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BIOGRAPHY
Johnson Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, known more commonly as J. P. Clark, was born in Kiagbodo, a bilingual town of Ijo and Urhobo speakers in the Delta State of Nigeria, on April 6, 1935, to Chief Clark Fuludu Bekederemo and his wife Poro. His great-grandfather, Ambakederemo, seems to have played an im- portant role in his literary consciousness. One of the wealthiest men of his time, Chief Ambakederemo had no less than sixty-one wives. This polygamous setting of sibling tensions and rivalries was a real cultural school for Clark, almost all of whose plays involve some form of kinship antagonism. Equally important is his proficiency in the two languages of his native place, giving him access to two separate, if contiguous and related, cultures.
Clark attended primary schools in Okrika, Rivers State, and Otughievwen, Delta State, from 1941 to 1948 before going on to Government College, Ughelli, where he took his Cambridge School Certificate in 1954. After a year as a clerk in the office of the Chief Secretary to the Government of Nigeria, in Lagos, he was admitted to University College, Ibadan. It was at UCI that his literary talents began to flower. In 1957 he founded the Horn, a poetry journal where some of his earliest poems appeared. He was also editor of the UCI Students’ Union journal, the Beacon. He took his B.A. (Honours) degree in English in 1960.
Clark-Bekederemo began his working career as information officer in the Western Regional Ministry of Information in 1960, but the following year he joined the staff of the Daily Express as editorial writer and head of features. It was at this time that he published his first two works, Poems and Song of a Goat, both by Mbari Publications, Ibadan. However, his journalistic career turned out to be brief, for in 1962 he left for Princeton University on a year long Parvin Fellowship. On his return, he was appointed research fellow at the In- stitute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. While there, he researched and recorded The Ozidi Saga, which was to remain unpublished for a decade and a half. The year 1964 was a very fruitful one for Clark, for it witnessed the publication of Three Plays by Oxford University Press, which included Song of a Goat as well as two new plays, The Masquerade and The Raft. Also published in 1964 was America, Their America by Andre Deutsch. It was also the year of Clark’s appointment as lecturer in the Department of English, University of Lagos, of his marriage to Ebun Odutola, and of the birth of their daughter Ebiere.
Clark-Bekederemo published in 1965 a new collection of poems, A Reed in the Tide, made up partly of poems from his first collection. It was followed by a new play, Ozidi, in 1966, the year he became coeditor, with Abiola Irele, of Black Orpheus, ajournal of African literature and culture. These were to be his last major literary activities for about half a decade because of the Nigerian civil crisis and war between 1966 and 1970. His war activities have given rise to a certain amount of controversy. What is certain is that he supported the federal cause, that is, Nigerian unity, and was strongly enough opposed to the Biafran secession to speak against it publicly in and outside Nigeria, although he had several friends, like the writers Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, and Mi- chael Echeruo, on the Biafran side. In the course of the war, in 1968, another daughter, Tamara, was born to Clark.
The end of the war saw the publication of Casualties, a collection of new poems occasioned by the war. In the same year, 1970, The Example of Shake- speare, five essays previously published in various journals, was issued by Long- man. A third daughter was born the following year. In 1972 Clark was appointed professor of English at the University of Lagos. But thus began as well a long creative lull. The Ozidi Saga was published in 1977 from his research fourteen years earlier. A son, Ambakederemo, was born in 1978, and two years later Clark retired from the University of Lagos.
Since then, a new creative surge seems to have begun. In 1981 he published A Decade of Tongues, a selection of his earlier poems, State of the Union, new poems, followed in 1985. That same year he published The Bikoroa Plays, a new trilogy consisting of The Boat, The Return Home, and Full Circle. The PEC Repertory Theatre, which Clark established with his wife, Ebun, in Lagos, has also issued another play, The Wives’ Revolt. Clark now spends his time between his work at the PEC Repertory Theatre in Lagos and his native home, Kiagbodo.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
Clark-Bekederemo’s first major publication, Poems (1961), contains some of his best-known and best-loved poems—‘‘Ivbie,’’ ‘‘Night Rain,’’ ‘‘Agbor Dan- cer,’’ and ‘‘Abiku.’’ In spite of the occasional nature of the subjects of the poems, two related concerns predominate in this collection: the celebration of African cultural experience and achievements, as exemplified among the Ijaw and Urhobo people of the Niger Delta, as well as lamentation and criticism of European colonialist exploitation, along with the psychological crisis produced in modern Africans by the European encounter. Significantly, Clark followed up the poetry that same year with what remains perhaps his most popular play, Song of a Goat, thus signalling his competence in the two genres in which he has done most of his writing.
