If Only the Road Could Talk by Niyi Osundare, Africa World Press (AWP), New Jersey, USA, 2017, 128pp

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Many literary pundits believe that the poet, Niyi Osundare, is the odds-on favourite next Nigerian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Niyi Osundare’s recent collection If Only the Road Could Talk is subtitled “Poetic Peregrinations in Africa, Asia, and Europe”.

Osundare is, indeed, a poet of the wide world who remains rooted at home, bringing back universal truths to the homestead. The poet travels to all the cardinal points and dutifully ensures that all the vast roads of his adventure talk back to us in sublime words of wisdom, style, and depth.

In the Preface, which he aptly titled, “The Road Never Forgets,” Osundare makes this momentous recall: “I have never forgotten what my mother said that afternoon in September 1973 as I was about to leave home for my first long journey to ‘the land beyond the seas’ (the one to Leeds University, UK) when she looked up at the sky, then at the road ahead before clearing my path with a string of prayers, which ended in a confident, self-assuring pronouncement: “The road which is taking you away from me will also bring you back to me. The road did. And kept doing so until four decades later when she too picked up the horsetail and danced to the other side of the Great River.”

If Only the Road Could Talk can be read as a blend of crossroads on the long road that Osundare has trodden ever since he published his first volume, Songs of the Marketplace, in 1983. From the auspicious debut, Osundare upped the ante as arguably Africa’s most prolific serious poet by publishing critically acclaimed collections such as Village Voices (1984), A Nib in the Pond (1986), The Eye of the Earth (1986), Moonsongs (1988), Songs of the Season (1990), Waiting Laughters (1990), Midlife (1993), Seize the Day (1995), Horses of Memory (1998), The Word is an Egg (2000), Tender Moments: Love Poems (2006), Days (2007), Random Blues (2011), City Without People: The Katrina Poems (2011), etc. There is no letting-up of the lyrical poet as the latest offering eloquently evinces.

If Only the Road Could Talk depicts Osundare’s profound probing of roads, places, and people. The road tells the listening poet many stories, which are retold to the wide world by the contemporary bard.

The challenge for most African poets has been blending the oral with the scribal. In Osundare, there is a natural symmetry that is completely shorn of affectation. His social vision shines forth through every line, stanza, or canto. I can personally attest to Osundare’s commitment as he used to visit with us in those underground days of guerrilla journalism where he used to wonder at how fast one turned out the damning editorials against General Sani Abacha.

In If Only the Road Could Talk, Osundare harps on the radical essence with Nkrumah, Vaclav Havel, Oginga Odinga, Brecht, etc serving as the humanising prototypes.

Osundare has richly succeeded in bringing home to the world the vast roads, oceans, and sundry spheres and realms of his lived life. His relentlessness as a poet is a testament to the truism that where the well is deep, there can hardly ever be a lack of water to nourish our shared existence.

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist, and author

Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.