Red Room Where the Writers Are

Issue/Publication: The people were sapped during the Babangida’s dictatorship but they were thoroughly dehumanized during the Abacha’s adventure in power; graduates roamed the streets with holes in their pockets; life became very cheap and the children died in millions from treatable ailments, malnutrition and abject poverty Government workers were paid salaries that were too dehumanizing to be remembered and mentioned. Many people committed suicide and many were pushed into suicidal crimes; the women became prostitutes while the head of the junta and his cohorts stashed away the revenues that could fill the stomachs of the youth of the nation. It was in the mood of those days that the writer wrote the song…using the concept of the Ifa philosophy which taught that men chose their destiny in Orun (heaven ) before coming to the world to live it; and he also burrowed the Christian concept of angels as well. The writer wished he was not born into the world; not with his destiny anyway of having to witness the crimes of the dictatorship.

Poem

September 29, 2008

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Had I a prescient View

Of this worlds bitterness

I might have stayed on in heaven

Never to have been born

Washed down

With my mothers cyclical bleeding

Lost in the realms of a wish

This world is filled with misery

Melancholy, disappointment, hunger and tears

Intractable bitterness of loss

Death and so many burials

I don’t know the world is like this

Filled with inequalities

I might have stayed on in heaven

Far away in the realms of hope

Of a possible fulfillment

We shall meet on the land

Spoken of by patriarchs

Where there is no end to laughter

Where there is no sorrow

Where there is equality

No hunger and no loss

I don’t know the world is this bitter

I might have stayed on in heaven

Lost in the realms of a wish

I would visit the world in a dream

Away from this bitterness of life

Disappointment of unfulfilled dreams

These social prejudice and punishment

Inflicted on us by the world

If I have the prescient view of man

I would never have been born

I would stay on with the angels

Lost in the realms of a wish

The world is the ocean

Man is the unfathomable sea

The abysmal matrix of sin

And no one can swim the seas