Poetry is like breathing to me- Nkemjika Okeke

Can you tell us about you and poetry?
Me and poetry are two things you can’t separate. We are like life and breathing. Without life you can’t breathe and without breath you can’t live. It’s like that. It’s like the blood stream in me.

How did you two become intertwined?
I discovered poetry, or rather poetry came to me at a point when I felt I had to let out something anyhow and letting it out in essay form wasn’t helping me. Prose wasn’t giving me what I wanted in terms of expressions. As much as I was letting out the steam, I wasn’t expressing myself well enough so poetry was just the exact medium I needed.

So using poetry to express yourself do you feel the relief you craved from whatever you wanted to let out?
Relief is an understatement. It’s like each poem I write, at the end of it, it’s like something new leaves you, like a new creation of you standing next to you, just the way I am looking at you. I am trying to go back to prose but I discover that there is poetry in everything.

So are you still likely to venture into prose then?
I will. But that would be at the leverage that poetry gives me because right now poetry is in charge.
The way you speak, it is as if you are bonded to poetry.
For life.
That is like a master-slave relationship. . .
For life.

So who then is the master and who is the slave?
Let me be the slave. Poetry is the master.
That is interesting. Ok, now let us talk about the first poem you wrote.
The first poem I was conscious of writing was during my secondary school days, in my JS2. It was on AIDS. We had a programme about the World AIDS Day and some of us were selected to write poems. I ended up coming up with about two pages of a long note page and it was my first experience of doing spoken work poem as well because I had to commit it to memory and read it out before the school. That was where everything took shape.

What was the reception to that poem?
It was well accepted. The poem eventually went to the ministry of health.

Now that you have published a collection of poems, do you feel you can rightfully call yourself a poet?
Hmmm, that is big because poetry has a way of scoring you, not the other way round and it also depends on other poets even though they may not be able to experience every single emotion you were going through while writing the poem but  they also have a stake in one being seen as a poet because many people write their poems and it never leaves their bedroom.

And now that you have come out of your bedroom,  do you feel satisfied with the result of your coming out?
Of course. The fact that you are able to breathe outside yourself. When this book came out, I thought fine, it’s out, let me go back and continue my writing. The next morning, I got a call from the publishers asking me to check on Amazon, that it was already rated a bestseller in less than 24 hours. He then said start working on the next manuscript, you should be almost through with it now.

Don’t you feel rushed?
No. Right now the plan is that once this one is out, I will go back to my shell and continue.

Is that possible now?
In a way, yes. It’s not like shutting yourself out of the world but going back to the fellowship you have with poetry. You wake up and talk and you get talked back at, you look at nature, it smiles at you, just go back to that person that keeps writing and duplicating.
 Beyond Dialogismos touches on a number of themes, including love and social commentary. Do you feel that a writer has a social responsibility to be critical of society?
Yes, he does. Because going back to where we were coming from in literature where people like Chris Okigbo, Soyinka, Gabriel Okara were able to keep us abreast with what was happening. Sometimes they proffer solution to what they write about because poetry gives you an insight so that when you pen it, you give it life and before something happens, you already have an idea and you can see what you can do about it because you have seen it coming.

Talking about the society, there seems to be a proliferation of poets on social media, there are lots of poetry anthologies coming out. The question is: is there a gatekeeper for all this things or is everything coming out like that?
There is a gatekeeper. Everything has different sides. There are people, I won’t say they are not anointed, but because they see you could do this thing and achieve something with it, they also want to do it. It’s like seeing someone build a house and being called a landlord and because I want to be a landlord too, I will go build a house. So it is possible that most of the people writing do not have this fellowship with words but because they see what other people are writing, they train themselves and develop a passion for words.

This fellowship with words you’ve been talking about, how does it come about?
For me, it comes in several ways. Talking with people, just sitting by myself, strolling. While talking to someone I could just key in on some of the words he uses and write them down and overtime they start building up themselves. Or I could be strolling in the evening and see things that I could write about. At other times, and this is funny I still laugh about it, I could be sleeping and the lines would rush into my head on their own, or it’s as if they are standing in front of me separately and I would have to write them down to make a connection. Most times it’s a message for someone because there might be someone saying I have been thinking about this but I had no idea how to put it down.

Considering all this then, what do you think is poetry to you?
Poetry is the wordplay that is my life, it’s my best way of being me.

Essentially you are saying your poetry is very personal?    
99.9 per cent of the times, yes.
Don’t you think that is potentially a problem for those who read you and can’t key into your emotions or experiences to grasp what you are trying to express?
As much as it is personal to me, I try to imagine that it could be someone else, or someone else’s thoughts so I keep it simple so they can understand because if you use the words that come to my head, for instance when I use Hebrew of Greek words, I break them down so people will understand.

So in other words, you are writing your poetry about you but not for you?
Yes. About me in the general sense but about life around me.

In the next five years, what do you hope to achieve with your poetry?
I hope to make the people coming after me know that whatever you are facing, you could give it a voice and let things work out for themselves. I believe words are powerful, like when someone tells you negative things about you, it is up to you to tell yourself about you and that is what nature hears. Whatever someone says, and you don’t say what you want to, it is the word of that person that holds sway. So instead of living vacuums around you, just fill it up with words and move on.