After greater than 4 many years in legislation, Bayo Oyagbola has revealed his first poetry assortment, exploring life, mortality and the search for that means. Vanessa Obioha speaks with him about his literary journey.
Some pursuits endure at the same time as life takes a special course. Bayo Oyagbola is a major instance. Despite a distinguished authorized profession spanning greater than 4 many years, his fascination with the inventive arts has remained a relentless.
From a younger age, Oyagbola, the managing accomplice at Oyagbola Chambers, evinced a ardour for the inventive arts. He was naturally drawn to literature in all its varieties, in addition to historical past and the workings of the human creativeness.
“What shapes it and what it brings into being,” he says in a current dialog.
Although he was passionate in regards to the inventive arts, Oyagbola didn’t pursue formal research in the sector. Instead, all through his secondary college schooling, he studied the sciences.
“I had always loved the physical sciences, chemistry most of all, but also mathematics and physics,” he explains. “To me, they were languages in which I had become fluent.”
Biology was, nonetheless, a special proposition. Even although it concerned methods, Oyagbola didn’t expertise the identical deductive high quality as with the opposite sciences.
“Its terminology felt more external to the subject. I had been heading towards medicine qualification, but the study of the human body interested me less than the abstractions of the pure sciences.”
His mother and father, nonetheless, had different plans. They needed him to check legislation, and when his father pressed him to make the change, he supplied little resistance. As Oyagbola places it, his transition to legislation was a case of parental stress assembly a tender goal.
His curiosity in the inventive arts endured at the same time as he pursued a authorized profession. He obtained his bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in legislation from University College London earlier than founding Oyagbola Chambers in 1987. Oyagbola was additionally certainly one of 5 members of the committee that ready the legal guidelines of Ogun State in 2006 and served on the state’s Judicial Service Commission for three years. He has lectured internationally for the World Intellectual Property Organisation on copyright and confidential info.
Alongside his skilled pursuits, he continued to write down poetry, drawing inspiration from oral traditions and the occasions and encounters round him. Some of his poems got here collectively in a single sitting, whereas others took form in phases. This 12 months he revealed his first assortment, The Sky’s Forgotten Prayer: Echoes of River, Drum and Heaven. The assortment explores reminiscence, mortality, spirituality, Yoruba tradition and the human search for that means.
“The collection grew out of experiences, thoughts and emotions accumulated over many years, stretching into decades,” he says. “Whenever an event or encounter has affected me deeply, I have made a habit of writing about what it stirred in me. Those writings have not always been poems; they have often taken the form of prose, sometimes at considerable length.”
Balancing a demanding authorized apply with inventive writing was not all the time straightforward. The COVID-19 pandemic, nonetheless, gave him the house to collect his ideas and deliver a few of his poems collectively into a set. At least 60 per cent of his poems have been written in that interval.
When his colleagues learnt that he wrote poetry, some weren’t shocked. They have been already acquainted with his contemplative nature and the themes that occupied his thoughts. What raised eyebrows, nonetheless, was his resolution to publish his work.
For Oyagbola, legislation and poetry will not be solely separate disciplines. Both demand precision, an appreciation of language and a cautious consideration of that means.
“Legal drafting demands precision, but poetry requires its own discipline. The poet must guard just as carefully against thought and imagery slipping beyond their intended meaning. An expression of glee, for example, should not inadvertently become clouded by gloom or foreboding.”
His engagement with literature and tradition has additionally deepened his relationship with Yoruba. One of the extra placing points of his literary journey is that he taught himself to learn the language after leaving college, opening up a physique of writing that had beforehand been past his attain.
“Although I had always enjoyed ‘ewi,’ much of the literature informing Yoruba thought and culture was not readily accessible to me. I wanted, for example, to write out and read the ‘Ifa corpus’ in the original Yoruba, where I felt I could understand it best.”
For him, preserving Yoruba cultural reminiscence requires greater than protecting its literary traditions alive in written type. He believes writers should additionally discover methods to deliver these works earlier than wider audiences by means of efficiency and the spoken phrase.
“We should specific our cultural meanings and understanding in the language of the current, as has been executed extensively with Greek works, and with works in Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit and many different languages.
“We should chant Yoruba ewi whenever the opportunity arises, allowing it to extend and deepen the meaning of our everyday exchanges.”
Asked in regards to the that means of his assortment’s title, Oyagbola presents an introspective clarification that reveals one thing of his philosophical outlook.
“The sky is us, and we’re the sky. It is what we see and really feel in our deepest contemplations. It holds our deepest fears and biggest hopes. It is what we wake to consider, and what typically provides us relaxation.
“The prayer is our communion with our inner selves: with the id, more than the ego. I think of the id as that unconscious part of ourselves which we must nourish if we are to feel at peace. What we so often forget, I suggest, is how to communicate with our inner selves.”
In Cosmological Relativity, in which he explores time, consciousness and actuality, Oyagbola shared that these topics are interconnected, and an understanding of 1 can deepen our appreciation of one other.
“I have never believed that knowledge should be compartmentalised. The more subjects we know, the more deeply we can understand each of them,” he says. “As for mortality, my thoughts on it have never been fixed. My quest has always been to understand why. Why do we exist? Who are we? What is this ‘we?’ No answer is fixed; no answer is immutable.”
Although his participation in Nigeria’s literary scene has been restricted, his evaluation of the panorama factors to a disconnect between writers and the broader public.
“Writers tend to speak mainly to one another, when they are in conversation at all, while the wider public often seems bewildered by what is being discussed.”
He is equally involved about what society stands to lose when literature and the humanities obtain little consideration. For him, their worth doesn’t lie in leisure or mental stimulation however in their capability to domesticate an appreciation of magnificence with out the urge to own or exploit it.
“We lose opportunities to encounter and enjoy true beauty for its own sake, free from the acquisitiveness that I believe is damaging our communities. To appreciate beauty without the impulse to possess it, or to make it serve our appetites and desires, is, in my view, an ennobling experience. Literature and the arts give us that opportunity.”
