Scar in the Heart of Pain: A review by Francis Jakpor for Business Day Newspaper

For the common man who bears the scars of poverty, unemployment, illness, failed relationships and societal stigma, life is indeed a struggle against the odds. There is always the inner urge to succumb to despair because the hurdles seem too high to scale while the future appears bleak. But is it really advisable to throw up our hands in despair? Isn’t it necessary to do some introspection and chart a new course that would perhaps lead to a more fulfilling life? Those seem to be the questions that Uche Uwadinachi, winner of the 2006 ANA Poetry Contest (Lagos chapter), asks the reader in his collection of poems titled ‘Scar in the Heart of Pain’.

The collection is divided into three parts: Curse, Cure and Course. Curse, which contains 19 poems – some of which are Heart of Pain, Stigma, A World of Worries, Survival, None, What, We still Mourn and In This Struggle Against Pain - paints a rather dreary picture of an individual in the throes of torment. Imagery is used to great effect, as are similes, personifications and hyperboles – all of which make the poems more true to life. In Heart of Pain, for instance, we find an individual for whom every day is “another aching day” whose heart is “injured with scars,” “cries in muffled tones” and is now “abandoned in the street of tomorrow’s mercy.” Stigma is no less fatalistic. We meet an anguished soul forever tarnished by his status in life. The scar he bears “no herbal gel can erase”. Instead, “the sun beams into his naked skin, inflicting more injuries.” Consequently, he screams for the world beyond to wrap him in its “eternal darkness”, but all to no avail. Rather than being purified after all his complaints, he is “putrefied”.

But Uwadinachi does not hang his shingle on the door of despair. In Cure, the second part of the collection (19 poems), he seems to suggest that it is not enough to rail at the cards that nature has stacked against us. There comes a time when we must confront our destiny head-on. He says “not a plastic surgery, not a royal shroud, not a quick suicide, only a confrontation of You by US can WE overcome the aged scar.” Some of the other poems in this part such as Proclaim Your Claims, Dream, Tomorrow and Successes are similarly clarion calls to action after a hiatus defined by needless pain.

In the concluding part of the collection (with 14 poems), it would not be out of place to say the poet is saying a cure for the tormented soul is not enough. Now, there is a sea of opportunities which can only be enjoyed by the truly resourceful and industrious mind. Life is now a level playing field. Our success or failure ultimately depends on how committed we are to achieving the goals we have set in life – “During harvest, some resume cultivation and others remember searching for seeds,” he says in Successes. In Proclaim Your Claims his admonition is that “whatever I bind in faith is bound in fate. Tomorrow is only a space between your fingers.”

All told, ‘Scar in the Heart of Pain’ is a great read and comes highly recommended for the youth who are constantly on a quest for self-discovery and fulfillment. Uwadinachi, a performance poet and graduate of English from the Lagos State University, has certainly proved his mettle with this one. Obviously, it is not much of a stretch to project that his subsequent collections will be just as excellent … if not more.

