Niyi Osundare 1947-

Nigerian poet, essayist, playwright, and nonfiction writer.

INTRODUCTION

Compared with writers as diverse as Walt Whitman, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo Neruda, Osundare is one of the most admired African Anglophone poets of his generation. Exploring themes such as the importance of respect for nature, the imperative of historical preservation, and the dignity bestowed by hard work and perseverance, Osundare has produced poetry that speaks to both an academic and a popular readership. Osundare has won many awards for his work, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, two Cadbury Prizes, the Fonlon-Nichols Award, and the Noma Award, which is Africa's equivalent of the Nobel Prize for literature.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Osundare was born in 1947 in Ikerri, a village in western Nigeria. In his poem "Farmer-Born," he describes himself as "farmer-born peasant-bred." Osundare's father was a noted village musician, and his paternal grandfather was a diviner-physician. As a child Osundare would accompany his grandfather into the forest to gather roots and herbs to cure all manner of ailments. An integral part of the healing process was the use of incantations to stir the medicines to life. Thus, he became acquainted at an early age with the power and importance of nature and language. Osundare attended local Christian schools and Ibadan University, from which he graduated in 1972 with honors in English. From there he moved to England to pursue a master's degree at the University of Leeds, and later moved to Toronto to attend York University, where he earned a doctorate. In 1982 he returned to Nigeria to join the teaching staff at Ibadan University. In 1990 Osundare won the first of two Fulbright scholar-in-residence fellowships to work at the University of Wisconsin. His second fellowship was to the University of New Orleans, where he became a full professor of English in 1997. In August 2005 Osundare and his wife were among the tens of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans. The couple were nearly swept away in the flood waters, but they managed to climb to safety in their attic, where they remained for twenty-six hours until a neighbor heard their cries for help and rescued them. Having lost all of their belongings—including all of Osundare's manuscripts—they were homeless for the next two weeks before being taken in by a family in Alabama. While living temporarily in the family's basement, Osundare received an e-mail message from Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, offering him a teaching position. Since then, Osundare has lived with his wife in Rindge, New Hampshire.

MAJOR WORKS

Musicality is one of the most essential elements of Osundare's poetry. In his later work he often includes musical directions because he believes poetry should be experienced orally. He has said: "When I perform in Nigeria, I have a number of musicians backing me up with different kinds of drums. Each drum has its own kind of symbolic message. The drums are very important as tools of expression and interpretation. Poetry flows, it is rhythm. And the rhythm is in every word, every syllable. My language, Yoruba, is music." Osundare's first published collection, Songs of the Marketplace (1983), evidences these values. The volume's title is a reference to the vibrancy of African markets, which are gathering places for community socializing as well as places of commerce. Nevertheless, despite the book's implicit emphasis on African music and culture, its individual poems are highly critical of the social and political realities that plague modern Nigeria. In the poem "Excursion" Osundare presents a litany of portraits of African poverty, and then contrasts them with the callousness of the rich and powerful: "Several government people / have passed through these streets / several Mercedes tyres have drenched / gaunt road liners in sewer water." In his second volume, Village Voices (1984), Osundare continued to lament social and economic inequality in Nigeria, particularly after the oil industry brought fabulous wealth to the upper classes along with unprecedented governmental corruption and greed through the 1970s and 1980s. In The Writer as Righter: The African Literary Artist and His Social Obligations, a book-length essay published in 1986, Osundare detailed his thoughts on the role of writers in spotlighting social ills in Africa. With A Nib in the Pond (1986) Osundare returned to poetry, this time with an explicitly socialist agenda, dedicating many poems to such leaders as Fidel Castro and Agostinho Neto. With The Eye of the Earth (1986) Osundare began to address environmental issues in his poetry—a concern that continues throughout his body of work. In Songs of the Season (1990) Osundare took a different approach, deliberately couching his poetic observations in simple, accessible language to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The subjects of the poems are national and international events of the time, in the form of satires, dialogues, tributes, and parables. The poems in Waiting Laughters, for which Osundare won the Noma Prize in 1990, are meant to be performed and accompanied by music. The work has been described as an "experimental orchestration around a major theme." In Midlife (1993) Osundare turned to more personal subject matter, exploring the arrested development of his homeland through his own experiences as a middle-aged man. Horses of Memory (1998) contains more poems inspired by Nigeria's desperate need for political change and the country's collective memory of its troubles. In The Word Is an Egg (2000) Osundare's awareness of the power of language comes to the fore, with poems that focus on writing in the language of one's colonizers, the role of words in the formation of personal and national identity, and the social and political abuse of language in the forms of censorship and illiteracy. Osundare's most recent volume of poetry, the post-Katrina Tender Moments (2006), departs from his characteristic focus on politics and social ills and addresses instead the intricacies of human relationships.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Osundare is revered as a poet who examines the social and political condition of modern Africa with musicality and a sense of humor despite his often-grim subject matter. Critics often comment on the human quality of his work, particularly in his evocation of history and memory through the use of traditional African literary and musical elements that appeal to ordinary people. In a November, 2002 interview for Poetry International Web, Osundare commented on the essential role of the writer in dramatizing Africa's problems: "You cannot keep quiet about the situation in the kind of countries we find ourselves in, in Africa. When you wake up and there is no running water, when you have a massive power outage for days and nights, no food on the table, no hospital for the sick, no peace of mind; when the image of the ruler you see everywhere is that of a dictator with a gun in his hand; and, on the international level, when you live in a world in which your continent is consigned to the margin, a world in which the colour of your skin is a constant disadvantage, everywhere you go—then there is no other way than to write about this, in an attempt to change the situation for the better."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Songs of the Marketplace (poetry) 1983

Village Voices (poetry) 1984

The Eye of the Earth (poetry) 1986

A Nib in the Pond (poetry) 1986

The Writer as Righter: The African Literary Artist and His Social Obligations (nonfiction) 1986

Moonsongs (poetry) 1988

Songs of the Season (poetry) 1990

Waiting Laughters: A Long Song in Many Voices (poetry) 1990

Selected Poems (poetry) 1992

African Literature and the Crisis of Poststructuralist Theorizing (nonfiction) 1993

Midlife (poetry) 1993

Seize the Day and Other Poems for the Junior (poetry) 1995

Horses of Memory (poetry) 1998

Pages from the Book of the Sun: New and Selected Poems (poetry) 2000

Thread in the Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture (essays) 2000

The World Is an Egg (poetry) 2000

The State Visit (drama) 2002

Two Plays (drama) 2005

Tender Moments (poetry) 2006

CRITICISM

J. O. J. Nwachukwu-Agbada (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: Nwachukwu-Agbada, J. O. J. "Lore & Other in Niyi Osundare's Poetry." In New Trends & Generations in African Literature, edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones, pp. 73-86. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Nwachukwu-Agbada explores Osundare's rejection of European-influenced dogmatic poetry in favor of socially conscious folk poetry about ordinary people.]

For a writer to merit a mention in literary history there are a number of criteria he/she must meet. One is his/her position in the tradition; another is the uniqueness of his/her artistic virtues; and yet another is the configuration of emphases to which his/her oeuvre is regularly returning. Niyi Osundare seemed to have been aware of these literary dictates before he set to work. To be sure, in each of his poems so far, his artistic anchor seems to be a recourse to lore, particularly the lore of his Yoruba people and a diagnosis of the social conditions of the ordinary person in society. Before his generation, poetry in Nigeria was essentially privatist; even though much of it recorded public issues, it was rendered in personalist terms with the aim of excluding the majority of its potential audience and cultivating a small coterie of connoisseurs (Chinweizu et al.; Osundare, ‘A Distant Call’; Aiyejina, ‘Recent Nigerian Poetry’; Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Matter and Form’). Niyi Osundare is not just a pioneer of the age who has sought to counter the trend in Nigerian poetry, he is probably the most prolific and consistent in his use of folk resources and the examination of the lives of ordinary people.

A proof of his awareness of his direction from the outset is to be found in two of his poems, ‘The Poet’ and ‘Poetry Is’. As artistic manifestos, they are a deliberate contradiction of the school of poetry which insists that ‘a poem must be "pure" and never "soiled" with "thought" (Knickerbocker and Reninger, p. 224). An examination of the poetry of the major Nigerian poets before Osundare shows that they were not averse to the thinking of this school. The dogmatic position of this poetic movement in Europe is encapsulated in Laurence Lerner's famous poem entitled, ‘This Poem’ in which poetry is said to be a ‘mask’ meant to conceal the poet's thought. A poem in Lerner's consideration is not supposed to reflect reality because it is essentially a ‘fiction’ which ‘disfigures’ and ‘distorts’ (pp. 105-6). In other words, poetry is neither a cognitive object nor a didactic medium outside of itself. According to Wilbur Scott, poets and critics of this persuasion ‘shun all material such as the personal or social conditions behind the composition, the moral implications … so long as these are "extrinsic"—that is tangential to an understanding of the poem’ (p. 181). Lerner was of course articulating in verse the view of a poetic stance pioneered by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Mill etc. and brought to its peak by such modernist poets as Hopkins, Lorca, Mallarmé, Cowley, Tagore, Pound, Eliot and Thomas.

