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The development of Niyi Osundare's poetry : a survey of themes and technique

1995; Indiana University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

1527-2044

Aderemi Bamikunle,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Niyi Osundare has published six books of poetry: Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984), A Nib in the Pond (1986), The Eye of the Earth (1986), Moonsongs (1988), and Waiting Laughters (1990). From the level of technical maturity, it is apparent that the poems of A Nib in the Pond were written earlier than the poems in his other books, for they are mostly occasional poems that do not hold together, as his poems in the other works do, by a central recurrent motif or a pervasive image or symbol. As do Osundare's early poems, the poems of A Nib in the Pond reflect the qualities of a learning stage, as this essay will demonstrate later. However, the themes that will preoccupy this poetic career are already present even at this stage: social and political corruption, maladministration and mismanagement, deprivations and oppression suffered by the masses, concern with Third World situations, and concern with poetic art and how it can serve to better his society. From Songs of the Marketplace one begins to see signs of poetic growth and maturity: thematic grouping of poems, recognizable patterns of images and symbols, patterned usage of materials from African traditional poetry and its prosody, particularly from Village Voice onwards. A distinctive Osundare poetic voice has emerged with recognizable language characteristics running through subsequent works. But each new work is a stage in the ongoing development of Osundare's poetry. Each collection builds upon the poetic experimentation of its predecessors and takes the experimentation a step further. This essay will examine closely the gradual development of Osundare's poetry by analyzing the themes and techniques of the sequence of his books. Osundare's poetic career begins with very explicit political poems, as we see in Songs of the Marketplace and Village Voices. From the earliest collection, a pattern is established that recurs in subsequent collections, particularly in A Nib in the Pond and The Eye of the Earth. One can easily subdivide the poems into those that probe Nigerian national issues and those that deal with the situation in other countries of the Third World or with the oppression of the Third World. Only in Village Voices is this pattern avoided as he focuses totally on Nigerian rural community life. There are hardly any personal poems dealing with the writer's own personal and private experiences in any of his collections of poetry. When he resorts to the nostalgic recall of youthful experiences as material for his poems in The Eye of the Earth, the focus is not on the self but on the communal Eden-like life that has since been dislocated by colonialism and the economic systems and institutions that developed from it: