town, to a triumphant cheer
Sublimals (sic) of a busy year of wandering exploits
Roll to a halt; buried in their hearts
Is a whore who wove a path for saints (sic)
To tread to heavensgate (sic) at twilight. (lines 1 – 7).
From the above excerpt, one can attest to the alternation of lines in the verses from three to four-line verses in order to maintain some form of order. The word ‘sic’ is added to the quote to query the wrong use of words like ‘sublimals’(sublime), ‘heavensgate’ (two independent words that should be separated from its compound composition here) and the omission of the question mark symbol(?) after the word ‘saints’ in line six because the line begins with the interrogative auxiliary verb ‘is’ and not the pronoun ‘it’.
The point in poetry is not to get at meaning from denotative use of words neither is it to decipher only its connotative inferenceswritten in a bombast style with undue verbosity. It is primal to read and enjoy the consonance of rhythm, rhyme and articulation of sound vocabulary choices that have been crafted together in deliberate unison to leave even the distant critic in awe and obeisance.
Rather than labour the reader with lengthy arm-twisting verses, the use of quatrains gives it a short, brief and concise taste that appeals to the reader’s sense of time. It allows the reader to take short breaths to ponder and comprehend the versatility of the piece before moving on to gulp the other pieces of the pie. It is like taking short but deep breaths that guarantee sustenance. As Abrams puts it, while defining free verses as:
the kind of effects, in the suspensions within syntactic units and the increased control of pace, pause, and time, that become available where the verse is released from the necessity of a recurrent beat and regular line, but is controlled instead by the variable spacing of words, phrases, and lines: (69).
Yeibo takes the caesura effect a notch higher in White Masks. The poems have scanty use of punctuations and this is deliberate, no doubt. Punctuations alter the flow of words in sentences giving the reader that pause for air needed to gulp other lines. Being a ceaseless flow of poems from the beginning to the end without sub-divisions and with sparse use of run-on-lines to interlace with the next continuous lines, punctuations play a major role in achieving that structural knot of the poetic fibre. Each comma, colon or semi-colon placed at strategic points has its aesthetic value to the overall appraisal of the poem. This is so because if wrongly placed meaning is interjected. The use of this ‘caesura effect’ mid lines in Yeibo’sWhite Masks contributes richly to its literary flair. See ‘TIMELESS TUNES’ as cited above.
Shrouded with the mystic motif of Biblical allusions asimaginative pointers,White Maskscontains a plethora of solemn verses obliquely blurred by vision of religiousmementoes. You can hardly flip through a poem without seeing these religious nuances that prick you with some form of piety. Darthone (1974) avers that:
Besides the oral sources, the Bible…, had the greatest influence on indigenous literature. … it might now be unfortunate that Africans were introduced to written European literature through Christian propaganda. (2).
In his poem titled:‘A Resonant Void’, Yeibobuttresses this allusionsuccinctly:
No offals or portions, an absolute virgin lust
From the maskedchoir; the master, pot-bellied. (lines 4-5. Emphasis mine).
In ‘After the War in the Soul’ words like ‘soul’, ‘crested’, ‘muezzin’, ‘funeral’, ‘ablution’, ‘’scents’, ‘cathedrals’, ‘crescent’, ‘sacred’ and ‘spirits’; all add colour to the spiritual adulations of the poem. They tend to mismatch religious piety with humanity in ways that attract decorum, morality and poise. In all, the perfection of divinity in contrast to a dying world of filth and flaws are foregrounded through such splendid use of allusions.
This same trend is seen in the poem: ‘Mocking the Godhead’. Here, lascivious intercourse is questioned with words that grapple with shame, charm and chance. The poem does not give away its nuances in direct words. It does so with interwoven power play of fanciful laden imagery of coupled couplets (to borrow a leaf from Gabriel Okara’s lines) with grin consequences yet adored in disbelief. The choice words of: ‘godhead’, ‘sacramental stones’, ‘cathedrals’ and ‘glory’ are some words that highlight the piety of the poem. Such allusions must be considered to decipher meaning as they evoke an imagery of desecration and wanton abandoned of the pure motives of copulation.The persona is indeed on a spiritual voyage of ecstasy.