In Osundare's ‘The Poet’ (A Nib, pp. 9-10). poetry must be infused with social consciousness. Here the poet ‘is not a gadfly’ who can afford urbane disinterestedness when ‘urgent’ social issues need to be commented upon. In other words, the poet cannot remain aloof, ‘refine himself out of existence, paring his fingernails’ like a Joycean god when all over the place there are ‘soiled streets’ calling for ‘collective action’. This position locates Osundare's poetry in the socialist realm. The socialist artist by orientation does not believe in ‘the "magic" qualities of art works and the unique features of the artist's mind’ (Caudwell, p. 127). Rather he believes that an artist must proffer a specific social and cultural philosophy ‘towards the field of action’. The poet ought not be a ‘prophet’ or ‘God's hollow ventriloquist’ who remains superior to others on account of his possession of the so-called special innate traits. Osundare's ‘The Poet’ argues that since ‘the poet's eyes are washed in the common spring’ he must therefore serve as a social activist and salvage society from its own decadence. The belief is that,

Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation. Such traditional literary devices as symbolism and metre are social in their very nature…. The poet himself is a member of society, possessed of a specific social status: he receives some degree of social recognition and reward; he addresses an audience, however hypothetical …

          (Wellek and Warren, p. 94)

Anybody reading Osundare's ‘The Poet’ or his ‘Poetry Is’ against Laurence Lerner's articulation of the ‘purist’ school in ‘This Poem’ may conclude that the former is not bothered by form. But in an interview with Sanya Oni, Osundare dismisses any misconceptions as to his notion of art: ‘One is not asking for a simplistic kind of art, but for art that is accessible, relevant and beautiful’ (p. 7). The truth is that in spite of the ideological intent of socialist art, an attention to form is equally important. Leon Trotsky, one of the Leninist faithfuls in socialist Russia in the 1920s, is known to have taken Mayakovsky to task over his oeuvre which the former says have ‘no peaks, they are not disciplined internally. The parts refuse to obey the whole. Each part tries to be separate’ (p. 152). However, in articulating the social conditions of the underprivileged in the historical development of the Nigerian society, Osundare has chosen to work within the oral tradition to which poetry is no stranger. He achieves two things by this choice: he convinces us that he is a cultural nationalist, what with his employment of the oral technique which is in fact an enduring African contribution to literary stylistics; secondly, he symbolizes his declared empathy for the condition of the ordinary man in the street by returning to a thought and speech pattern to which this class may easily respond.

I

It was William Bascom who had sought to distinguish between verbal art and literature by his observation that ‘verbal art is composed and transmitted verbally, while literature is composed in writing and transmitted in writing.’ However, he never failed to have the two linked up when he said:

Yet it is obvious that these two traditions have not followed independent courses, but have intermingled and influenced one another. One result has been reworked tales, proverbs or other forms of verbal art which have reworked and adapted to literary standards of style and propriety, and thereafter transmitted by writing or printing.

          (p. 249)

Niyi Osundare is one such writer who has not only reworked folklore but has also deployed folk items¹ for the purposes of enhancing his writing and projecting his ideological predisposition. It is clear from his revelatory preface to The Eye of the Earth (1986) that he is able to unite orality and writing because of his rich cultural background, he being ‘farmer-born, peasant-bred’, and having ‘encountered dawn in the enchanted corridors of the forest, suckled on the delicate aroma of healing herbs, and the pearly drops of generous moons’ (p. ix).

Any wonder then that the titles of his collections either bear out his love for lore (Songs of the Marketplace, Village Voices and Moonsongs ) or indicate at once that advocacy would be an essential element in his verse (A Nib in the Pond, The Eye of the Earth, Waiting Laughters and Songs of the Season ).

In his ‘Poetry Is’, a poem we have described as one of his artistic manifestos, the very first line takes us to the associativeness of a folkloristic heritage, particularly when it objects to ‘esoteric whisper / of an excluding tongue’. For him, poetry is not ‘a learned quiz / entombed in Grecoroman lore’; instead it is the ‘eloquence of the gong / the lyric of the marketplace’ (Marketplace, p. 3). The ‘lyric of the marketplace’ subsumes musicality and collectivity because a marketplace in folk history is a gathering point, the heart of the village; the spirits of selling and buying come together here. In his important poems, lore and one human predicament or the other are brought together with an artistry that makes his work very memorable. In ‘Excursions’ (Marketplace, p. 7), the sundry commentator is either a folk or a folk sympathizer because of the manner in which he cultivates our emotion in favour of the ordinary person:

in city fringes pregnant women

rummage garbage heaps for

the rotting remnants of city tables

above, hawks and cultures hovering

for their turn
 

          (p. 8)

His most touching line in ‘Excursions’ is where he calls attention to ‘the family head’ who ‘roams the bush / trapping rats and insects’. This is a picture of poverty and underutilization of one's energy. The trapping of rats and insects is a folk chore meant for children in the villages, but when an adult engages in such an activity he is either mentally underdeveloped or abjectly improvident. Because the folks constitute the ‘other’ in his poetic vintage, Osundare is always reflecting their sordid lives in terms which either bespeak of their wretchedness and helplessness or their ignorance.

In ‘Reflections’ (p. 37), he objects to the way the world is socially structured and likens it to ‘the Solel Boneh's steam-shovel’ because ‘it scoops earth from one place / To fill up the hole in another’ (p. 38). What the rich gain is the loss of the poor; poverty is the aftermath of someone else's affluence. Often Osundare's metaphor for the poor is sheep, while wolf is his idea of the rich who savour the helpless in order to survive doubly. In ‘Ignorance’ (p. 33), he asks, ‘how could sheep all agree / to give their crown to a wolf?’ (p. 34). This is a sidestep to the animal' story in which the wolf seeks the cooperation of the very creatures it regularly feeds upon. In ‘To the Dinosaur’ (p. 41), a folkloric, prehistorical animal is employed as a metaphor for the African tyrant's emptiness; the metaphor is a sarcastic reference to African rulers who adopt ancient, undemocratic postures in order to retain their places for life. One of their strategies is to dispose ‘two million / skeletons to purchase a gilded skull’ (p. 41). This issue of sheep ignorantly ministering unto the wolf is re-echoed here

                    . . . . .
 

Knowing neither

You have torn down the gate

and asked wolves to tend your sheep
 

          (p. 41)

The ‘leopards’, the whites, take over the places of wolves in ‘Namibia Talks’ (p. 49) but the sheep remain Africa and Africans. The poet-persona chides fellow Africans:

For so long we mistrusted our sheep

to the care of leopards

we have woken to the whitened skeleton

of talkative folly
 

          (p. 50)

Osundare, a folk commentator, utilizes diachronic terms and divests them of their archaic denotation. Words and clichés which ordinarily would have been regarded as worn-out are refurbished for the sole purpose of creating original humour. Name-calling and term-twisting as we know are very common in folk life. The oriki singers in Yoruba culture invest beauty on their composition through action-imagery, alliteration, pitching and morphological innovations. A few examples of his neologism will suffice.

Let us begin with what he has done with the word ‘archaic’. In more poems than one he has shown his aversion for stilted academicism because it is pretentious. Those who are guilty of this belong to the ‘archaidemia’ (Marketplace, p. 27). Other nonce words of his include, ‘kwashiorkored children’ (Marketplace, p. 3) for malnourished children; ‘mercedesed Pharoahs’ (A Nib, p. 15) for important people in Mercedes cars; ‘kiwi-ed boot’ (Moonsongs, p. 32) for boots polished with kiwi polish; ‘darkdom’ for kingdom (The Eye, p. 25); ‘executhieves’ (The Eye, p. 46) for people in executive positions who steal from government coffers; and ‘kolatera’ (Village Voices, p. 50) for collateral (but the poet here plays on ‘kola’, the Nigerian euphemism for bribe). Others are word distortion and inversion. These are copious in A Nib : ‘comrades or comeraids / trail-blazers or blaze-trailers’ (p. 21); ‘from democracy to demoncrazy / from conscience to con-science’ (p. 21); ‘allies or all lies / adultery or adult tree / message or mess age’ (p. 21); ‘suffrage or suffer age’ (p. 22); ‘of statesmen and statemen’.

Osundare copiously uses metaphors and images that point to the past for purposes of making a contemporary statement on various issues which affect the lives of the ordinary person. In ‘The Horseman Cometh’ (Marketplace, p. 45), the horseman is the military tyrant who ‘will build arsenals / in place of barns / and prod the poor / to gorge on bullets’. Apart from ‘horseman’, a term which takes our minds to antiquity, the word ‘cometh’ is on its own an archaic item. However, in the employment of these words, the poet is playing with the synecdoche of modern African anachronism when unelected individuals snatch power by force:

A horseman gallops to power

and tyrants of all the world rejoice

torture chambers multiply apace

and the noose thickens, descending
 

          (p. 45)

His references to sword in ‘Killing without a Sword’ (Village Voices, p. 13), ‘The Land of Unease’ (Village Voices, p. 45), ‘The Rocks Rose to Meet Me’ (The Eye, p. 14) or the words closely associated with the sword such as ‘scalpel’, ‘knife’, ‘matchet’, ‘mattock’ etc. are his metaphors for mindless eating. It is ‘mindless eating’ which leads to the request for ‘a fruit deliciously beyond our reach’ in ‘Killing without a Sword’. In ‘The Land of Unease’, the persona castigates men that ‘forge unequal knives / … with machetes greedier / than Esimuda's sword’. These are men who want to have everything to themselves. They are the prodigal in ‘Eating Tomorrow's Yam’ (Village Voices, p. 16) who ‘calls for a knife’ when ‘there is only one yam left / in the village barn’. The point here is that the word ‘sword’ and associated words take us to the time of gladiators who amused by being reckless.

