The poet looks pensive as he settles down to bare his mind –first he gauges the question and contemplates the answer. ‘My motivation is simply the environment, there is so much sexual energy, we may pretend it is not there, but there is so much sexual tension between the youths. I know this for having been a secondary school teacher, and later on a Sports administrator at the University and what is prevalent under the cover of the night. In urbanised areas like Kaduna you see ladies parading the roads in the evenings. The book is a response to so many things and I thought I should set out to respond to these issues’.
As a teacher in Hill Top Model-School Minna, he interacted widely with students through sports and literature –where he sub-consciously observed their rites of passage to maturity. He was prompted to write a six-page essay that forms the nucleus of the book; many girls read it: they were in fact the target audience, especially those in JSS II; the latter because girls start out early, they begin to notice themselves, their physique and carriage. At this point if their esteem and candour is not well managed they drift into the sexual world, it is this transformation that gives rise to the problem of sexuality.
If we ever doubted for once the nexus between the body growth and the psychology of sex -not after Dzukogi’s engagement of young minds: “When you prod them, they tell you stories, they tell you about their peers who have engaged in it. Many at times some of them are straight, sometimes they had strange stories but yet they confide in you when they earn your confidence. It is at this point you stop and ponder at the society. Your mind points to the culprit the proliferation of sexual materials.”
The writer goes on to say, “So another reason why the book was written was to attempt to appeal to their senses to counter what they get from adverts, films, magazines, etc. They need something concrete at that age as they are developing a sense of control, as much as a sense of reasoning –keeping themselves pure.”
He further states the difficulty in curing the society of the mono-manic state sex has turned into amongst young people, he alludes to once more the undue exposure to graphic materials that assaults the latter’s minds on a daily basis, suggestive materials even in sitting rooms. And because they are bustling with so much energy they ask you how to counter it with a positive force in order not to fall into the mono-manic sexual trap.
However, he wasn’t overly confident about their reception to his mission. From the very beginning, he was unsure how his missive would be received. After two weeks, he gave it to them and, on the contrary, they were not too shocked because they were artistes at heart. They disagreed a lot with some portions, and they were bold about it. For instance, they argued on the aspect of looking into a man’s face and the attendant attractions it held. He countered them by arguing that African women’s custom didn’t permit them to look into men’s faces. The face was the first point of attraction it is the first contact to the dangerous act –“When you look, you like”.
At this point I mentioned what I once overheard from a female activist in an interesting role reversal that when they come across men who, in her words, were also baring their chests and thighs or in tight fitting clothes, they don’t feel like jumping on them! This elicited laughter from the poet. “Men are jumpers the nature of attraction is not the same…the nature of arousal is faster than that of women. Women are beautiful and alluring, the man looks like a rock! What attraction does one get from a rock?” The conversation tilted towards indecency in men’s dressing: “When I was finishing the book at the university, I asked the female students what they considered indecent dressing in men they hardly could tell. They listed sleeveless T-shirts, skin tights, athletes’ biceps was all they could say. They also added -handsome face, pointed nose, the hair and the back of the head.”
Bisi Alimi can be said to be the first Nigerian to infamously own up in public to his gay sexual preference in a conservative society like Nigeria. Since he did, there have been increasing debates going on about the rights of gay people to co-exist amongst heterosexuals.
I asked Dzukogi what he felt about the increasing noise surrounding the gay rights movements sprouting up in Nigeria. “The peak of any degeneration leads to high irregularity; they have tasted the conventional way of doing it, now they taste the unconventional. There are people who are inquisitive. A man to a man is incompatible so also sex between two women is also incompatible. Is sex not a reproductive act? Where are they getting their definition of what reproduction is? You don’t even need a dictionary to define it. If it’s good enough why are other animals not doing it? It is simply man’s waywardness. Do we see goats doing it? Then men who claims to be superior engages in it. Even God said men were superior. It is imperative that man must be controlled or degenerate.”
As we struggle to discern when and how our sexual values got blighted, Dzukogi points an accusing finger to our poverty index. “Because of lack, the cheapest thing poor young people can lay their hands on is sex.” Perhaps he had our urban slums in mind. “People can’t get married, children who are their own mothers and fathers. Also remember touching, seeing does not recognise whether you are rich or poor. But the rich have the leverage of being at peace because poverty is not interfering.”
The writer was making a direct correlation between the attendant high prevalence of prostitution in urban areas and the equally high rate of poverty in those areas. He also pointed an accusing finger in the direction of alcohol abuse and criminality, which he said were all in tandem with illicit sex.
The biggest obstacle to unravelling the sexual mystique or finding solutions to the mono-manic sexual desires that are engulfing us lies in our inability to talk candidly about sex. Was it pretence? I asked him. “It’s not pretence, it’s the African way; our religiosity. Our religions do not find it comfortable, especially Islam. The African society does not permit such discourse, when there was less exposure it worked –people were afraid to be found in it. Today the case is different there are sexual materials left and right, even the newspapers are not spared – on the second and third pages are sexual innuendo.”
As one who has taught students, he confesses that when you speak to students about sexuality education they are no longer afraid, not like in the past. There is also the communal feeling and sense of belonging that is missing in our lives today, which does not help the situation. “Everybody was afraid to do the wrong thing, where there were parents one was afraid to do wrong for fear of being rebuked.”
