Vistas, as an anthology, is, in the words of the preface, a vehicle for “publishing some poetry that has been lying in manuscripts, or in the hard drives of laptop computers.” The preface acknowledges with some candour that poetry is often considered the most difficult literary genre to understand, and yet paradoxically the most attempted — that hopeful writers, intimidated by the bulk and technical demands of novels and plays, find themselves seduced by the apparent ease of verse. The implication is that Vistas functions partly as a corrective to that romantic delusion: here is poetry that has been tried, tested, and found worthy of the printed page.
Among the contributors — who include Godwin A. Ikyer, Olusola Elizabeth Ogunrinde, Moses Tsevenda, Kehinde Emmanuel Ogunrinde, and Bassey Ude Bassey himself — the figure of Maryam Yusuf Magaji stands apart, both in terms of the range and ambition of her contributions and in terms of what those contributions reveal about her intellectual formation. Nine poems, scattered across the anthology's three thematic sections, bear her name. And yet they feel, to a careful reader, like chapters in a sustained argument about voice, memory, and the relationship between the private lyric and the communal archive. The biographical note appended to the anthology tells us that she holds a PhD in Oral Literature from the University of Ibadan. This is, in fact, the lens through which her poems most reveal themselves.
To read Magaji's poems through the lens of oral literature is to engage with a complex body of theory and practice that has shaped much of African literary criticism since at least the 1970s, when scholars like Ruth Finnegan, Okpewho Isidore, and later Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o began insisting that the dominant frameworks of literary study built on the written text, the isolated author, and the autonomous work of art, were inadequate instruments for measuring the vitality and the intelligence of African expressive culture. Oral literature, as a discipline and as a practice, is founded on a different set of assumptions. It begins with the recognition that language is first of all a social event that happens in the presence of specific audiences whose responses are constitutive elements of its meaning. The griot does not perform in a vacuum; the praise singer's art is inseparable from the community it addresses; the dirge is not a poem until someone weeps. In this understanding, literature is not a property of the page but a property of the encounter.
For a poet trained in oral literature, the implications for written poetry are considerable. Such a poet is unlikely to be satisfied with the kind of lyric privacy that much Western poetry prizes. She is more likely to be drawn toward forms that acknowledge the social dimensions of speech: the address, the praise poem, the lament, the invocation, and the communal narrative. All of this is present in Magaji's nine poems in Vistas, in ways that are sometimes explicit and sometimes almost invisible.
“The Muezzin's Call”: On Sacred Vocality and the Community of Sound
The first of Magaji's poems to appear in the anthology is “The Muezzin's Call,” placed in the opening thematic section devoted, broadly, to spiritual and devotional themes. It is one of the most technically accomplished poems in the collection, and it introduces, with remarkable economy, the central preoccupations of Magaji's entire contribution.
The poem begins with a question: Is there any sound as beautiful as the muezzin's call? The rhetorical question is an ancient device, common to oral genres across many cultures, and it does several things at once. It signals the poet's own position as someone answerable to beauty, someone who has been stopped in her tracks by a sound. It simultaneously positions the reader as a potential dissenter, someone who might answer the question differently, thus opening a dialogue rather than simply making a declaration. And it establishes, from the poem's very first breath, that what is at stake here is not private experience but shared, communal, public sound.
What follows is a sustained evocation of the azan (the Islamic call to prayer) that is remarkable for its attention to the phenomenology of sound in space. The muezzin's call, as Magaji renders it, is not a single voice but a multiplicity: one after the other from different parts of town / North, South, East and West, / all corners and spreading out other calls ring out / As one ends, another picks up / in a continuous call to all who would listen. The soundscape she describes is profoundly oral in its structure: a call-and-response that spans a whole town, a community of voices that are simultaneously individual and collective, each different from the other and yet all oriented toward the same purpose, the same address.
This is, at its core, a poem about the oral transmission of faith. The muezzin is perhaps the most paradigmatic figure in Islamic culture of the person whose function is the oral proclamation, and Magaji's poem enacts, in its form, the very quality it is describing. Notice how the poem builds through accumulation rather than through argument. It does not analyse the call, it layers descriptions of it, each one adding new registers of sound, new spatial coordinates, new emotional textures, until the cumulative effect is something close to the experience of being inside the soundscape itself. This is a recognisably oral compositional strategy: the griots and the praise singers also build through accretion, through the piling of epithet upon epithet, until the weight of the accumulated praise becomes itself a form of tribute.
