Why Ikyaabo Tells Tales
behind our Phoney Smiles
Title Behind the Phoney Smiles
Author Ikyaabo Barnabas Terhemba
Genre Poetry
Publisher Premier Media
Pages 60
Reviewer Vanger Fater
African poetry has gained popularity
in our contemporary society. With the advancement in written literature, it has
received much attention even from people who thought the genre was an exclusive
literary field for literary scholars. This much is a credit which must be sealed,
as one wraps a present, and decorated on the tables of contemporary poets.
African first generation poets had compelled the society in which they lived to
think of poetic messages as some abstract ideas entombed in lines or verses which
only an abstract being divulges. This gave poetry a very low patronage while
its Prose and Drama counterparts continued to receive societal accolades and
attention. Of course, such a development was not a failure which arose from the
society; the problem hung on these poets who believed that obscurity defined a
good poem, and since writers stand the risk of being influenced by the
activities of antecedent colleagues, the modern generation of poets, although
most tried not to be influenced, had a considerable number of poets who took
over with obscurity.
The
effect of this was that poetry continued with the plague of an unpopular stand
even among students of Literature. However, with the coming on board of the
contemporary poet and his refusal to patronize obscurity of diction, poetry has
gradually rebuilt its glory among people of all professions which we can argue
– and rightly so – that was not even there. The contemporary African poet has
boycotted obscurity to birth verses whose messages reveal the essence of human
life – its meaninglessness; man’s bestial nature; the irony of life and all
that pertains to it.
In Barnabas Ikyaabo’s “Behind the
Phoney Smiles” – a collection of 51 poems – the contemporary poet has set forth
to reveal this ironic nature of not just life, but of men whom it exists in; of
everything man engages in; of the world at large. This explains why the first two
poems in the collection take an eponymous title after the collection. The poet
expresses his profound understanding of what lies beneath smiling lips in his
eponymous “Behind the Phoney Smile I”. He reveals that “Behind the spurious smiles/There
lies a lonely heart; intoxicated with rage and tears” (1). The message in these
lines is deeply revealing that one wonders why a lonely heart gripped by rage
and tears dripping in torrents still chooses the path of smiling. This
revelation is of the ironic nature of life as the next stanza lays it before
us: “Behind the pseudo smiles/Are agonizing pains/And there lies [sic]/the
distance [sic] echoes of our daily cries” (1).
As this ironic smile is revealed,
one questions its essence. It is confusing that a hurt mind chooses to smile
even when the heart continues to wallow in an interior inferno. However, this
confusion becomes murdered when the last stanza explains that “the rich steps
upon the hearts of the poor/and they smile back, hiding the pains/these fabricated…smiles/Are
but hurtful feelings in disguise” (1). It is now understood that the poet’s
mind and sympathy lie with the poor; and having come from the part of the world
where the poor are deprived of freedom, we understand that smiling has remained
an only option when struck by the mighty.
It is this same message that is
continued in ‘Behind the Phoney Simile II”. The poet’s lamentations as the
world continues to paint smiles whose stand from reality is as Pluto from the Sun
is expressed with deep imagery. We are told that “Behind the phoney smile/deep
pains lie…/Eating up the flesh with venomous acidic bits” (2). There is an
attempt by the poet to have his readers understand the fierce nature of these
ironic smiles, and this explains why he brings in images of flesh being eaten
up with venomous acid. Imagery has remained a powerful tool in the hands of not
just African poets, but of poetry in general. Hence, Ikyaabo utilizes on it to
press home his message of an abnormal world albeit smiles drawn on faces. We
are told that rivers have burst their banks; walls are smashed; funnels of the
earth are being flooded with blood; the ocean too has become a vessel filled
with brackish liquids (2). His use of imagery is akin to Kukogho Samson and
Kolade Olanrewaju whose “I said these Words” and “Punctured Silence”
respectively contain verses deeply bath in the pool of imagery.
Ikyaabo’s
collection – like Su’eddie’s “Home Equals Holes” and Terseer Baki’s “Euphoria
of Sophistry” – is an all encompassing work which has touched on many subjects.
In “This Remains a Mystery”, the poet questions the nature of the world in
which we inhabit; wonders about the power(s) behind creation; imagines why man
whose sake the beautiful world is created is certain of lying someday where
words and touches will be thrown in vain. These are all mysteries which the
poet seeks in vain to unravel, and when it becomes clear that his efforts will
forever be fruitless, he gives into wishes where he says “Have I the powers, I
would pay the moon visit/ to have a double feel of its bleached glow/And the
boundless luminosity of its sparkle/And then to the sun to unearth the mystery
of its flawless radiation” (5). Other subjects like love, death, morality and
politics are well captured in the collection as the poet unravels the excitement
which thrills in youths; the agonizing tucks of death; the fall of man before
his creator; the raping of a nation’s resources while the masses starve to
death.
The
decision to tell these tales whose yoke centres on the phoney nature of the smiles
humans, all of us, put is believed to have stemmed from the hopelessness of
humanity itself. The hallmark of the poet’s message comes in our understanding
that he paints, in the most vivid manner, the picture of a pretentious world in
which men – rich and the poor – live putting on smiles which are indeed at
loggerheads with the pain that burns within them. His ability to have his
readers understand what motivates the smiles which decorate most faces as being
bitterness than the actual happiness those smiles appear to set is all that
Ikyaabo has achieved in his collection. We can as well argue, and rightly so,
that the poet has been troubled over the clandestine manner that men live which
makes things on the surface not in conformity with those beneath.
However, Ikyaabo’s collection is not
bereft of mistakes and typos. The poet’s lack of adherence to rules governing subject/verb
agreement (concord); of proper tenses within the verses is rampant. Poems like “I
Smile”, “Behind the Phoney Smile”, “The Rapist is Back”, and “Baby Babbles”
have all relegated concord, while “The Puddle Jumper”, “Hunger Bite” and others
have had wrong tenses uncorrected. Yet, these do not hinder his verses’ beauty.
Being a first edition, it is expected that the poet and his publishers sit to
tame these errors of concord, tenses, and punctuation in later editions.
In conclusion, therefore, “Behind the
Phoney Smiles”, being the poet’s debut collection, has earned him much credit
since the verses have captured life’s bothering issues which humanity keeps
pondering on. For allowing his lines flow in simplicity amidst complexity,
Ikyaabo’s poetry possesses a reservoir of intrigues which makes one laughs over
human’s stupidity while wondering why
beings are being beasts with imaginary terrifying tusks. With such feet
attained, Ikyaabo has joined the league of African contemporary poets
determined to unmask poetry as a genre with the desire of making its patronage
akin to that which prose and drama enjoy.