He goes further to say, “In this mutilation parents must talk, tell them not to do it, just like beating does not work today. Young people must be counselled; we must appeal to their conscience, we must devise ways of reaching out to them and the remedy is to talk to them.”
Sexual counselling or education perhaps remains a veritable outlet to curb the menace of illicit sex, Dzukogi agrees that the only option is to teach them to stop it. Tell them about the dangers the consequences of their actions. He recounts an encounter he had almost a decade ago. Walking by a classroom, he saw a female student arrested by a nude picture in a magazine. Upon being accosted, she mentioned that there was nothing overtly wrong with the graphics –it was just a picture. He was caught between walking away and talking to her. He took the latter option to make a difference in her life.
The book goes by the provoking and paradoxical title of Sex is Beautiful. “People don’t like the title, especially adults. Young people do. The reasons for the varying emotions from adults is not far from religion and culture; to stick with the title I didn’t find it easy. Even my wife didn’t like it; she said I should change it… Someone said to me: ‘I don’t like the title but I will buy the book for my daughter in the university’.
“I want young people to pick it. The title, kind of, hangs in their minds. I complained also and my publisher told me to forget it that they would get used it. Even my wife has gotten used it. I received this text recently: ‘This is a father of grown up children; the book has made my night and morning for rediscovery. Permit me to call the book a gift or another revelation’. You see Alkasim, even if this is the only thing the whole book fetches me in this life, I am fulfilled. This completes the whole thing. Because this one soul can save the world; this is the reason why writers must continue to write. You can imagine the number of people that send me text messages, sending you text messages, sending Diego text messages enquiring about where they can pick up copies of the book. Truly, it was written with students of secondary school and the university in mind…adults are difficult to redeem.”
Dzukogi also strongly believes in the Freudian instincts of man. He once asked his students to drop the book on a table and observe her roommates’ encounters with the book. Most of them enjoyed the book. At first they were excited and then at the end some of them were remorseful and sober. A lot of them didn’t like the poem on sex girl. They felt it was harsh indictment of young girls. A student wondered if she was perceived as a sex-indulgent girl for attempting to dress minimally and bare flesh. In her views she was being trendy and stylish, not knowing that it could as well be a green light to the opposite sex. “That’s another life saved,” proclaimed the writer.
A poet can never run away from the calling of meandering words and brilliance of craft, Dzukogi like all poets fails to steer clear of poetry in his book Sex is Beautiful. There are poems like the aforementioned ones that dwells on the related subject matters and drawing from the author’s personal history.
What shapes his philosophical outlook about life aside his calling as a teacher and father? “Life is shaped by one’s experience what you do in the later days in your life is shaped by what you did earlier in life. In the past if you were in form I you were 15 or 16, but today at 17 you find young people who have finished secondary school. Life in today’s world has reversed the way things were. Things have been drawn nearer compared to say thirty years ago. So it makes sense if young people marry early after secondary school and after service for young girls and boys respectively.”
He reclines farther and squints his eye as if trying to focus on a speck on the floor. “If information can be on your finger tips, with access to news and events abroad and you can see sex in a remote village in Minna. This invariably means a young child can indeed become agitated without anybody knowing. Because he is quietly watching sex in Asia, Europe, etc. So what now becomes of the sexual agitation that has been triggered off? The solution is to manage the situation –the easy way being for the person to have a legitimate partner to offload his or her anxiety. In the past, because the world was farther the man in Ogbomosho needed two weeks for his letter to arrive, so if it was difficult to misbehave before. The solution today is marriage.”
For someone who got married during his studies for the National Certificate of Education (NCE II), he is indeed aware of the dangers of bottled sexual energy. He bared his mind on early marriage saying, “It has saved me because I had a wife. Can you imagine if I didn’t have any, the trouble would have been more sexually?”
This seems to be catching up with the students he interacts with on a daily basis, as he overheard their discussion during a recent road trip. The subject was on young couples and early marriage and the need to marry early. Amongst the merits mentioned in the conversation was the fact that young couples could become grandparents at 43.
Dzukogi firmly believes, as he espoused in his book that the best medium to counter abundant sexual energy and allures is marriage. It’s a prescription that he insists should count in life. “There’s always beauty in growing up with your children, not master and servants, of friends, there’s mutuality and concordance and most importantly there’s a strong bond established.”
The parents would no doubt be the ideal models for the children who would grow up in a convivial atmosphere of sharing love and life, patience, endurance and above all sharing the burden of keeping the house. You provide for your family and when you can’t, your wife chips in. That’s the beauty of life.”
He pauses and then exhales: “If you have something at stake you will take life easy and not rush it, that’s what one has in life…you have the duty to tell the rest –young couples, young families.” So after Sex is Beautiful what is next on the agenda of the emerged pamphleteer? He is already working on the sequel, which would be centred on how to keep the family.
As we round up almost two hours of intense conversation he reveals that indeed for those who practice Islam there is a sense in polygamy, however the economic environment does not give the room for its perfect practice. Life he says should be handled with reasons and practical experiences. The lessons therein might appear to some as idealistic, but to many it is like another revelation.
But indeed the reader’s perception of our society’s preponderant sexual mono-mania won’t be the same after reading BM Dzukogi’s Sex is Beautiful.
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