Abstract
This article studies Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth (1986) as a homecoming journey that reveals the traveller’s complex relationship with time and place. In this journey, the poet revisits distinguished symbolic places that stand for significantly nourishing and spiritual values for his people, and establishes a dialogue between the past and present of these places in order to question the recent economic and political changes that have led to the deterioration and degradation of the journey’s destinations. At each destination, the poet holds a comparison between what has been and what lies before him, recalling the images that are stored in his memory of the past of these places. This act of recollection is not used as an escapist nostalgia that romanticizes the past in order to present a self-complacent image. Rather, it used as a means of presenting a forward-looking vision that derives inspiration from a past that can be exploited in reminding the poet and his people of what has been inflicted upon earth and the country so that they can regenerate their land and their way of life. Throughout his journey, the poet has a high sense of the different images and effects of time on place and his own conceptualization of the land and its landmarks.
Highlights
Niyi Osundare (1947-) belongs to the second generation of Nigerian poets whose poetry is “marked by stylistic accessibility” (Balogun, 2004, p. 187)
No critical study has dealt with this collection as a homecoming journey that uses memory as a confluence that merges time and place in revisiting the poet’s spatiotemporal past
The purpose of this study is to explore the connection of the poet’s memory and historical landscape knowledge with his poetically ritualistic homecoming journey that is largely undertaken in the first programmatic movement of the collection and furthered throughout its other movements
Summary
Niyi Osundare (1947-) belongs to the second generation of Nigerian poets whose poetry is “marked by stylistic accessibility” (Balogun, 2004, p. 187). The poet’s reference to the rural and native calendar of seasons, not the mathematical one of years and months, serves three purposes: first, he sticks to his rural worldview which can be regarded here as an attribute of his identity; second, it retrospectively reflects on the images of time highlighted earlier in the poem, implying that the eternal time of the forest where the clock is “unhanded” was still active until the “last season;” third, the season is a season of vegetation, but of animal life renewal as well Using words such as “sumptuous,” “striptease,” “gleaming,” and “clapping” suggests that this season represents a carnival where fauna and flora celebrate the renewal associated with the turn of seasons. He asks to be dismounted so that he can “flow” safely back to the present, strengthened by the life-supporting memories of this enlivened past
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