Every day Akanbi Esther Oluwaferanmi sits before her laptop, sometimes in her hostel, churning out lines of poetry, singing or learning the Japanese language. It is art she explores with passion, hoping that one day she will go places.
In March 2021, this 400 level student of Biological Sciences at the University of Abuja, will be receiving a prize for her haiku, Japanese poetry in three lines, titled “My Country, Nigeria”
Her entry was among the 9,021 haiku submitted from 74 countries and regions across the world.
In a recent message to her, Mr and Mrs Omori, in partnership with the Institute of International Exchange, which organized the poetry competition, said they were thrilled to receive the submission of the 21-year-old student of the University of Abuja, Nigeria; and would like to award her a prize because she wrote “an honest haiku about her country.”
Oluwaferanmi’s joy knew no bounds when she received this message, not least since she went into the contest without much confidence.
She enthuses, “I did not want to do it (competition) at first, but I got the strength and determination to try my luck when I submitted my entry for the embassy competition (that’s another competition by Japanese embassy in Nigeria). Then everyone was commenting, I don’t think I have been adored like that in my life.”
The poet adds that even Japanese lecturers from Egypt, US, Japan among others, found her video so adorable. “So I was happy, and it was with that energy that I entered for the haiku contest,” she says.
She is full of praises for her four Japanese teachers: Sensei Asemota, Sensei Morita, Sensei Francis and Sensei Mio all of whom she appreciates for giving her the right motivation.
She is also grateful to her online teacher, Sensei Morita, a Japanese professor at Cairo University, who informed her of the competition.
Sensei Morita had given her a clear description of what to do and how to do it, and she downloaded videos from YouTube, watched a lot of them and continued to write tons of short poems.
Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, the Vice-Chancellor of University of Abuja, who is a professor of Comparative Literature, also motivated her, she says, by making it “so easy for the students to learn the language.”
Haiku is a Japanese poem of 17 syllables, three lines of 5 syllables, second line of 7 syllables and third line of 5 syllables, traditionally evoking images of nature.
Writing in this form, for a non-native Japanese speaker, can be difficult. Usually, Oluwaferanmi would write her poems in English, but translating them to Japanese was a huge problem for her since she normally got more than the actual number of syllables required for haiku.
“I can write hiragana and Katakana but kanji is quite hard and much,” Oluwaferami, who is also a member of Japanese culture club, University of Abuja Chapter, says with a chuckle.
Even with her interest in poetry and the recognition she is already getting for her work, she wouldn’t consider herself a very good poet yet. She beleives she will need to work harder on the art.
After graduation from the University of Abuja, an institution she says she will always be proud of, Oluwaferanmi would love to work as a research biologist anywhere in the world. It is her real dream, she reveals.
But for now, she is just happy and looks forward to receiving her much treasured prize, sometime in March 2021.
