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Niyi Osundare and the Materialist Vision: A Study of The Eye of the Earth

1997; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5070/f7252016650

2150-5802

Charles Bodunde,

Indian Economic and Social Development

Niyi Osundare, emerging as the most prominent poet of a new generation in Nigeria, has made an overwhelming contribution in a relatively short time.His most notable poetic works are Songs of the Market Place, Village Voices, Waiting Laughter, Mid/ife, The Eye of the Earth and Moonsongs.However, more than any of his texts, The Eye of the Earth encompasses all the material which lends itself to dialectical investigation.In this paper, The Eye of the Earth is used as the basis to explore the materialist vision in Osundare's poetry.Biodun Jeyifo's critical introduction to Songs of the Market Place reveals the dialectical vision as the very kernel of Osundare's poetry.Jeyifo locates Osundare' s position within the new poetic tradition as that which "constitutes a distinct revolution within the new poetic revolution."' He describes Osundare as "the most distinctive voice among our new poets"(p.xiv)because in his poetry, o ne encounters "both poetry of revolution and a revolution in poetry" (p.xiv).Jeyifo further argues that Osundare's poetry demonstrates the unique values of mature revolutionary poetry, for the social implication of his works is never obscured by mystifYing artistic techniques.His poetry, as Jeyifo explains, possesses the capacity to "agitate that dialectical space between accommodation and resistance in a given social order' (p.xiii).Emmanuel Ngara approaches Osundare' s poetry by abstracting ideas from the preface to The Eye of the Earth.The preface is often used by artists to exhibit their literary intentions and, indeed, their authorial ideology and embodies the grains of the artist' s vision, especially when it is written with the sort of energy exhibited by Osundare.Ngara proceeds to make a textual study aimed at extracting an ideological vision from The Eye of the Earth, a collection he 2