Niyi Osundare Research Articles

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

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.

Trauma and Resilience in Osundare’s City Without People

The paper examines the representation of trauma in City Without People, the collection of poetry by Nigerian poet-scholar, Niyi Osundare. The critical lens of the study also focuses on how the poet employs poetry as a therapeutic means of working through the trauma engendered by the Hurricane Katrina experience in the United States of America. Assumptions from trauma theory serve as theoretical framework for the study. The research reveals that, contrary to the position held by some trauma theorists that traumatic experiences defy remembrance and are unspeakable, Osundare’s collection shows the possibility of remembering traumatic experiences and articulating them. Also, there is evidence that the postmemory of slavery connects with the collective trauma of the Katrina experience among the Black community. City Without People also demonstrates a quintessential instance of the deployment of expressive writing as scriptotherapy.

Domesticating the English Language in Niyi Osundare’s The Word Is an Egg

Niyi Osundare’s revolutionary poetics is rooted in his distinctive ability to maximise his bilingual linguistic repertoire to express Yoruba thoughts in English words. In this article, I analyse the creative and stylistic strategies that Osundare deploys to domesticate the English language using poems from his collection The Word Is an Egg (2000). I argue that Osundare uses his autonomy and agency as an African writer to present an alternative perspective on the politics of language in African literature while also meeting the decolonisation imperative of his day. He domesticates the English language by peppering it with Yoruba to create an “African English” or “Yoruba English” in his poetic composition. The article is in five parts. Initially, I situate Osundare as a poet within the Nigerian literary landscape and highlight the critical reception his radical development of Nigerian poetry in English received. A literature review focuses on the contentious language debate in African literature. The third part presents decolonisation theory as the theoretical framework, specifically highlighting language as an African resource for challenging the Western grip on poetry and the hegemony of the English language in African literature. In the fourth part, the domestication of the English language by Osundare, I discuss how he uses English and Yoruba to co-create an African English or Yoruba English in his poetic composition. I conclude by asserting that Osundare’s alternative perspective weakens Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s absolute perspective on language usage in African literature by highlighting the omission and inherent problems in the absolutisation of colonialism in decolonial discourse.

Stylo-linguistic analysis of structure in Niyi Osundare's poem “The Rainsong”

This study conducts a stylo-linguistic analysis of Niyi Osundare's poem "The Rainsong," examining the language, form, and structure used to convey meaning and impact. Through a detailed analysis of graphological, phonological, syntactic, and lexico-semantic features, the study reveals the poet's deliberate choices in crafting a powerful and impactful work of poetry. It highlights the use of repetition, personification, imagery, and defamiliarization to create a sense of urgency, hope, and optimism, demonstrating how the poet's use of language and form shapes our understanding of the world. Employing Halliday's Systemic Functional Language as its theoretical underpinning and adopting the methodology of close reading and text analysis, this study contributes to the field of literary analysis. It demonstrates the value of stylo- linguistic analysis in uncovering the intricacies of poetic language and informing teaching and learning practices to better appreciate the complexities of poetry.

Uso del enfoque histórico para el análisis literario en el contexto de enseñanza del inglés como lengua extranjera

This article presents an English as a Foreign Language lesson aimed at Venezuelan university students of International Studies. The purpose of the lesson is to guide students towards interpreting a literary text from a Historical Approach perspective. Theoretical principles are analyzed, and the central text is the poem Not My Business by Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare. The poem’s theme is considered relevant for the target population as it addresses abandonment and indifference in the face of social and political injustice. A lesson was implemented based on the poem, which not only facilitated language development and communicative competence but also promoted reflection on the consequences of apathy towards social issues. Thanks to an eclectic, student-centered approach, the selected text served as an example of how to narratively recount past events in a meaningful way, addressing a topic of notable relevance.

