1,720,962 research outputs found
“Stubborn Beauty”: Africadian Women and Black Consciousness in George Elliott Clarke’s Where Beauty Survived
No full textIndividualism and memory: Robert Frost and Tanure Ojaide
Full text linkThis article examines individualism and memory in Robert Frost's A boy's will (1913) and Tanure Ojaide's The beauty I have seen (2010). The paper adopts existentialism as a critical approach. Previous studies on these poets, especially Ojaide, have neglected the individualistic nature of their poetry and stereotyped the poets. This article, thus, brings a new approach to the critical debates and scholarship on these poets. The aim of the article is to show the individualistic and existentialist nature of the poetry of Frost and Ojaide. In the analysis, individualism is examined at the level of form and content; starting with the use of the lyric form and poet-persona inclusion in the poems to the thematisation of gloom and the importance of memory, among others. The paper shows that, truly, these poets are largely individualistic in outlook, and they have expressed existentialist philosophy in their poetry
“Stubborn Beauty”: Africadian Women and Black Consciousness in George Elliott Clarke’s Where Beauty Survived
Full text linkJahan Ramazani. Poetry in a Global Age
No full textWorld literature studies have disproportionately focused on fiction, and poetry is the least theorized form. Jahan Ramazani’s book inserts poetry into the crucial discourse of globalization in his examination of works from different periods and contexts. In his introduction, Ramazani theorizes what he frames as “polytemporal and polyspatial poetics,” and he draws from the premise that “the making of a poem, as of a pencil, amalgamates, reshapes, and compresses materials that span large swaths of the globe” (1). His thesis is that poetry does not exist as in a void and is a product of influences and forms that traverse space and time. This point is necessary for positioning poetry on the same pedestal as the novel in terms of its transnational mobility. Ramazani makes a case for a dual understanding of poetry’s place in the globe; on the one hand, he submits that poems “belong to their immediate historical moment,” and on the other hand, he acknowledges the “transnational skeins” of poetry. These transnational influences manifest in received tropes, forms, genres, rhythms, and even words (3-4)
Niger Delta Subaltern Agency and Resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky
No full textThis article applies the theoretical positions of some scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective to the reading of poetry by Niger Delta writers. I argue that the Niger Delta people are subaltern in the Nigerian national space due to their disadvantaged sociopolitical position as well as the resource conflict that has left the region at the mercy of the state and its agents. With insights from the writings of Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Partha Chatterjee, I read the subaltern themes of agency and resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky. In adopting this framework, I draw from Guha’s original theorisation of peasant insurgency and the structure of power as well as later theorisations of relational power discourse and subaltern agency. My close reading of selected poems reveals the figure of the Niger Delta subaltern as the architect of their own destiny and whose resistance haunts the dominant discourse of the nation. The notions of insurgency, the nation and its fragments, failed revolutions, and relational power discourse are deployed as hermeneutical strategies. My adoption of this theoretical approach recovers its insights for the reading of literary works by writers from minority groups
Negotiating Home in the Long Poem: Amatoritsero Ede’s Transpatiality
Full text linkIn this paper, I argue that Amatoritsero Ede uses the long poem to negotiate the idea of home in an African diasporic context. As a form that carries the implications of length, time, and space, the long poem has been used by poets to interrogate the way we structure the world and to deconstruct grand narratives. The figure of the Black immigrant is one that destabilizes grand narratives of nationalism. This makes the form important in its capacity to ask important questions about nation and tradition even as it transgresses them. As a writer from the Niger Delta, a marginal location in Nigeria, and one who has travelled widely and called many places home, Ede writes poetry that speaks to his inhabitation of multiple spaces and produces a sort of ‘transpatiality’. This paper argues that in Ede’s Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children (2009) and Teardrops on the Weser (2021), the long poem form and its ability to negotiate belonging, home, identity, and the complex edge habitats that some diasporic subjects inhabit allows us to better understand and conceptualize Ede’s ‘transpatial poetics’ and the way diasporic writers make and negotiate home. I begin by exploring critical responses to Ede’s poetry to foreground the importance of form and then proceed to unpack the concept of home in the context of the new African diaspora and Afropolitanism. Ultimately, I read Ede’s long poems formally and thematically in terms of the way they represent and meditate on the complex concept of home
Rewriting The Caribbean Experience In Homerian Style: A Study Of Themes, Style And Vision In Derek Walcott's Omeros
Full text linkThis study investigates the themes that bother upon the Caribbean experience in Derek Walcott's Omeros. A brief introduction to the poetry of Derek Walcott is given before attempts are made at rendering some of the themes of the work such as identity, slavery/colonialism, rootlessness, reconciliation, and migration. These themes are discussed with relevant extracts from the poem. It is realised that the poem is a reenactment of the total Caribbean experience in all its totality. However, the study goes further to underscore the peculiar Homerian style of the poem. The style is discussed with regards to the extant epics of Homer and Dante and some of the stylistic indicators discovered include the use of the epic genre itself, the use of the terza rima, statement of theme, the use of symbolism and imagery and, of course, the language of the poem. These stylistic devices are used to underscore the importance of the poem in the Caribbean literary canon. Finally, Derek's Walcott's ultimate vision of reconciliation is briefly examined in this work. Findings show that this poem is Derek Walcott's seminal masterpiece on reconciliation for the Caribbean people.Keywords: Derek Walcott, Caribbean, Homerian, Themes, Techniqu
Satirical forms and strategies in Joe Ushie’s Popular Stand and Rome Aboh’s A Torrent of Terror
Full text linkThe influence of socio-political and economic realities continues to flock the literary sphere of Nigerian literature. In the genre of poetry, a park of social and political realities have always been the burden of early poets like Wole Soyinka, Tanure Ojaide, Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, Ezenwa Ohaeto, J.P Clark, Christopher Okigbo, among others, all in the attempt to portray the disillusioned status quo of the country as a result of bad governance. In a similar vein, contemporary poets like Musa Idris, Peter Onwundinjo, G‘Ebinyo Ogbowei, Kalu Uka, Gbemisola Adeoti, Ogaga Ifowodo, among others, alongside the early poets still feature the stark and dark, diseased and ill circumstances that keep the minds of Nigerians disillusioned. However, this paper investigates the satirical strategies and forms (Horatian and Juvenalian) in Joe Ushie‘s Popular Stand and Rome Aboh‘s A Torrent of Terror. Using New Historicism as a theoretical framework, the analysis attempts to show how the various types of satire and sub-satirical devices are used to question regurgitating socio-political aches in recent times. Furthermore, Ushie and Aboh are substantiated as satirists as their use of pun, ridicule, sarcasm, farce, innuendo, irony, travesty and other satirical tools help the quest for change amidst the prevailing upheavals hindering national growth and development in Nigeria
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