Abstract
The symbiotic relationship between literature and history is most visible in the writer’s deployment of his or her art to document experiences of the past and their impacts on the feelings and well-being of his or her people in the periods represented in the work(s). This article explores the historical content and significance of Tanure Ojaide’s The Endless Song from a new historical perspective. Most studies on Ojaide’s poetry often focus on his critique of bad leadership and his denunciation of exploitation and pillaging of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region with little attention paid to his poems as history in verse form. This article therefore contributes to criticism on the interface between literature and history. This study further highlights significant motifs in Nigeria’s history in the periods documented in The Endless Song and analyses the traumatic impacts of the events on the well-being of Nigeria and her people. These are aimed at showing that Ojaide’s The Endless Song is more than an outcry against the plundering of the Niger Delta region; it represents the spatiotemporal record of Nigeria’s turbulent history.
Highlights
In contemporary criticism on Nigerian literature, Ojaide is often categorized as a Niger Delta poet and activist in the mold of Ken Saro-Wiwa,1 and his poetry nearly always appraised from the perspective of his advocacy for the Niger Delta struggle and social reforms in society at large
This article advances the view that Ojaide is a historical poet whose works, using the example of his poetry collection, The Endless Song (Ojaide, 1989), capture succinctly Nigeria’s sociopolitical and cultural history and the national trauma it has engendered
In “The Vision” which opens the second part of the volume, Ojaide directs his criticism at African tyrants and prophesizes on the present and future of Nigeria
Summary
In contemporary criticism on Nigerian literature, Ojaide is often categorized as a Niger Delta poet and activist in the mold of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and his poetry nearly always appraised from the perspective of his advocacy for the Niger Delta struggle and social reforms in society at large. The Endless Song is viewed in this article as a poetry collection that is more than a verbal object that the poet deploys to protest against the state of affairs in Nigeria; it is a cocktail of various human experiences which constitute historical moments etched in rhyme and the poet’s interpretation of the events. The implication of this for this study is that the question of objectivity on the part of the poet does not arise as the New Historical critic regards all histories as subjective narratives influenced by circumstances of the period including writers’ ideologies and cultural prejudices. Part 4—Lessons— is an assessment of the situation after he has appraised the sociopolitical and historical conditions in Nigeria, and Part 5—Clearing—highlights the lessons to be learnt and draws analogies between the present and the past to chart a more auspicious path for the future
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