TESTIMONY OF A POETRY PROPHESY

On July 14, 1984, I met a woman who changed my life. She was dark and pretty, in her early forties. She wore a faded red gown crossed with bold native beads around her neck and wrist like a funky city nomad. The obvious distance that her kind of person suffered from people was not just because she looked primitive and weird but this was a town where Christianity and Islam were considered as the popular and sensible religion. She is a voodoo priestess. Unfortunately, i did not visit her temple but met her on transit in a bus, sitting next to me, after waking up from a long migraine sleep.
She stared at me, in a fixed gaze and said “learn to write your predicament into poetry, then you will sleep no more.” This wasn’t an endless pilgrimage to the hillock of the moon or a fasting for the next ninety nine days to find a cure. Just write your poems to paint your problems, and that is the remedy in solving my long cry in the dark room library.
Before then, I had lived my entire life around a terrible phenomenon I suffered from childhood. I bored it ever then, on me like a protruded mole cheek, disfiguring and saddening my happiness. That heart-burden was the scar i lived to erase. The worst was when I lost my “I’’, the essence of human hood. I could not face myself or stand to watch the shame; I gave up and began living as a masquerade among people.
This thought was what banged my head until I slept off on board that bus. Following her words, I began learning to concise my whole dilemma into verses, making them bleed exactly what I feel in imageries, trying to examine and test them in rhythms and rhymes, then using them to compare and represent other worst issues for some other persons. Like Arithmetic, it broke into smaller, simpler and clearer basis of analysis. And, I saw nothing but my naked self discussing with the so called unseen grand master of my “self’’.
My fears, scales, speck falls off me! My sight became crystal clear to see the real me in me. Through this therapy, I discovered that scars though inevitable in the development of every man, yet you learn to face and manage them, ultimately allowing nature to take care of itself. Like the flowing river, our dreams will stumble on rocks, hills and weeds, however these, cannot stop the journey to the destination along other rivers.
Life is not man-made, even if it major forces are. If you impede it, then it will explode; so destiny can be delayed but can never be changed. The more you try to hold or hoard it, the more the pressure gathers, thus the more the blast of its outbreak to come.
Writing generally helps us to pour out our burden on papers, but poetry helps us to capture the consciousness and feel of our raw selves in the pen: our control over such circumstances, through our omniscient mind. The unique thing about poetry is that, though it employs literary features but most times does not compromise with conventional linguistic regulations and conditions.
Poetry is free and liberal. The indispensability of learning its art, must begin with the originality, liquidity and sincerity of your simultaneous gushing emotions, then the rules can set in and not the rules ruling the mind. Poetry is free to all: ageless and shapeless like water. The thick diction in your environment changes in another society. However, it liberality still allows you to code it for some select mind but universally poetry is voluntary and benevolent to all seekers.
When you have a burden or pain in your heart, attempt to write them out in poems on papers. Then take a next look after a while at these same poems and see if they have the same weight like they do in your minds, or if your mind is as pessimistic as it use to be. You don’t need to be an expert to write a poem for therapy, only make it less wordy, concise, thoughtful, then make it a lyric that best expresses yourself and definitely, a solution is sure to come.

ME

The cruel claws
Of my own hands
Prick deeply through my skin
To the bone
I kicked, my voice ceased
Darkness my only witness
Watches from the other side
With a hanging smile
Cannot even lend a hand
To shield me from me

Seen by none
But me alone sees
My very bones, my heart
Feeds it every part of life

I cannot even hide
From my shadow
With the aid of darkness
But not from this me

Dire in dreams
Hidden from eyes
Traceable in trance
Borne in men - me
Before my birth
Its umbilical cord
Runs through me
This is the scar.

ITCH WEBSITE


©Uche Uwadinachi

WALLS OF UNENDING SHADOW 1 & 11

(A Poem dedicated to Kadiri Aderibigbe, who was shot in the course of a mass protest against the killing of an innocent boy (Charles Okorafor) during a police raid in Ajegunle On the 1st of April 2010)


1

I have seen
The four walls
Coated with gory hand-prints
Of criminals and suspects
In-scripting awkwardness
Pleading for a public presentation

I stared at slogans
Screaming….
“we die…innocent”
“i was here”
“and so what”
“are you the president?”
“dem go fire me”
“na today”
“…save us”

My heart tears my eyes
And the graffiti spawns
Ceaselessly…

My head smothers
As ravaging foul odour
Of urine and shit
Shutters me to worship
At the walls of unending scars
With my own “craze-words”.

II

Hell is cell!
The black bowl
Smiths into a black hole
Bloats for the unborn convict
Guilty – of life, wanting to survive
…raiding flames at night
…beaming red in flight
…yellow coal for ice
Collies for the burning
Of our already hurt hearts.

“Pollease”…police
Poll for faults
Lease of crimes
To catch and lock our lives
Into the bloating black hole
Of a cell.

And so
The walls persist
A writing cry of the weak
Dying…to die today
And died…. Tomorrow
WILL DIE NO MORE.

Uche Uwadinachi(c) 2009



Read more on
Police killings in Ajegunle

by Sokari on April 12, 2010

in Human Rights, Nigeria, Police Brutality on

SOKARI'S BLOG

DANCE OF CHANGE

A boutique
Of traditional antique
Glamour of form
Un-adorn
Market
For the town machete
Worshipping
Rituals at festivals
Untouchable
Unsociable
Untenable

Blood turns palm oil?

