Foreword

Tears in a Basket is Sophia Obi's first collection of poems. She has however been published in literary magazines and newspapers and had read her poems in different fora.

A product of the Creative Arts Department of the University of Port Harcourt, Sophia Obi is also very much at home with the other genres of creative writing. However, she has been, it seems to me, marked out more as a poet than as a devoted prectitioner of the other genres of creative writing, given the quality-depth of treatment and expression range of human encounters with the reality of living, such as hope, disappointment, conflict, birth, death, love, suffering, frustration and so on.

All human situations the reader will find are well articulated with vivid imagery, invoking the local ambience, which compels empathy instead of boredom, sympathy instead of indifference.

In her remarkable poem, titled 'Oloibiri', she indicts the multinational oil companies of exploitation and articulates all that is to be said about the life-threatening predicament of the communities in the oil producing areas of the Niger Delta.

Oloibiri, where oil was first discovered in commercial quantity in this country and exported in 1956, has been abandoned as an old spent lady, when the oil wells went dry. She bemoans her fate and declares in anguish;

I lay on the alter of faded glory,
Oily tears rolling through my veins ,
To nourish households in the desert

...I hear the echo of years gone by
In my vicinity, there is the quake of discovery
A zebra string of popelines running through my belly
Causing me to ache from relentless exploitation.

...Yet I quench the thirst of the desert dwellers
...While my children wallow
in the crude mud peculiar to my swamp

Now with my fertility gone,
I carry a begging bowl, unable to form
A sovereign body to build a monument
to my forsaken glory.

But all is not lost in forlorn hopelessness and gloom when she is:

Awakened by the oil tears of the Ijaw Nation
I hear the laughter,
I hear the celebretion
That comes with controlling the blessings
Of my God-given inheritance.

Here, Sophia Obi predicts eventual victory of the struggle for the control of their resources by the oil producing states of the south of Nigeria. Thus, she has thrown her poetic weight on the side of the resource control advocators.

No creative writer of the South-south zone in his or her works has come so boldly and daringly out in support of this struggle as Sopia Obi has done.

The unambiguity of her statement and the vigour of her language and the explicit and detailed imagery, underline and define the accessibility of her poetry. This accessibility like a lifeline runs through all the poems in this collection. Some are elegant and sensitive and others, delicate human situations one encounters in real life.

Sophia Obi, with her Tears in a Basket, has appeared in the literary scene of Bayelsa and indeed of Nigeria, with a bang. Sprung from the waste Lands of the South-south left bereft of all life by the exploration and exploitation of oil by the international oil companies, she has first-hand experience of the life-threatening predicament of the people of this area who, hitherto, had eked life out of the rivers and rivulets, lakes and streams and scarce arable land.

Sophia Obi's talents as a poet are in no doubt. She has great potentials and readers are assured of more things to come in not a too distant future. Tears in a Basket is for all lovers of good, fresh poetry. It is certainly a welcome addition to the corpus of Nigerian literature.

Gabriel Okara.