Beyond the use of structural lyricism as form and art, Yeibo’sWhite Masksportends a rebirth of the formalist revolution that once rocked the mid-twentieth century literary renaissance in Europe and the rest of Northern America. It does so with a harsh bias for structural form to content. Every good writer knows that to write effectively is to communicate in simple, short and straight forward words and sentences. But that negates the interest of poetry. Not in the sense of being unduly verbose but in terms of select word play and creative choice of diction. This aspect sets White Masks in a class of its own. Words and structural format are toyed with in such dexterity that the reader cannot but be perplexed in rapt admiration. The juxtaposition of simple and not-too simple vocabularies coupled with the cohesive blank versification all add to the beauty of the poetry.
It is not the first time – and neither would it be the last – that Yeibo deploys the mask motif in his poetry collection. In The Fourth Masquerade (2014) from the title down through the contents the mask is laid bare as a motif to connote hypocrisy, pretence and callousness. Here in the White Masks,the veiled apparel of a mask runs through the poems. Its symbolism goes beyond that veiled masquerade to one that is muffled and vague. It situates that diversity and varied forms of misidentify as used in several instances of borrowed variants such asmasquerades, night, moonlight,veils, shadows or silhouettesdeployed with tautness. The coercive use of such dark variants forms the pattern of repetitive strain that lies within the structural congruent of symbolic lexicon in the collection.
The title, ‘white masks’ is worth dissecting a bit. On the cover page, the white background is dotted with varied colourful variants of the mask – white, grey, black and off-white. Four masks centralised in symmetry with the title. The plurality of the masks is in tandem with the title key word ‘masks.’ But the question is why white masks? Why are there masks of other different variants and shades? A peep into the title poem could give answers to these plaguing posers especially when contrasted with the poem, ‘White Debris’ on page seventy-two. The maskssymbolise that veiled apparel miffed by the distant sounds of distractions; muffled by the constant innuendoes of shame, hate and sorry sights bedevilling humanity in aworld full of vague nuances of love, of life and of live-in lovers.
Against the surging threshold amplifying
The message of the town crier
Lubricants of the hearth, without libation. (‘WHITE DEBRIS’,lines 3-6)
And dawn appears again as a newborn
With phosphorescent wrinkles and blood-shot eyes
Dyed in fragrant white masks – (‘WHITE MASKS’, lines 7-9)
Replete with the terse use of local colours. White Masks dangles the elements of locations and delicacies in such ways that display its import on the veracity of the poetry. These code-mixed terms are in asterisk and explained with foot notes to give the reader a sense of understanding. They flood the pages and give it that indigenous literary flavour that permeatesthe archetypalrustic rural setting. To cite but a few examples include but not limited to: ‘Ofonibengha’, ‘Forcados’, ‘Ageh’, ‘Bomadi, ‘Agbayabou’, Tarakiri, ebedebiri,Daada, et cetera, which are known places and communities in the Delta region of Nigeria. Delicacy as ‘kekefiyai’ also known as ‘KKF’ is also cited to embellish the local recipe.
With tactile imagery that tends to blend with the sense of touch as well as other words that arouse our sense of smell, the reader is bemused by such words as ‘ooze’. ‘foul’, ‘sizzling’, ‘smell’, ‘burnt’, ‘fragrance’ and so on in the poem, ‘Addendum’(58). One gets that urge to taste and smell the aroma being painted by this deliberate choice of diction. The poem can be appreciated with its symbiotic pun that evokes the reader’s fantasy and attraction in ways that create an aesthetic distancing which Abrams, in reference to Immanuel Kant’s, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1970), describes as: “an act of contemplation which is disinterested (that is, independent of our personal interests) and free from all reference to its reality, moral effect, or utility.”(43).
It further adds that: “aesthetic distance …, is often used not only to define the nature of all literary and aesthetic experience, but also to analyse the many devices by which authors control the degree of a reader’s distance, or “detachment” to the degree of his involvement…” (44).Yeibo’s deployment of this technique in White Masks is never in doubt considering the muffledsombretone inherent in most of the poems that tend to evoke a nostalgic feeling of grief and gloom.