The aura of lore which suffuses Osundare's poetry is justified by his decision from the outset to explore the pool of communal memories. His stance as the conscience of the folk after all accords well with the role of the artist of old whose bounden duty it was to ‘wear courage like a shield / telling kings their fart / chokes the village nose’ (Village Voices, p. 1). The ‘other’ in whose favour he has chosen to resolve his art is the folk whose concept of the earth is gradually being distorted by ‘executhieves’. In The Eye of the Earth, for instance, the autobiography is collective rather than private. According to Funso Aiyejina, ‘the animistic energy with which the volume is charged does not originate from the poet as an individual but rather as the sensitive heir to, and interpreter of a complex tradition and a collective philosophy’ (‘To Plough’, p. 2106).

In performing this role, Osundare chooses to be a griot, but a modern one. Unlike the griots of old who

… conserved the constitutions of kingdoms by memory work alone; each princely family had its griots appointed to preserve tradition.

          (Niane, p. vii)

Osundare would like that which is worthy such as the earth's ecology to be conserved and our capitalist tradition which is retrogressive to be done away with. In ‘Forest Echoes’, the persona recalls the time when,

Bouncing boughs interlock overhead

like wristwrestlers straining muscularly

on a canvas of leaves wounded

by the fists of time
 

          (The Eye,   p. 3)

The poet chooses a journey motif very common in folktales. The trip is towards the forest comparable to that undertaken by D. O. Fagunwa's hero in The Forest of a Thousand Daemons or Amos Tutuola's Palm-wine Drinkard. The poet's allusion to Fagunwa's protagonist's journey in,

Here they are

midget and monster still
 

                    . . . . .
 

A forest of a million trees, this,

a forest of milling trees
 

          (p. 5)

is revealing. In ‘The Rocks Rose to Meet Me’, the Romantic picture of a communion with the elements is complete. Here the Rocks—Olosunta and Oroole—are personified: ‘Olosunta spoke first / the riddling one whose belly is wrestling ground / for god and gold’ (p. 13). After Olosunta, spoke Oroole: ‘Oroole came next / his ancient voice tremulous in the morning air’ (p. 15). We may interpret this interlocution between man and the rocks at the metaphorical level to mean a reading of their history and the process of disintegration they might have experienced as a result of the ‘plundering’ to which they had been exposed over the years, yet in folklore, animate/inanimate communication is realistic. The desolation which has visited the forest in recent times is due to the impact of capitalistic exploitation of resources and the nuclear experimentation which have tended to undermine the original status of the earth:

a lake is killed by the arsenic urine

from the bladder of profit factories

a poisoned stream staggers down the hills

coughing chaos in the sickly sea

the wailing whale, belly up like a frying fish

crests the chilling swansong of parting waters.
 

          (p. 50)

Like a typical traditional bard, Osundare employs forms of folklore in varying proportions. Apart from the songs (orin) which still retain part of their original Yoruba structure, proverbs (owe), curses (epe), incantations (ofo), riddles (alo apamo) and myths (itan) are largely reworked, and in most cases built in snippets into the lines. In Segment IV of Moonsongs he instructs that the poem be read ‘to the accompaniment of the song: Osupa oi yuwa mi o, osupa o, i yeyin mi …’ (p. 8). He does not supply the Yoruba song, not even in a glossary. In most of the poems the musical instruments to be used are suggested: omele, gbedu, ibembe, bata, adan, agba, ogbele, woro, reso, gangan (all types of drums), gong, shekere, the flute etc. are recommended for various poems. Outside the songs, these other folkloric forms are integrated into the poems so that it becomes difficult to draw lines in their usage. For example, Moonsongs which flows like an ijala verse (Yoruba hunter's incantation) has several stanzas in which bits of these oral forms are incorporated in varying proportions:

How many hours will make a minute

How many oceans total one drop

Of elusive water

How many forests will make one tree

In regions of meticulous showers

How many …?
 

          (Moonsongs,   p. 17)

In ‘Under the Mango Tree’ (Moonsongs, pp. 49-50) alliteration, tongue-twisters, punning and word reformulation are easily noticeable in a passage such as this:

the mortal murmurs of musing mangoes,

of crude climbers and missiles

from starving quivers;

and suddenly, each fruit a toll

of expiring winds

each toll a tale

each tale a tail of coiling snakes

ah! mangoes man goes. Man
 

          (p. 50)

Direct Yoruba terms and expressions in his lines show his fidelity to lore and orality. In all his collections so far Yoruba interjections are quite numerous. Many of these are glossed but there are indications that they might be direct borrowings from local songsters who use them in their various compositions: Expressions such as ‘Iya jajeji l'Egbe / Ile eni I'eso ye'ni’ (suffering afflicts the stranger in a strange land / One is most important in one's own home) in Songs of the Marketplace (p. 40); ‘Ogeere amokoyeri’ (the one that shaves his head with the hoe) in The Eye of the Earth (p. 1); ‘Ise losupa nse lalede orun, lalede orun / Is losupa nse …’ (Busy is the moon in the compound of the sky / busy is the moon) in Moonsongs (p. 21). However, some of the words and expressions are apparently used for their musical effect since they are not explained. In Moonsongs, there are ‘agbamurere’ (p. 1), ‘kiriji kiriji kiriji pepelupe’ (p. 1) and ‘Teregungu maja gungun’ which the poet in fact says is only a ‘rhythmic refrain, it has no meaning’ (p. 44).

II

The other major prong of his poetry is the ‘other’, referring to the social condition of the African and Nigerian citizenry. In his assessment of Osundare, Biodun Jeyifo has remarked that,

In all of modern African poetry, all, I repeat, only in the poetry of Agostinho Neto and David Diop will you find the same depth and passion and lyricism in solidarity with the oppressed, the down-trodden, the dispossessed, and a corresponding faith in their aspiration and will to revolutionary change as we confront in Osundare's poetry. The dispossession of the majority of our people, and more specifically of the rural producers, may, in fact, be said to be the grand theme of Osundare's poetry.

          (pp. 317-18)

The tendency on his part to let the burdens of the ordinary man take over the prop of his poetic vintage is justified in ‘The Poet’ in which he projects the view that,

The poet's pen is

the cactus by the stream

(shorn of its forbidding thorns)

each stem a rib

towards the field of action

its sap the ink of succour

when doubt's drought

assaults the wall
 

          (A Nib,   p. 10)

The implication of the above poetic programme of action is that the poet believes in a poetic mediation whose content is ideological, whose resolution favours civic causes.

To be able to perform this crucial function for the ordinary citizen, Osundare's poetic stance is modelled on the town-crier. Fortunately this stance is not far from a griot's with which we have also associated him. In the words of Griot Mamadou Kouyate, griots ‘are vessels of speech … the memory of mankind’ (Niane, I). But Osundare's town-crier is in addition the conscienceman. This is perhaps one obvious example of his debt to the late Christopher Okigbo who called himself ‘town-crier with my iron bell’. In ‘I Wake up This Morning’, Osundare's persona says:

I have borrowed the earful clamour

of the towncrier

gained the unkillable clarion

of the gong
 

                    . . . . .
 

when I sing ears shall bend my way
 

          (Village Voices,   I)

Having adopted this posture, the poet-protagonist is then able to call attention to the contradictions in society to which the common man is easily a victim. One of these contradictions is the disadvantage which the ordinary person suffers as a result of his position in the social and economic relations network. Often his means of existence is threatened as the poet observes in ‘Eating with All the Fingers’ because whereas members of the privileged class in society can afford to ‘eat with all the fingers’, the poor are not usually so lucky. The poet-persona, having deployed himself as the spokesman of the people, intones:

we will raise our voices

and tell the world

we will not be watchers

of others eating
 

          (Village Voices,   p. 15)

This position is restated in ‘Unequal Fingers’ in which the speaker says,

Let no-one tell us again

that fingers are not equal

for we know

how the thumb grew fatter

than all the others
 

          (Village Voices,   p. 60)

Poems such as ‘The New Farmer's Bank’, ‘A Farmer on Seeing Cocoa House, Ibadan’, ‘The Eunuch's Child’, ‘A Villager's Protest’, ‘The Politician's Two Mouths’, ‘Akintunde, Come Home’, ‘Chicken Story’ are the voicing of these issues which daily agitate the minds of peasants. ‘The New Farmer's Bank’ (Village Voices, p. 50) is a satirical thrust at the contradiction in establishing agricultural credit banks all over the country to which the grassroots farmers have little or no access:

Then go till your land

with closed fists

how can you borrow government money

without Kolatera

‘A Villager's Protest’ and ‘The Politician's Two Mouths’ are swipes at the politician who would make promises upon promises before election time only to fool the villagers who voted him into office. The truth is that if,

A politician tells you to wait

and you heed his words

ah! friend

your sole will tell you

the biting pains of folly
 

          (Village Voices,   p. 57)

Rather than fulfil his promises, the politician will seek his own pleasure. Listen to ‘A Villager's Protest’ :

Now in

and promises forgotten

fat cars, juicy damsels

and the best there is
 

          (Village Voices,   p. 48)

‘Excursions’ (Marketplace, pp. 7-15) is a searing indictment of society for structures which ensure that the poor are perpetually held to their miserable places. All over the land, poverty, ignorance, want and disguised slavery are evident:

halfnude, toughbiceped labourers

troop in tipperfuls from sweatfields

drilled by foremen soulless like

a slavemaster, a few kobo greet

the miserly homecoming

of a pilgrimage of misery
 

          (p. 8)

Even in the churches, the oppression of the poor goes on through deceit and cant:

between belches the plump preacher

extols the virtue of want,

the only ticket to the wealth beyond
 

          (p. 9)

And in the markets, greedy businessmen, now overnight millionaires, are making their money simply by being

exporters

importers

emergency contractors

manufacturers’ representatives

buying cheap

selling dear
 

          (p. 15)

‘Sule Chase’ (Marketplace, pp. 16-18) equally indicts society for its tendency to react to social symptoms rather than cast a lingering look at their causes. Sule who is chased even by dishonest and unpatriotic members of the various strata of society on account of his pilferage of a piece of bread is no more than a victim of a heartless capitalist orientation. Yet, unlike Sule, his chasers are guilty of even more heinous crimes against society:

The race gathers more legs

In every lane

Tailors with giant scissors

Permsecs with PENDING files

Barristers with fused bulbs

Telephonists in dead head-sets

The doctor with his chair aloft …
 

          (p. 16)

Even those who merely hear Sule has stolen join in the chase without actually knowing what he stole until they stone him to death and behold ‘they arrest Sule's corpse / His left hand clutching / A rumpled three kobo loaf’ (p. 18).

