By Bizuum Yadok
The ability of a woman to weaponize her sexual organs or to use it strategically to squeeze out hard-to-get favours from men was often referred to in Nigerian parlance, as “bottom power”. I wouldn’t know what they call it now even though I strongly believe that that practice has been used by women since the creation of Eve and I doubt if it will ever stop. So when my eyes fell on Dr. Joy Nwiyi’s ‘Burning Bottom’, I instantly thought that the woman’s “botTOM” was involved. A quick dive into the text would prove me wrong.
Nwiyi didn’t just use “bottom” in a different sense from the one I mentioned earlier, but she also brought to the fore almost everything else that is deserving of national discourse. The eponymous poem, ‘Burning Bottom’ appears second among the fifty-two poems contained in the text. Here, the poet refers to a burning bottom as a foundational history of a nation – I suppose in this case, Nigeria – which had been faulty from its very beginning and has thus been sustaining various internal conflicts since it was forcefully coupled up by the British colonialists as one people. The short poem reads:
Segmented in bits of history from
years of a burning bottom flamed by
unflinching heat and watching smoulders
of a past meeting with present
Synchronizing well like water on
bridge sides streaming unhindered
yesterdays flowing into today
firing cracks of an already parched bottom.
In its brevity, one has to admire the creativity involved in composing the poem. At face value, one could glaringly see how the first three lines are tailed by an isolated line and how the sequence is repeated in a way that enjambment is well pronounced. The metaphor of “water… flowing” and later “firing” existing “cracks of an already parched bottom” evokes an unfamiliar yet interesting imagery. This goes to say that if the base of bottom of a building is faulty then the entire building will be faulty and it corresponds with the parabolic “house on the sand” in the Bible. I suppose the poet is not advocating for split of the country but to quench the fire of the present, one would need to first dig down to the burning bottom and put out the fire or renegotiate the terms of the country’s purported unity.
The next few poems that follow bear witness to the poet’s disenchantment with the country’s socio-political situation. Some of them include: ‘Going Away Gently’, ‘Growing a Wilderness in the Place We Love’, ‘Harmattan Tells Our Story’s, ‘Solution Seeker’, ‘ ‘Tones of Derangement’, ‘Does God Forbid’, ‘With Pleasure’, and ‘Camping’. The poem ‘Camping’ particularly speaks of the absence of underlying ideologies in political parties in Nigeria which enables party stalwarts to freely migrate from one political party to another. This ugly trend of mass decamping or mass defection is being manifested again in the face of the coming general elections in 2023, which is bad for a country’s democracy. The poet captures this thought succinctly in the first two stanzas of ‘(De)camping’:
They are:
brothers in ambitious despair
here or there only
when a place of acceptance
and unflinching reception flowers
forget the symbol and the hues
deep the anthem says the same
na the same people
a mixture of shady things
The succeeding lines of the poem express the convenience of decamping since the motive is always greed and survival. The injection of Pidgin English on line 7 of the poem adds colour to the poem while also situating it properly in the Nigerian society.
Religious hypocrisy and extremism, ethnic bigotry, discrimination, gender-based violence, heartbreaks, mental trauma, promiscuity, transience of fame, and the nature of marital relationships, are but some of the myriad topical concerns expressed through some of the poems in the collection, ‘Burning Bottom’. Such poems include: ‘The Colour of Devotion, ‘On the Wings of Devotion’, ‘Kith or Kin?’ ‘Cash or Kind’, ‘Runs’, ‘Flawed’, ‘Trauma’, ‘Somewhere in Memory’, ‘Inside Fame’, ‘Just Swagger’, ‘About us’, ‘Talking About Together’, among other poems.
Some of the poems appear private yet still manage to express intense sexual experience or perhaps it is just my perception. Those two poems stand side-by-side on pages 52 and 53 of the text under the titles, ‘For Waiting Long’ and ‘A Welcome for First Rain’.
Rarely do Nigerian writers focus on the environment although we must admit that writers like Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide and Helon Habila portray levels of environmental degradation found in Nigerian societies. However, Nwiyi’s poem, ‘Nowadays’ brings out attention to the cause and effect of environmental destruction and the imperative of protecting it. Consider the first two and the last two lines of the poem:
Nowadays the wind is vexed
refusing to cool only, its wings run wild
. . .
flapped leftovers of shaved forests
all paled from overuse, wind’s portrait is left behind.
The poet’s choice of concise words is deliberate as she obviously wants her readers to interact with the poems without resorting to dictionaries or footnotes. Her de-emphasis of punctuation marks, especially the use of capital letters is also worthy of note and that does not impede the grasping of the poems. Somehow, the poet leaves her reader yearning for more. Dr. Nwiyi’s ‘Burning Bottom’ is Nigeria’s story, with all of its nuances, at a glance.
Yadok, a teacher, lives and writes in Pankshin, Plateau State.
