In the Centre of the Cosmos: Sacred Spacetime in Niyi Osundare’s ‘A Song for Olosunta’

Abstract

Time and nature are two intertwined concepts. They are so inseparable that there is a temporal index to every spatial event and vice versa. Nothing happens in a space except at a time; neither does anything happen at a time except in a space. For the Nigerian poet, Niyi Osundare, time and space occupy a prominent place in his oeuvre, but critics tend to privilege one and ignore the other in their analyses of his poetry. Osundare also frequently poetizes animist deities of Ikere-Ekiti, the town in Southwest Nigeria where he was born and raised. He uses his poetry as a medium to worship the deities. This paper is a study of time and nature in relation to an animist god of Ikere-Ekiti. It fuses ecocriticism and temporal analysis to shed light on ‘A Song for Olosunta,’ a panegyric which evokes an annual festival in honour of Olosunta, a lithic god worshipped by Osundare and his fellow Ikere-Ekiti animists. Against the background of the annual festival inscribed in the poem, I examine the god as an ecological and temporal icon, highlighting the differences between his shrine and its surroundings; and between his timescape and the timescape outside the shrine.