Osundare's town-crier model is further advanced in The Eye and Moonsongs. To begin with the social issues in each are fused and continuous, story-like in fact. And secondly in each case one voice is heard throughout. In The Eye, the poet is still concerned with the plight of the people, but this time his concept of people is global. Here he is no longer addressing the local chieftains running their country like a personal estate, but all those in influential places world-wide whose duty it is to ensure that ‘our earth … neither wastes nor wants’. The earth is described as the ‘breadbasket / and compost bed / rocks and rivers / muds and mountains’. The entire collection calls attention to the dwin- dling state of forests, rocks and rain resulting from the bizarre approach of the earth's inhabitants to the survival of plant and animal life. The volume is also a surreptitious ideological banter on capitalists and multinationals, scattered in different parts of the world, busy plundering rather than ploughing the earth. In ‘Ours to Plough, Not to Plunder’, the poet beckons the inmates of the earth to ‘let gold rush from her deep unseeable mines / hitch up a ladder to the dodging sky / let's put a sun in every night’ (p. 48).

The central symbol in Moonsongs is the moon; like ‘the eye’ in The Eye the moon is here a watchman, an observer, the one who oversees the earth. The moon is ‘the eye of the sky’, the ‘hourglass’, the ‘serenade of the storm’, the ‘lymph of the lore’, the ‘historian's if’ (pp. 24-5). It is the harbinger of new seasons and the signal of the passage of years. It is also a mask through which the poet is able to make sundry statements about the joys and chaos of the seasons, about night and day, sea and sky, the poor and the prosperous. The intention of the poet is civic since all these things affect the ordinary person. The most transparent and graphic of the poems in Moonsongs are those addressing the fate of the other person, the underprivileged. An example will suffice. In Segment XXII, the poet contrasts the experience of the moon in Ikoyi with what is observed in Ajegunle, both parts of Nigeria's Lagos now metaphors for affluence and squalor respectively. In Ikoyi, ‘the moon … is a laundered lawn / its grass the softness of infant fluff’ whereas in Ajegunle ‘the moon / is a jungle / sad like a forgotten beard / with tensioned climbers’ (p. 42). By this comparison, the poet is able to strike our ire and win our sympathy for the misery of a large section of the world's populace.

III

Niyi Osundare is not only the most prolific of Nigeria's post-Civil War poets, he is the most consistent in the manner in which he employs folkways to advance public advocacy. Often the pose of his persona is folkloric, rather quixotic and prattling, relying so much on the oral stylistic technique and morphological inventiveness, two crucial elements in folk speech and drama. Since his first collection of poems was published in 1983, the quality of poetic mediation in his oeuvre has continued to improve. The Eye of the Earth, his fourth volume, epitomizes the success of his poetic career because here content and form are conjoint; here too he shows that accessible language need not lead to doggerel. However, in Moonsongs the symmetry of scope of concern and artistic language is awfully absent;² the poet who had in his various pronouncements denounced the recondite language of pre-Civil War Nigerian poetry here allows his language to tilt upwards with the result that whereas he employs various dimensions of lore and discusses the fate of the people as in the other collections, his linguistic medium is more complex, more obscure as he piles images, metaphors and symbols which ordinarily have little associations.³ Be that as it may, Osundare will remain an unforgettable member of the post-war Nigerian revolutionary poetic vanguard who daily carve anguish out of the simple words our elders taught us.

Notes

1. Alan Dundes considers as folklore all the activities of the folk, written and unwritten. See his ‘What is Folklore?’ in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 1-3.

2. Chinyere Nwahunanya has said so too. In a paper he presented at the 1989 Modern Language Association of Nigeria Conference held at the University of Nigeria Nsukka entitled, ‘Osundare's New Esotericism: The Genesis of Poetic Disintegration’, Nwahunanya warned that if the new trend of obscurity continued in his poetry, ‘Osundare would be cultivating the same problems which made the troika (Chinweizu et al.) scream at the Okigbos, the Soyinkas and their ilk. Most importantly, instead of leading to poetic growth, it would result in an obscurantism that would mark the beginning of his distintegration as a poet.’ (p. 12).

3. During a chat with Niyi Osundare in his office on 29 January 1990 he freely accepted that Moonsongs was largely obscure, but attributed it to the pains he suffered from the multiple head injuries he received in 1986 from a robbery attack which took place right on the University of Ibadan campus. According to him, the poems were written on the hospital bed against the advice of his doctor. Luckily, his post Moonsongs collections—Songs of the Season (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1990) and Waiting Laughters (Lagos: Malthouse, 1991)—belong to the mainstream of the Osundare tenor.

Works Cited

Aiyejina, F. ‘Recent Nigerian Poetry in English: An Alternative Tradition.’ In Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, Vol. I. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Guardian Books, 1988.

———. ‘To Plough, not to Plunder.’ A review of The Eye of the Earth in West Africa (London) 6 October 1986.

Bascom, W. R. ‘Verbal Art.’ Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955).

Caudwell, C. Illusion and Reality. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977 (1937).

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980.

Jeyifo, B. ‘Niyi Osundare.’ In Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present Vol. 2. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Guardian Books, 1988.

Knickerbocker, K. I. and Reninger, H. W. Interpreting Literature: Preliminaries to Literary Judgement. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979 (1955).

Lerner, L. ‘This Poem.’ In New Lines II: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Conquest. London: Macmillan, 1963.

Niane, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Trans. G. D. Pickett. London: Longman, 1965 (1960).

Nwachukwu-Agbada, J. O. J. ‘Matter and Form in Post-War Nigerian Poetry (1970-1985).’ MA Dissertation, University of Ibadan, 1986.

Oni, S. ‘Osundare, Poet of the Marketplace.’ National Concord, 24 June 1988.

Osundare, N. ‘A Distant Call.’ West Africa (London) 4 November 1985.

———. A Nib in the Pond. Ife: Ife Monograph Series, 1986.

———. Moonsongs. Ibadan: Spectrum, 1988.

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

———. The Eye of the Earth. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1986.

———. Village Voices. Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1984.

Scott, W. Five Approaches to Literary Criticism. New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962.

Trotsky, L. D. Literature and Revolutions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960.

Wellek, R. and Warren, A. Theory of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973 (1949).

Christine Fioupou (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Fioupou, Christine. "Poetry as a ‘Metaphorical Guillotine’ in the Works of Niyi Osundare." In Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, pp. 277-90. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

[In the following essay, Fioupou examines the impact and influence of Osundare's politically charged poetry.]

This essay will not be dealing with short fiction as such but with poetry and short fiction, or, to put it more clearly, with poetry and, as it were, ‘short’ faction—faction not only in the sense of the literature which fuses fact and fiction but also in the sense of rebellion through alternative literary forms. Niyi Osundare belongs to the second generation of Nigerian poets from the University of Ibadan who call themselves the "alternative" tradition,¹ as they see their verse as an ‘alternative’ to the more complex poetry of the first generation of writers: also, they use the ‘native’ tradition of orature and ‘alter’ it to make it their written and oral contemporary own. In a penetrating and provocative article, Stephen Arnold used the five-hour interview he had with the writer to reveal "the full autobiographical and mythopoetic significance"² of Osundare's poetry and its "rootedness" in Ikere-Ekiti, Yorubaland, where the author was born in 1947. Talking about his early life and the origin of his love of satire, Osundare recalls:

Hence the title of this essay. I shall use Osundare's words—alluding to the functions of songs in his father's oral tradition as "a metaphorical guillotine"—to focus on his own poetry. It would be too ambitious here to consider the theoretical issue of satire, given the author's prolific production—his nine ‘collections’ of poems range from the socially committed to the more private. So I shall be examining some of the poems that relate to satire, studying how they function both as individual pieces and as part of a wider dynamic structure: if poetry is a kind of guillotine that can hurt and kill metaphorically, then the power of the word and the power of the pen can be a form of "political action [taking] an artistic form" for those who, like Niyi Osundare, are still in the country and take the risk of speaking out.

Songs of the Season in Seasons of Anomy

Songs of the Season is a selection of poems "with a definable style and purpose"³ which Niyi Osundare has been writing for his weekly column in the Sunday Tribune since 1985, an experiment with what he calls verse journalism. Indeed, if some Nigerian writers choose the short story or various forms of short fiction to deal with vital political and social issues, Osundare tends to privilege the verse form.

Roughly speaking, the poems included in Songs of the Season are those written between 1985 and 1990, thus spanning two military dictatorships—the end of the Buhari Regime (1984-1985) and five years of the Babangida Administration (1985-1993). The introductory section, called isihun—meaning ‘voice-opener’ in Yoruba—is made up of a single poem called "A Song for My Land," subtitled "For Nigeria at 25" (hence written in 1985), which aptly conveys the topical tone of the collection.