Like Animals Like Human Beings: An Ecocritical Metaphor Discourse of Leadership in Selected Poems of Niyi Osundare

Niyi Osundare extensively investigates the natural world, which is the habitat inhabited by nonhuman beings, in his poems. As a result, his poetry is referred to as eco-poetry. There have been a lot of studies of Niyi Osundare’s poetry that have focused on traditional aesthetics, political power, exile, and the African experience, but not enough studies that have looked at the leadership of animals in their natural habitats. The main sources of information for the study are Niyi Osundare’s The Leader and the Led and Random Blues. This study examined the animal metaphor in relation to leadership from the viewpoints of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Michael Halliday’s transitivity theory. Four main participant and process categories are identified by the data as being present in the poems, with the Material and Relational processes having the largest frequency distributions (62.98% and 22.22%, respectively). This large proportion indicates both the ongoing activity in the African continent and the significant demands that people are under in their desire to rule the biosphere. The the low occurrence of verbal and mental processes in followers (11.11% and 7.40%, respectively) suggests that both animal and human leadership aspirants are more interested in what followers do than followers are. Also, the findings revealed the metaphorical representation of each animal thus: serpent(complacence), leeches and lice (parasite), orangutans (class), beasts (hard labor), crocodile (betrayal), hive (defense), lion (subjugation), antelopes/impalas (fright), hyena (glutton), giraffe (nonchalance), zebra (duplicity), elephant (destruction), warthog (ugliness), rhino (violence), snake (anarchy), lamb (peace), tiger (aggression), doe (compassion). Overall, the study concluded that we need leaders and followers who are similar to lambs and does for harmonious cohabitation in the ecosystem.

Alter/ Native and the New Historicism Contents of Second Generation Nigerian Poets

This paper examines the intersection and synergy between Alter/Native criticism and the New Historicism in the context of second-generation Nigerian poets. Alter/ Native criticism focuses on indigenous literary traditions, cultural contexts, and oral histories, while New Historicism explores the interplay between literature and historical conditions. By applying these critical approaches to the works of second-generation Nigerian poets and novelists, such as Niyi Osundare, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka, this study aims to shed light on how these poets and novelists enrich our understanding of Nigerian literature by examining the cultural and historical contexts in which their works are produced. Drawing from indigenous literary traditions, the second-generation Nigerian poets employ AlterNative criticism to explore themes of identity, cultural heritage, and the preservation of indigenous voices. Their works incorporate elements of folklore, proverbs, and cultural symbols, reflecting a deep engagement with Nigerian cultural heritage. Additionally, the New Historicism provides insights into how the historical conditions of Nigeria, including colonization, independence struggles, and post-colonial challenges, influence the themes and styles of the poets' works. Through the application of the New Historicism, we can examine how these poets engage with and respond to historical events, power dynamics, and social realities. By examining the poems and critical perspectives of second-generation Nigerian poets, this paper showcases the synergies and mutual enrichment between Native criticism and New Historicism. The combination of these approaches enhances our understanding of the cultural and historical dimensions of the poets' works, providing deeper insights into the complexities of Nigerian literature. This study contributes to the broader field of Nigerian literary scholarship and offers a comprehensive understanding of the contributions made by second-generation Nigerian poets to the Nigerian literary canon.

Poetry Analysis of Osundare’s Random Blues: Using Speech Act Theory

Osundare's involvement in performative poetry is an attempt to fulfill her social responsibilities and connect with her community as her collective poetry is expressed through performance. The rhetoric of his poems and the structure of their presentation explains why he uses the techniques and resources of the African oral tradition in many of his poems. The purpose of this study is to explore the intertextual relationship between the second generation of Nigerian artists and the new Nigerian artists in terms of colonial influences and relationships. This study shows that poet Niyi Osundare is a second generation iconoclast through which he influenced the poetic landscape of contemporary Nigeria. This study shows that contemporary poets are not significant and methodologically influential to other secular poetic texts, so the aesthetic principle of poetry is emphasized when the dialogue between texts is seen in the form of Osundare poetry. Osundare tells about the paradigm shift of intertextual relations from a vertical point of view, and the artistic practices preserved from the colonial period are the vertical practices of the postcolonial space. The research is qualitative in nature and primarily analyzed primary and secondary data from the literature, original research and literature review. This study also uses poststructuralist intertextuality as a theoretical framework to explore the extent of intertextual relationships. This study suggests that in order to understand recent Nigerian poetry in English, there is an urgent need to explore the history of their intertextuality. Beyond the intertextual dimension, this study demonstrates that the symbiotic relationship between power and traditional formation provides an ontological framework for examining the aesthetic experience of recent English poetry in Nigeria.

