OSUNDARE, Niyi

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Nationality: Nigerian. Born: Oluwaniyi Osundare, Ikerri, 12 March 1947. Education: University of Ibadan, B.A. (honors) in English 1972; University of Leeds, England, M.A. in English 1974; York University, Toronto, Canada, Ph.D. in English 1979. Career: Since 1982 lecturer, University of Ibadan. Taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of New Orleans, 1990–92. Awards: Commonwealth Poetry prize, and Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry prize, both 1986, both for The Eye of the Earth; Cadbury Poetry prize, 1989; Fulbright scholarship, 1990, 1991; Noma prize, 1991, for Waiting Laughters: A Long Song in Many Voices.Agent: Heinemann Educational Books, Ighodaro Road Jericho, PMB 5205, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.

Publications

Poetry

Songs of the Marketplace. Ibadan, New Horn Press, 1983.

Village Voices. Ibadan, Evans Brothers, 1984.

A Nib in the Pond. Ife, University of Ife, 1986.

The Eye of the Earth. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1986.

Moonsongs. Ibadan, Spectrum Books, 1988.

Songs of the Season. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1990.

Waiting Laughters: A Long Song in Many Voices. Ikeja, Lagos, Malthouse Press, 1990.

Selected Poems. Oxford, Heinemann International Literature and Textbooks, 1992.

Midlife. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1993.

Seize the Day and Other Poems for the Junior. Ibadan, Agbo Areo Publishers, 1995.

Horses of Memory. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1998.

Pages from the Book of the Sun: New and Selected Poems. Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 2000.

Other

The Writer As Righter: The African Literary Artist and His Social Obligations. Ife, University of Ife, 1986.

African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorising. Ibadan, Options Book and Information Service, 1993.

Thread in the Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture. Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 2000.

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Critical Studies: "New Trends in Nigerian Poetry: The Poetry of Niyi Osundare and Chinweizu," in Literary Criterion (Bangalore, India), 23(1–2), 1988, and "The Development of Niyi Osundare's Poetry: A Survey of Themes and Technique," in Research in African Literatures (Bloomington, Indiana), 26(4), winter 1995, both by Aderemi Bamikunle; "The Praxis of Niyi Osundare, Popular Scholar-Poet," in World Literature Written in English (Singapore), 29(1), spring 1989, and "A Peopled Persona: Autobiography, Postmodernism and the Poetry of Niyi Osundare," in Genres Autobiographiques en Afrique, edited by Janos Riesz and Ulla Schild, Berlin, Reimer, 1996, both by Stephen H. Arnold; "Orality and the Craft of Modern Nigerian Poetry: Osundare's 'Waiting Laughters' and Udechukwu's 'What the Madman Said,'" in African Languages and Cultures (Oxford, England), 7(2), 1994, and "Survival Strategies and the New Life of Orality in Nigerian and Ghanaian Poetry: Osundare's 'Waiting Laughters' and Anyidoho's 'Earthchild,'" in Research in African Literatures (Columbus, Ohio), 27(2), summer 1996, both by Ezenwa-Ohaeto; "Niyi Osundare and the Materialist Vision: A Study of 'The Eye of the Earth'" by Charles Bodunde, in Ufahamu (Los Angeles), 25(2), spring 1997; by Richard Taylor, in Anglistik (Wurzburg, Germany), 8(1), March 1997; "Folklore and the Primacy of National Liberation in 'Village Voices'" by Olusegin Adekoya, in Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France), 20(2), spring 1998.

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Describing himself as "a farmer born and a peasant bred," Oluwaniyi Osundare is the son of a father who was a drummer, an oral artist, and a farmer and a mother who was a dyer and weaver. His name literally means "God has honor; the Spirit of the river has vindicated my innocence." Also a dramatist, literary critic, scholar of linguistics, and political commentator, he reigns as Africa's most prolific and popular anglophone poet of the alternative (sometimes rendered "alter-native") tradition of the generation succeeding the founders of Nigerian verse in English—Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara. Not only is he Africa's most public and selfless poet, he is also—after Soyinka—the most translated and honored, a profoundly rooted, local poet who is also a cosmopolitan much revered by a world audience. Among the awards testifying to this are the Commonwealth Poetry prize, two Cadbury prizes for poetry (from the Association of Nigerian Authors), the Noma award (sponsored by the Japanese and equivalent to an African Nobel prize in literature), the Fonlon-Nichols award (African Literature Association), given for excellence in contributions to aesthetics and to the struggle for human rights, and honorary doctorates from French and American universities.