The first section, called Songs (7-36), engages in satire against, for instance, pompous professors and grovelling dons, opportunists and pandering poets, reckless drivers and ruthless tax-gatherers, murderous tyrants and kangaroo courts:

In our country's court there's a Kangaroo

[…] He mangles the Law with his haughty hoof

And tilts the scales with a lode of lies
 

He leaps through our past with marsupial magic

He sees a lion and hails a lamb
 

          ("Song of the Kangaroo,"   21)

The last poem of this set, "Shout of the People" (34-36), is subtitled "In memory of Nigeria's fifth coup d'état." It refers to Babangida's coup—which toppled Buhari—and is presented as just another remake of a sterile charade parading as salvation:

2We have heard so many dawn crows

And brave pledges from cocky throats

But their rooster has never laid an egg

And our brood waits, bereft

Of a hatchery of hopes
 

And shout the PEOPLE

Behold we starve

The couplet, a rejoinder to the false promises made by post-Independence self-proclaimed khaki kings, is used as a refrain throughout the poem. In the last stanza—"We have been trampled" (36)—the shout of the people turns into a more urgent cry of protest that abruptly closes the first Songs:

And shout the PEOPLE

Break these chains!

For we bleed

The second section; called Dialogue (37-59); is shorter but more varied in form and mood, as it includes a moving "Song of Life" (52-57)—a warm tribute to the late actor Femi Johnson, his love of life, yams and wine—as well as satirical pieces based on debates—or the lack of them. For example, "‘Only Four’: A Song for Obtuse Angle" (51) dramatizes with grim irony the vindication of a university man who proclaims that he is responsible for the killing of "only" four students and not for what the press called a "senseless massacre":

When I become an emperor

I will slay the press

And hang all editors by their itchy pens.
 

[…] The students assailed my comfort

For just a few hours

And I called the police to quell the row

My guests fired their guns

(After all the mob too fired

Their volleys of noisy chants)

And a few students decided to die.
 

          (51)

Variations on the lethal fire of guns pitted against the metaphorical "volleys" of students' "noisy chants" or against the journalists' "itchy pens" are woven into the satirical poems of the third section: Tributes (60-100) exposes repressive systems and simultaneously pays homage to the victims of the powers that be. In his "Letter to Fawehinmi" (70-72), Osundare addresses Gani Fawehinmi, the civil-rights champion and critic of the military authorities for over thirty years. An indomitable public-spirited man, this lawyer is called the "conscience of the common man." He has been sent to jail more than nineteen times, and was in prison when Osundare wrote his tribute in 1989 ("Dear Gani, / I wonder where you are now," 70). From what I gather, he was back in jail until recently, for, as the first line of the stanza hammered throughout the poem grimly anticipates,

These, still, are seasons of terror

Of blind hunters and forests

Of savage guns
 

          (71)

Osundare assures "Gani" that he is a model for those who can claim "WE are not a people / without a voice / without a vision / without a spine […] / WE are not scoundrels who swallow their tongues / To save their mouths" (71). The letter then ends on a note of hope for the tireless fighter who was jailed because he had "Proffered a bountiful harvest of OTHER ways":

… Look beyond the walls

Beyond the shuttered screams of incarcerated conscience

Beyond the emperors who seal our fate

In their national stomachs

Look … beyond …

The brittleness of office,

The transience of POWER

Look … beyond …
 

          (72)

The mood of "For Dele Giwa" (73-76) is more threnodic, as it is dedicated to the editor of Newswatch, killed by a letter bomb in 1986. The circumstances of his death are rendered, dirge-like, through animal tales and proverbial sayings:

The hyena's laugh is cackle of death

ah! the hyena's laughter

is ploy before the pounce:

whoever takes the lion's spoor

for the snail's offenceless track

let him count again

the absent fangs of a giggling mouth.

And the hyena laughed its fire laugh

And Giwa crossed the other bank.
 

[…] Dele Giwa has crossed the river
 

          (73)

The grief felt by Osundare for the loss of a friend and colleague is described as being shared by the murdered journalist's pen, paper and ink: the very physical personification of the social critic's writing ‘weapons’ deepens the sense of waste and sterility, pain and frustration, miscarried hopes and aborted dreams:

the pen prostrate now

like a labouring bull, its womb swollen with inks

of unmediated birth;

the nib lies face up like a tool bereft,

its tongue askew, its point one staring shadow

of flowless metal,

in the closet a teeming forest of virgin paper

awaiting the quickening touch

of the pricking pen.
 

[…] Dele Giwa has crossed the river.
 

          (75)

Apparently, Dele Giwa's critical pen had become too powerful for the Babangida regime and had to be stopped lest it fertilize unwanted ground and yield "baskets of ripening truth …" (74).

The satirical pieces of the fourth section, Parables (101-27), are deeply rooted in Yoruba oral tradition. Parables, animal fables—which here often come close to short fiction—proverbs and praise-songs are appropriated as part of the author's debunking strategy. For example, following the fairy-tale pattern, "The King and the Poet" (124-25) illustrates two bards' different reactions to kingship and tyranny. Osundare sides with the poet who "vanished into a bottomless dungeon" because he refused to comply with the king's "craving [for] the velvety caress / Of plastic truths" (125) and rejects the grovelling praise-singer who helps perpetuate repressive systems:

Our bard saw a funeral in every street

But told stories of fanciful fairs
 

He sang and sang and sang

The king sinking deeper into orgasmic coma

He saw himself, not only a king now,

But also a god, thunder with a million bolts.
 

          (126)

Yet the poem ends on the awakening of the despotic king to the harsh reality announced by a swordless guard:

His message was brief and very brutal:

  "Your Majesty, there is a raging sea

  Right at the palace gate."
 

          (126)

It is precisely Osundare's sympathy with a "raging sea at the palace gate" that spurs him to go on with his "Sunday strivings," as the title of the last set of the collection—Sundry strivings (128-50)—seems to suggest. Indeed, Songs of the Season ends on a pun on sundry/Sunday, and the last poem of the movement is significantly called "Song for All Seasons" : thus, by recycling daily struggles for his Sunday column, the poet sings not only for the season but for all seasons and for all and sundry, relentlessly struggling against "Seasons of Anomy." ⁴

Songs of the Season could, then, be called "Songs of Resistance" or, to adapt Soyinka's words once again, ‘guerrilla poetry.’ Soyinka's influence on the younger generation of writers is undeniable—Osundare headed his "Song of the Tyrant" (22-29) with a quotation from Kongi's Harvest, Soyinka's first satirical play to deal directly with military dictatorship. And when one thinks of "metaphorical guillotines," one cannot help thinking of Soyinka's own ‘agit prop’ theatre, which he calls "guerrilla theatre" or "shotgun theatre": in 1983, when Shagari—then President of the civilian regime of the Second Republic—came to deliver his election speech at Ifé, Soyinka and his Guerrilla Theatre Unit—composed of actors, singers and musicians—performed their "Etika Revolution," scathing satirical sketches in a mixture of pidgin English and standard English that exposed the corruption and violence of the Shagari Administration. Soyinka defines his ‘guerrilla theatre’ as a political weapon that allows the theatre company to "aim, shoot and go" for—as Edgar Allan Poe would say about the short story—"a certain unique or single effect," as it were. The songs, collected on an LP under the title Unlimited Liability Company,⁵ soon became very popular in Nigeria. They spread as the anthem of the opposition and were widely played on the radio when, ironically enough, Buhari first came to power:

I love my country I no go lie

Na inside am I go live and die

I love my country I no go lie

Na im and me go yap till I die.

I can testify that this refrain is sung in Lagos and beyond by people from all walks of life. Apparently, it has been in everybody's head for years, known even by those who cannot read. The chorus is repeated, the tune appropriated, and new songs adapted from it. When reading some of his poems from Songs of the Season, Niyi Osundare insists on borrowing the tune from Soyinka's "I love my country" in "The Road to Abuja" (23-24) or "And Cometh the Bulldozer" (17-18), to name but two poems. In the last example,—referring to the Keep-the-Country-Clean campaign in 1984-85 that ruthlessly demolished shops and house—the song is remoulded as:

A roar and rumble in our starving streets

Down came our huts and shambling shacks

The wind now our robe the sky our roof

But this abyss is not a place to die
 

Surely not a place to die
 

          (18)

which is an ironical variation of Soyinka's "na inside am I go live and die." What is remarkable is the cross-fertilization of these various oral and written literary genres—theatre, journalism, short fiction, popular songs and poetry—that reverberate in Nigeria as means of survival when "Silence buries truth in its abyss of fear" ("For Dele Giwa," 74).

The Power of the Word: Waiting Laughters or "Waiting for the Bastille"….