Environment, Climate Change, Insecurity and World Peace: A Critical Examination of Selected African Literary Texts

The interest in African literary texts has increased significantly in recent times within the academic community. However, crucial issues such as climate change, environment, insecurity, and world peace have not received adequate attention from scholars, despite their relevance. This study aims to explore these topics in African literary texts of various genres by employing the ecocriticism of selected African texts as a theoretical framework and using content analysis as the primary methodology. The corpus of this study focuses on the works of Ramonu Sanusi (novel Un Nègre a violé une Blonde à Dallas), Niyi Osundare (poem “They Too Are the Earth”), David Rubadiri (poem “African Thundersorm”), and Ahmed Yerima (play Ipomu), all of whom have been selected for sharing the primary objective of this work - to shed light on the environmental realities of modern society by describing the rates of environmental and climate change and their adverse effects on humanity. Moreover, the authors emphasize the need for world peace to ensure global sustainable development. By critically analyzing the African literary texts, this research seeks to contribute to the academic understanding of these significant global issues and the critical role that literature can play in addressing them.
 Keywords: African literature, climate change, Environment, Insecurity, World Peace.

The Print Media and the Evolution of Third-Generation Nigerian Poetry

Previous literary scholarship and critical allusions to the evolution of Nigerian literature have unanimously acknowledged the emergence of a third generation of Nigerian poetry. This development which gained accentuation between 1980 and 2000, threw up an avalanche of successors to the second-generation poets, notably: Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, Niyi Osundare, Okinba Launko, Catherine Acholonu and Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie. Despite the visible numerical strength of this new generation of writers; their aggregate prolificity and their gross contribution to our national creative output, adequate seminal attention has not been paid to the role of the print media in the catalysation of this milieu. This study, therefore, situates the third generation of Nigerian poets and their works, within the context that they are bonafide products of the print media. They sprouted and flourished in an era where creative activity, triggered by national socio-economic realities, bloomed without collateral and commensurate outlets for the expression of this creative outburst. They have continued to sustain the richness and robustness of Nigeria’s poetic traditions. Their continuing commitment to socio-political engagements has reinforced the enterprise of preceding generations. This study will constitute a veritable reference material on the emerging corpus of critical discourse on the evolution of Nigerian poetry, deriving from the pages of Nigerian newspapers, en route to the 20th century.

Sociopolitical Reconstruction in Niyi Osundare’s The State Visit and Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground

Socio-political reconstruction is a motif in African literature and it is for this reason, among others, African literature is regarded as literature of commitment since creative writers in the continent embed socio-political and economic problems plaguing the continent in their writings. Thus, African literature dwells more on the functional role of literature than the entertaining role, and that is why African literature is often described as functional literature. African writers see literature as a tool for societal re-education and liberation. They consider themselves as the conscience of the nation and terror on corrupt political leaders. Therefore, they take advantage of the opportunity literature affords and affect the lives of the people. They do so by portraying the everyday socio-political and economic challenges thereby making their literary art a commitment geared toward a reconstruction of the socio-political and economic systems of the society. This paper is therefore an attempt to highlight how Niyi Osundare in State Visit and Ahmed Yerima in Hard Ground depict and attempt to reconstruct the society.

Figures of Reality: Vision and Imagery in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry

The international stature and renown of Niyi Osundare as a poet is due in part to the fact that his restless creative impetus is engaged with the existential predicament of the common man, and partly also because of his reliance on imagery as a veritable artistic form for the definition and exploration of his themes. This paper examines Osundare’s poetic imagery from the standpoint of its imaginative and thematic values. It argues that Osundare’s imagery not only embodies the poet’s vision of his society, but is also central to his technique. The paper also examines the themes that have generally exercised Osundare’s image-making faculty, and how he uses imagery to amplify or illustrate those themes.

In the Centre of the Cosmos: Sacred Spacetime in Niyi Osundare’s ‘A Song for Olosunta’

Time and nature are two intertwined concepts. They are so inseparable that there is a temporal index to every spatial event and vice versa. Nothing happens in a space except at a time; neither does anything happen at a time except in a space. For the Nigerian poet, Niyi Osundare, time and space occupy a prominent place in his oeuvre, but critics tend to privilege one and ignore the other in their analyses of his poetry. Osundare also frequently poetizes animist deities of Ikere-Ekiti, the town in Southwest Nigeria where he was born and raised. He uses his poetry as a medium to worship the deities. This paper is a study of time and nature in relation to an animist god of Ikere-Ekiti. It fuses ecocriticism and temporal analysis to shed light on ‘A Song for Olosunta,’ a panegyric which evokes an annual festival in honour of Olosunta, a lithic god worshipped by Osundare and his fellow Ikere-Ekiti animists. Against the background of the annual festival inscribed in the poem, I examine the god as an ecological and temporal icon, highlighting the differences between his shrine and its surroundings; and between his timescape and the timescape outside the shrine.

