Abstract

Recent Nigerian poetry in English seems to concern itself with the most pressing socio-political condition in Nigeria, especially the prolonged military despotism in the past decades whose consequences are still felt in the society. One of the strategies the poets use to dramatise and historicise the situation is the dialogic approach. Their poetry reveals a dialogue between the poet and the people, and between the poet and the despot. The poem that emerges from this act of dialoguing, it will be seen, is conditioned by how the poet perceives the personae with whom he dialogues, i.e. the dialogue between the poet and the people and the dialogue between the poet and the despot differ. The poem is also polyphonic, able to depict to a greater degree the social contradiction in an oppressed society. Using selected poems of younger Nigerian poets, I intend to show the process – and the possible effects – of this dialogisation in recent Nigerian poetry.

Highlights

  • Nigerian poetry in English which emerged during the socio-political turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s, this article argues, is dialogic

  • The lyric imagination, for the Nigerian poets, especially the ones who versify during what was seen as the intense militarisation of the Nigerian state, offers itself as medium of interpersonal exchange, a feature that makes the lyric poems they write fundamentally dialogic

  • As I have pointed out earlier, African poetics, oral or written, is dialogic, and these poets’ precursors wrote poems that could be considered dialogic, the successive dictatorships in Nigeria in the decades between the 1980s and 1990s, and the resultant severity of hardship and uncertainty of life impelled these poets to grow more dialogic in their imagination with the assumption that their poetry had the primary duty of intervention

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Summary

Introduction

Nigerian poetry in English which emerged during the socio-political turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s, this article argues, is dialogic. Abstract: Recent Nigerian poetry in English seems to concern itself with the most pressing socio-political condition in Nigeria, especially the prolonged military despotism in the past decades whose consequences are still felt in the society.

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