"Farmer-born, peasant-bred,"⁶ Osundare extensively uses images of sowing and harvesting in all his collections: as the farm is planted with seeds that will sprout, so words will scatter their grain and fertilize the page or the ear, as the opening poem of Village Voices suggests:

[…] My words will not lie like a eunuch wind

fluttering leaves in a barren forest
 

[…] I shall rise with tomorrow's sun

and plant more songs in the ears

of a waking world
 

then plant them like a yam seedling

which multiplies the original breed.7

Village Voices, published in 1984, is dedicated to the poet's father—"a conversationalist / who savours the flavour of words / a singer / whose throat is honey to the heart" (vii)—who could also, as we know, provoke the fall of a king with a "metaphorical guillotine." Many of Osundare's poems capture the transfiguring power of songs and music, and of words: words can be endowed with quasi-magical qualities, can both soothe and hurt, as when the poet/singer uses the traditional ‘poetry of abuse’ to deflate his opponent:

[…] Bees hum peacefully in a fallowing farm

A restless boy punctures their hive

With a crooked stick
 

You have poked your crooked finger

In the hive of my mouth

A chorus of bees would have stung

Were this my season song
 

Yes, I would have told you

About your swollen testicles

Which crook your legs like miserable bows,

And your lips thick like hippo skin;
 

          ("Not in My Season of Songs,"   9-10)

In his study of satire in Irish literature, Vivian Mercier claims that "‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, / But words will never hurt me’ is one English proverb that has never had much currency in Ireland."⁸ We could say the same about Africa but also about any place—England included—where words are considered as potent weapons. This view is illustrated in the title-poem of A Nib in the Pond, collected in 1983:

We read your lines

opening up the earth

like a book of paths […]
 

You who throw a nib

in the pond of silence

the ripples in your inkpot

convulse barracks and powerbrothels

overturning plots of plunder

lying on calculating tables

like bowls of poison9

The incongruity of the title comes from the unexpected association of the nib of the pen, connected with the act of writing, with the more rural pond into which the nib is not only dipped but thrown provocatively to break the "silence." Similarly, in "The Word," where "the word / is a pod / quick with unspoken seeds / exploding in the dry season / of occasion" (12), poetry is not synonymous with neutrality or remoteness from the world. It can be a rhythmical call for action, particularly in the face of unbearable situations:

Not standing still

is the beginning of battle

he will never pluck the fruit

whose back caresses the earth
 

The circle which has a beginning

also has an end

a little patience is what it needs

the stammerer will call

his father's name.10

The last stanza rejects despair by exploding the fateful sense of closure associated with the circle and revitalizes the proverbial saying about the stammerer, which reappears as a positive leitmotiv throughout A Nib in the Pond. For instance, in the poem "When We Write the Epitaph of Apartheid" (1983), dedicated to Nelson Mandela, the cumulative repetition announces an inevitable positive outcome:

Time it may take

the stammerer will call

his father's name
 

Time it may take

The sun will rise

Above the trees
 

          (43)
 

[…] We will see you

When our struggle

blooms into victory
 

… When in lurid colours

We write the epitaph of apartheid
 

for

Time it may take

the stammerer will call

his father's name

Time it may take

The sun will rise

Above the trees.
 

          (45)

These lines have a prophetic ring indeed, now that the vicious circle of apartheid has historically come to an end, now that, after much "stammering," its epitaph is written. Hence, Osundare's incantatory words prompt the reader/listener not to give up the struggle, preparing the ground and loosening up the soil for "seeds of change" (51).

Waiting Laughters, published in 1990, also explores the various forms of waiting, capturing them through humour, wit and laughter, going "beyond wails, beyond walls"¹¹ to counter "monologues / of talkative triggers."¹²"Waiting Like the Bastille" is, of course, an illustration of the literal guillotine of the French Revolution to which Osundare alluded in his interview:

Waiting

like the Bastille, for the screaming stones

of turbulent streets;

their bread is stone

their dessert garnished sand from the kitchen

of hearthless seasons

And when the humble axe finally heeds its noble task,

the head descends, lumpen dust in its royal mouth
 

Behold the wonder

the crown is only a cap!
 

       (22)

Here, the poet crosses boundaries to look ironically again at "the transience of power"; he relishes antitheses like "humble" and "noble" as well as the polysemy of "lumpen" associated with "royal," thus deflating all power-mongers who, whether kings or generals, should know they are as vulnerably human as any pariah. The poem carries the debunking process further with a Yoruba chant that derides dishonourable rulers; then—with mocking repetitions that echo children's songs or nursery rhymes—it demystifies the king's body and emblems of power:

The king's brave legs are bone and flesh

Bone and flesh, bone and flesh

The castle is a house of mortar and stone

Mortar and stone, mortar and stone

A chair is wood which becomes a throne.
 

          (22)

The last two lines of the poem—

Oh teach us the patience of the Rain

which eats the rock in toothless silence
 

          (23)

—are in fact repeated throughout the book, and it soon becomes obvious that Waiting Laughters —subtitled "a long song in many voices"—is much more than a mere collection of poems or a sum of fragments. Osundare himself calls most of his works "composed volumes, not collections,"¹³ as collections would imply that the poems have been written independently, without a clear thread linking them together. Apparently, the poems are orchestrated in such a way that they can be read as a kind of subversive symphony—to deflate "sinphoneys"?¹⁴—punctuated by obsessive refrains that in the end form the lyrical backbone of the piece. The words, relentlessly repeated throughout, become so many obsessive chants that reverberate or are reappropriated from one composition to another, sticking in the reader's memory. The rhythmical repetition of key lines allow the poems to become chanting performance more than ordinary recitation, all the more so as very specific musical accompaniments are provided as a kind of ‘stage directions’ at the beginning of each section of Waiting Laughters. This suggests that Osundare's written poetry is also meant to be the kind of performance poetry that can initiate the public into a new type of communal experience. And even if it can be argued that "phrases never concentrate themselves into the shape of a dagger,"¹⁵ that searing words or "metaphorical guillotines" are impotent in the face of parcel bombs and fire-guns, the debate on whether artists can directly influence the course of history is still open. At least, in Nigeria, they can become instrumental in further strengthening the resilient stuff their public is made of. Meanwhile, writers will go on with the "quickening touch" of their pens, mediating Village Voices or "Odes to Anger" :

[…] Do not take away my anger

A volcano is gathering in the pit of my stomach

Let me erupt in fables and fire songs
 

Dreams are dying, waters wailing

Medieval monarchs decree our lives from rocky

  heights

Justice dangles on common gallows
 

[…] Do not take my anger away

My stubborn noun, my adjective which,

Like the scorpion, carries a burning tale

The middle stanza from this poem—published by Osundare in January 1997 in the Nigerian Post Express—could allude to "the judicial crime" which the Abacha military government committed against writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists. When he was in detention, Saro-Wiwa had managed to send a letter to the editor of the London Guardian in which he stated that, when after a year in prison, "sixty five days in chains, weeks of starvation, months of mental torture," he was taken to appear before a kangaroo court, he knew that "a sentence of death against which there is no appeal is a certainty." Yet his claim, used as the title of his letter, was that "In Nigeria the pen is still mightier than the sword," for

The men who ordain and supervise this show of shame, this tragic charade, are frightened by the word, the power of ideas, the power of the pen; by the demand of social justice and the rights of man. Nor do they have a sense of history. They are so scared by the power of the word, that they do not read. And that is their funeral.¹⁶

Saro-Wiwa also accused the governments which supply "arms and credit to the military dictators of Nigeria" and pilloried all those who "denigrate humanity" world- wide, yet he remained hopeful because he knew there were people committed to fighting them. And this allowed him to write; "Whether I live or die is immaterial." Ken Saro-Wiwa—with his eight companions—was hanged on November 10, 1995. And though the hangman's noose was not metaphorical, his words have survived as writers and journalists keep fighting with "the barrel of a pen" (Ngugi), hammering out their anger to their readers or listeners. Niyi Osundare stated that "[Ken Saro-Wiwa]'s pen was getting too large, his images too disturbing" for the powers that be.¹⁷ Wole Soyinka was also becoming too mighty for the government, and went into exile in November 1994. He was subsequently charged with treason by the Nigerian military; if he had stayed in the country, he stated, he would have faced a fate similar to that of Ken Saro-Wiwa.¹⁸ Already, in 1988, during the Symposium on African Literatures organized in Lagos in honour of his Nobel Prize, Soyinka—in his keynote address, "Power and Creative Strategies," broadcast on Nigerian Television—had called for the end of all dictatorships, "this denigration of the popular will":

"The divine right of kings" which ended with the decapitation of crowned heads of Europe several centuries ago has—need I state the obvious?—been replaced by the "divine right of the gun" on this continent.¹⁹

A coup later, with new "pampered emperors on purchased thrones," we have come full circle …²⁰

To conclude, and to make a long story short or various long poems-cum-symphonies into one short story for "a certain unique or single effect," I shall stammer once more, quoting again from Niyi Osundare's "medley of voices" and "metaphorical guillotines":

The circle which has a beginning

also has an end21
 

Time it may take

The stammerer will call

his father's name22
 

Waiting

like the Bastille, for the screaming stones

of turbulent streets23
 

Waiting

like the tyrant for his noose24
 

Oh teach us the patience of the rain

which eats the rock in toothless silence25

Notes

1. Biodun Jeyifo, "Introduction" to Niyi Osundare's Songs of the Marketplace (Ibadan: New Horn, 1987): vii.

2. Stephen Arnold, "A Peopled Persona: Autobiography, Post-Modernism and the Poetry of Niyi Osundare," in Autobiographical Genres in Africa, ed. Janos Riesz & Ulla Schild (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1996): 150.

3. Osundare, "Preface," Songs of the Season (Ibadan: Heinemann Frontline, 1990): v.

4. Adapted, of course, from Wole Soyinka's novel Season of Anomy.

5. Soyinka, Unlimited Liability Company, Featuring Tunji Oyelana and his Benders; music & lyrics by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria: Ewuro, 1983).

6. Osundare, The Eye of the Earth (Ibadan: Heinemann Nigeria, 1986): ix.

7. Osundare, "I wake up this morning," in Village Voices (Ibadan: Evans Nigeria, 1984): 1-2.

8. Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962): 107.

9. Osundare, A Nib in the Pond (collected in 1983; Ifé Monograph on Literature and Culture, 4th series, no. 6; University of Ifé, 1986): 12.