We Live, only if the Environment Lives; An Enquiry into Niyi Osundare’s Eco-poems

This paper sets out to investigate the symbiosis between humankind and the environment that they inhabit. The relationship between the denizens of the earthly environment and the lifelong interdependence of both flora and fauna are examined in this work. Two of the volumes of poetry by Niyi Osundare are used in the treatment of the themes of this study. These are: Waiting Laughters (1990) and The Eye of the Earth (1996). The literary theoretical approach known as ecocriticism is deployed in the study of the poems selected from both collections. The study is further underpinned by the Reader Response critical theory. The paper concludes that a mutually rewarding co-existence is the only prescription for an augury of pleasure and sustainability between the environment, on the one hand and humankind, on the other.

The Poet as a Crusader for Social Justice: Stylistic Implications in Niyi Osundare’s Random Blues

The role of the poet as a crusader for social justice has been well-acknowledged in literary circles and beyond. This stems from the nature of art as a humanistic endeavor genetically imbued with the spirit of standing with humanity and freeing it from the stranglehold of social malfeasance, reprehensible and tendencious inclinations. Poetry is, therefore, a unique artistic expression of solidarity with the people and an aspiration or vision towards a better human experience. Osundare’s social involvement through literary practice has meant the engagement of issues with the intent of exposing the contradictions that impoverish society. The social involvement and foregrounding of the thematic issues has entailed the mobilization of linguistic resources as stylistic strategies for poignancy and effective communication. This paper interrogates the meeting point between Osundare’s social concerns in his Random Blues and the linguistic strategies he employs to the service of poetic communication. To this end, the paper analyses New Historicism which underscores the invocation of socio-political times in the production and interpretation of literature; and insights from Systemic Functional Linguistics that stress the place of function and relevance in determining linguistic choice and meaning. The paper concludes that as a social critic, Osundare has used poetry to spearhead a rude awakening of the oppressed in the society against the contradictions and manipulations by the powerful few, calling the latter to action and championing the cause to bring about social transformation and liberation from the chokehold of tyranny and oppression.

Is There Life Besides “Coloniality?”: Metapoetics and the Second Level of Decoloniality in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry

At the heart of Niyi Osundare’s metapoetic writing is a decolonial program that radically unsettles the autotelic conception of art in order to question the coloniality of poetry, language, episteme, nature, and being. Far from being an index of Bloomian anxiety, this is the poetry of ideas that has exerted the most profound influence on his literary imagination and to which he has returned in volume after volume. In this paper, I call this feature the second level of decoloniality in Osundare’s poetry and distinguish it from the first level in which the poet switches from English to Yorùbá, but retains English as his dominant language nonetheless. I argue that although Osundare decolonizes poetry and language at this first level (through code-alternation, metonymic gaps, Yorùbá choric chants, ideophones, and onomastic references), this is simply not enough to combat the coloniality that colonialism left in its wake, hence the need for the second level. At the second level, the poet draws on the critical affordances of metapoetic self-consciousness to not only further question the imperial universalism of colonial modernity, but to articulate what he himself recently theorizes as “differential aesthetics.”

Lexical Repetition and Syntactic Parallelism in Selected Political Essays of Niyi Osundare and Ray Ekpu