The emotional arc of the poem is also worth attending to. We move from the aesthetic to the communal and spatial, to the emotional and somatic, to the social and the mundane, and finally to the devotional climax: Extolling Allah's greatness, affirming belief in his oneness / They all call one and all to hasten to prayer, / One and all to hasten to greatness. The final repetition — one and all... one and all — functions as a kind of ritual repetition that itself enacts the communal unity the muezzin's call is striving to create. The poem, in its very structure, becomes an act of the kind of communal gathering it is describing.
“Daddy” and “Sabina”: The Praise Poem in Its Domestic Register
If “The Muezzin's Call” opens the anthology with Magaji's most explicitly communal and devotional concerns, “Daddy” and “Sabina,” the two poems that appear together in the section devoted to memorials and to the living and the dead, reveal her working in a more intimate register that is no less shaped by the oral tradition.
The praise poem — known by various names across African cultures: the panegyric, the oriki in Yoruba, the kirari in Hausa, the eulogistic poetry of the Zulu izibongo — is one of the most widespread forms of oral literature on the continent. Its function is multiple. Crucially, it is always addressed to or about someone specific.
“Daddy” operates, in all of its essential movements, as a praise poem, even as it wears the dress of a contemporary personal lyric. The poem opens with a declaration of the speaker's privileged access to its subject: The only man I could twist around my finger. This is the typical move of the praise poem (to establish the intimacy between the speaker and the praised), but it is rendered here with a colloquial directness that is entirely contemporary.
What follows is a remarkable inventory of the father's qualities expressed through repeated, small, concrete narratives. He would get her to clean cups and plates more than once; he would inspect the cup she returned, looking above his glasses, and this gesture becomes a recurring image that functions in the poem exactly as formulaic repetition functions in the oral tradition: as a way of fixing the memory and making it available for communal retrieval. The plural us in that line is worth noting. This is not simply the speaker's private memory; it belongs to a community of family members, who share it and return to it together.
The poem's catalogue of the father's qualities follows the incremental logic of the praise poem: each detail is cumulative, building toward a portrait that is more than the sum of its parts. The father's love expressed through the careful cutting of food into small pieces, adjusted for her weak teeth, is one of the poem's most moving moments precisely because it is so specific and so resistant to generalisation. The oral tradition teaches that the particular detail is the means by which the ancestor is preserved. The praise poem does not say he was kind; it says he cut his last morsel of food into small pieces so I would not have to deal with chewing the tough bits. The specificity is the praise.
“Sabina” is a more formally elaborate praise poem. The animal comparisons — Like the elephant, she never forgets; / Like the lioness, she shields her own; / Like the tortoise, she is always wise; / Like the cat, she has nine lives — are among the most recognisably oral devices in the collection. The extended animal metaphor, the series of comparisons that illuminate different facets of the praised person's character, is a staple of oral praise poetry across sub-Saharan Africa.
But Magaji is doing something more than reproducing a formulaic structure. She is also thinking about what each animal comparison implies about the kind of social intelligence it embodies. The elephant's memory is the memory of the oral tradition (it is the memory that does not require the written archive, the memory that can retrieve the past with perfect fidelity because the past has been internalised rather than externalised). To say that the mother is like the elephant is to say that she is a living archive, a person in whom the family's history is stored and from whom it can be retrieved.
The tortoise brings with it the weight of an enormous narrative tradition. In West African oral literature, the tortoise is perhaps the most ubiquitous trickster figure whose wisdom is expressed through cunning, patience, and a seemingly inexhaustible resourcefulness. To say that the mother is like the tortoise is to say that her wisdom is not the wisdom of the school or the textbook but the accumulated, practical, hard-won wisdom of experience.
The poem's closing lines — As the voice of five, I say nay / Mummy, you are a rock, a foundation we all build upon — return to the communal dimension that is so characteristic of the praise poem. The speaker is the voice of a collective, and her praise is offered on their behalf. The oral praise poem is always already communal in this way: it speaks for and to a community, it establishes and reinforces bonds of belonging, it places the praised within a network of relationships that give her meaning.
“Days of Old”: The Epic of Lost Labour and the Nostalgia of the Communal Memory
The poem that appears under the title “Days of Old” is, in some respects, the most ambitious of Magaji's contributions to Vistas, and it is the one that most clearly demonstrates the influence of the epic and the historical narrative traditions within oral literature on her poetic practice. It is a poem of economic history, of what Nigeria was and what it became, and it tells that history through the vehicle of a lamentation, a form that is central to oral literature across cultures.