10. Osundare, "Not Standing Still," A Nib in the Pond, 12.

11. Osundare, Waiting Laughters (Lagos & Oxford: Malthouse Press, 1990): 25.

12. Osundare, Midlife (Ibadan: Heinemann Frontline, 1993): 66.

13. Arnold, "A Peopled Persona," 144.

14. Osundare, Nib, 42.

15. Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition, 182.

16. Ken Saro-Wiwa, "In Nigeria the pen is still mightier than the sword," Guardian Weekly (May 28, 1995): 2.

17. Osundare, "The Longest Day," Newswatch (November 18, 1996): 44-45.

18.Herald Tribune (March 15-16, 1997).

19. "Power and Creative Strategies," Index on Censorship 17.7 (August 1988): 8.

20. Osundare, Midlife, 66.

21. Osundare, A Nib, 12.

22.A Nib, 43.

23. Osundare, Waiting Laughters, 22.

24.Waiting Laughters, 14.

25.Waiting Laughters, 23.

Works Cited

Arnold, Stephen. "A Peopled Persona: Autobiography, Post-Modernism and the Poetry of Niyi Osundare," Autobiographical Genres in Africa, ed. Janos Riesz & Ulla Schild (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1996): 142-65.

Jeyifo, Biodun. "Introduction" to Niyi Osundare's Songs of the Marketplace (Ibadan: New Horn, 1987): vii-xv.

Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

Osundare, Niyi. "Celebrating Soyinka," ANA Review (October-December 1996): 26.

———. The Eye of the Earth (Ibadan: Heinemann Nigeria, 1986).

———. "For Kunle Ajibade," Post Express (January 11, 1997): 15.

———. "The Longest Day," Newswatch (November 18, 1996): 44-45.

———. Midlife (Ibadan: Heinemann Frontline, 1993).

———. Moonsongs (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1988).

———. A Nib in the Pond (collected in 1983; Ifé Monograph on Literature and Culture, 4th series, no. 6; University of Ifé, 1986).

———. "Ode to anger," Post Express (January 11, 1997): 15.

———. Seize the Day and Other Poems for the Junior (Ibadan: Agbo Areo, 1995).

———. Selected Poems (London: Heinemann, 1992).

———. Songs of a Season (Ibadan: Heinemann Frontline series, 1990).

———. Songs of the Marketplace (1983; Ibadan: New Horn, 1987).

———. "Theatre of the Beaded Curtain: Nigerian Drama and the Kabiyesi Syndrome," Okike 27-28 (March 1988): 99-113.

———. Village Voices (Ibadan: Evans Nigeria, 1984).

———. Waiting Laughters (Lagos & Oxford: Malthouse Press, 1990).

Saro-Wiwa, Ken. "In Nigeria the pen is still mightier than the sword," Guardian Weekly (May 28, 1995): 2.

Soyinka, Wole. Unlimited Liability Company, featuring Tunji Oyelana and his Benders; music & lyrics by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria: Ewuro, 1983). Gramophone record.

Tanure Ojaide (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Ojaide, Tanure. "Niyi Osundare and His Poetic Choices." In The People's Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare, edited by Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah, pp. 17-26. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003.

[In the following essay, Ojaide explores Osundare's responses to various influences in his poetry.]

Niyi Osundare has published a body of poems, which deserves serious study, over the past two decades that have acquired a pattern of what he does and does not do. The poet's Yoruba background, his university education, and the Zeitgeist and Volkgist of the late 1960s through the 1970s in particular, combine with other factors to shape the direction of his poetic explorations. It is in light of these factors that I intend to examine his poetic choices and how these choices impact on his work. To the poet, many poetic choices are made available, depending on one's interests and objectives. Some of these aims affect thematic and aesthetic considerations. Like an explorer, the poet's interests determine the choices of what to experience. With Osundare, some choices appear forced upon him by conditions of the time, as others arise from personal options and considerations. Thus he is influenced at certain times to "imitate" and at other times to react against. Admiring or disliking somebody or something elicits various responses, which can be seen as aspects of influence. For example, if admiring the later poetry of Christopher Okigbo makes Osundare musical, and if disliking Wole Soyinka's obscure and difficult poetry in Idanre makes him write what he considers to be accessible to the generality of poetry readers, there is a strong influence of both writers. Like every artist in one way or the other, Osundare makes such choices that he feels will meet the demands of fulfilling his poetic role and expectations.

A prime molder of Osundare as a poet is the education he received at the University of Ibadan from 1969 to 1972. It is not that the other universities he attended much later for graduate studies, such as Leeds and York, did not influence him, but his formative years as a poet were spent at Ibadan. Having the personal experience at the University of Ibadan at about the same time as him and knowing Osundare as a fellow student in the same English department, I know that the university curriculum and student activities of the time have had a lasting impact on him. In the English department, we had started to read African literature primarily side by side with British literature. There were courses in African literature, such as modern African poetry taught by Dan Izevbaye, modern African drama taught by Oyin Ogunba, and modern African fiction taught by Theo Vincent. These modern African literature courses were taught along with modernist poets, like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats, courses on Shakespeare, metaphysical poets, and other areas and periods of English literature.

There was a strong interest in modern African poetry that was written by J. P. Clark Bekederemo, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka, among others who did not have the advantage we enjoyed of reading African literature. I can recollect in lecture halls, tutorials, and the creative writing club that there were heated discussions about these three Nigerian poets. Most of us seem to have chosen models from among them. Okigbo's untimely death in the war gave a great boost to the popularity of his poetry among young students of English. Soyinka's detention during the war also made him very popular among us. Niyi Osundare, no doubt, was part of this group who was fascinated by the poetic persona cut by Okigbo, the musicality, and word play of his po- etry. One can adduce Osundare's interest in poetic musicality, in the forms of chant-like rhythms and the use of figures of sound—especially alliterations, to this Okigboesque disposition of most of us "budding" undergraduate poets at the University of Ibadan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Okigbo's last poems, "Path of Thunder: Poems prophesying War" and the experiments, such as his elegiac homage to W. B. Yeats, were familiar reading materials among undergraduates of English then. What could be a stronger echo of Okigbo's "The General is up … the General is up … commandments … / the General is up the General is up the General is up—" than Osundare's "The general is up, up, up / The general is up …" in Moonsongs ? (Okigbo, 69 and Selected Poems, 68).

The use of incantation rhythms, alliterative sounds, and word play has become part of Osundare's poetic signature. The "Eye of the Earth" best illustrates this aspect of Osundare's poetic choice. Here is "Earth" :

Temporary basement

and lasting roof
 

first clayey coyness

and last alluvial joy
 

breadbasket

and compost bed
 

rocks and rivers

muds and mountains
 

silence of the twilight sea

echoes of the noonsome tide
 

milk of mellowing moon

fire of tropical hearth
 

spouse of the roving sky

virgin of a thousand offsprings
 

Ogeere amokoyeri
 

          (p. 1).

In using incantation rhythms, Osundare balances one line against another as each couplet further reinforces the previous one. He also uses oriki rhythms in Moonsongs. While later I will talk of Osundare choosing simplicity over difficulty and obscurity, as in Soyinka's Idanre, this use of Yoruba poetic models has been attempted earlier by Wole Soyinka in poems like "Koko Oloro" in Idanre and "Muhammad Ali at the Ringside, 1985" in Mandela's Earth. Here, both poets share experiences of poetic forms of their native culture.

Closely related to the poetic infatuation with Okigbo's musicality and play on words is a certain resistance to obscurity and difficulty of African poetry as in Soyinka's Idanre phase. Many young Nigerian poets of the early 1970s might agree with some of the points made by Chinweizu in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature about the euromodernist excesses of modern African poetry even though criticisms were made. In the English department of the University of Ibadan, during the period of Osundare's undergraduate program, lecturers and students had wondered what Soyinka meant in many of the poems—especially the title poem. Most of us left the classroom to the creative writing club and carried with us, from one place to the other, arguments as to what poetry should be. As much as we respected Wole Soyinka to the point of reverence, many of us did not want to write poetry in his manner. As I said earlier, the model was usually Okigbo and sometimes J. P. Clark-Bekederemo. A "budding" dramatist like Shadrack Agbagbarha might have had a better inclination to Soyinka's drama, but plays like A Dance of the Forests and The Road might not have endeared to some of us because of their perceived difficulty.

The obvious reaction to the euro-modernist aspects of modern African poetry, as in Soyinka's worst cases in Idanre, no doubt geared Osundare and many other undergraduate poets to write more comprehensible poetry, as in J. P. Clark Bekederemo's "A Reed in the Tide." One way Osundare has shown this aspect in his writing is the conscious choice of simplicity in collections, such as Village Voices, Songs of the Marketplace, and The Eye of the Earth. To Osundare, "[T]he simple word / is the shortest distance / between two minds" (Selected Poems, 3). In fact, his "Poetry Is" can be seen as a poetic manifesto of the younger generation of Nigerian poets of the early 1970s and as an indirect jibe at Soyinka's type of poetry. Among my coevals at Ibadan, including Osundare, the deep respect that extends to reverence for Soyinka did not endear many of us too much with his Idanre phase of poetry. Osundare's poetic choice at the beginning of his poetic career was for poetry that communicates directly. To him,

"Poetry is

not the esoteric whisper

of an excluding tongue

not a claptrap

for a wondering audience

not a learned quiz

entombed in Grecoroman lore
 

Poetry is

a lifespring

which gathers timbre

the more throats it plucks

harbinger of action

the more minds it stirs
 

Poetry is

the hawker's ditty

the eloquence of the gong

the lyric of the marketplace

the luminous ray

on the grass's morning dew
 

Poetry is

what the soft wind

musics to the dancing leaf

what the sole tells the dusty path

what the bee hums to the alluring nectar

what rainfall croons to the lowering eaves
 

Poetry is

no oracle's kernel

for a sole philosopher's stone
 

Poetry

is

man

meaning

to

man
 

          (Songs of the Marketplace,   4).

