Old songs in a new flute: Theme, language and audience in Ezenwa-Ohaeto's poetry

Abstract

The post civil-war period in Nigeria has seen the coming, into the literary scene of the country, of many young aspirants crying out for their voices to be heard. One of such voices is EzenwaOhaeto, who has called himself a traveller with a song, a kind of troubadour) The civil war (1967-1970), in addition to forming a literary watershed between the serious Nigerian literary beginnings and the immediate present, has rightly been referred to as a rich source o f poetic harvest 2 because of not only the number o f works that have drawn from that experience but also because o f the continued and accelerating national socio-economic decay indirectly linked with that holocaust, and against which our playwrights, novelists and poets have all along been crying out. Credit for some of our fledged and fledgling weaverbirds' temerity and courage to be talkative, even into the muzzle of guns,