The poem opens with a sustained evocation of the pre-oil Nigerian economy: the groundnut pyramids of the north, the cotton plantations, the cocoa pods, the timber, the rubber. Each image is given several lines of sensory detail — white balls of cotton blowing in the wind / bowing and nodding their heads like sages of old — and the cumulative effect of this catalogue is to create a picture of a society in which labour was dignified, in which what you produced from the land was connected to who you were.
The oral epic tradition, particularly in West Africa, typically involves the recounting of a community's history through narrative: how things were, how they changed, how the community arrived at its present condition. The griot is the keeper of this history, and the griot's performance is a kind of civic instruction, a reminder to the community of where it comes from and what it stands for. Magaji's poem operates within this tradition, but with a crucial inversion: where the oral epic typically celebrates the founding moments, the heroic past, the glorious origins, her poem mourns them. It is an anti-epic, or perhaps more precisely, an elegiac epic, a poem that uses the conventions of historical narration to lament.
The pivot comes with the arrival of oil: Then suddenly comes black gold / In water no less / and terribly crude / it was thick, it was dark and easily sold. The language here shifts register quite deliberately. Where the agricultural economy was described with warmth, with sensory richness, the oil economy is described with a kind of flat, cold irony. ‘Terribly crude’ works on two levels: as a descriptor of the oil's physical properties and as a moral judgment on what the oil economy brought with it. Easily sold: the ease here is not the ease of skilled labour bringing its product to market but the ease of extraction, of taking something from the ground without having spent yourself in its cultivation.
The poem's final couplet — It made instant millionaires of men, and slowly, / Honest labour was put out to pasture — captures the asymmetry of the oil economy's effects: the wealth came fast for some and the damage came gradually for everyone.
“Wishes,” “If Only,” and “Lies”: The Interior Lament and Its Social Dimensions
The three poems — “Wishes,” “If Only,” and “Lies” — form a triptych of sorts, dealing with the interior life of a woman who is exhausted and tired of being lied to. They are the most apparently private poems in Magaji's contribution to the anthology, and they might seem, at first glance, to be the furthest from the oral tradition.
“Wishes” is the most plainly confessional of the three. The speaker wishes that time would stand still, that someone would lift the weight from her shoulders, that her head could be unclogged, that she could start anew. The accumulation of wishes — I wish... I wish... I wish... — is a recognisable structure in oral literature. The wish-catalogue appears in laments and in folk songs across West Africa, and its function is to create, through repetition, a sense of the depth and persistence of that longing. Each repeated wish adds force to the accumulation, building toward a climax that releases the tension: But life goes on and I must move with it / Aches, pains, worries and all. The closing line, with its acceptance of what cannot be changed, is the characteristic closure of the lament form: the singer acknowledges the irreversible, puts down the grief she has been carrying, and returns to the dailiness of living.
“If Only” is more formally ambitious than “Wishes,” and in some ways it is the most important poem in this triptych, because it makes the most explicit claim about the relationship between the speaker and her community. The poem is structured around a series of conditional phrases — If only someone would look / If only someone would care / If only someone would stop to listen — that are, in their cumulative effect, an address to a community that has failed to see her. The oral lament, as scholars of the tradition have noted, is almost always implicitly social: it is not simply a cry of pain but a call to the community, a demand for recognition.
The poem's central metaphor of the speaker as a creature with a smooth exterior and a soft quivering mess on the inside, evokes the image of the snail, or perhaps the tortoise: hard shell, soft body, a creature that has learned to protect its vulnerability through the armour of apparent strength. This image resonates with the tortoise metaphor in “Sabina,” and the resonance is not accidental. Magaji is building, across her poems, a vocabulary of animal images drawn from the oral tradition, images that carry the accumulated meanings of the tales and proverbs in which they have appeared.
“Lies” is, on the surface, the most polemical of the three: a direct accusation against a behaviour the speaker associates with a gender. Why do men tell lies? / To cover for what they do / To keep doing what they want. The directness is almost startling after the more complex registers of the preceding poems. But the directness is itself a formal choice rooted in the oral tradition. The proverb, one of the foundational genres of oral literature, achieves its power precisely through compression and directness. “Lies” operates with something of the proverb's rhetorical confidence, building its case through repetition and through the escalating absurdity of its observation. The comic exaggeration of the closing lines — the astonishment of someone who finds human behaviour genuinely puzzling — is itself a feature of the oral satirical tradition. The oral satirist expresses wonderment, performing a kind of anthropological bafflement at the irrationality of the behaviour she is observing. This is funnier than outright condemnation, and it is also, in a strange way, more devastating, because it refuses the seriousness that the subject of the satire would no doubt prefer.