The play and its companion piece, The Masquerade, two parts of an incom- plete trilogy, both of which were published along with The Raft three years later, are family tragedies of incest, betrayal, murder, and suicide, conceived somewhat along classical Greek models, notably Aeschylus’s Orestian cycle. In them, Clark demonstrates not only the universality of the tragic impulse and its ritual basis, but also, as proof perhaps of this premise, the amenableness of the African traditional social experience to the classical tragic form. In other words, tragedy is not the preserve of Europe, since African experience was the stuff of great tragedy in the hands of any capable artist. The last play, The Raft, is a satirical allegory of the divisive ethnicism of the Nigerian nation, with its four characters, Kengide, Olotu, Ogro, and Ibobo, representing the four regions, all heading in their strife-torn boat for disaster.
Clark followed up the plays the same year with America, Their America, his only general prose writing to date. The book is part travelogue (that is, a nar- rative of his experiences as Parvin Fellow in Princeton University and as New York sojourner) and part criticism of American social and political life: the crass materialism, its superpower imperialism, and the endemic racism. These themes tie closely with Clark’s long-standing anticolonial, anti-Western resentments. However, the dualistic focus of the text inevitably manifested a certain stylistic tension between the bombast and sensationalism of journalism and the felicities of poetic prose.
Interestingly, the text incorporated a number of explicit poems that were re- published the following year as part of A Reed in the Tide, Clark’s second collection of poems and the first to be issued by an established international publisher, Longman, in the West African subregion. Of the thirty-three poems in this collection, more than half had appeared in Poems and others in America, Their America. What new materials Clark included, for example, the poems ‘‘The Leader,’’ ‘‘Emergency Commission,’’ and ‘‘His Excellency the Mas- querader,’’ were directly inspired by the worsening Nigerian political situation. There was little to indicate that any direct or indirect connection had been made between these events and the colonial heritage of which the very nation of Nigeria was an expression and that had been an important theme in his earlier writing.
Clark wrote one last major play, Ozidi, before the start of the Nigerian civil war. The theme of revenge, of retributive justice and its excesses, seems to have exercised endless fascination for Clark, for this was also the subject of his oral epic, The Ozidi Saga, published in 1977, as well as of the documentary film of a festival drama titled Tides of the Delta. But in the play, Clark subtly allegorizes the traditional play of the Ijo, elaborating a ritual of national cleansing after the excesses of corruption, strife, and bloodletting. This was Clark’s last effort in the dramatic genre for twenty years.
Soon after the war, in 1970, he published one of the most lyrical and poignant laments to emerge from that terrible event. This is Casualties, made up of two parts, ‘‘Casualties’’ and ‘‘Incidental Songs for Several Persons.’’ The tone of lamentation for the dead, for the country caught in the throes of a human and moral agony, is entirely dominant. However, several of the poems are rendered in the form of animal allegories, though Clark leaves no one in doubt as to his thrust through the extensive reference notes he provides. This allegorical form may have blunted the poignancy somewhat, but it equally lifts many of the poems from a maudlin slide. Even more important, it relocates them within the kind of traditional African idiom and the proverbial and riddling forms of ex- pression Clark continuously cultivated, which seem to have made a little more tolerable for him the painful consciousness of expressing African experience in a foreign language. But Casualties remains Clark’s last successful poetic work, since State of the Union (1985) has been unable to recapture the vitality of that idiom.