World politics of the Cold War era, diverse implications for Africa, non alignment, and Marxism also helped to shape Osundare's poetic direction. Osundare's days at Ibadan involved radicalized student union politics. There were frequent demonstrations against policies of European or North American governments that ran contrary to African interests. Students were bussed to Lagos to demonstrate when Portuguese mercenaries invaded Guinea Bissau. Most students seem to have aligned on the part of revolution, no matter how well they understood its implications. This infatuation with revolution was manifested in student union politics in 1970 when Osinowo ran for the secretarial position, which he won by distributing posters emblazoned with "Osinowo, Revolution." I believe most of us voted for him because he stood for revolution. The death of Kunle Adepoju in a student demonstration in 1971 was perhaps the apogee of this student radicalism against their administrators and anti-African interests.

Osundare imbibed many Marxist ideas, and in fact, he declared himself a Marxist in the 1970s and early 1980s. Although he declared himself a Marxist, Osundare was not an ideologue for all its implications like Biodun Jeyifo, Tunde Fatoba, and Festus Iyayi. In any case, his proletarian ideas form part of the bedrock of Village Voices, Songs of the Marketplace, and Moonsongs. Most of the poems in these collections are people/masses-oriented. "I Sing of Change" is illustrative of a classless society:

I sing

of the beauty of Athens

without its slaves
 

Of a world free

of kings and queens

and other remnants

of an arbitrary past
 

Of earth

with no

sharp north

or deep south

without blind curtains

or iron walls
 

                  . . . . .
 

I sing of a world reshaped
 

          (Songs of the Marketplace,   90).

Unlike the earlier generation, with poets like Clark-Bekederemo, Okigbo, and Soyinka, the major conflict now had nothing to do with African and Western influences but with class. This class conflict stared Osundare in the eye in two areas of Lagos:

Ikoyi

The moon here

is a laundered lawn

its grass the softness of infant fluff;

silence grazes like a joyous lamb,

doors romp on lazy hinges

the ceiling is a sky

weighted down by chandeliers

Ajegunle

here the moon

is a jungle

sad like a forgotten beard

with tensioned climbers

and undergrowths of cancerous fury

cobras of anger spit in every brook

and nights are one long prowl

of swindled leopards
 

          (p. 73).

The contradictions of society, as expressed in Marxism, became more glaring after the energy crisis of the early 1970s and after the political corruption worsened the economic plight of the common people.

Osundare adopts a communal voice, rather than an individual voice, in many of his poems in Village Voices and Songs of the Marketplace. Osundare's poetry does not appear to be personal. It is rare for him to write about a personal experience or for him to be confessional. There are no poems about his relationships—no love poems, for instance. He distances himself from the personal, but he, nonetheless, still expresses himself. One would expect personal poems in Midlife, but there are none. It is not that every poet must write about his or her relationships, but I have not seen an Osundare love poem. Love poetry could oftentimes show much of the sensibility, passion, and humanity of a poet. Poets like Pablo Neruda and Odysseus Elytis in recent times have been involved and distanced in their poems. The choice should not be so much between being involved and being distanced, as in a relationship, but should involve being completely human. Thus, is the paradox that while he attempts to be a literary pop artist by using the communal voice and simple language, Osundare disengages from the personal, which coalesces into pop art, and shows much of one's humanity.

Consequent upon his Marxist infatuation and a materialist approach to life, Osundare rejects the primacy of myths and the kabiyesi syndrome of Yoruba dramatists like Soyinka and Femi Osofisan. He is very selective of his use of Yoruba folklore. Unlike Soyinka, associated with Ogun and Osofisan with Eshu, Osundare has so far avoided being tagged with any party of the Yoruba pantheon. So how Yoruba a poet is he as we can say of Yoruba being the essence of Wole Soyinka and to a large extent of Osofisan? These two are more dramatists than poets, but still there is overwhelming presence of Yoruba divinity in their works. Osundare avoids the company of gods in his poetry.

But I am not saying Osundare is not a Yoruba writer. His choices are informed by ideological and political considerations, as he wants to be seen as ranging on the side of the people—as down-to-earth. Here and there are elements of Yoruba folklore, but not the myths that form the backcloth of Soyinka's and Osofisan's writings. In The Eye of the Earth, for instance, Osundare talks of "the one that shaves his head with the hoe." In Moonsongs, he no doubt employs the image of the moon of his youth as revealed in Yoruba mythology: "The moon pounds her yam / in the apron of the night" (Moonsongs, 1988: 29). There appears to be a growing use of materials from Yoruba folklore but not from the pantheon. Waiting Laughters 's strength comes from the use of Yoruba axioms, proverbs, and myths:

I have not told a bulbous tale

in the presence of asopa
 

I have not shouted "Nine!"

In the backyard of the one with a missing finger
 

          (p. 70).

"Asopa" is one with swollen scrotum.

And yet Osundare models some of his poems on oriki rhythms as "Earth," in The Eye of the Earth, quoted in full earlier and other poems in Moonsongs. His musicality is a blending of alliterative sounds and Yoruba rhythmic patterns—ijala and oriki.

Osundare's choice of certain figures of speech and sound is also very significant on the nature of his poetic style. The copious use of metaphors, personifications, epithets, and alliterations give a certain robust singsong identity to his poetry. In Moonsongs, "The moon this night is an infinity of smiles" (p. 43). Furthermore, he addresses the moon:

Oh moon, matron, master, eternal maiden

The bounce of your bosm

The miracle of your cheeks

Your smile which ripens the forests

Your frown which wrinkles the dusk

The youth of your age

The age of your youth …
 

          (Selected Poems,   55).

Metaphors and personifications make poetry not only exude sensuous delight but also concreteness. Here, Osundare sidetracks the weaker similes for stronger metaphors and personifications that give vitality to the poet's style.

Osundare has many poetic choices regarding style. In "Forest Echoes,"

Palm-bound, scalpel-toothed,

the squirrel pierces the tasty iris

of stubborn nuts;

adzeman of the forest,

those who marvel the canine fire

in your mouth,

let them seek refuge in the fluffy grace

of your restless tail
 

          (Eye of the Earth,   8).

In many other poems, epithets appear in alliterative clusters, such as "A bevy of birds" and "A barrack of beasts." Here, Osundare appears to have been influenced by the popular trio of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka, whose poetry relished metaphors, epithets, assonances, alliterations, and hyphenated words.

One of the controversial aspects of the "new African poetry" is the accusation that it pays too much attention to content at the expense of form. The critic, Ken Goodwin, has written about this particular aspect. With too many African writers, the didactic side seems to have been more emphasized at the expense of the craft. While it favors meaning, the African oral tradition does not neglect craft. This modern African literature of engagement was carried to its limits in the 1970s and 1980s during the Marxist phase. At the same time, there was a writer, like the francophone Labou Tansi who reacted in the opposite direction. For Tansi, according to Jonathan Ngarte, "[T]he emphasis now had to be put not on writing only in order to say something but rather on writing as a mode of invention, as a way of writing oneself into being with words that are so many pieces of one's own flesh; for him there can be no other aesthetic or thematic approach in a world in which mankind seems determined to kill life" (p. 132). Thus, there appears to be a binary attitude, as if African literature has to emphasize either themes or aesthetics.

It is here that Osundare stands out as bridging this unnecessary gap between "saying something" and "writing as a mode of invention." He says a lot in his work in a very artistic way. What could be more thematically engaging than "The Eyes of the Earth?" And yet the poem is aesthetically fulfilling. Osundare's choice, therefore, is to synthesize aspects of themes and form.

So far in his poetic career, Niyi Osundare has made many poetic choices that have given a certain character and identity to his poetry. There is no doubt that his being a Yoruba, the socio-political atmosphere of his years of adulthood, and his training in the English department at the University of Ibadan influenced him to take mod- els and reject some artistic directions. His simple, people-oriented poetry, his musicality, his rejection of Yoruba pantheon for a Marxist materialist stance, his conscious attention to craft, and his lack of very personal, confessional poetry are results of his poetic choices. These choices have not just assigned him an identity, but these choices have also given poetic strength to his poetic opus.

References

Clark-Bekederemo, John Pepper. A Reed in the Tide. London: Longman, 1965.

———. Casualties. London: Longman, 1970.

Ngate, Jonathan. Francophone African Fiction: Reading a Literary Tradition. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988.

Okigbo, Christopher. Labyrinths. London: Heinemann, 1971.

Ojaide, Tanure. Poetic Imagination in Black Africa: Essays on African Poetry. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1996.

Osofisan, Femi. The Oriki of a Grasshopper and Other Plays. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1995.

Osundare, Niyi. Songs of the Marketplace. Ibadan: New Horn, 1983.

———. Village Voices. Ibadan: Evans, 1984.

———. The Eye of the Earth. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1986.

———. Moonsongs. Ibadan: Spectrum, 1988.

———. Waiting Laughters. Lagos: Malthouse, 1990.

———. Selected Poems. Oxford: Heinemann, 1992.

———. Midlife. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1993.

Soyinka, Wole. Idanre and other Poems. London: Methuen, 1967.

Additional coverage of Osundare's life and career is available in the following sources published by Gale: African Writers; Black Writers, Ed. 3; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 176; Contemporary Poets, Ed. 7; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 157; and Literature Resource Center.