By Anthony Bishop/ General Correspondent
“Prof. J. P. Clark has paddled on to the great beyond in comfort of his wife, children and sibling, around him.
“The family appreciates your prayers at this time. Other details will be announced later by the family,” the statement read.
John Pepper Clark was a Nigerian poet. He was also a journalist, playwright, and scholar-critic. His poetry celebrates the physical landscape of Africa. He attacked American middle-class values, from capitalism to black American lifestyles.
He began his career as writer and journalist by working as a Nigerian government information officer and then as the features and editorial writer for the Daily Express in Lagos (1960–62). A year’s study at Princeton University on a foundation grant resulted in his America, Their America (1964), in which he attacks American middle-class values, from capitalism to black American lifestyles.
In his best poems, his erotic imagination makes successful use of the patterns of traditional African life. Three of his plays are tragedies in which individuals are unable to escape the doom brought about by an inexorable law of nature or society.
Clark’s characterization is convincing and his symbolic setting richly allusive. Ozidi is a stage version of a traditional Ijo ritual play, which in a native village would take seven days to perform. Like Yoruba folk opera, it is alive with music, dancing, mime, and spectacle. Clark also produced a film (with Francis Speed; The Ozidi of Atazi [ 1972) and an English translation of this Ijo epic. His Casualties: Poems 1966–68 (1970) is concerned primarily with the Nigerian civil war.
