African Musical Rhythm and Poetic Imagination: A Phono Stylistic Interpretation of Clark-Bekederemo's "Return of the Fishermen"

John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (formerly John Pepper Clark) is a well-known Nigerian poet and playwright. Born of Ijọ/Urhobo parentage in 1935, Clark-Bekederemo hails from Delta State of Nigeria. Most of his poems and plays reflect this riverain background. Apart from his many plays, Clark-Bekederemo has had one hundred sixty-one (161) published poems to his credit. These are contained in five volumes, namely, Poems (1962), A Reed in the Tide (1965), Casualties (1970), State of the Union (1985), and Mandela and Other Poems (1988). This study focuses on his first volume, Poems, specifically, on "Return of the Fishermen." It applies the notion of African musical rhythm (within the framework of phono stylistics) to the interpretation of the poem, which some critics have either dismissed as meaningless or have interpreted amiss.

Clark-Bekederemo has enjoyed reasonable critical attention as a poet. Critical works on his poetry exist mainly in the forms of books, book sections/chapters, and journal articles. Few of these works, however, issue from a stylistic/phono stylistic perspective. In his book, J. P. Clark, Robert M. Wren, for example, relies mainly on historical and political incidents as well as social and physical setting for his analysis and interpretation of Clark-Bekederemo's poems. The result is an analysis/interpretation based solely on historical, social, political, and ecological dynamics but devoid of poetic/aesthetic devices deployed by the poet. Similarly, I. I. Elimimian in his full-length book on Clark-Bekederemo's poetry does not leave the reader in doubt about the fact that he does not approach the book's subject from a stylistic standpoint (vii). This point is clearly demonstrated by him in his treatment of "Return of the Fishermen," an issue to which we shall return shortly.

In his Three Nigerian Poets, a major section of which focuses on J. P. Clark-Bekederemo's poetry, N. J. Udoeyop recommends the use of "form [. . . .] language and diction to evaluate our literature" (15); he does not, however, apply these stylistic devices in his treatment of Clark Bekederemo's poems but relies mainly on politicohistorical details. Udoeyop, however, gives insight into the deployment of phono stylistic features in Clark-Bekederemo's poetry and explains the source of such features. He does this by citing Clark's article "Another Kind of Poetry" in which the poet compares English poetry, especially that of the Romantic and Victorian eras, to the udje poetry of the Urhobo people of Nigeria. In English poetry, according to Clark in this article, a system of punctuation, a convention of typographical arrangement, and a convention of stress form the main mechanics of poetry. By contrast, the udje poetry of the Urhobo

has the effect of words issuing from the mouth to delight the ear and stir the human frame in interplay with others in a close audience. Its rhythm is one of common speech [. . .] which drawing from special vocabulary tends towards the twin dialects [. . .] that many Urhobo regard as the most musical and ornate version of their tongue. That common speech impregnates the poetry all the way by the melody line of the song that is [. . .] the poem, so that a piece comes to be loved as much for its melody as for the content of its words.

(qtd. in Udoeyop 86)

Udje poetry, Clark says, is rich in "teeming tonal clusters and vowel harmonies, flights of phraseology and semantic glides that simply take breath away [. . .] assonance and alliteration occur in plenty" (Udoeyop 86). As Udoeyop rightly observes, "Clark [. . .] writes in alliterative style" not only because he wants to achieve the musical effect that he cherishes in Udje poetry, but also because he wants "to preserve a native style" (86-87). There is no doubt that the alliterative device as well as the musical rhythm of udje poetry as described by Clark has significantly characterized much of Clark's poetry in English, as a study of many of his poems, including "Return of the Fishermen," reveals.

Reliance on politicohistorical details also informs R. N. Egudu's two critical works in...