Published by Handel African Books Network in September 2007, Tsunami Blues and other Poems is made up of 48
Poems by 33 Nigerian poets who attempt to put in verse the varied reactions to the tragic
disaster of 2004 around the shores of the Indian Ocean. The title itself is taken from the lead poem “Tsunami Blues --to the victims unaccounted” written by Desmond Wilson who teaches communication arts at a Nigerian university. Although they were not anywhere near the scene of disaster, a striking feature of the reaction of these Nigerian poets is the
empathy that resonates all through their writings, making it almost as if the Nigerian country was physically affected by the tragedy. Tsunami in the mind of every contributing poet to this
anthology was vicariously felt in the Nigerian nation prompting the poet to ask: Tsunami, Tsunami/ Why did you do this to me? (Tsunami, my grief/ Tsunami, our scourge;/ Tsunami, the destroyer of our world. /Why O Tsunami?) A roll call of the impact of the disaster can also be gleaned from Desmond Wilson’s contribution to the volume: From Phuket to Madras, /Seychelles, Maldives, Somalia, /Bangladesh and Sri Lanka…
A graphic description of the tempestuous scenery is also evoked from the poem: At Aceh you (“Tsunami”) ravaged the land /Pummelled homes and terminated lives/ The Indonesians at rebels'' throats /Lost men on the defence line./ Rebels scampered in the aftershock /As you rolled
Ocean into fits of fury/ As if ending yet another war!
The poems, in a manner of an African elegy, imbue the source of
grief with preternatural qualities. The poem “Hunting dog” by Joe Ushie, editor of the whole Tsunami volume, while also describing the sudden unexpected occurrence of the flood waves that destroyed many lands of the Indian Ocean (In silence you accoutred /Hunting dog of a carnivorous god, /And struck in unguarded hour; /Raiding twelve harmless lands) further imagines the disaster as a huge and devouring monster against whose acts of vile plunder even nature riles. (Now you withdraw /200,000 souls in your jaws/ Not minding, not just minding /The cloud''s fallen countenance /The birds'' wails from every tree/ The winds'' riots in the sky). There is an African empathy, and in essence, empathy for humanity in the use of “we” where both poet and human survivors are no longer distinct from the victims who mourn the loss of
lives and property. (We see these ruins /We walk these foot-webs /We watch this wreck / We, the unlucky survivors /Left alone in the homesteads)…
It will be recalled that the Tsunami disaster took place on December 26, 2004, around the central part of the Indian Ocean. Twelve countries of Asia including some parts of Africa were consequently affected by the onrush of tidal waves as a result of the earthquake that decimated homes and human lives. According to the editor of the Tsunami Blues and other Poems over 240,000 human lives, the flora and fauna, and the latifundia of the coastal settlements of the twelve littoral countries were washed into the belly of the Ocean which submerged the whole world in a funereal mood. In his words, “all of humanity was suddenly wrapped into one fear, one pain, one sorrow and one language: grief.” The poems by several Nigerian writers have become an enduring testament to that sorrowful disaster in Asia and Africa.
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