Oral Poetic Techniques as Decolonial Creative Strategies in Osundare’s The Word is an Egg

Abstract

Modern Nigerian poetry in English was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the writing of Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, and Christopher Okigbo. The trio, regarded as pioneers and the first generation of Nigerian poets, succeeded largely with their adoption of modernist techniques to convey African material. By the 1970s, their writing came under scrutiny with the call to decolonise African literature and, by extension, Nigerian poetry in English. In this article, I demonstrate how Niyi Osundare demystifies the form and language of Nigerian poetry in English by the creative deployment of oral techniques in selected poems. I argue that Osundare, as a Nigerian second-generation poet, decolonises and democratises modern Nigerian poetry by delinking from his predecessors’ Eurocentric conception of poetry. The article is in five parts. The first part provides an introduction, the second is a background review of the development of Nigerian poetry in English from which the research problem, purpose, and aim are identified. The third part is on the structure of The Word is an Egg. The fourth part analyses the oral poetic techniques employed by Osundare as decolonial creative strategies, and the fifth provides a concluding attestation of the transformative nature of Osundare’s poetic art.