You say
We dance stringed
In cowries to the feet
Bond of bold scars-
From tribal marks?

Our art, an act of ants
Only to trade dirt
Underground the dark colony
Woe-ed not to be seen
In scenes of the gold sky

And
We gather
Like ant-soldiers
Coming and going
Working daily selflessly
Across the earth
Only to feed
Mould hill
And meet?
Look again!

See me
Greet beyond the breath
Of a cross-road sacrifice
Saluting fellow Africans
On knees with enchanting echoes
Of blackness to the beauty
Of our skin

And my pomade
Lies before me to wipe
The legs of our children
Standing still
Waiting ill
Waiting, to dance

This is not a helmet
Of shame to disguise PAIN
I am prepared
With a mask to celebrate
The ceremonies of seasons

In sowing and harvest
War and peace
Birth and death

I dance
A frenzy foot in trance
To see the gods
Wear their glittering faces
To know the next pace
The wood decorated
With cowries shell and raffia
Bears my late uncle’s bead
And mother’s lion-cloth
To be worn
In the battle shores
Of the Niger

Why myth
To prejudice my art
Look again
And see you in me
Me in you
Rescuing the present
With a new dance

So let’s tangle
In black white ankle

A crying eye still sees

My lips are big
To cover my big teeth
My short is brown
But it is the textile
You wear, fishing afar
The same river

Watch me lead
The dance,
Then you follow
In frames of Agbara thunderclap
Moving laughter in the wind
Calling interceding tunes
In the howling breeze
My tidings are silent happy smiles
For all our worried hearts

The dance is on
But the conquest is certain
The gods blesses our hoes
To revert those woes
Cursing our skin very holes
Deep In the blood
Like disastrous flood
From those river BANKS

Soon
And soon
The global drought
Economic pest
The prolonged hunger
Our persisting cry
Shall cease to be

Those couches shall overturn
The fluorescent shall burn
Into a coming terror
Of the night delight
Pillar falling limbs
The walls cracking
Down the stairs
In heavy rumble
Of pavement grumble

Discard those idea-logics
Let’s dance
As one feet
Killing their beat
Occupying the seat
Shake their hearts
Out of the locked ribs

Hold a broom firmly
Sweep the rest
‘Dust’ cant resist arrest
In defiance as mud
Sweep!
All in their sleep that feeds
From daily sessions
Toils and sweat of
Our farming children

They spell brilliance
For tyranny…for menace
Granting amnesty to criminals
Who comply with their continual
Dictates of ‘agendas’
Then sentence the majority
Thumb prints bearer
To a tea cup silence
Shunning the pulse
That throbs in many other hearts

This is the dance
Of change in exchange
Of dumb-murmuring
Serenity agape an
Eternity of atrocity

I am Ezenwanyi
I am the new dance
I am REVOLUTION.

REVIEW BY THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER OF THE POETRY BOOK 'SCAR IN THE HEART OF PAIN' WRITTEN BY UCHE UWADINACHI

A REVIEW BY ANEOTE AJELUOROU (GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER)
OF THE BOOK
'SCAR in the HEART of pain'



THERE's something immensely affirmative about the hunan spirit that defies all understanding-it's the capacity to adapt to any vissitude of life.And in no other form of writting is the persevering quality of the human spirit celebrated than in the work of art. Through the ages,there abound a strand of writting devoted to the unyeilding,rugged nature of the spirit that stands solid in the face of tremendous suffering and hardship.Every clime has it own record of men and women who have gone through the most horrendous of situationns,but who ended up singing songs of praise and triump.
'SCAR in the HEART of pain' is a poetry that is narrative and desciptive as it chronicles the poet's encounter with the human spirit.Uche Uwadinachi battles a kind of terror lodged in the heart. So he sings Scar in the HEART of pain, where “The SCAR/Is a faceless parasitic burden-…. Uwadinachi is a young performance poet with promise as his poetry resonates with a life waiting to be lived.