The range of themes in Osundare's volumes of poetry is vast, though they are primarily centered on social and ecological concerns, which is not surprising for an avowed socialist. Among his principal preoccupations are communality, generosity, hard work, perseverence in the face of adversity, African self-esteem, justice, frugality, respect for nature and the earth, a sense of beauty, and memory, especially the imperative of historical preservation. Being a "tabloid bard" has helped establish his popularity, and in the occasional poetry in his weekly newspaper column "Songs of the Season" satire is the most frequently encountered mode, with subtle subversion peaking out from nearly all of his lines. In his other work, however, Osundare creates composed volumes rather than collections, and reading individual poems in isolation from the totality of the books that contain them vitiates their potency.

Osundare also writes for younger readers, as, for example, in Seize the Day (1995), thus helping keep African poetic traditions alive and exposing his audiences to poetic strategies from non-African cultures. Though not necessarily influenced by them, Osundare shows affinities with Walt Whitman (in his use of free verse and in his vision and oracular emphasis on common people), Bertolt Brecht (in his mordant, sarcastic alterations of popular expressions), and Pablo Neruda (in tender, lyrical poems celebrating humble objects from trees to trains).

Because the venom Osundare sometimes injects into the veins of the dominant culture flows from "the fang of facts," an adequate understanding of many of his poems requires at least some knowledge of colonial and contemporary, or postcolonial (to him, neocolonial or recolonial), history. His poetic function is not only to be a rememberer but more importantly "a reminder." Nevertheless, he is not dogmatic about embracing clarity. For example, Moonsongs (1988), written during a long convalescence from an attempted assassination in 1987 in which he suffered blows to the head from an ax and was left for dead, has been described by many critics as "surreal." Yet its symbolism, though arcane, personal, and obscure, can be grasped with study.

The simplicity of the bulk of Osundare's poetic oeuvre is an illusion. He is not an anglophone African poet; he is a Yoruba poet who writes in English. No existing theory illuminates his work, but it can be illuminated. For those willing to make efforts to gain a modicum of competence in Yoruba, at least some of the new dimensions with which he gracefully endows poetry in English can be appreciated. To readers with no understanding of Yoruba, his verse is a beautiful grisaille. To use an analogy, the Yoruba elements in Osundare's poems lie beneath what appear to be English conventions in the way artistic watermarks in banknotes remain invisible unless a person knows how to look for them, what kind of light to hold them up to. Without such knowledge African poetry in English can seem diluted, simple, and deficient, when it actually is anything but that.

The easiest way to get a glimpse of the multivalent Yoruba nature of Osundare is to keep in mind that he is above all a performance poet, one who uses drums to generate tonal and rhythmic expectations in his audience and who frequently prefaces his poems with indications of musical instrumentation and forms to accompany the words. To Osundare, in keeping with Yoruba tradition, poetry is a speech-song continuum, with the audience's participation a given. (Call and response, as seen in the relationship between African-American preachers and their congregations, is routinely assumed by this poet.) Repetition of sounds is fundamental to Yoruba poetics, though not in the English or European style of rhyme, meter, alliteration, and assonance. There is a high incidence of onomatopoeia and parallelism, and Yoruba tonal and other structural patterns prevail. These musical patterns can be appreciated without being fully understood, despite the fact that they have semantic and narrative layers that are imperceptible to the untrained ear.

Likewise, the poetic forms employed by Osundare may not be obvious. Though he occasionally writes a ballad, a sonnet, or an ode and may even employ certain elements of English prosody, he prefers the conventions of oriki (praise poems), ijala (hunters' chants and work songs), and other Yoruba forms drawn from a deep well of fables, parables, lullabies, proverbs, riddles, and similar sources. Each of these has indigenous specifications, but he often alters them in a continual effort to dereify and defossilize concepts and language in the service of cultivating fresh thought, a new inner life, provocative and entertaining expression, and social activism.

There is a common thread of perceptual and ideological consistency running throughout Osundare's work. This ranges from the youthful poems of works such as Village Voices and The Eye of the Earth—all published by the mid-1980s—to transitional works such as Moonsongs and his more mature works beginning in the 1990s, including Waiting Laughters and Horses of Memory. But there is also a constant of experimentation and increasing reach seen in the poet's development. Over time the specific localities of early poems have dissolved into more general African and wider settings, extending Osundare's accessibility to a more universal audience.

As the critic Biodun Jeyifo wrote in the introduction to Songs of the Marketplace, in Osundare "we confront both poetry of revolution and a revolution in poetry, in terms of forms and techniques." In less than two decades Osundare moved from being a mighty local force in African letters to being a poet of global stature.

—Stephen Arnold