Postmodern Doctrines and Poetic Vision in G’Ebinyo Ogbowei’s marsh boy & other poems

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores and queries the reliance on postmodernist doctrines that continue to flood the Nigerian cultural and intellectual spaces. Essentially, postmodernism undermines established religious, cultural and political metanarratives that guide the sense of morality, order and decorum that are characteristic of many African societies. To examine the infiltration of the postmodernist philosophy into the Nigerian ideological space, a significant place to begin is the country’s literary productions. Ebinyo Ogbowei’s marsh boy & other poems is a compelling commentary on the author’s appropriation of postmodern creeds to counter long-established metanarratives which have allegedly abetted the fractured political and economic climate of many countries. The poet adopts revolutionary aesthetics, intertextuality, eclecticism, nihilism and pessimism, pornography and playfulness and ruptures linguistic and grammatical conventions to affirm his philosophy of progressive emancipation through revolutionary, nihilistic, and subversive acts. In the end, his postmodernist strategies fail because they plunge his fictional society into deeper chaos and lack of finality and closure, while he embraces coital diversion as an escape hatch from the vagaries of life. This places a huge question mark on the viability of postmodern protocols, especially as it concerns the undermining of religious and cultural metanarratives that have so far provided humanity guidelines for social and political decorum.