“Gecko” and “If”: On Natural Signs and the Wisdom of Uncertainty
The two poems “Gecko” and “If” represent Magaji at her most reflective and, in some ways, her most philosophically interesting. Both poems use the form of extended meditation to approach questions that the oral tradition has always taken seriously: the question of signs and their interpretation, and the question of what the dead know that the living do not.
“Gecko” is a poem about a creature whose meaning is uncertain. The speaker cannot decide whether the gecko that shares every room she has ever occupied is a friend or a foe — Friend or foe I do not know — and the poem's entire enterprise is the exploration of that uncertainty. In many West African oral traditions, certain animals are understood to carry specific meanings: the owl is a bird of ill omen, the tortoise is the trickster, the spider is the weaver of fate. The gecko, however, is more ambiguous. It occupies a threshold position, between the house and the wild, between the human and the non-human, and its presence in the poem is itself a kind of threshold experience: the speaker is neither inside nor outside a settled interpretation of what this creature means to her.
The poem's treatment of the gecko is deeply attentive to the animal's actual behaviour — it slithered in and found a spot / Tail swishing back and forth / Counting what I know not / From high up there / It looks at me / Lying still for hours on end — and this attention is itself a mode of meaning-making. In the oral tradition, the ability to read the signs of the natural world — to understand what the animals and the plants and the weather are saying — is a form of wisdom, and the one who cannot read those signs is not simply ignorant but vulnerable, cut off from the community's accumulated knowledge of how to navigate the world.
The poem closes with a decision to live with the uncertainty rather than to resolve it: I would like to think a guardian and not foe / As I have to live with it on my wall. The choice to interpret the gecko as a guardian is not a claim to knowledge but a pragmatic preference to inhabit the uncertainty.
“If” takes up the question of the dead more directly, and it is perhaps the most metaphysically ambitious of Magaji's poems in the anthology. The poem is structured as a series of conditional speculations: If the dead could catch a glimpse / of what it is they left behind, / I wonder what they'd think. The I wonder here is not simply a conversational hedge; it is a formal signal that what follows will be speculation rather than assertion, and the speculation is organised around a series of questions — Would they approve of the fights? What would they say to those who waste their inheritance? Would they still leave the same? — that function as a kind of communal self-examination.
The poem's great insight is that the dead's perspective would be one of disappointment, not simply grief. The fights over inheritance, the squandering of what was saved, the drinking and the womanising and the conspicuous consumption would all strike the imagined dead as a betrayal of what their labour was for. And the poem's closing question — Given the chance, would they still leave the same / Or give out in alms to the poor and needy / Paving way for themselves in the hereafter? — turns the moral screw one more time: it asks whether the dead, seeing what has become of their legacy, would make different choices. It is a remarkably honest question that implicates the dead in the failure of the inherited world.
“Sleep”: The Apostrophe as Oral Address
“Sleep” is the most formally traditional of Magaji's poems in its use of apostrophe — the direct address to an absent or non-human entity — and it is, for precisely this reason, the most explicitly connected to the oral tradition's characteristic mode of speech. The poem begins: O sleep! Why have you forsaken me? The exclamation, the direct address, and the anguished question are all the opening moves of the classical lament.
The apostrophe is, in oral literature, a genuine form of address, premised on the belief that the entities being addressed are actually capable of hearing and responding. When the speaker of an oral lament addresses the dead directly, she is performing a speech act in a cultural context where the dead are understood to be genuinely present and genuinely addressable.
Magaji's address to sleep participates in this tradition while also being entirely contemporary in its psychological content. Sleep, for the speaker, is a kind of liberation, a journey to a land where I float and run free / Where I am happy as a lark / Where love, laughter and friendship abound. The contrast between the land of sleep and the waking world is the contrast that structures the poem. Sleep is where the self is unconstrained; waking is where the self is obligated, burdened, and defined by its duties to others.
The poem's central grief is insomnia, but insomnia as a social and psychological condition: Without you here my mind wanders / Going back to times I am wont to remember / Tying knots and weaving webs / Constantly wondering what went wrong. The images of tying knots and weaving webs are drawn from the vocabulary of women's work in the oral tradition, and they suggest that the speaker's restless mind is engaged in a kind of compulsive domestic work, making and remaking the fabric of her past, unable to let it rest.