The recurrent alliterative devices are resplendent. ‘The PrieSt’s Pouch’(8), ‘Surrogates of the Soul’(50), ‘Sagging Stars’(63), ‘SOFT STONES’(97), ‘STREET SONGS’(103), ‘and ‘…Promise in a Puddle’(118)are obvious inferences in some poem titles. Other instances therein include: ‘…a luscious lady lying like a lifeless log’(lines 26 of ‘A SETTLED BANKRUPCY’ and ‘… like Leicester lifting the league cup.’(lines 6). Such aestheticism heightens themood and undulates the toneto achieve a musical effect best reserved for themythical wine-gods.
Not minding such faux pas therein such as sublimals (sic),heavensgate (sic),in ‘BLACK PULCHRITUDE’(65);faithfuls(sic), wake-keep (sic), as contained in the title poem, ‘WHITE MASKS’ (27-30); as well as the grammaticalblunder in ‘MOCKING THE GODHEAD’: “Those who go straight to the point…/Or lays (sic) wreaths on the waist before dawn.(65-66, lines 1-4); White Masksstillcarves a niche for itself as being a work of art whose structural parallelism and form intertwine with a firm grasp of lexicon thatforeground it; giving it that triumphant entry into theavantgarde of poetic collections best reserved for classics which crave in you a longing for hearth and home.
In tandem with this thought above, Professor Hyginus Ekwuazi while recommending White Masks to literary scholars, in his Foreword within the preliminary pages of this poetry collection, attests firmly that it is: “highly recommended to the discerning reader – to anyone who takes more than a passing interest in any aspect of modern Nigerian poetry.”
Books with front pages on white background have always been a craving soft spot for many. Regardless of the striking pose or varied colourful artistic paintings on such books, they always stand out – bright and beautiful. The bright white colour foregrounds whatever texts – simple or dense – laden on it and give it that inviting freshness and cleanliness every book needs to attract the desired impulsive readership. Yeibo’sWhite Masks falls in this pristine category.
In sum, Yeibo’sWhite Maskscomes as a soothing balm to the plethora of literary pieces that give succour to the soul in these plaguing times. It is in that realm of surrealfantasy where Martin Heidegger describes poets “as the mortals, who, singing earnestly of the wine gods, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s track, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning.” (Heidegger, 1971:94).
White Masksenvelopes the reader with such firm grasp of literary elements blended with dexterous lexicon that engulfs one’s perception of sight, sound and other sensory organs which leave the reader bemused in a world full of life, laughter and livid memories of ecstasy and fantasy; in a piteous never-ending wonderland.A nice read for the literati. And as Derrida ends it:
The future can be anticipated only in the form of absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can thus announce itself, present itself, only under the species of monstrosity.
-Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976:23).
Works Cited
Abrams. M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fourth Ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.
Baskakov, Vladimir. ‘Mass Art and the Popular Spirit in Art’ in Problems of Contemporary Aesthetics. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1984.
Darthone, O.R. African Literature in the Twentieth Century. London: Heinemann, 1974.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans.Gayatri Spivak,. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
– – – . “The Time of a Thesis:Punctuations.” Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin in Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan Montefiore. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1983.
— . Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Encyclopedia Britannica. Edinburgh: http//e.m.wikipedia.org/Formalism
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language Thought. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971.
Ekwuazi, Hyginus. Foreword. White Masks. Lagos: Malthouse Press, 2019.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. An African Popular Literature: A Study of the Onitsha MarketPamphlets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Scott. Wilbur S. Five Approaches of Literary Criticism. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Udenta, Udenta O. Revolutionary Aesthetics & The African Literary Process. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing, 1993.
Wordsworth, William. “Experimental.” Lyrical Ballads. Fourth Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1805.
Yeibo, Ebi. The Fourth Masquerade: Poems. Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2014.
– – – . White Masks: Poems. Lagos: Malthouse Press, 2019.
Amatare Mozimo was born in the early seventies in Lagos and hails from Bayelsa State. He is seasoned critic and broadcasting journalist whose works have been published in reputable journals and news magazines. A graduate of English Studies from the University of Port Harcourt whose knack for writing has put him on the global literary space as an emerging voice in literary criticism. He is currently the Vice Chairman of ANA Bayelsa State and has published three books: The Unending Day (Prose); The Running Mace (Poetry) and a book on Broadcast Journalism for rookies.
