ORAL DISTILLATES AND POSTCOLONIAL TEMPER IN ADEMOLA DASYLVA’S SONGS OF ODAMOLUGBE

Abstract

This paper engages the self-validating domain of orality as a valuable and potent field in the depiction of postcolonial Africa, in particular Nigeria. The paper accounts for orality as the authentic core of the mode of self-assertion, continued self-existence and the consistent (re)validation of how traditional societies structured their worldviews and cultural aesthetics. It argues that African writers still utilise the aesthetic provisions that their oral backcloth and oral past provide in the identification, (re)appraisal and the representation of the postcolonial situation in Africa. Engaging Ademola Dasylva’s Songs of Odamolugbe as primary text and data, the paper examines and explores features of Yoruba oral poetry and allied aggregates that the Yoruba traditional culture offers. This is clearly realized and apprehended in the crafting of the collection of poems and the overarching thematic foci and direction. These representations are captured within two extremes. Employing insights from postcolonial literary theory in its critique of the primary text, the paper situates the enervating frustrations, collapse of industry, economic inanities, atmosphere of fear, tensions, widespread underdevelopment, neocolonial excesses, prevalent hunger, deep-seated corruption and a general apathy to life and living as daily experienced in postcolonial Africa and Nigeria. As part of its finding, the paper attests that Dasylva’s Songs of Odamolugbe relishes a completed precolonial past where African communities maintained a communal cultural ownership of their existence and presided over their own affairs. It concludes that the poetry collection decries and rejects the morbid realities that characterize the postcolonial African experience.