Burden of the Visionary Artist: Niyi Osundare’s Poetry

Scholarship on the poetry of the Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare continues to privilege the social and political content of his work, in addition, of course, to his fascinating appropriation of the techniques of indigenous Yoruba poetry. Introducing Osundare’s first published collection of poetry, Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Biodun Jeyifo identified the poet’s grand theme as the dispossession of the masses and, more specifically, of the rural producers (xi). In a perceptive and relatively early appraisal of Osundare’s poetry, Aderemi Bamikunle draws attention to the themes of “social and political corruption, maladministration and mismanagement, deprivations and oppression suffered by the masses, concern with Third World situations, and concern with poetic art and how it can serve to better his society” (121). In like manner, in their prefatory remarks to an insightful 2000 interview with Osundare, Cynthia Hogue and Nancy Easterlin argue that “the folk traditions of his early life alongside the urgency of Nigeria’s political situation” provide Osundare’s poetry with “its energizing impulse” (“Interview” 192). Seeking elsewhere for the distinguishing virtue of Osundare’s poetry in his preface to The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare, Abiola Irele notes, not fully approvingly, that the essays in the volume strive to celebrate Osundare’s “achievement as a poet deeply imbued with a social vision” (xvii). In several interviews, the poet has encouraged this reading of his work. However, this fixation on social and political transformation in Osundare’s poetry, while certainly justified and helping to locate his work at the heart of a postcolonial Nigerian literary tradition, has as its cost the virtual exclusion from critical attention of an equally vibrant and sustained global humanistic vision.

The Heir of History

The contribution of Nigeria’s preeminent pioneer writers—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo—to the enunciation of the Nigerian writer’s vocation early in the formative stage of the Nigerian canon was crucial. Speaking at the African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1967, Soyinka remarked on and sternly denounced the divorce between the artistic preoccupations of many African writers and the realities of their societies. Identifying the preeminent role of the African writer “as the voice of vision” and the conscience of society, Soyinka cautioned, “When the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience, he must recognize that his choice lies between denying himself totally or withdrawing to the position of chronicler and post-mortem surgeon” (20). Similarly, in a talk titled “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause,” delivered in 1968 at Makerere University College in Kamapala, Uganda, with the Nigeria-Biafra war raging, Achebe pronounced the absolute irrelevance of African literature divorced from crucial political issues: “It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant—like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames” (78). Appraising very highly the impact of Soyinka’s and Achebe’s views, Sule E. Egya observes that the two have provided an ideological connection among different generations of Nigerian writers (425).

On the other hand, Okigbo’s contribution to this debate can be discerned only through his work, since his reflections in interviews on the writer’s role in society often entail outright renunciation. In a 1965 interview granted to Robert Serumaga, Okigbo virtually denied being concerned with communicating meanings: “Personally, I don’t think that I have ever set out to communicate a meaning. It is enough that I try to communicate experience which I consider significant” (114). Yet Okigbo’s response to the topical political issues of his time completely altered the form of Nigerian poetry, and his innovations continue to resonate in the practice of many current Nigerian poets, including Osundare. Ben Obumselu argues that the basic inspiration for that transformation was the deepening political crises of the 1960s:

By the time Okigbo arrived in Ibadan in 1962, the city was in political turmoil. The contest for...