Communicating the popular in Niyi Osundare's “Soetry”: Moonsongs reconsidered

Abstract

Niyi Osundare is undoubtedly one of the finest of Nigeria's and Africa's poets, with several volumes to his name. Most of Osundare's creative works have been appreciated as the distinctively poetic work of an educated artist who received the western poetic traditions that he adopted for his Nigerian context. But Osundare's background is also distinctively influenced by his Yoruba tradition from which genres of the song, and myth have been mined and creatively reworked. In Moonsongs, poetry, myth and song coalesce to produce a popular genre of art that I describe here as “soetry”. The clear features of soetry are manifest in the poetry in the song and the song in the poetry. This may not be new to African folkloric genres but my concern in this paper is to unearth some of the meanings released at the moment of the transvaluation of “written” poetry rendered in the performed or perfomative song. I argue that both poetry and song constitute the popular genre of soetry. If Moonsongs is analysed using the theoretical richnesses of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives, the idea of soetry manifests the power to name, and mean multiple African realities in ways that approximate popular culture. This aspect of the popular is, in the case of Osundare's soetry, produced by the elite though the same popular resonates with the worldview of the ordinary Nigerian men and women.