By Sarah Osborne

One sick man can bury a country with his iron boots,
though he may lack the sense to cover the mass grave.

From the kind of groans the earth has witnessed,
from the faces that have disappeared,
from the blood that has soaked the flag

an evil djinn torments the federation.

-Tanure Ojaide, "A General Sickness,"  Delta Blues and Home Songs (50)

Sometimes it is easier to ignore a problem because it is not right before our eyes. Due to a distance by land, we excuse the distance by heart. People who are struggling become numbers and statistics that we glance over, consider for a moment, and then forget about. Humanity is lost somewhere in the calculation of numbers. 

It is often in poetry that we manage to capture the human soul. That which can not be quantified or simplified becomes exemplified and immortalized in the written word. Award-winning poet, Tanure Ojaide expresses a feeling of loss and concern for the Nigeria that has been spoiled through the oil spills. 

Through a study of Ojaide’s poetry in the collection called Delta Blues and Home Songs, we find the main theme that resonates within the lines is how profoundly the people of the Niger Delta are connected to the land.  The author portrays the people as the victims of a robbery by the oil companies who stole their land, their livelihoods, and their way of life. 

In the first collection of poetry Ojaide's "blues" carry the sadness following the execution of the Ogoni Nine and, in the words of postcolonial ecocritic Byron Caminero-Santangelo, "what they reflect about Nigeria's condition" (Caminero-Santangelo 171). This first collection gets its name from OJaide's poem "Delta blues" where he describes his home as suffering from an "immortal pain / masked in barrels of oil" (21) There is a sadness that has overtaken the people that live in Nigeria. Ojaide brings an image with his description of "the silence in homes that speak loud / in grief that deluged the land's memory" (22) and then of "those nine mounds woke / into another world, ghostly kings / scornful of their murderers" (23).

Ojaide connects people to their home, illustrating a degradation that extends from the land to the people who live there. 

Ojaide personifies Nigeria in many ways, creating a connection between the land and the people by making Nigeria one of them, one of those people that has suffered the effects. If the land goes ill, then so do the people.

Nigeria sleeps in a makeshift grave.
If she wakes with stars as her eyes,
the next world will be brighter for me and my compatriots.

--"Sleeping in a Makeshift Grave" (24) 

Ojaide writes of a Nigeria that was beautiful and familiar. In a poem called "When Green was the Lingua Franca," Tanure Ojaide describes the land as full of color and life. Ojaide describes an adolescent memory of a Nigeria that was "teeming with life" (12) and describes a balance of nature that the land has with "compensation for all" (13). The poem then takes a darker turn as the land is corrupted by oil. The land is "wiped out by prospectors" and the nature he once knew is "mortally poisoned" due to greed (13). The people are shown in the light of the victims, and Shell Oil as the monster who means them harm.

Ojaide illustrates how the degradation of their home drastically affects the people. For example, in a poem called "Witchcraft," Ojaide explains that while his home "suffers between life and death," people who do not call it home "can only wonder" about the truth and devastation they have faced (32). In the poem "Visiting Home" the water from the "homeland's spring" is no longer drinkable (45). In "Waiting for the next world" the author shows a land unable to sustain life as it once did and how he "caught no fish where others filled gourds" (46).  Ojaide writes the people of the Niger Delta as the victims who do not carry the blame of the loss of the land, but have been living the consequences. 

There is a measure of hope in Ojaide's work as well. In "Elegy for Nine Warriors" the author writes of the martyrdom of the Ogoni Nine who inspire others to "take over their standard" and continue their fight (Ojaide 25). Reminding others to stay strong in a time of strife, Ojaide says in a poem called "Journeying," that by trying to silence those of Nigeria their enemies only made the message "become / oracular rattles that penetrate frontiers" (31). The poet of "On solidarity marches" is sure that such actions do not go unpunished and that "history will take its revenge, however delayed" (42).  

Works Cited

• Caminero-Santagelo, Byron. Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. Print.
• Ojaide, Tanure. Delta River Blues and Home Songs. Ibadan, Nigeria: Kraft Books, 1997. Print.