Is There Life Besides “Coloniality?”: Metapoetics and the Second Level of Decoloniality in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry

Abstract

At the heart of Niyi Osundare’s metapoetic writing is a decolonial program that radically unsettles the autotelic conception of art in order to question the coloniality of poetry, language, episteme, nature, and being. Far from being an index of Bloomian anxiety, this is the poetry of ideas that has exerted the most profound influence on his literary imagination and to which he has returned in volume after volume. In this paper, I call this feature the second level of decoloniality in Osundare’s poetry and distinguish it from the first level in which the poet switches from English to Yorùbá, but retains English as his dominant language nonetheless. I argue that although Osundare decolonizes poetry and language at this first level (through code-alternation, metonymic gaps, Yorùbá choric chants, ideophones, and onomastic references), this is simply not enough to combat the coloniality that colonialism left in its wake, hence the need for the second level. At the second level, the poet draws on the critical affordances of metapoetic self-consciousness to not only further question the imperial universalism of colonial modernity, but to articulate what he himself recently theorizes as “differential aesthetics.”