Celebrate the Literatus John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo on His birthday

John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (born 6 April 1935) is a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has also published as J. P. Clark and John Pepper Clark.

Life

Born in Kiagbodyuo, Nigeria, to an Ijaw father and Urhobo mother, Clark received his early education at the Native Authority School, Okrika (Ofinibenya-Ama), in Burutu LGA (then Western Ijaw) and the prestigious Government College in Ughelli, and his BA degree in English at the University of Ibadan, where he edited various magazines, including the Beacon and The Horn.

 Upon graduation from Ibadan in 1960, he worked as an information officer in the Ministry of Information, in the old Western Region of Nigeria, as features editor of the Daily Express, and as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. 

He served for several years as a professor of English at the University of Lagos, a position from which he retired in 1980. While at the University of Lagos he was co-editor of the literary magazine Black Orpheus.

In 1982, along with his wife Ebun Odutola (a professor and former director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Lagos), he founded the PEC Repertory Theatre in Lagos.

A widely travelled man, Clark has, since his retirement, held visiting professorial appointments at several institutions of higher learning, including Yale and Wesleyan University in the United States.

Poetry

Clark is most noted for his poetry, including:

·         Poems (Mbari, 1961), a group of 40 lyrics that treat heterogeneous themes;

·         A Reed in the Tide (Longmans, 1965), occasional poems that focus on the Clark's indigenous African background and his travel experience in America and other places;

·         Casualties: Poems 1966–68 (USA: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1970), which illustrate the horrendous events of the Nigeria-Biafra war;

·         A Decade of Tongues (Longmans, Drumbeat series, 1981), a collection of 74 poems, all of which apart from "Epilogue to Casualties" (dedicated to Michael Echeruo) were previously published in earlier volumes;

·         State of the Union (1981), which highlights Clark's apprehension concerning the sociopolitical events in Nigeria as a developing nation;

·         Mandela and Other Poems (1988), which deals with the perennial problem of aging and death.

Critics have noted three main stages in Clark's poetic career: the apprenticeship stage of trial and experimentation, exemplified by such juvenilia as "Darkness and Light" and "Iddo Bridge"; the imitative stage, in which he appropriates such Western poetic conventions as the couplet measure and the sonnet sequence, exemplified in such lyrics as "To a Fallen Soldier" and "Of Faith"; and the individualized stage, in which he attains the maturity and originality of form of such poems as "Night Rain", "Out of the Tower", and "Song".

Throughout his work, certain themes recur:

·         Violence and protest, as in Casualties;

·         Institutional corruption, as in State of the Union;

·         The beauty of nature and the landscape, as in A Reed in the Tide;

·         European colonialism as in, for example, "Ivbie" in the Poems collection;

·         The inhumanity of the human race as in Mandela and Other Poems.

Clark frequently dealt with these themes through a complex interweaving of indigenous African imagery and that of the Western literary tradition.