Voice and Memory in the Poetic Imagination: Nduka Otiono in Conversation with Chinua Achebe, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Gabriel Okara

Introduction

It all began with the news of Dr. Gabriel Okara’s visit to Boston to spend some time with his son, clinical psychologist Dr. Ebi Okara, and his family. My acquaintance with the great poet in Nigeria before my relocation to Canada in 2006 ensured that the news reached me through the grapevine. It was one of those spillovers of the privileges of a writer, literary journalist, and national secretary of Nigeria’s writers’ guild, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). Hence, despite the personal nature of the visit, word of the great writer’s visit to the US somehow got around to me in Providence, Rhode Island. The presence of Dr. Okara so close to Brown University, where I was then a postdoctoral fellow and senior research assistant to Professor Chinua Achebe, sounded like a midday angelus bell calling the faithful to prayer. I hearkened to the call, further spurred by the example of Achebe’s celebrated conversation with James Baldwin (Randall-Tsuruta 210–21). I connected with Ebi to verify the senior Okara’s visit and to determine the length of his stay. I also enquired whether he would be available for a special literary evening at Brown. Encouraged by Ebi’s positive response, I met with Professor Achebe and mooted the idea of a joint literary evening between him and Dr. Okara. Professor Achebe’s enthusiastic embrace of the proposal could not be more contagious and encouraging. He told me it was an historic opportunity and a marvellous coincidence. He stressed that he had not shared a stage with Dr. Okara for as long as he could remember, and that he had hoped for such an opportunity. The urgency of the event need not be overemphasized: these were two globally celebrated African writers in their twilight years—Dr. Okara was 90, and Professor Achebe was 81.

Armed with Achebe’s endorsement, I met with the then-Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown, Professor Corey D.B. Walker. He was ecstatic over the news, and swung into action to facilitate the historic literary evening. He invited the award-winning Poet Laureate of the state of Louisiana, Brenda Marie Osbey, who was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Churchill House, to join as the third guest writer for the evening. We decided to host the event as part of the Department’s Conversations in Africana Writing Series with the theme “Voice and Memory in the Poetic Imagination.” The event was held at the George Houston Bass Performance Arts Space in Churchill House, the home of the Department of Africana Studies. As Walker told the mixed audience—made up of students, academics, and guests from the community—in his introductory remarks, the event was curated to build on the Department’s tradition:

The Faculty of Africana Studies at Brown University has a rich tradition of counting among its members some of the world’s great writers, from the late Haitian writer and critic Rene Depestre and playwright Adrienne Kennedy to Ama Ata Aidoo and George Lamming, to our current faculty colleagues Chinua Achebe, Brenda Marie Osbey, and John Edgar Wideman. This distinction represents one of the unique features about the discipline of Africana Studies in its ongoing pursuit to create new knowledge borne out of the continual intellectual exchange between creative writers, artists and scholars.

Walker further emphasized that “Conversations in Africana Writing is our department’s forum for hosting some of the world’s great literary artists, speaking about the significant questions, issues and concerns of the complex and demanding art of writing.” He underscored that “it is this conversational aspect that makes these encounters such unique occasions” and cited Gabriel Okara’s insightful declaration that “[s]poken words are living things like cocoa-beans packed with life. And like the cocoa-beans they grow and give life […] They will enter some insides, remain there and grow like the corn blooming on the alluvial soil at the riverside” (The Voice 110).

The literary dialogue of that evening...