This paper examines lexical repetition and syntactic parallelism in selected political essays of Niyi Osundare and Ray Ekpu, which have been relatively underexplored, in order to determine how they have been deployed to represent Nigeria’s socio-political concerns as well as the points of convergence and divergence in the use of these devices by both writers. M.A.K Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar served as the framework. Eighteen (18) essays were purposively sampled; 9 each from Osundare and Ekpu’s publications in Newswatch where they both published between the Second and Fourth Republics (1979–1999). The study shows that lexical repetitions underscore argument, expand the thematic range and create lexical links between words in the discourses. Syntactic parallelism creates a multidimensional representation of discourse themes such as deprivation, anarchy, civil unrest, moral decline, government’s harsh economic policies and intimidation of the press. These themes are situated within a specific context in order to reinforce their gravity. Osundare’s essays deployed the mhq patterns for effective description and thematic projection. Conversely, Ekpu’s essays use the mhq and hq patterns for effective description and thematic projection. The essays of Osundare employ the SPC1 structure to foreground the blatant disregard for human rights while Ekpu’s employs the SPCA and SPA structures in projecting the breach of the judiciary. These devices contribute to the structure of the selected essays and create room for according emphasis and explicitness to the discourse themes. Osundare and Ekpu draw on lexical repetition and syntactic parallelism to unveil and denounce socio-political ills in the country. They employ these devices to underscore their political stance.

Interconnectedness Between Culture and Nature: Ecopoetics in Niyi Osundare's The Eye of the Earth

In the spate of global warming that is causing toxic climate changes as a result of the industrial revolution and urbanization that have influenced man’s culture (lifestyle), many scholars and ecologists have invigorated the need to preserve nature via scientific books, journals/articles, movies, novels, etc. However owing to the widely believed complexities in poetry, many do not still realize that poets all over the world (and Nigeria to be specific) have also responded to ecological issues by using poetry to create ecological consciousness. It is on this basis that this paper explores the poetic opus of Niyi Osundare, The Eye of the Earth, as it regurgitates the ecopoetic principle of interconnectedness between man and nature. The study aims to add to the existing knowledge of literary discourses in general. The study adopts a qualitative methodology by collecting data from books, journals, articles in libraries, and cyberspace. The study finds that the collection largely amplifies the degradational state of the earth, precisely in the Southwestern region of Nigeria. It also discovers that the collection shows the interconnectedness between humanity as a microcosm and nature as a macrocosm.

The Place of Grammar in a Stylistic Study: An Analysis of Niyi Osundare’s Open letter to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan

This study examined the role of Grammar in the Linguistic Stylistic analysis of Niyi Osundare’s Open Letter to President Jonathan. The study identified, analyzed, and related the prominent grammatical components in the letter to its socio-political context. The study employed both primary and secondary sources of data. Additionally, the data were analysed using the purview of the linguistic approach of stylistics. It was discovered that the grammar of the language of the text was deployed in a manner of appealing to President Jonathan to willingly and graciously accept the outcome of the 2015 General Elections in Nigeria. The study equally demonstrated that grammatical devices employed in the letter illuminated the style of language use of Osundare in political discourse. The study concluded that grammar has an important role to play in studying political discourses as it enhances the discovering of their intentions.

Going Down Textual Lane: Ibadan in Text and Thoughts: A Review of Under the Brown Rusted Roofs by Abimbola Adunni Adelakun. Published by Kraftgriots, Ibadan, 2008, 252pp.1

As a child born and battered (not buttered) in Lagos, my thoughts about Ibadan people are three-fold. I think of a different accent when they speak English. When you read Niyi Osundare’s article you will moderate that notion. The other stereotype that comes to the mind of this Lagos boy is that Ibadan houses do not have street addresses but you can describe where you are going or looking for by Agboole Oloolu or Agboole Alabẹni (as in Bimbo Adelakun’s Novel). The third stereotype is that people of Ibadan eat a lot of ẹ̀kọ and ọọ̀ ̀lẹ̀ (as in mó̩inmó ́ i̩ ́n-beans pudding in English). I cannot really trace where I got that last one. It will be great to read what people of Ibadan think about Lagos city, i ̀lú iná ń jó ogiri o ̀ ̀ sá - The city where fire burns be the walls remain. The place we sing its praises as aromi ́ ṣá lẹ̀gbẹ lẹ̀gbẹ -The city where water flows in abundance. Let me tell you my story of Ibadan through the eyes of writers and thinkers.
 My maternal grandmother was a mid-wife at Adeọyọ Hospital. My first train ride was to Ibadan and each time I hear the name Ibadan the smell of puff puff by Mama Room Two (aka Mrs. Lufadeju to adults) takes me over. Ten much later in life, the poem by J.P Clark in the West African verse 1 This is a revised and expanded version of a review originally published in TCN: The Cultural Newspaper on January 29, 2020. 332 Kole Odutola competed with the puff puff of Mama Room Two. To mention Ibadan and not recite the poem was like an academic crime.