One of modern Nigeria’s foremost literary figures, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, known for the first part of his career as John Pepper Clark, is dead.
Aged 85, the Emeritus professor, playwright and poet known famously for his war poem ‘The Casualties, nature poem, ‘Night Rain’ and 1961 play ‘Song of a Goat’ is the younger brother of former federal commissioner for information and south-south leader, Mr. Edwin Kiagbodo Clark.
In a statement signed by Prof. C. C. Clark, for the family and Mr. Ilaye Clark, for the children on Tuesday, JP Clark died in the early hours of today.
The statement reads: “The Clark-Fuludu Bekederemo family of Kiagbodo Town, Delta State, wishes to announce that Emeritus Professor of Literature and Renowned Writer, Prof. John Pepper Clark, has finally dropped his pen in the early hours of today, Tuesday, 13 October, 2020.
“Prof. J. P. Clark has paddled on to the great beyond in comfort of his wife, children and sibling, around him.
“The family appreciates your prayers at this time. Other details will be announced later by the family.”
Born Johnson Pepper Clark-Bekederemo in Kiagbodo, Nigeria, on April 6, 1935, Clark-Bekederemo was the son of a chief in Nigeria’s Ijaw ethnic group in the Niger Delta.
Growing up in a small fishing village that had no elementary school, Clark-Bekederemo nevertheless enjoyed the best education that British colonial Nigeria had to offer due to his parents’ influence.
He attended British-run schools in the towns of Okrika and Jeremi and then entered the colonial Government College in Ughelli, graduating in 1954. Clark-Bekederemo worked for a year as a government clerk, gaining contacts among Nigeria’s elite, and in 1955 he entered the University of Ibadan (still a branch of the University of London at the time).
He majored in English and received an honours degree in 1960.
Clark-Bekederemo had already become noted as an important writer.
Clark-Bekederemo’s most famous play, Song of a Goat, was also written during his university years; it was published in 1961.
The play was written in verse and had the structure and feel of a Greek tragedy, with an ancient curse as background, a family drama that unfolds into violent events, and a chorus-like group of onlookers.
Despite its emulation of Greek models, Song of a Goat was African to the core; the theme of impotence had an especially strong impact in an African setting.
After graduating from University College, Clark-Bekederemo worked at a newspaper in Lagos.
His early plays and poetry had been published, and they circulated among Western readers.
As a young African writer with a fairly high profile, he came to the attention of university programmes in the United States that were set up with the goal of cultural exchange in mind.
Clark-Bekederemo was the recipient of Princeton University’s Parvin Fellowship and spent the 1962-63 academic year in the United States.
The outcome was unsuccessful on a personal level; Clark-Bekederemo clashed repeatedly with his hosts and was asked to leave Princeton after a year.
In artistic terms, however, the visit was a productive one. Clark-Bekederemo wrote a book, America, Their America, about his experiences, criticizing what he saw as American materialism, obsession with sex, and ignorance about the rest of the world.
America, Their America was published in London in 1964 and appeared in the United States five years later.
While at Princeton, Clark-Bekederemo worked on two more plays. The Masquerade was a romantic tragedy that carried forward the lives of some of the characters in Song of the Goat.
A third Clark-Bekederemo play, The Raft, was intended for radio broadcast. Its four characters are woodcutters floating logs down the Niger River to urban markets; they fall into mortal danger when their raft starts to break up are faced with the test of cooperation.
Clark-Bekederemo returned to Nigeria as the newly independent nation was beginning a long slide into political chaos.
He married a fellow academic, Ebun Odutola, and the couple had four children.
Showing continuing productivity in both drama and poetry on a one-year University of Ibadan fellowship, he became a professor at the University of Lagos in 1966.
Clark-Bekederemo delved more and more deeply into African themes in his writing.
A Reed in the Tide, Clark-Bekederemo’s 1965 volume of poetry, touched on the Nigerian political themes that would soon consume Clark-Bekederemo’s life.
His 1966 play Ozidi was an adaptation of an Ijaw story that in its traditional setting would have been told over seven successive days, using music, dance, and mime.
