Ikeogu Oke was, on Monday this week, announced winner of this year’s Nigerian Prize for Literature sponsored by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Limited for his latest work of poetry, ‘The Heresiad’. He is author of five collections of poetry, including ‘Where I was Born’ (2002), ‘Salutes Without Guns’ (2009), ‘In the Wings of Waiting’ (2012), and ‘Song of Success’ (2012). His prose works are ‘The Lion and the Monkey’ (2014), ‘The Tortoise and the Princess’ (2015) among others. Here, he talks about the Prize, his winning book and more. Excerpts:
Daily Trust: Congratulations on your victory as this year’s winner of the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature. What were you doing when you received the good news and how did you feel?
Ikeogu Oke: Thank you very much. I was at home and naturally I was elated. I was reading and also had my eyes on my phone checking updates that popped up on social media. That was how I got the news. Before then I had made an update on my Facebook page where I stated that I was really anxious.
DT: You competed against two well-known poets, Professor Tanure Ojaide and Ogaga Ifowodo. Did you at any point wonder about your chances of winning?
Oke: I am not an obscure poet, really. I have been writing poetry for over thirty years. I have had quite a number of publications. In fact, I got published in the United States in 1988 and I was paid for the publication. I do it because I love it, so it’s not to project my ego. But, yes I thought I could win, if you put in the kind of work I do. When I appeared on the short list I was hopeful. I was particularly hopeful because the competition rules said we were going to be judged by merit. For me that was very key.
DT: ‘The Heresiad’, your 2017 collection of poetry that won the NLNG Prize has been described by you as “operatic poetry”. Can you elaborate?
Oke: Operatic is an adjective that indicates opera performance, a kind of poetry that is dramatic and lyrical. I felt that someday somebody would pick up the challenge to perform it on an operatic stage.
DT: You featured one poem extended over a hundred pages. Why?
Oke: Such kinds of poems have been written. It’s an epic poem and they are usually known to be long. It could have been longer or shorter, but I had a story to tell and I told it spanning over a hundred pages.
DT: The work has, within it, a lot of philosophy, narrative, culture, allegory, politics, history and tradition. Also, musical notes were provided with which the poem could be sung. What were you hoping to achieve?
Oke: I wanted to give as much as possible to my audience. I tried to do it in such a way that it could be conveyed in musical form and give to my audience what couldn’t be found elsewhere.
DT: Did you at any point wonder if Nigerians, or Africa as a whole, would be tuned to such an ambitious brand of poetry?
Oke: I made mention of Nigeria in my work. For instance, there are lines about Abacha and Anambra State, so there’s relevance for Nigerians. But Nigerians are like other people in the world. There are those that have read the classics. I don’t see why Nigerians can’t consume poetry of any kind. I have no doubt that they would be able to enjoy my work.
DT: How long did it take to write ‘The Heresiad’ and what was the experience like?
Oke: I worked on it for 27 years. I moved to Calabar in 1988. I was 21 then and about to start a new job. There was a writer who was in trouble because of a work he did and it caused reactions across the globe. I later got to read what the writer had published that caused a problem. Eventually I thought of writing a poem and soon had about twenty lines. I started thinking of how to develop it into a long narrative, an epic, because the lines struck me as epic in their movement and rhythm. Afterward, other sets of lines came to me and I wrote them down. I worked on the poem continuously. From the time the first line came to me and when the last line came, spanned 25 years.
DT: You are not only known as a poet but also a short story writer. For example, you have published four books of poetry: ‘Where I was Born’ in 2002, ‘Salutes Without Guns’, 2009, ‘In the Wings of Waiting’, 2012, ‘Song of Success’, 2012. In 2014 you published your first prose work, ‘The Lion and the Monkey’ and ‘The Tortoise and the Princess’ in 2015. Have you thought about writing poetry for children?
Oke: I have written a collection of poetry for children published by Heinemann. I write poetry for the joy it gives me. They are all musical poems and were adapted as cartoons for children. But I don’t talk about it much. I hope someday it would be brought out in a way the public would be familiar with it. I consider children very important. For the future of poetry, we need to give more attention to children.
DT: Is poetry your favourite genre?
Oke: I think every writer has a particular genre he or she works best with. There are things that come naturally to us writers. I could, by effort, claim to be a good writer of fiction, and yet do a bad job. I try to be diligent. I think I have done quite some work in that area. Poetry, however, seems to come to me more naturally than prose. That’s just how it is.
DT: What are you working on at the moment?
Oke: Recently I completed a hundred love poems.
