How poet Niyi Osundare met the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina with his art

When no school in Nigeria could be found for his deaf daughter, he and his wife Kemi and their three daughters and son moved to the United States and in 1997, Osundare became a professor at the University of New Orleans. He became a columnist for Newswatch, Nigeria’s premier news magazine, and the Sunday Tribune has featured his poetry column since 1985.

Once again, so far so good. Still very much in touch with and steeped in the cultural priorities of his native place – and culture and politics are not separate things in Nigeria – Osundare had not only America to explore but more particularly Louisiana and New Orleans, one of the world’s great cities.

Eight years after he and his family settled there, the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Niyi and Kemi managed to get their daughter away and out of the city in time but were caught as the waters rushed in.

Trapped in their house, they were forced to retreat upstairs to the first floor, then onto the roof, where, after a night and a day of increasing desperation, they were rescued. The book of poems that came from this experience, City Without People: The Katrina Poems (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2011), begins with “The Lake Came into My House”:

It all began as a whisper among

The leaves. The tree’s tangled tale

And the wanton narrative of the wind

Then, the pit pat pit pat bang bang bing

Of the hooves of the trampling rain

My shuddering roof, my wounded house

A shunting of shingles

Unravelling of rafters

And the wind dropped a pool

In my living room. The sky

Rumbled like a stricken bull;

Lightning zigzagged its fire through

The darkening clouds. Wind-driven,

Tornado-tormented, the Lake overran

Its fence, pouring its piled-up anger

In the careless streets…

Thus it begins. The whole book takes us through the horrifying experience but ultimately explores, dramatises and delivers a sense of human beings helping each other, beyond and very much despite the overwhelming indifference and even murderous carelessness of governments.

The City

is

8 feet

below sea level

The people

are

many, many miles

below government care

You can see immediately how the declaration carried by those last four lines has appropriate bearing upon more than one political circumstance and in many countries but the pressing moment of Katrina in New Orleans in August 2005, that led to more than 1800 deaths, draws everything to focus on the there and then. Imagine it. “Emergency Call” comes towards its ending like this:

911 911

There is nine feet of water

In my living room

Oh, unfurl your fins

And swim like sharks

911 911

We’re trapped in the attic

And the water is rising

Oh, get on your roof

For the copter men

911 911

But it’s two o’clock at night

And it’s dark as hell

Oh, pray to the holy Angels

They’ll send you wings and a chariot of fire.

As the book gathers reflective, thoughtful poems in the years following the event, its shape and wisdom begins to emerge from the urgencies of the occasion. The hurricane “Told me a thing or two about / The tyranny of things” such as “How…to count the teeth of the Water Dragon / to doubt those in power and their flaming tongue / to hoist the Word above the waters / to master every line in the poetry of pain”. One poem, subtitled “Overheard at the Evacuation Centres”, tells us:

When the levees broke

And the city drowned

The President blamed the Governor

The Governor blamed the Mayor

The Mayor blamed the weather

The weather blamed the sky

The sky blamed the sea

The sea blamed the wind

The wind blamed…

THE fact of disaster brought to bear upon us all by “nature” is not always “natural”. It is more often nowadays more or less directly a product of the world humanity has made. What’s natural in what’s been made for profit for a few, that imperils and kills so many, is a human propensity for violence and greed.

Every one of the civilisations I’ve ever read of or experienced has tried to find ways to modify and contain such inclinations. Sometimes they become addictions and are fortified in self-justifying governments of corruption and criminality.

They can never be extinguished entirely, without death. They are the liabilities of life. But they can be directed and contained. And simple, vital truths like these can become exhausted and over-familiar. Our world cultivates the cynical. It deploys apathy. But the poetry helps keep us alive. Osundare spells it out clearly:

Poverty

is

a

weapon

of

mass

destruction

Osundare’s commitment to political engagement, to judgement spoken out upon bad government, the malevolent selfishness of those who wield power, is deservedly famous, and exemplary. He should be better known in Scotland.

The address of his work is both local and international. There is no separating category marking difference between those areas, just as national and international make one multifaceted world, just as good government in a small country can change the measurement of value for other nations anywhere. As a Yoruba and as a Nigerian, Osundare has particular contexts to deal with, both cultural and political. And equally, as a citizen not only of America but of that singular city, New Orleans, there’s a particular sense of international provenance.

In 2020, at an online reading event facilitated by Glasgow University’s Creative Writing Unit and hosted by the poet Colin Herd, Osundare was spellbinding, even through the machinery of modern technology and from thousands of miles away. The virtues of virtual reality were enacted even as we all experience the tiresome, numbing, debilitating, non-human concealments that are a characteristic of screen media.

Osundare’s magnetism in performance is partly due to his easy insistence that poetry is music, so that even when directly engaged in political statement and indeed attack, the musical authority, the propensity to dance and rhetorical device, carry a verbal construction beyond mere statement. “To utter is to alter” he has said. But that word “utter” is loaded with physical, intellectual and emotional power beyond the banalities that are always a liability in any propaganda.

Osundare’s poem “Katrina Will Not Have the Last Word” records the good wishes from friends and benefactors from all over the world, coming in the wake of the storm:

Ogun’s scion, He-of-the-Fiery-Pen,

Couriered his own munificence and care

From his roost across the seas:

“O ku ewu, Niyi. Take heart…”

That message came from Wole Soyinka. “O ku ewu” means “Compliments on your survival!” The same salutation might be given to Scotland in the 21st century, once independence is regained. Chinua Achebe wrote: “What the storms took away / friendship will restore.”

Keep hold of that.