Place and the postcolonial poetry of Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article examines postcolonial engagements with place in modern Nigerian poetry. By foregrounding the mutual implication of text and place, it attends to the transnational struggles over spatial representations and alterity. It also explores how similar tensions are replicated on a smaller scale in terms of nation, region, and ethnic geography. Such a focus on the literary articulation of both the local and the global demonstrates the fractal dimensions of colonialism, as well as the spatial consequences of coloniality within the (Nigerian) postcolony. Four works – Tade Ipadeola’s A Time of Signs, Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems, Niran Okewole’s The Hate Artist, and Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth – provide the basis for the analysis. The article also sets out the importance of poetry, which tends to be marginalized in studies of modern African literature, as a crucial dimension of the African postcolonial interrogation of place.

KEYWORDS:

• Nigerian poetry
• postcolonial place
• poetry and place
• spatial alterity
• coloniality of place
• postcolony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In other words, colonialism was not just about reorganizing what could be seen, sensed, and physically felt (like the body), but also about submitting the spiritual life of the colonized mind to the whims of power and empire.

2. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2007) observe, the notions of “center” and “periphery” are contentious because scholarly engagements that set out to dismantle them sometimes paradoxically reinforce and stabilize them as historically static truths (32–33). They also point out that these terms do not “explain the multidirectional flow of global exchanges, [ … ] most noticeable in cultural exchange [as in] the phenomenon of the Black Atlantic” (vii). I invoke and modify these concepts in this article.

3. Mbembe (2002) presents arguments for a decentred reading of Africa: that is, that the essentialization of Africa as a geographically, culturally, and racially unified place has made “the idea of an Africanity that is not black [ … ] simply unthinkable” (256).

4. This paradigm has been inflected by China–Africa relations, with Chinese use of colonial strategies such as conditions attached to loans given to African countries. However, China’s discursive representations of Africa and Africans have not been sufficiently widespread to allow one to make reasonable comparison with those of the west.

5. Okewole also references internal imperial domination within Europe, such as colonial motivations for the attacks of the Irish Republican Army and the Beslan school siege.

6. Niyi Osundare, phone conversation with author, August 20, 2020.

7. President Trump made this remark to senators in the context of a bipartisan immigration plan: “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” He seems to have been referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African countries (see Barron 2018; Watkins and Phillip 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tosin Gbogi

Tosin Gbogi is an assistant professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of African and African diaspora literatures, popular culture, and race and ethnic studies. His articles have appeared in Folklore, Pragmatics, Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, and Neohelicon.