In the late 1960s, Clark-Bekederemo’s life was directly touched by a series of military takeovers that led to a full-blown Nigerian civil war.
His former classmate Emmanuel Ifeajuna, a military officer, was killed after Clark-Bekederemo had helped to bring him back into Nigeria from exile in Ghana, and the world looked on in horror as part of Nigeria split off and declared independence as the new nation of Biafra, only to suffer brutal reprisals at the hand of the Nigerian military.
Clark-Bekederemo’s 28 war poems were collected in a 1970 volume called Casualties. His poems addressed the conflict from a variety of perspectives.
The poem that gave the book its title examined the stance of Nigerians who fomented the war from abroad, attempting to whip up support for one side or the other. “The casualties are many,” he wrote, “and a good number well/Outside the scene of ravage and wreck;/They are the emissaries of rift,/So smug in smoke-room they haunt abroad,/They are wandering minstrels who, beating on/The drum of human heart, draw the world/Into a dance with rites it does not know.”
Around 1980, however, Clark-Bekederemo began to feel creative impulses rising once again.
He took early retirement from the university that year and set up a theatre company, the PEC (for Pepper and Ebun Clark) Repertory Theatre.
The PEC Repertory Theatre became Nigeria’s first repertory theater institution, an ongoing theatrical company dedicated to the performance of a mix of classic and new works. Clark-Bekederemo himself wrote works staged by the new company; his 1985 play The Return Home was part of a cycle of three works the author entitled The Bikoroa Plays. These works were rooted in a half century of Nigerian history through which Clark-Bekederemo and his ancestors had lived.
In 1984 Clark-Bekederemo also wrote a comedy, The Wives’ Revolt that was influenced by the ancient Greek comic playwright, Aristophanes.
Two more books of Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, State of the Union and Mandela and Other Poems, were published in the 1980s; some of the poems in these volumes addressed the problems of contemporary Africa and discarded whatever youthful idealism Clark-Bekederemo might have harboured concerning the continent’s future.
Several collections of Clark-Bekederemo’s plays and poetry were published in the late 1980s, both in Nigeria and elsewhere; in the United States, Howard University Press issued a collection of his works along with his translation of the Ozidi saga.
Clark-Bekederemo remained active as a writer into the 1990s.
Clark-Bekederemo received the Nigerian National Merit Award for literary excellence in 1991 and was the recipient of various other awards.
Selected works:
(as John Pepper Clark) Song of a Goat (play), 1961
(as John Pepper Clark) Poems, 1962
The Masquerade (play), 1962
(as John Pepper Clark) The Raft (radio play), 1964
(as John Pepper Clark) America, Their America (nonfiction), 1964
(as John Pepper Clark) A Reed in the Tide (poems), 1965
(as John Pepper Clark) Ozidi (play), 1966
(as John Pepper Clark) Casualties: Poems 1966-68, 1970
The Example of Shakespeare: Critical Essays on African Literature, 1970
The Wives’ Revolt, 1984
The Bikoroa Plays, 1985
Collected Plays and Poems, 1958-1988, Howard University Press, 1988
Mandela and Other Poems, 1988
The approach of his 70th birthday in 2004 set off a round of celebrations that included performances by popular musicians Mr. Luvles and the Psound Xpres Band. Clark-Bekederemo could look back on an extraordinarily varied body of work, all of it tied together by his rootedness in Nigerian life.
His love of country showed through in one of his shortest and most modernistic poems, Ibadan which read in its entirety: “Ibadan, /running splash of rust/and gold—flung and scattered/among seven hills like broken/china in the sun.”
On 6 December 2011, to honour the life and career of Professor Clark-Bekederemo, a celebration was held at Lagos Motor Boat Club, Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, for the publication of J. P. Clark: A Voyage, The definitive biography of the main animating force of African poetry, written by playwright Prof Femi Osofisan. The launch was attended by “what could be described as the who is who in the literary community”, including Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.
In 2015 the Society of Young Nigerian Writers under the leadership of Wole Adedoyin founded the JP Clark Literary Society, aimed at promoting and reading Clark’s works.
Death: His death was announced on 13 October 2020.
Sources: Wikipedia
