What Agbeye Oburumu offers in Mine Too Counts is a chorus that runs through the gamut of the occupations and job engagements through which Nigerians keep the engine of the country running.
By Chimezie Chika
There are moments when, no matter what we profess to be, being a Nigerian seems to bring us close to despair or astonishing disappointment. Over the decades, Nigerians have learnt to take their country’s multiple failures for granted. Each power outage, water scarcity, poor healthcare, bad roads, job scarcity, failed or failing infrastructure, and economic downturns become just another familiar index of negotiating life as a Nigerian.
Yet, beyond that commonisation of state failures, Nigerians routinely navigate through some of the most damning circumstances (many of which are part of the selfsame leadership shortcomings of the state) to survive. This is the Nigerian condition, whose very idea conjures up images of corruption, neglect, abandonment, favoritism, helplessness, economic struggles, and political dysfunction. It cannot be gainsaid how these issues affect the efforts of the ordinary individual hustling in the streets.
This is the point of departure in Agbeye “Agbeye Talks” Oburumu’s new spoken word poetry album, Mine Too Counts. In the last few years, the poet has gradually built up a following on the strength of his thought-provoking spoken word practice. The distinguishing attribute of his voice is his grasp of the relationship between orality and content.
In Mine Too Counts, Agbeye Oburumu gives voice to the voiceless. Each track is the imagined testament of a person engaged in one of the perennial occupations in the country, and the tracks are titled accordingly.
We have the banker, the POS operator, the fisherman, the photographer, the street sweeper, the lawyer, music producers, and so on, leading up to 30 tracks. This might seem like a lot, yet it is not, for one quickly realises that many of the tracks are within the range of one minute, and the entire tracklist sums up to just about an hour. This concise arrangement makes the listening experience more urgent and engaged, in keeping with the subject of the album.
Each track or testament in Mine Too Counts is rendered with appropriate voice befitting the occupation, complete with rhymes, punchlines, and double entendres—these being the characteristic oratorical techniques that distinguish spoken word from poetry.
For instance, in the testament of “Recycler”—a rather euphemistic term for waste disposal workers—the persona sees himself as being ‘thrown away’ by the common people who fail to regard his thankless job. Or hear “Vulcanizer”: “Once wheels flat, your dreams go go slow”. The “Plumber” talks about “patching life” as he patches pipes.
A kind of dark humour can be heard in many of the testaments when Agbeye Oburumu narrows episodes down to the social realities of certain occupations in Nigeria, and the listener is wont to understand and laugh over their serious implications. The “Photographer” says: “You don snap person sixty-two pictures make e select only two?” Hear the “Newspaper Vendor”, who has many humorous punchlines: “Even tear-tear paper fit feed me. Ask suya man.”
The manner of Agbeye Oburumu’s rendering of these personas outlays intimate portraits of Nigerians across various economic and social divides. He is particularly able to accord humanity to their voices and characters in a way that touches the listener. We are also entertained by the dramatic monologue structure of the album—complemented by Onyionda Wegwu’s faultless vocals—which Agbeye Oburumu enhances through altering his voice to suit the character of each persona.
What Agbeye Talks offers in Mine Too Counts is a chorus that runs through the gamut of the occupations and job engagements through which Nigerians keep the engine of the country running. The personas created from this chorus of people bring the burden of their experiences through Agbeye Talks’ creative embodiment of them, each telling us that no matter how lowly or high or irrelevant their livelihood may appear, what they do matters both in the personal and national scheme of things.
The last statement encapsulates what basically becomes Agbeye Oburumu’s theme—expressly evident in the refrain that runs through the tracks: “Under every title, a heart beats…. mine too counts.” His central idea is that every citizen, no matter how seemingly relevant his job, contributes to the country’s well-being.
Some of the most pivotal testaments here—in the tracks, that is—shine a refracting mirror on the social and political problems of the country’s contemporary existence. In “Real Estate Agent”, Nigeria’s housing issues are given voice (“Is it safe? Can I raise my children here?”). In “Lawyer”, we are given some of the literal problems of Nigeria’s justice system (“law without humanity”).
In “Police”, the persona paints the Nigerian Police Force in a positive light while still highlighting the basis of its issues, as perceived by the rest of the populace (“checkpoint don turn to stress point”). The “Journalist” highlights the duty and obligations of practicing journalism in a country like Nigeria. The “Teacher” track highlights pointedly the under-appreciation and poor remuneration of teachers (“My bank account got stage fright for years now”). The testament in the “Doctor” track is one of the most touching, especially its unflinching portrayal of the inadequacies of Nigeria’s healthcare system, if a system does indeed exist at all.
The yields of Mine Too Counts are endless, and stretch even beyond the boundaries of the entire album. The testaments of the personas are grim journeys through pain and resilience. Nevertheless, the overwhelming tone in this work is one of optimism. Each of the personas’ testament emerges and operates on the premise of hope.
Here, they utter their problems and then state their dreams afterward; this becomes obvious everywhere in Mine Too Counts. In the testament of the lowly “Wheelbarrow Pusher”, he proclaims suffering in an almost beatific way: “Sometimes my body dey cry but my spirit go whisper,/Push more, push some more,/push, better dey front/… sometimes I dey cry when I dey baff for night,/ but no be cry of defeat oo/na cry of strength. …/I no just dey push load, I dey push tomorrow come near.”
This is the temperament that runs through the tracks, grounding each persona’s testament into Agbeye Oburumu’s message of reality and steadfast hope. While hope is unimpeachable in most human situations, I am not convinced that insistent marketing of hope is always the right panacea. If anything, hope can sometimes impinge on reality and the beginning change, innovation, and a complete reordering of hopelessness comes from a deep and complete acquiescence to reality itself.
Agbeye Talks is ever careful to create language befitting each persona. While the uneducated (hawker, keke rider, vulcaniser) speak the pidgin lingua franca of the country, the educated (doctor, lawyer, journalist, etc) speak in English. The lyricism here depends entirely on the repetitions of words related to poverty, deprivation, and dreams of success. The entire album unrelentingly gives voice to grievances, concerns, pains, and complaints of the common people, mostly of the lower classes. If there’s any criticism here, it is that one would have expected more trenchant political salvos against the very political architects of the economic and social status quo of the country.
The political and social awareness in Mine Too Counts is nonetheless reminiscent of the provocative work of Dike Chukwumerije—arguably Nigeria’s most politically and culturally relevant spoken word poet. A distinct proletarian bias prevails here, which elevates Agbeye Oburumu’s musings considerably. If his work here is anything to go by, then the future will only yield far greater fruits for him.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, The Iowa Review, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1