JP Clark’s death reminds us of the complexity of history

By the time John Pepper Clark died nearly two weeks ago, Nigeria, his country of birth, was yet again haemorrhaging the blood of its compatriots mowed down by their own government in the pretext of containing the widely popular #EndSARS campaign that has dominated the minds of Nigerian publics and humanity generally.

It is a supreme irony that JP, as Clark was popularly known among his compatriots and his contemporaries, should die at a time when his compatriots are preoccupied by the more urgent business of ducking bullets fired by their own government, something that Clark had repeatedly written to condemn.

If Nigeria is a case study of the pain that militricians can inflict on a country, JP Clark is easily the most committed critic who stayed put in Nigeria to reactivate the moral compass of the military juntas.

Born in 1935, Clark was educated in Ibadan and, later, Princeton, before returning to Nigeria where he devoted the rest of his life to a scholarly calling that saw him write some of the most enduring poetry, drama, and criticism.

He had begun this vocation as the editor of The Beacon, a student magazine at Ibadan. On his return to Nigeria, Clark founded The Horn, a literary journal that is credited with introducing to Africa and the world the first generation of Nigerian poetry in English. It was in The Horn that Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and the South African Es'kia Mphahlele, who was then in exile in Nigeria, inaugurated a tradition of African poetry in English.

Literary tradition

As early as the 1960s, therefore, JP Clark took up the challenge of moulding a literary tradition that was characterised by extensive experimentation with style and a deep reflection on the immediate physical and intellectual environments in which the emerging intellectual class found itself.

Few people with even a passing acquaintanceship with poetry can ever forget the elegance of Clark’s poem, “Ibadan”, or the affective allure of “Abiku”. These poems, together with “Night Rain” and “A Streamside Exchange” have been favourite inclusions in anthologies of African poetry, and continue to elicit dense intellectual debates among those who seek to understand the role of Clark’s generation of artist in mediating a people’s interaction with their immediate environments.

Like many of his generation, Clark’s overarching agenda seemed to centre on enabling the people to place themselves in a meaningful genealogy of occasional triumphs and inevitable failings.

Reaching farther into history, for instance, Clark recuperated the epic of Ozidi, fragments of which he reconfigured into The Ozidi Saga. The resulting play, Ozidi, was a tour de force that Abiola Irele, the late Nigerian giant of a critic, described as “a modern morality play, concerned most essentially with the place of hubris in human affairs”, a play that “presents us with a character study of the utmost psychological and moral interest.”

Clark’s preoccupation with ‘psychological and moral interest’ cut across virtually all his writings, and was manifest in the few instances where he took on more overt acts of activism. Two illustrations of this should suffice.

One was in his obsessive thematisation of precarity of life as destiny for Nigerians under their militricians, notably in the play The Raft, which Irele described as a “parable of Nigeria … nothing less than a meditation on the precariousness of the human condition.” Clark’s sensitivity to the human condition, particularly the fickleness of human life, could well have been due to his intimate contact with life, suffering, and death.

Records indicate that he, together with Christopher Okigbo, had twice sneaked into Ghana to convince Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna to return to Nigeria where ethnic unrest was threatening to blow over following a coup. Ifeajuna was accused of plotting a coup back home, and had himself sneaked into Ghana where was under the protection of Kwame Nkrumah.

Eventually, Ifeajuna went back to Nigeria, and joined the secessionist Biafra side of the civil war, only to be accused by the leader, General Emeka Ojukwu, of treason because he, Ifeajuna, had made surreptitious contact with agents of the federal government to negotiate terms of a ceasefire. Tried quickly and found guilty by Ojukwu’s men, Ifeajuna was executed by firing squad.

The second case of Clark’s impotence in the face of death would come much later, in 1986, when together with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Clark approached and appealed to the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida to spare the life of the poet soldier, Mamman Vatsa. Although Babangida gave them a warm welcome and even made the right noises of favourably considering their plea, they came out of the meeting with Babangida only to learn that Vatsa had been executed while they were in state house. In brief, Babangida had cynically entertained them to small talk while knowing that he had already authorised the murder of Vatsa.

Biafra Civil War

If you add these two incidents to Clark’s knowledge of the circumstances under which Christopher Okigbo died, you begin to appreciate why death and dying are common motifs and concerns in Clark’s own works.

This is especially so when you consider, further, that during the terrible Biafra Civil War about which Achebe wrote in There Was a Country, and in which Okigbo died, Clark opted to support the federal government that oversaw the hacking, shooting, and starvation of two million souls to death.

One only needs to watch documentaries on Biafra, or read accounts of the same, to confront the horror of it all, and to wonder what moral compulsion drove Clark to throw his lot with the federal side. Was Clark, in his later years, haunted by the guilt of complicity in the Biafra pogrom? Perhaps. His long poem, “The Casualties”, seem to suggest his regret at how the war turned out.

What is certain, however, is that over the years, Clark remained a respected and even revered figure in the Nigerian world of letters, having accumulated many accolades from different regimes.

Clark was bestowed with the highest honour in Nigeria, the Nigerian National Order of Merit, as well as the Nigerian Centenary Award. Writers across the continent also saluted him with the Pan-African Writers Award.

Within Nigeria, the greatest sign of honour was, in my view, the fact that Wole Soyinka agreed to direct and to produce Clark’s Song of a Goat.

Beyond Nigeria and Africa, Clark’s work has equally attracted respectful recognition. He was voted as the Nigerian Poet of the 20th Century and, as Femi Osofisan, a notable critic has averred, “I believe we can say without fear that, of all his contemporaries, JP (Clark) has arguably been the most protean, the most self-regenerating, and the most continuously experimental as much in terms of form and technique, as of theme.”

This is the man who, by quirk of an unfortunate irony, has died at a time when the country he worked so hard to normalise, has sunk yet again in a cycle of violence. It seems that violence has cheated Clark out of a befitting mourning by his compatriots, and now the onerous task of mourning this accomplished poet and playwright, critic and public figure, falls on everyone else but his compatriots.