The Text without a Full-stop

By

Obododimma Oha

Two things become very clear to me. First, anybody could be a poet. Poets don't have to have grey hair or wear unkempt beard. Just anyone could be a poet. Was that not why an Igbo sage warned that if we have too much on our minds, we might pass a spirit unknowingly and fail to greet?

Secondly, it has become glaring that poets are not just writing poems. A poet may be rigorously theorizing. Just as many African ancestors used proverbs and folktales to theorize. Poets' theories on texts, societies, etc could be particularly interesting. It is on that basis that one would like to comment on Bimbola Faith's poem below. 

  that full-stop you saw

did not end that sentence

that full-stop

was never the closure to the text

for behind every dot on the page

are thousands and millions of unspoken texts

countless pieces of allophones, phones and phonemes

innumerable companies of allomorphs, morphemes and words

heavy, horrendous, homongous emotion

open, borderless, boundless, deep, vast feelings

but all approximated into a grunt, a tear or a smile

many things to say

many things unsaid

many things unsayable

everything rounded off to a dot

One thing that is noticeable is the shape of the poem: first, it is centralized and there is minimal punctuation, especially full-stop, at the end! And the poem is talking about full-stop and text-making! Punctuation marks or pauses could be check-points we create here and there on the highway of the text. They  create borders and boundaries to the stream of speech unnecessarily. By the way, did you notice that the poem was given no title? That could be deliberate. Don't titles that we give articles and books imply their having borders of meaning, of ideation? 

It means the poet would like us to shift from the sentence as we know it to the text and stop thinking of check-points. If we think too much about the sentence or make our grammar too sentential, then we would think of having check-points and they could slow our journey down! 

But apart from slowing down the journey to meaning, other things in the journey are worth thinking about. One could think of the "innumerable" morphemes and allomorphs, the phonemes and their friends. The unfathomable "vast feelings" and grunts that cannot be accounted for while checking the sentences for correctness. In addition, certain emotions can be uttered, some not uttered, and some beyond utterance. 

It is obvious that the poet is in the frightening zone of post-structuralism. It is typical of these thinkers who populate deconstruction to focus on texts and to discourage attachment to sentence grammar. Same for the later versions of systemic linguistics. Their fascination is with text grammar. 

This is clearly exemplified in the poem. The text and the world must be linked up. No boundaries. No check-points. No delays on this search for meaning. That ideological trash and that pragmatic statement about "everything" being "rounded off" can show us where we are secretly going. There is always some gain in checking how text and context are linked. 

The more I read the untitled poem, the more I learn about the text and test myself on text-making in this troubled world. Same way I learnt  some years ago about post-structuralist metafiction, while supervising a PhD project on it. We learn everyday and should be humble enough to allow the poem to theorize about the text and to teach us.