Ogaga Ifowodo’s Poetics of Dissent: Reflexive Subversions of Petro-Imperialism in The Oil Lamp

Abstract

Poet Ogaga Ifowodo delivers scathing criticisms of oil hegemony in Nigeria in his 2005 book, The Oil Lamp, and these criticisms underscore the destabilizing threat that petro-politics pose to the nation itself. This essay examines Ifowodo’s indictments of petro-imperialism in Nigeria, and I also look closely at his self-aware subversions of the nation’s ruling order. Much of the scholarship on The Oil Lamp builds on developments in postcolonial ecocriticism, and scholars often praise the activist energies in Ifowodo’s poetry. However, these studies overlook how The Oil Lamp also conveys critical awareness of the constraints of creative expression as a force of political change. In this inquiry, I investigate the poet’s meditations on the possibilities and the limitations of writing as counter-hegemonic strategy. This study offers a close reading of the poems, which I argue is essential both to appreciating Ifowodo’s poetics and to grasping his claims about dissident writing.