Professor JP Clark, one of the foremost African writers, died on 13 October, 2020. He was 86. His family obeyed the instructions in his last Will and Testament that his remains should be interred within three days of his demise at his country home in Funama, near Kiagbodo. No expensive and wasteful burial rites. He just exited simply. JP Clark was a highly gifted writer but notoriously querulous person. He remained so till the very end. For instance, he gave Odia Ofeimun a wide berth since the publication in 1980 of The Poet Lied which the Longman publishers were compelled to withdraw from circulation by Clark’s lawyers. This long poem by Ofeimun, which is very critical of some steps taken by Clark during the Nigeria-Biafra war, and the opinions which Clark expresses clearly and strongly in his Casualties, had earlier been published in the literary journal, Idoto, in 1975. One more instance: he was in court in February this year in a libel case he filed in Lagos against Adewale Maja-Pearce who wrote A Peculiar Tragedy: JP Clark-Bekederemo and the Beginning of Modern Nigerian Literature in English. He had commissioned Adewale Maja-Pearce to write his biography but Maja-Pearce turned in some very insightful readings of Clark’s works, and stinging and unflattering passages which Professor Clark and his lawyers considered libelous. The court was going to sit again the very week that the Lagos High Court was set ablaze by some hoodlums in the wake of the #EndSARS protests. Yes, our JP Clark was generous and kind to some younger writers but he was off-putting to many others who experienced his peevish dispositions. 

He knew that he wanted to be a writer very early. He was very active at literary events in Government College Ughelli. In his sophomore year at the University College Ibadan (UCL), he did not only start writing poetry and plays seriously he also edited the UCI Students’ Union journal, The Beacon, and was the founding editor of student’s poetry journal, The Horn. Many of the poems in his first collection, Poems, published by Mbari publications in Ibadan, first appeared in those journals. He was 23 years when he published the best of his early poetry in those magazines. You will immediately notice when you read ”Ivbie” and other poems of this period, that JP Clark had read widely and closely the best of the Euro-American canon. He had internalized his borrowings from the classics. The borrowings were then merged and fused seamlessly with the cadences and lyricisms of the folk songs and parables of Ijaw and Urhobo. T.S. Eliot once said in his essay on Phillip Massinger that ”immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” As a poet in his youth, he was not an immature writer who, to quote Eliot again, ”threw his borrowings into something which has no cohesion.” Very early on, JP Clark showed so much promise. He signaled to the literati in Ibadan and elsewhere that he was going to do much more in the future. It was also during his Ibadan years that he wrote his first published play, Song of a Goat.
Upon his graduation from UCI, he worked as features editor and editorial writer at the Express group of newspapers in Lagos where he met Chief Olabisi Onabanjo (former governor of Ogun State) and Mr JO Dipeolu (former Chief Librarian, University of Ife). In an interview with him published in TheNEWS, Mr Dipeolu paid a glowing tribute to Clark, one of his best friends, for his critical insights and beautiful prose as a journalist. It was JP Clark’s brilliance as a journalist that won him in the 1962/63 academic session the prestigious Parvin Fellowship at Princeton University. But in America, Their America, his memoir of the Parvin days at Princeton, JP Clark is at his truculent best. Every schedule that did not suit him, he bluntly turned down. He disagreed openly with Dr Robert van de Velde, the programme director, who simply took Clark’s intransigence for arrogance and insubordination. Here was a Fellow who was invited to Princeton as an accomplished journalist but who insisted that he must be treated as a major poet and playwright. He did not finish his fellowship term in Princeton before he left for Nigeria or, more accurately, got himself expelled from America. In so many ways, America, Their America is an extraordinary book. It was published in 1964 by Andre Deutsch in association with Heinemann when JP Clark was 29 years. Republished in 2015 by Bankole Olayebi’s BookCraft, his criticisms of racism in America, and the stupidity of many of its racist and white supremacist citizens, which was on full display under President Donald J. Trump, are still spot on. Interestingly, in his old age, Professor Clark took a lot of pride in being a Parvin Fellow at Princeton University—a calm critique, a rebuke even, of his maverick tempers in that Ivy League.


JP Clark’s America, their America

When he returned to Nigeria, he worked between 1963 and 1964 at the University of Ibadan as a Research Fellow. He spent most his time researching and recording frenetically The Ozidi Saga. He was lucky to meet, befriend and marry Ebun Odutola during that time. The couple remained married for 56 years. It is fitting that he dedicated some of his major works to her, and wrote one of his last poems for this wonderful woman who endured and loved him till his last breath. Appointed lecturer in English Department, University of Lagos in 1965, he rose to become a professor in 1972 and retired in 1980. He never stopped writing, producing and teaching. The Nigeria-Biafra war obviously dented his image, for that was when his integrity as a friend and as a writer was tested and questioned. He had to spend many years afterwards removing the stains of betrayal.

His published poetry collections include: Poems; A Reed in the Tide; Casualties; A Decade of Tongues; State of the Union; Mandela and Other Poems; A Lot from Paradise; Of Sleep and Old Age; and Once Again a Child. His published plays include: Song of a Goat; The Masquerade; The Raft; Ozidi; The Boat; The Return Home; Full Circle; The Wives’ Revolt; and All for Oil. His essays are collected in The Example of Shakespeare and Other Essays. These books, as Toni Morrison would say, were the major sources of his self-regard. Professor JP Clark was honoured, among other awards, with the Nigerian National Order of Merit. Full length books on him include JP Clark by Robert M. Wren published in 1984 by Lagos University Press; JP Clark: A Voyage by Femi Osofisan published in 2011 by BookCraft; and A Peculiar Tragedy: JP Clark-Bekederemo and the Beginning of Modern Nigerian Literature in English by Adewale Maja- Pearce published in 2013 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.  
With his strikingly intimate, consistently witty and elegant essay that makes the past vivid and inviting, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka leads a formidable team of other Nigerian writers to paint an intensely personal, lucid, fluent, gripping and illuminating portrait of JP Clark, and pay him a moving tribute. We hope that this commemorative edition will serve as an invaluable source of information to all those interested in reading Clark’s plays, poems and memoir/travelogue.