Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile

Abstract

I MET ESIABA IROBI IN THE LATE 1980s, after I made the ill-advised decision to return to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where, as a former student leader, I was already a pariah, rather than accept an admission offer from Harvard Graduate School. In Nsukka, Irobi, then a graduate assistant in Dramatic Arts, was already fully engaged in a battle that would dog him across three continents and mark his entire adult life, a battle that he came ever so close to winning only in the last few months before the tragic hand of fate struck him down in Berlin on 29 April 2010. He was waging a war of survival with the academy.His prodigious talent, irrepressible garrulity, and seemingly affected eccentricity had not endeared him to some very powerful people at the university who made sure not only that he failed to graduate with first-class honours but also that life would be miserable for him there as a graduate assistant. His mentor and distant kin, Professor Jas Amankulor, was away in the USA, where he sadly met his untimely death through cancer. In Amankulor's absence, Irobi was a fair target for his powerful adversaries, imbeciles, as he often referred to them, cursing under his breath. Men who once were just as bright in their own youth, perhaps not quite as talented, yet lull of energy and promise but who, with time, had lost the will to excel and eventually retired to the little fiefdom of the academy, whence to wield their cudgels at the younger talents who reminded them of their own earlier promise and, perhaps more poignantly, their failure to reach that promise. Imbeciles, he would spit, absolute cunts! Scavengers loitering around looking for putrid flesh. Accursed vultures! They would have to feed on their own mothers' flesh, not his, he would say to me.Ultimately, those vultures drove us out of Nigeria into lifelong exile. We both wrote about that exilic fate, versified our own deaths, and wished for funerals in the homeland, yet we held onto stubborn hope that, in spite of every tribulation, we would prevail even over exile and banishment, and one day return alive to build a new republic. Esiaba Irobi never made it.In 1987, when we met, I was a budding artist and writer who had taken to producing literary and art criticism for money because I was indigent, although my dearest wish was to be a poet and make my art. Irobi, on the other hand, despite the human demons that haunted and persecuted him, was a prodigy not only in the popular sense of that word but, in fact, in his outrageously copious output as a poet and dramatist, also. In addition to his classroom duties, he was directing plays, some of them his own, often in long, sold-out runs; he was producing a seemingly endless stream of playscripts; he traded barbs with me in the national weeklies about literature and language; and he performed weekly at the Anthill, a literary cabaret that the artist and musician Gbubemi Amas established on the outskirts of the university as a den for poets, dramatists, budding singers and songwriters, and the lot. And every so often, he took a theatre troupe on the road to perform. His troubles with his senior colleagues in the Drama Department did not seem to slow him down; instead, they drove his exceptional industry even as they whetted the edge of violence that marked his work at that time. Theatre students, young actors, budding playwrights and poets alike adored him, and their adulation fired his spirit as he enjoined them not only to confront the many ills in what was already a failing postcolony, but to aspire to great personal accomplishment in their own lives as well. Despite his legendary mirth and loud laughter, he was also a perfectionist both in class and on the set. He did not give an inch to mediocrity or lousiness on a young actor's part or that of a student lighting director, and his temper, though always short-lived, was as explosive as the revolutions that he espoused in his plays. Most important, he taught by example as he poured everything - indeed, every drop of sweat - into his work on stage or on the set. …