Much more successful has been his recent drama. In 1985 Clark published The Bikoroa Plays. In this full-fledged trilogy, consisting of The Boat, The Return Home, and Full Circle, Clark again returns to the theme of the family feud and curse: fratricide, vengeance, and its aftermath. Biowa’s wilful murder of Bradide in a dispute over the use of a jointly owned boat (The Boat) corre- sponds to the accidental killing of Kari by Ojoboro—both of them Bradide’s sons—in a scuffle a generation later (Full Circle). But what ironically unites both plays is The Return Home, which is conceived as a festival drama of ritual purification where the curse of the earlier fratricide was ostensibly undone, though it never really was, judging from the action of Full Circle. In all these plays, the essential tragic statement Clark-Bekederemo intends to make is far from domestic, or even ethnodirectional. His vision is fundamentally national and, by extension, racial and continental. The Nigerian condition and, from there, the African and black condition, that tragic cycle of repeated bloodletting and political and socioeconomic stagnation, are the real focus of these apparently merely domestic disasters. It is less a comment on the dramaturgic skills of Clark-Bekederemo than a failure of critical imagination that this has not been properly recognized.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
From the beginning, the criticism of Clark’s drama has recognized the the- atrical difficulties and challenges they pose to producers and directors. For ex- ample, a theatre critic complains of Ozidi: ‘‘The pulsating drama of Ozidi with its expansive scope of action and unbounded vision, is capable of exhausting the physical resources of the living stage’’ (Umukoro, 137). Not only the themes but also Clark’s dramatic technique, which necessitates the presence on stage of violence, whether of a ritual kind or otherwise, has often been held account- able for the problems of performing Clark’s plays. They have thus been some- times regarded as closet dramas (Wren, 76). Neither have the themes been sufficiently appreciated or understood. On the other hand, the evocative language of the plays, either explicitly poetic, as in Song of a Goat, or idiomatic, as in most of the others, has been widely admired. More recent criticism has focused on the rich traditional cultural background of his plays (Ifie).
Much better appreciated generally is Clark’s poetry. His gift for visual meta- phor has been often remarked and commended, especially in his early poetry (Udoeyop, 85). As the first modern West African poet of note, Clark’s place in African literature was made secure primarily in this genre. However, the occa- sional nature of his subjects and themes has been pointed out, indicating a lack of any substantive ideological base or controlling ethic. Equally less appealing is the variety of the styles in his early poetry, with distinct echoes from Yeats, Hopkins, and Eliot. His later work has not achieved as much recognition and admiration. While the allegorical style of Casualties has elicited critical praise, his language has been adjudged somewhat stilted (Biakolo, 182). Neither has his latest poetry been at all favorably received. The experiment with prosaic language in State of the Union and the attention to non-Nigerian themes in Mandela and Other Poems have been adjudged not very successful. Thus in critical terms, Clark’s earlier writing, with its thematic concentration on the colonial experience and its impact, seems to have done greater credit to his talents and reputation than his later work, which has focused more on the pains of Nigerian nationhood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by J. P. Clark-Bekederemo
Poems. Ibadan: Mbari, 1961.
Song of a Goat. Ibadan: Mbari, 1961.
America, Their America. London: Andre´ Deutsch, 1964; London: Heinemann, 1968. Three Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
A Reed in the Tide. London: Longman, 1965.
Ozidi. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Casualties. London: Longman, 1970.
The Example of Shakespeare. London: Longman, 1970.
The Ozidi Saga. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press; Oxford University Press, 1977. The Hero as Villain. Lagos: University of Lagos Press, 1978.
A Decade of Tongues. London: Longman, 1981.
The Bikoroa Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1985.
London: Longman, 1985.
The Wives’ Revolt (mimeograph). Lagos: PEC Repertory Theatre, 1985. Mandela and Other Poems. London: Longman, 1988.
Selected Studies of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo
Akyea, Ofori E. ‘‘Traditionalism in African Literature: J. P. Clark.’’ Perspectives on African Literature. Ed. Christopher Heywood. New York: Africana, 1971. 117– 25.
Ashaolu, Albert O. ‘‘The Classical Temper in Modern African Drama.’’ Comparative Approaches to Modern African Literature. Ed. Sam O. Asein. Ibadan: Department of English, 1983. 77–93.
Biakolo, Emevwo. ‘‘The Structure of Metaphor in Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry.’’ Review of English and Literary Studies 3.2 (December 1986): 175–82.
Egudu, Romanus. Four Modern West African Poets. New York: Nok, 1977.
Ifie, Egbe. A Cultural Background to the Plays of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo. Ibadan: End- Time Publishing House, 1994.
Nwachukwu-Agbada, J. O. J. ‘‘Hands over Head: The Nature of Tragedy in Clark Be- kederemo’s The Bikoroa Plays. ’’ Review of English and Literary Studies 3.2 (December 1986): 126–35.
Povey, John F. ‘‘Two Hands a Man Has’: The Poetry of J. P. Clark.’’ African Literature Today 1 (1968): 36–47.
Udoeyop, N. J. Three Nigerian Poets. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1973.
Umukoro, Matthew M. ‘‘The Theatrical Challenges of Ozidi. ’’ Review of English and Literary Studies 3.2 (December 1986): 136–47.
Wren, Robert. J. P. Clark. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
© EMEVWO BIAKOLO
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