Ambassador Of Poverty - P.O.C Umeh

Philip O.C. Umeh studied English at the University of Lagos; taught English at the Government College, Umuahia where he was senior English Master until 1978, and where he himself had been a student, from 1955 to 1961, one year below the writer and political martyr, Ken Saro-Wiwa in the famous school, to whom he addresses a eulogy, “To Ken Saro Wiwa” in his poems:
Victor Ludorum –
For the Spartan rigours of Umuahia
All for Ken
Olives for laurels
From the city scattered over seven hills
All for Ken… .

From 1978 he was Editorial Director at the Publishing House, Nelsons, and from Publishing, he went to government, and retired from public service as the Federal Director of National Productivity.
Umeh’s experience as public school master and civil servant seems to ramify in the tense, dissatisfied moodiness of his collected poems Rhythm of Conscience & Ambassadors of Corruption (Author’s House, 2014).
The poems are gathered in a self-published collection, and in many ways could have gained from a far more disinterested process, even if only to lend it a little more polish and selective care.
But it speaks in part to the condition of contemporary publishing, which today is more democratic, far less guarded, and untroubled by regulation and its sometimes paralyzing gatekeeping.
It is certainly, of course, open to debate, what readers of subtler forms of poetry would make of Philip Umeh’s work, poetry being such a profoundly subjective genre. But it is important here to note that there are two categories, in my view, of poetry and of poets writing currently in Nigeria.
There are those who view poetry as a functional and eclectic mode shorn of all alluring and pretentious accoutrement, but which speak directly to the condition of the world and its experience.
There are those who think of poetry as a more aesthetically conscious, and rhetorically complex system of thought whose many layers carry the force of poetic truth and which convey that force through the ordered pattern of deliberately layered language.
Philip Umeh’s poetry belongs with the former; he privileges utility and accessibility over acrobatics and complexity. The danger of course being that the poems might come off as rant.
But if it is rant, it is a sustained rant that speaks equally to the poet’s willingness to get to the meat of things, and rouse, without equivocation, the sedated numbness of his audience, and apply neither balm nor iodine to the cutting edge or effect of his words.
Take the example of the title poem, “Ambassadors of Corruption” – there is nothing subtle or circuitous about its purpose. It is, as the Igbo saying goes, a way for the poet to eat the proverbial roasted breadfruit nuts and thereafter bare his teeth to his audience. The effect is singular; piquant:

Ambassadors of poverty are
The corrupt masters of the economy
With their head abroad
And anus at home
Patriots in reverse order
Determined merchants of loot
Who boost the economy of the colonial order
To impoverish brothers and sisters at home.

Ambassadors of corruption and poverty are
The “saviors” of the people
Office loafers in the guise of leaders
Barons of incompetence
With kleptomaniac fingers
And suckling filaments
Position occupants but enemies of service
Locked in corrosive war of corruption
With their peoples treasury
And killing their future. …
It is a long poem with ten irregular stanzas.
Each stanza plays up on the mood of the preceding stanza, by working a variation of the theme as a repeating cycle of values. There is irony here, but it is not the irony of warm and inverted feelings; it does not take us gently by hand, to reveal itself, it takes us by the scruff of the collar; it is a direct kind of irony; the sort of brash truth that draws attention to itself by its implications.
It is dark-eyed and shorn of humor, and skeptical. Yet memorable is its amusing caricature of elite doubleness and inversion – the self-regarding “patriot” whose double consciousness, the result of the neocolonial condition that keeps the contemporary African “elite” at the slippery and interstitial space of the crossroads, with his head abroad, while he defecates at home. Philip Umeh is pitiless with these catchphrases.
Rhythm of Conscience is ordered into twenty sections that give significant heft to the book. The stanzaic order of the poems however, is in fact, not ambitious, and feels in part ambivalent and not too well-thought.
These poems would have gained more from an investment in more formal authority; a sense of innovation, and a little less emphasis on what is communicated but rather on how it is communicated. The general frame of this collection is fairly predictable.
It is this lack of surprising truth or language that might grate the jaded reader seeking new stirrings from poetry, and a new visionary power.
Philip Umeh’s poetry offers none of this, but a sensible, heartfelt, and brutal truth about our contemporary condition.
In general, of course, the critic will quibble about the technical l details; but these poems are to be read – and read purely for their ordinary truth, and their ordinary power to reaffirm for us, and remind us all once again of what Achebe made famous as, where the rain began to beat us.