HOW DOES THE ENVIRONMENT INFLUENCE BOTH POETS BY WOLE SOYINKA AND J.P CLARK IN THEIR POEM, ABIKU

HOW DOES THE ENVIRONMENT INFLUENCE BOTH POETS BY WOLE SOYINKA AND J.P CLARK IN THEIR POEM, ABIKU

     

      Both poems entitled discuss the title child who returns to haunt his family after dying at a young age. However, they are formatted and presented in different manners to give alternate meanings to the story presented. The first, written by Wole Soyinka is written in stanzas, while John Pepper Clark’s is a block form.

      However, they also share a variety of qualities in common, such as nature imagery and belief in incarnation. One similarity between Soyinka’s and Clark’s poems is the belief in incarnation. Both discuss the Abiku, which is a young child who dies before realizing puberty and continues to haunt his mother after his passing. First, Soyinka’s poem contains specific instances in which the Abiku torments his previous parents.

      According to Yoruba mythology, Abiku refers to a child who dies repeatedly before puberty. It means predestined to death. Influenced by some spiritual deities, a child dies prematurely leaving the mother miserable. Once the mother gives birth again and the child has the same physical features as the previous one, she puts a mark on the chest, back or face of the child. The parent then consults the oracle and appeases the spirit family of the child, if it is confirmed that is from there.

      Abiku are spirits who may have families in the spiritual world. The myth is that those spirits are hungry as no one offers sacrifices to them. In anger, they come to physical world to eat and provide food for their spiritual family and at the peak of happiness in the home, they die. Such happiness may include marriage ceremony, coronation and wealth. This is a pure act of revenge as the cry of a mother excites the Abiku spirit.

      The poem’s personal, Abiku mocks the object used to confine him to earth. The bangles and charmed circles cannot restrain him from dying. He asserts proudly I am Abiku calling for the first and repeated time. From the tone of Abiku, we know that he is addressing his parents.

      He tells them that they are wasting their time by trying to make him stay. This poem vividly portrays the futility of life, meaning that man’s effort to avoid death is futile and man is a main vain person. The dominant mood of the poem is pride. The language is simple with complex meaning. Its complexity is achieved by the use of metaphor and imaging.

      The title of J. P. Clark's poem is a store of meaning for the poem itself since it gives us understanding of many of the sentences we will encounter in the poem. The word Abiku is Yoruba for spirit child. It refers to a child who must die and repeatedly be reborn again and again. So, Clark is talking to one of these Abiku.

      The poem opens by Clark sounding a denouncement to this Abiku who probably has just be reborn for coming and going these several seasons to mean that he gets born, and when the family thinks that he is here to stay, he dies. And he does it several times  so that Clark seems so fed up as to tell him to ‘stay out on the baobab-tree'

In Ghanaian cultural tradition and in the Nigerian culture, the baobab-tree is suspected to be the meeting place of all manner of spirits, witches and wizards who work at night. By asking Abiku to stay out on the baobab-tree, Clark is asking him to stay in the spirit world and not be reborn.

      In the third line, Clark emphasizes this by asking Abiku to follow where he pleases his ‘hundred spirits' which gives a sense that Abiku keeps coming and going from a Community of like-minded spirits. This should be so, as Clark says if ‘indoors is not enough' for Abiku (line 4). Indoors refers to normal life among men when Abiku brings joy at birth, only to bring sorrow at death soon after.

      Clark goes on to explain the modest condition in which they live, if perhaps that is what keeps Abiku going away. He confesses that it ‘leaks through the thatch' (line 5), a roof  of grass and straw used as matting for a poor home built usually of clay, when it rains till floods brim the banks (line 6). At night also, bats and owls tear through the eaves (lines 7-8), making sleep difficult.

      Clark continues that Abiku should make up his mind, no longer should he ‘bestride the threshold' (line 14), meaning he should no longer stay with one foot indoors and the other out on the baobab-tree; an indecision between life and death, this world and the other, ‘but step in and stay for good (line 15-16). Henceforth, Clark mentions a few things we will to understand by understanding the Yoruba culture.

      When an Abiku comes and goes a couple of times, a frustrated family gives the Abiku scars at birth so that being now made ugly, it will displease the gods and spirit world. This makes the child stay alive and ends the sorrow of the family that is burdened to bear that child over and over. Clark says that they can see and ‘know the knife scars (line 16) ‘running down his back and front’ (line 17).

      Clark tries to convince ‘Abiku to Step in and stay for the woman who bears him is now tired’ (line 22) ‘of his many reincarnations and so tired that her milk is now going sour' (line 23). This souring only happens to milk that has grown old that the woman is now growing too old to keep up with Abiku's treachery and may no longer have a strong body to bear him. Clark tries to make it not sound so bad, by saying that it is with this same milk that many more mouths (line 23), presumably of those other people who stay and reach to the sun, have gladdened the heart of the family which have not hurt because these other people lived on and also the hearts of these ones who lived on to gladdens themselves with the milk of this woman’s breast.