13 - “Lament for the Casualties”: The Nigerian War of 1967–70 and the Poetry of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo

Summary

Introduction

John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo's Casualties(1970), a classic literary account of the nation-rending years of the Biafran secession from the Federation of Nigeria, is a uniquely African book of poems in English. A noncombatant, Clark-Bekederemo was a committed federalist with good friends, like the novelist Chinua Achebe and the poet Christopher Okigbo, on the secession-ist side. Of his lack of involvement in the hostilities, Clark-Bekederemo has written wistfully, “The pity is that I have had no part at any time in the drama still unfolding.” Yet, through the structure of Casualties, Clark-Bekederemo captures with prophetic insight the political events in Nigeria, which moved breathlessly from disturbance to massacre, from civil war to uneasy peace. Clark-Bekederemo's quiet assault gains agonizing momentum as the collection builds toward “The Casualties” and “Night Song,” the final poems of the war-sequence.

Clark-Bekederemo is an accomplished poet who has not received the critical attention outside his native Nigeria that he deserves. Despite the publication of Robert M. Wren's J. P. Clark (1984), which explores the politics and persons involved in the Nigerian crisis, Clark-Bekederemo's war poetry within the context of the English-language literary canon deserves further analysis.

While an undergraduate at University College, Ibadan, during the 1950s, Clark-Bekederemo read widely in the canonical works of English modernism, including the World War I poetry of Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon. Of Edmund Blunden's memoir, Undertones of War(1928), Paul Fussell has written, “every word, every rhythm, allusion, and droll personification, can be recognized as an assault on the war.” Blunden's magisterial account of his life as an infantry lieutenant during what he called “the slow amputation” of trench warfare and Wilfred Owen's cautionary “Preface” to his posthumous Poems(1920), which announced that “All a poet can do today is warn,” inform the poetry of Clark-Bekederemo's Casualties, which confronts with great sensitivity the disturbing nature of disorganized civil violence.

Despite the fact that earlier war poetry by noncombatants has enjoyed an indisputable position in the literary canon, this has not been true of more recent work. This can especially be seen in the scholarly criticism of the World War I poets, where it has been fashionable to privilege poetry by battle-hardened soldiers as opposed to responses by concerned civilians. This trend has, perhaps, been one of the reasons for the fact that there is only a small body of criticism focusing on Clark-Bekederemo's war poetry.