In this article I appraise the aesthetic and ideological implications of the use of the topical as source material for literary creation, with special focus on poetry. I underscore how the shared ...knowledge between the writer and the audience influences the craft of poetry and is equally crucial for the reception of a work of art. I link postcolonial writers’ fixation on the topical to Edward Said’s influential revaluation of Western historiography and privileging of the political in literary scholarship. I demonstrate my thesis primarily by examining selected poems from the anthology World on the Brinks: An Anthology of Covid-19 Pandemic (2020) as an instance of literary responsiveness to a topical global experience. I highlight and appraise the poets’ obvious allusions to, replications, appropriations, and interrogations of well documented discourses on the Covid-19 pandemic as a contestation of imperialistic theories and assumptions, and show how the topical and its discourses fundamentally influence the reception of the work of art. Focusing on the poets’ examination of the international politics of healthcare, and dispensing of palliatives, I interrogate the politics of the notion of common humanity vaunted in the wake of the pandemic’s exposure of the intangibility of territorial borders. In this article I equally reflect on the mechanisms of the survival and transformation of the topical in poetry.
Tanure Ojaide’s poetry has been discussed primarily with focus on his social activism, with occasional attention paid to his deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo poetry. However, a ...career-long preoccupation which hitherto has hardly received any critical attention is the poet’s presiding use of his poetry as metacommentary on the craft and purpose of his art. While privileging his 2010 collection The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy, this article examines selections from the body of Ojaide’s self-reflexive poetry in which he poetizes the role of the poet as an instance of the poet’s articulation of his poetics. It appraises the focal poems’ status as metacriticism by underscoring their abiding correspondence with Ojaide’s vision of poetry as expressed in interviews and scholarly writings, and by examining the aesthetic implications of his firm anchorage of his work in the tradition of indigenous African poetry.
The Nigerian writer Elnathan John (born 1982) has become a preeminent commentator on the complex human drama at the core of the experience of the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria. John is ...renowned for the caustic humour characteristic of his satirical treatment of virtually every facet of Nigerian life, as his Be(com)ing Nigerian: A Guide (2019) magnificently illustrates. In the corpus of his fictional accounts of Boko Haram insurgency (as epitomized in his debut novel Born on a Tuesday 2015) he has been preoccupied with the necessity for a nuanced understanding of the Boko Haram phenomenon and underscoring a usually neglected or at least deemphasized human dimension at the heart of that experience. In this interview, John complicates a simplistic account of ostensible doctrinal violence by painting a telling backdrop of a dysfunctional postcolonial Nigerian state that blights the wellspring of responsible creative social life, and more crucially impoverishes and exploits religion and politics, ideally meant to foster communal rather than egotistical aspirations, by advancing other interpretations of these social constructs that gratify human greed and the will to power.
This article appraises the seminal contribution of the renowned African scholar of Igbo extraction M. J. C. Echeruo in the field of Igbo folk drama. It attempts a close evaluative examination of his ...three focal articles on that subject: "The Dramatic limits of Igbo Ritual" (1971), "Mimesis and Dianoia in Igbo Folk Festivals" (1975), and "Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode" (1994), in addition to the unpublished but equally insightful 1976 conference paper, "Drama in Africa." It especially highlights the developments in Echeruo's thinking between the first article, on the one hand, and the later three, on the other. It equally appraises the responses of other prominent Igbo scholars to Echeruo's work and the relevance of that work to contemporary Igbo dramatists.
The reception of the work of the Nigerian writer Elnathan John has been enthusiastic. His work has found an outlet in Per Contra, ZAM Magazine, Hazlitt, Evergreen Review, The Economist, The Guardian, ...and The Chimurenga Chronic. John read sections of his then yet unpublished first novel Born on a Tuesday to enthralled audiences in Abuja, Nigeria's capital city; and on its publication, the novel has easily found its way into the reading list of many departments of English and Literary Studies in universities in Nigeria. John's work has equally elicited a warm reception from the judges of many literary prizes. Twice shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing, (in 2013 for the short story "Bayan Layi" and again in 2015 for the short story "Flying") John was runner up for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2016 for his first novel, Born on a Tuesday, and winner of a Betty Trask Award for the same novel in 2017. In this interview held at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany on 16 December 2019, John speaks on his recently published satire Be(coming) Nigerian: A Guide, the role of literary prizes, his future work, among many other issues of critical interest.
Established in 2004 by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG), the Nigeria Prize for Literature is in its sixteenth year of administration. Currently valued at $100,000, its material reward is ...phenomenal in the Nigerian economy, with the exchange rate outrageously in favor of the dollar. even more crucially, the prize has risen in its symbolic value from its initial focus on revamping the quality of publishing in the country to become arguably the most powerful cultural institution for validating a Nigerian/african view on artistic excellence. examining primarily archival documents relating to the prize from its inauguration, I appraise the processes of its articulation and substantiation of its vision of “excellence and craftsmanship” in Nigerian literature as well as its procedures of acquiring, accumulating, and bestowing prestige and remark on public reception of these as well as its relative international anonymity; I finally underscore its distinctive vision of Nigerian literature by locating it in the circuit of comparable prizes, especially the Caine Prize.
The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) inaugurated on June 27, 1981 at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, by Chinua Achebe celebrated her thirty-fifth anniversary in 2016. The occasion called for ...a reflection on the Nigerian literary tradition and on the burdens of current Nigerian writing. It also demanded an appraisal of the roles of the ANA as a body of writers in the formalization or even canonization of the literary tradition in Nigeria in the context of the objectives of the founding fathers of the association. Achebe's inauguration speech is thus examined as a foundational text on the roles of the writer and those of a body of writers; its chastened prophetic vision of burgeoning fanaticism in Nigeria is also drawn attention to in the current context of religious fundamentalism in the country.
This article appraises the seminal contribution of the renowned African scholar of Igbo extraction M. J. C. Echeruo in the field of Igbo folk drama. It attempts a close evaluative examination of his ...three focal articles on that subject: “The Dramatic Limits of Igbo Ritual” (1971), “Mimesis and Dianoia in Igbo Folk Festivals” (1975), and “Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode” (1994), in addition to the unpublished but equally insightful 1976 conference paper, “Drama in Africa.” It especially highlights the developments in Echeruo's thinking between the first article, on the one hand, and the later three, on the other. It equally appraises the responses of other prominent Igbo scholars to Echeruo's work and the relevance of that work to contemporary Igbo dramatists.
The paradigmatic antagonistic relationship between the Nigerian poet and the despot in his guise as a military ruler has often been examined in terms of a hegemonic contestation of power between ...unequal rivals. The military state’s typical response to the poet’s “truth” with the display of excessive might, often involving the emblematic battering of the poet’s tongue by the imposition of silence even in its eternal form of death, entrenches the notion of a powerful antagonist pitted against a weak opponent who nonetheless incarnates the spirit of the masses. A close reading of anti-military Nigerian poetry, however, underscores that the situation was replete with paradoxes: the inability of power to ignore apparent powerlessness; the ultimate triumph of powerlessness over power; and the fascinating replication in the counter-discourse of the (discursive) strategies of the dominant hegemony it battles against. This study highlights these trends in contemporary Nigerian poetry inspired by military despotism by paying particular attention to the work of the “third generation” of Nigerian poets.