Cross-cutting themes
Looking across the full span of Magaji's nine poems, certain thematic preoccupations emerge with such persistence that they must be understood as the central concerns of her poetic vision.
The first is the body (not the body as erotic object or political battleground, but the body as the site of care, labour, endurance, and limitation). In “If Only,” the body is the shell that hides the quivering self; in “Sleep,” the body is the thing that cannot rest; in “Wishes,” the body is the old, tired thing that needs rest in someone else's body. In “Daddy,” the body is present in the specificity of the father's gestures and in the speaker's weak teeth. This consistent attention to the body as a site of experience, rather than as a mere instrument of consciousness, connects Magaji's work to the oral tradition's grounding in the physical, the enacted, the embodied.
The second is the family, and specifically, the family as both a source of sustenance and a source of obligation. The poems about the father, the mother, and the siblings build a picture of a woman who understands herself primarily in relational terms, who locates her identity in a network of bonds that both support and constrain her. This relational self is, again, characteristic of the oral tradition's understanding of personhood: in many West African philosophical frameworks, the person is not a self-contained individual but a node in a network of relationships, and her identity is constituted by those relationships rather than existing prior to them.
The third is the nation, or, more precisely, the distance between what the nation was supposed to be and what it has become. “Days of Old” is the most explicit expression of this preoccupation, and it is also present in “If,” where the waste of inherited riches is both a family narrative and a national one, and in “Lies,” where the culture of deception that the speaker satirises is also, by implication, a comment on a public culture in which lying has become so normalised as to seem, almost, genetic.
Magaji among her peers: a comparative note
It would be unfair to consider Magaji's work in isolation from the other contributors to Vistas.
Bassey Ude Bassey, the anthology's editor and one of its contributors, brings a lyric precision to his poems — “To mother” and “The artists” are both formally accomplished works — but his register is more private and more indebted to the Western lyric tradition than Magaji's. His poems are beautiful; they are also less interested in the social dimensions of their subjects and less concerned with the way individual experience resonates outward into community.
Godwin A. Ikyer, whose poems appear throughout the anthology, is a poet of considerable ambition, working with mythological and environmental material in a mode that is explicitly indebted to his own scholarly interests in oral literature and multimedia studies. But where Ikyer's oral influences tend toward the mythological and the esoteric, Magaji's tend toward the domestic and the communal.
What is missing
No review of this kind would be complete without an honest accounting of what Magaji's poems in Vistas do not do, and what those absences might mean.
The poems are, with perhaps the exception of “Days of Old” and “If,” almost entirely inward-facing. They are concerned with the self and the family, the interior life and the domestic sphere, and the emotions of a woman moving through her life. The world outside these spheres enters only in “Days of Old” and, obliquely, in “Lies.” This is a consistent choice that may reflect Magaji's understanding that the domestic and the interior are not separate from the political and the public but are, in fact, where the political and the public are most immediately felt and most deeply contested.
Still, one occasionally longs for the kind of directness about Nigeria's public failures that poets like Niyi Osundare or Nnimmo Bassey or Tanure Ojaide have made their stock-in-trade. The oral tradition is also a tradition of satire and of social criticism, of holding power accountable through the exposure of its pretensions. Magaji's “Lies” gestures toward this tradition, but it does so in a relatively private register. The full force of the satirical tradition in oral literature is available to her, and one hopes that future work will deploy it more fully.
There is also, in these poems, a relatively limited engagement with the specifically Taraban or Middle Belt cultural context that one might expect from a poet whose roots are in that region. The animal imagery is largely pan-African or universal; the landscape is unspecified; the cultural details are those of a pan-Nigerian or even pan-African modernity rather than of a specific place and a specific oral tradition. This means that some of the richness of the specific oral traditions of the Taraba region ( the Jukun, the Mumuye, or the Fulani) remains untapped in these nine poems.
Conclusion
Reading Maryam Yusuf Magaji's nine poems in Vistas is not a simple pleasure, though it is certainly a pleasure. Her training in oral literature has given her something that cannot be acquired by reading contemporary poetry alone: an understanding of poetry as a social practice. This understanding does not make her poems less personal or less lyrical; it makes them more resonant, more capacious, and more connected to the traditions of human expression that her subject matter draws on.
