Review:
Niyi Osundare's City Without People (Black Widow Press, 2011)
Note: This review was originally published in
Entrepôt (Vol. 2, Oct 2011).
Dr. Niyi Osundare will be the featured reader Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at the 1718 Series held at the Columns Hotel. The series begins rather promptly at 7 and is usually SRO, so get there early for a seat. The readings are usually followed by a Q & A with the author.
http://1718aneworleansreadingseries.blogspot.com/
(Black Widow press, 2011) 137 Pgs.
Reviewed by Megan Burns
Niyi Osundare’s City
Without People: The Katrina Poems is a narrative journey from the first
moments that the water breached the levees to the traumatic experience of the
author and his wife trapped in their attic to the slow journey back to some
sense of normalcy. Instead of a straight
shot chronologically though, these poems vacillate from the first terrible
hours followed by the one year anniversary and then back to earlier
experiences. In this way, they capture the way memory holds a seemingly endless
amount of hours and experiences in a brief recollected interlude. This movement
in time as well reflects the book’s attempt to capture the ebb and flow of fear
and anger as well as passion and hope in the years following Katrina. These poems then are arranged strongly around
the tone and the emotion expressed in each section. It allows the poet to not
only examine the various reactions to this event, but it also plumbs the depths
of the poet’s personal experience as survivor, evacuee, displaced professor,
New Orleans citizen, and as part of a Nigerian community in New Orleans that is
displaced after the storm. Osundare’s Nigerian background and cultural milieu
allow him the opportunity to translate this event through his African heritage.
In cultural signals and codes, Osundare brings his own particular blend of
Nigerian influence to this historical New Orleans event. It’s this blending of
cultures, this looking back to the familiar in the midst of chaos, that brings
such a unique voice to this topic. In addition, Osundare’s ability to range from
anger to quiet desperation amid heartbreaking images and then soar back to such
heights of optimism and resilience makes this book one of the most important
books to emerge from the Katrina debacle. Unlike earlier books, this collection
benefits from the author’s deliberate need to process and collect his thoughts
and responses. The reader receives not one overwhelming sense of raw or heated
emotions, but instead passes through the ever-changing sense of response and
recovery that takes years to really name and comprehend.
The initial
section to this collection “WATER,
WATER!...” opens with the subtle line, “It all began as a whisper among/
The leaves.” The poem titled “The Lake Came to My House” is just the beginning
of several difficult poems in this section that recount the disastrous damage
that the water inflicted upon the city of New Orleans. The poem ends with the same
subtle tone that belies the vast trauma embedded within the lines: “The day the
Lake came down my street/ And took my house away.” Osundare easily moves from narrative
lyrics to stark lines that have imagistic overtones and then to more formally
rhymed and metered lines. His penchant for song is evident in poems like
“Katrina Anthem” which begins “Ka ka Katrina” and then continues out in
quatrains composed of rhymed couplets beating out a rhythm as tense and pitched
as the misery and distress that forms the subject:
Blood on your
hands, skulls in your fridge
You
swamp the river and swallow the bridge
In
your crowded kitchen a foul fleshfeast
Fit
for the monster and the hellish beast
In stark contrast to this melodic, albeit dark poem, is the poem
that is the title piece for the book, “City Without People.” Here Osundare
delivers a straight punch, no rhyme or song, but instead the bleak report from
the voice of the witness: “The trees are dead/ The birds are gone/The grass is
scorched” and later, the questions: “Tell me/ What do you call a house/ Without
walls?” One of the powerful aspects of this book is Osundare’s ability to
return again and again in various forms and tones to this subject. In one poem
where the reader finds despair; there will be another that sings of rebirth.
It’s an inconstancy that perfectly reflects the chaotic nature of responding
and surviving a catastrophe. In the midst of resilience, the author finds
himself angry and distraught and then in the next moment, “the sexy serenade of
the sax-o-phone” rises breathing new hope into the lines.
Osundare’s poems as well cover vast topics brought about by
the disaster from the negative response of outsiders who loudly criticized the
city’s rebuilding to the “Katrina refugee” moniker to the disaster tours that
descended into destroyed neighborhoods for tourists; this book in a sense
becomes a catalogue, a reminder of not only the city’s event but the fallout
from that event and how the nation responded.
As the unacknowledged legislator, Osundare pokes fun of these notions
while also cutting to the quick of the issue. In “Disastourism” he warns:
“Careful now,/ Dear Tourist/ Mind the bristling bones/ Beneath your sole.” In
other words, take care where you walk for in these empty hulls are the souls of
a city, and what does it say of your own heart to drive by in a bus pointing a
camera at this destruction. Osundare
points out that to uncap the lens of our own view would mean accepting that
this could have been prevented and that any region protected by levees could be
another “New Orleans” story.
The book ends with a poignant interview between Niyi Osundare
and Rebecca Antoine, which was collected in Antoine’s
Voices Rising II: More Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project. It’s
incredible after reading these poems, which attempt to encapsulate a series of
swirling emotions and responses to disaster, to read this interview that
clearly recounts Osunadare’s experience from the moment the levees broke to the
point where he returns to New Orleans almost a year later. People from poems in
the book acquire new depths as Osundare relates with wonder and appreciation
all of the people who helped him and his family not only survive their
harrowing entrapment in their flooded house but who continued to help them long
after the water had receded and the city had become a fading news story.
Osundare opens up a world interconnected by scholars and university colleagues
who came to his aid as well as Nigerian community members and friends both here
in America and in Africa who helped support him and his family at this time.
Osudare’s ties to Nigeria and to the country of his childhood are largely
represented in this book that talks of his new home. In song and in references,
in the call and response and in the chant, there are, in the bones of these
poems, beliefs in homes that span oceans and in communities not bound by
geography. From the preface, Osundare says, “I sing of a city which insists on
its own right to
life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.” This is a
book about people: People filled with the need to raise their voices against
the silence.
