The Futility of Waiting: A Receptionist Study of Tanure Ojaide’s “Waiting” and Isidore Diala’s “Waiting”

Abstract

This paper uses the Reader-response theory to investigate the futility of waiting as explored in “Waiting” by the two poets in their The Lure of Ash and The Beauty I Have Seen, respectively. It is a coincidence for two poets to pointedly dwell on the same title and subject matter. Isidore Diala and Tanure Ojaide are both second-generation Nigerian poets who witnessed the beginning of the fall of the Nigerian dream. The methodology used is qualitative as excerpts of the key poems and relevant works are cited and analyzed. The work is essentially literary as relevant aspects of literary criticism are deployed to buttress aspects of the paper. The findings of the study are hinged on the fact that the two poets of Ojaide and Diala coincidentally explore the metaphor of “waiting” in their poems of the same title to denounce the political inequalities in their country. The political class is presented as a set of hegemonists who exploit and subjugate the people. The two poems are revolutionary because of the revelation that waiting is futile, and is of the colour of ash. Indeed, waiting is ash, and ash is waiting, a pun stylistically deployed by Diala in his “Waiting.”