Oral Traditions and Aesthetic Transfer: Creativity and Social Vision in Contemporary Black Poetry, and: African Languages Literature in the Political Context of the 1990s (review)

Oral Traditions and Aesthetic Transfer: Creativity and Social Vision in Contemporary Black Poetry, by Charles Bodunde. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2001. 149 pp. ISBN 3-927510-69-6.

African Languages Literature in the Political Context of the 1990s, ed. Charles Bodunde. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2001. 187 pp. ISBN 3-927510-66-1.

The publications under review represent two ambitious additions to African literary scholarship. Oral Traditions and Aesthetic Transfer investigates the transformations of different aspects of the indigenous heritage in the works of contemporary African poets of different generations and from different regions, while African Languages Literature, on the other hand, focuses on the social and political contexts of different forms of literatures expressed in the languages bearing the different cultures of Africa. Bodunde's approach in Oral Traditions and Aesthetic Transfer is to underline two major patterns of relationship with oral resources in contemporary black poetry. While in the first, the poet maintains a sustained identification with a particular aspect of the tradition, in the other, multiple forms of oral representations are transferred and transformed in postcolonial terms. The author represents the first tradition with the poetry of Wole Soyinka, Mazisi Kunene, Okimba Launko, Tanure Ojaide, Kofi Anyidoho, and Ezenwa-Ohaeto, and the second with Okot p'Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, Jack Mapanje, Niyi Osundare, Kamau Brathwaite, Okello Oculi, and Obiora Udechukwu. He also makes sure to devote a fair measure of attention to each of the poets cited in the two categories while additionally establishing discursive linkages between them.

Launko's transformation of the idiom of Ifa, the Yoruba divination poetry, in Dream Seeker on the Divining Chain represents, for example, a deliberate departure from Soyinka who is well known for his creative identification with Ogun, the Yoruba god of heroic daring. Fed up, therefore, with what he considers an obsession with the cult of power that he says Ogun represents, Launko in his poetry deliberately shifts to Ifa, which, as he argues, stands for a complete body of knowledge, research, and philosophy. Bodunde devotes a chapter to the exploration of Launko's transformation of the oral divinatory system in Dream Seeker. But just a chapter before, he had at length investigated Soyinka's exploration of the myth of Ogun in Idanre and Other Poems. Through Ogun Abibiman, Bodunde also links the Nobel laureate with Mazisi Kunene's Emperor Shaka, the Great, the subject of which also connects the South African poet with Léopold Sédar Senghor, the renowned apostle of Negritude.

Bodunde proceeds with his investigation of the reconstruction of multiple forms of orality in modern black poetry by studying the works of Okot p'Bitek and Christopher Okigbo. The former's Song of Lawino, originally written in Acoli, the Ugandan native tongue of the author, but later translated into English, represents an instant success throughout East Africa. Okello Oculi, another Ugandan poet, is quoted by Bodunde as having admitted that the "success of Song of Lawino was so much that it was [even] able to carry the burden of so many other books." Okigbo, who was killed in the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, has equally proved to be influential—even more so in death, having remained the point of departure of several other poets that were later to emerge from Nigeria. Bodunde explores the pervasive engagement of specific local traditions by the two poets, their employment of the oral performance idioms, of indigenous images, metaphors, and rhythms, and their re-workings of all these in a contemporary context. The comparative perspective again becomes a source of great strength as Bodunde weaves a relationship between the poets and Mapanje, Osundare, Anyidoho, and others, establishing similarities, correspondences, contrasts, and differences.

A seminar on African-languages literature organized by the African Studies section...