For the poet Scar represents those heartaches in various guises that plague the human spirit, the sort of heartache that is inflicted on one man by his fellow man. It needs deep healing that can sometimes be confrontational to heal the scar. ‘Not a plastic surgery/Not a royal shroud?/Not a quick suicide/Only a confrontation/Of/YOU by US can WE/Overcome the aged scar’, which is ingrained.

The heart is the epicenter, both of the nation that needs direction and of man that is seeking for perfection and a measure of sanity in a world where life seems meaningless. So he sings ‘Scar…/Perpetual blemish/Invoking false hope in life…/I seek for the world beyond/To wrap me in its eternal darkness…/And life takes the side of death…/I am not purified… I am putrefied’ in Stigma’, There’s anguish and a wrenching of the guts in the meaninglessness of life as all probabilities end up in death and decay.

The poet’s hopelessness and the seeming redemption he funds manifest themselves in the three domains, which life for him. Life is bitter because there’s ‘curse’ placed upon it; so life finds a ‘cure’ to heal life’s many woes in man’s daily encounters. Finally, there’s a ‘curse’ to follow for life’s troubles to pass, which can only be found in nature, in being in tune with nature

The rivers flowing, the streams babbling and shady woods provide perfect serenity for man’s soul. It is here that man ought to find rest for his troubled spirit. So the poet proclaims in “The River’, The river/…in its ever flowing waves,/Faith is a continual pilgrimage of states…/…in its pure cleansing depth,/Reasons are regalia in blotches/To be washed in the stream-…The river divines a future/In the present from the future’.

Also to Oshun Osogbo he delightfully sings in ‘Osun’, ‘I bath in this stream/Free from stagnant stain…/All I see is crystalline bowl/Sinless…lenient/Unsoiled to any earth tie/Flowing generously for all/Inviting us to thread/New earth in water/Where our pains/Will be pacified and/Taken away.’

Clearly, Uwadinachi is a poet for the future. His imagery flows in a streamlet and it leaves no one in doubt as to his power to thrill in an expressive way that is pleasing. Uwadinachi’s handling of his subject also shows maturity. He is an emerging poet set for the future.

WITH BELLA

A sneak peek into Bookaholic with Bella this week.
Scar in the Heart of Pain by Uche Uwadinachi will be reviewed this Wednesday on Bookaholic with Bella sometime between 7.30am and 8.30am on Silverbird Television.

We will bring you an interesting Q & A later this week.

In the meantime, below is a poem from the collection.


Hunt me
Below clump prairie in the forest,
Scourge me
On ridges of tallest hills,
Taunt me
In my cramped dark burrow,
Scare me
Behind leaves of crooked trunks,
Shoot me
In this tranquil flight in the sky,
Chase me
Through hazy streets of the slum,

But don't dare me
On WATER!




To visit Bookaholic for more on Uche Uwadinachi Interview CLICK HERE

AT THE 11TH LAGOS BOOK FAIR AND ART FESTIVAL

TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY OF


The 11th Lagos Book and Art Festival is holding November 13 – 15, 2009 at the National Theatre Complex, Iganmu Lagos.

The Festival will feature exhibition by Bookshops, Publishers, Libraries and "freelance" individual exhibitors; a huge Art Fair featuring a variety of works by galleries, art-dealers and individual artists; live music, dance, drama and live performances.

FRIDAY, November 13 will feature events such as Mentoring Kids by Eugenia Abu at 11 am, followed by Children Craft Workshops, Play Groups and Performances. The final stage of the Book Trek: the Quest for the Most Literate Student holds at 2pm and will involve the review and the discussion of various books.

SATURDAY, November 14 will kickoff with Conversation: Lagos in the Imagination (3) with extensive references to Isi Joy Bewaji’s Eko Dialogue, Tejo Cole’s One Day is For The Thief, Odia Ofeimun’s Lagos of the Poets and Sefi Atta’s Swallow. There will be a Publishers Roundtable: Why I Publish What I Publish from 2pm to 4pm. Festival Party celebrating Segun Sofowote@70, Frank Okonta@70, Sammy Olagbaju@70, Tunji Oyelana@70, Mahmoud Ali Balogun@50, Nobert Young@50, Afolabi Adesanya@50, George Uffot@50, Edmund Enaibe@50, Kunle Adeyemi@50 will start at 5pm with music by Fatai Rolling Dollar.

SUNDAY, November 15 will open with a Youth Conference: Creativity and Empowerment, featuring a panel of young creative artists and art managers; convened by Positive Development Foundation and Youth Bank. Art Stampede will come up at 1pm.

Telephone: Toyin Akinosho 08057622415 and Kafayat Quadri 07029025583

Email: stampedecorang@gmail.com

The power of chanting to the priestess of poetry

BY UCHE UWADINACHI
P.O.P






The nursery rhymes of unending skipping sound resounding from the high-rise windows and the slit walls of the kindergarten school, remains the oldest known and surest way of imparting alphabets, sounds, objects and ideas, to a classroom of children, who are freshly being opened up to the mystery of learning and acquiring all the needed skills with which to gulp up knowledge as they grow up.

The fundamental of nursery education is the very tool employed by the poet who takes after the method of the teacher, who must function as the choir master, charging out the call to chant that is automatically echoed by the pupils to glean the golden fleece home.

The chant of poetry is not any different in the hands of the priestess of poetry, the wildest of imagination engages the emotions in a celebration of words in its ever best use-in a crescendo of rising staccato that leaves the poet and its lovers in an exchange of fulfillment striking the cord of the heart into an orgasmic climax that homes the being into the soul.

From the first exercise of one trying to word to oneself or other selves, some structure of finely written poems riddled on paper, to the point where the personae or reader’s innermost cavity is filled and the exterior body overflows with interpretative high spirit, chant sails salient to the meaning of poetry which enfolds the whole conundrum of life.

In contemporary literature, poets in tameless adventure have seek mediums, not just to make poetry more relevant and alive but to bridge the TEXT to the WORD. Chant eventually aroused as the most efficient and strongest tool adopted by the priestess of poetry who led the search. To relate this is to fore mostly understand the basic of chant.

Chant is the rhythmic speaking or singing of words or sound often primarily on one or two pitches called reciting tones. it may range from a single melody involving a limited set of notes to a highly set of complex musical structures, often included a great deal of repetition of musical subphrases. Chants functions as a heightened or stylized form of speech which though exist as a genre of its own yet allies with the priestess to render, perform and execute a poem.

The priestess is that devotee poet in the shrine of poetry who is most passionate and liberal in the practice of poetry. To read a poem goes beyond the mere silent stiff absorption of the lines as text, to the lowest motion and loudest recitation celebrated in chant. It is this act that makes poetry more ritual to the self.

There exist several means and routes to approach poetry, such as writing, reading, listening,reciting, etc but to enter the altar of poetry where the priestess dwells, you must leave behind your media and gadget, to enjoy the secret powers inhabited in the realm of this veneration which is an open home to all and sundry.

When a devotee recites a poem, chant heightens the notes of mood, fires the tone, repeating the lines then drags the being(s) to where you confront your very thoughts BARED. Leaving you before yourself is the best resolution any fellow poet or seeker can derive when you read a poem.

Chanting does not change or cheapen the form of your poem, best seller or award(s)-winning poetry collections, instead it exhumes life from the dumb gawking words, rendering it, a priceless performance which creates an unusual symphony of stress, style, and state to the original form that in no little measure helps to bring a better understanding of the meaning chased by the poet and the poem itself.

No wonder when chanting a poem line, getting caught in the rhyme and rhythm, one begins to tail the beat before the long , gesturing, fingers and hands swaying on foot tapping, while others completely internalized the process before them, are entrapped into a cocoon of themselves and can only return to themselves to seek meaning.

The priestess is a seeker who lives to proffer poetry not just as an inanimate text idol stagnated on colossal forgotten shelves for some chosen cerebral minds but as a free theatre for all who quest for purification and restoration of body, mind, and soul.

Poetry is a religion, poetry is a tradition, and those whose must follow, should worship in chant and spirit.


Uche Uwadinachi(c) 2009


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coming up!!!

why do i chant poetry?

Find out in the next article
"The power of chanting to the priestess of poetry"