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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Remi Raji, one of the loudest and most eloquent political poets in Nigeria today, sees his craft as a means of conveying serious social message to his land. Raji's consummate political theme, which is powered by what he calls "the nationalist imagination," is skillfully explored in his latest volume of poetry, Lovesong for My Wasteland (2005), more than in any of his previous collections. Following the tradition of the social commitments of African literature and evolving orature-based aesthetics that marries choreography to poetry (choreopoetry), Raji traces the history of Nigeria, in the symbolic forty-five verses of the volume, exposing the leadership failures and plunder of yesterday and today, and presenting a hope that is predicated on the people's collective stand to build their ravaged land. The business of this paper is therefore the exploration of Raji's political theme in his latest poetic effort to raise his society's consciousness to the collapse of national psyche and to redirect their attention toward a better tomorrow for which they have to work.
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Lovesong for my Wasteland (2005) is Remi Raji's fourth volume of poetry. Raji's maturity as a poet, shown in this volume, is seen in both his craft and his vision. His vision as a poet has ever since been anchored in a past plundered and wasted, in a present burdened with frustration and anguish and in a future envisaged with incurable optimism. His poetry is full of a cry of hope for a people. This is Raji's nationalist imagination. This vision is within the mainstream of literature of social commitments in Nigeria. In this study, this imagination is explored in Raji's latest effort, bringing out the strengths of the poet in capturing the plundered past of his land, the frustration that has robbed the people of their faith in their land, and the hope that the poet foresees for his land and his people.
Raji belongs to the third generation of Nigerian writers who, as Unoma Azuah has said, "have had to deal with disillusionment in every aspect of the Nigerian state, especially political" (24). Uche Nduka, Ifowodo Ogaga, Maik Nwosu, Emevwo Biakolo, Akeem Lasisi, Promise Okekwe, Toyin Adewale, Emman Usman Shehu, and Chiedu Ezeanah are among the notable poets of this generation concerned with the disillusionment that has occurred because of the military dictatorships of the early 1980s to the late 1990s in Nigeria. They have used their imaginations and creativity in capturing the despondency of the terrible years of General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida and the late General Sani Abacha, which spanned the aforementioned decades and exerted oppression on Nigeria in such a way that poverty and hopelessness became lingering realities for suffering Nigerians. Up till today, Nigeria is yet to recover from the dispossession, suppression, and oppression that came with those regimes. Poets of this generation attempt to chronicle those years and define the cruelty with which those dictators thrashed the land. Apart from harking back to the years of suffering, they philosophize, with generous sympathy to the ordinary people, on the current psychic collapse and frustration in the land, which are natural consequences of the military dictatorships.
Consequently, the third generation of Nigerian poets has produced more political poetry than any species of poetry. Because of the many poetic voices, frustrated, burdened with numerous political messages, Niyi Osundare refers to this generation as "an angry generation" (27). Indeed, there are more (political) poets than there are dramatists or novelists in Nigeria today. Ben Obumselu recently captured this phenomenon quite aptly when he concluded, "Nigeria is a bird-nest of singing poets" (14).
Political theme, within which we locate Raji's national imagination, has been with Nigerian literature since its inception. "The beginning of modern [Nigerian] poetry [...] produced a poetry of individual search mingled with political or public statement" (Nwoga 37). The spirit that powers such poetry can be understood from Terry Eagleton's argument that "[l]iterature has become a whole alternative ideology, and at the 'imagination itself, as with Blake and Shelley, becomes a political force. Its task is to transform society in the name of those energies and values which art embodies" (20). A poem does not exist for its beauty, for its entertaining structure and form, but for the thematic duty it performs of uplifting the state of the society about which it is crafted.
The second generation of Nigerian poets, head-mastered by Osundare and Odia Ofeimun, noted for its "market poetry" (Maduakor 81), lays a veritable precedence for the third generation as far as political theme and its aesthetics are concerned. The poetry of that age, as we see in the works of Osundare, Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Catherine Acholonu, and Olu Oguibe, is characterized by social contradictions that are "resolved in favour of the masses" (Aiyejina 122). These poets are so powered by the Marxist ideology and are so vigorous in their enterprise that the flourishing of national imagination, by which we mean the use of creative writing, a product of imagination, to make important political statements and redirect people's thinking towards positive change, is often rooted in their generation. Which is why Stuart Brown concludes that "it has been in the post-independence era that the idea of the poet as agitator and social commentator--indeed of poetry-in-English as an alternative forum for political debate--has really taken root" (46).
Raji and his generation not only "represent [their people] as it were on the contemporary [political] scene" (Mezu 96) in the manner the previous generation did, but they also take over the literary aesthetics of that generation known for what Obi Maduakor calls "energy of rhythm" (81) and its reliance on orature.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto proffers a reason for this:
The desires of the poets to eliminate textual impediments, unclog poetic syntax and infuse the poems with the oral flavour of the rich and variegated Nigerian culture, hinged on [the] conscious reaction to make more people enjoy poetry, despite their occupations, in spite of their preconceived ideas of the poetic craft, and not withstanding their levels of intellectual sophistication. (11)
Indeed it is for the poetry of the second generation (and, subsequently, the third generation) of Nigerian poets that audience comes to matter. This is because the poet's "duty is [...] broadened by his honest desire to detach himself and his speechless brothers from the viperous hands of the African dictators and the tightening grip of neo-colonialism" (Alu 198). The poetry is thus cast in simple expressions and songful rhythms. The poet of today reduces poetry "into simple questions (sometimes, without the question mark), put in relatively simple language--in fact, into language of song--drawing upon familiar symbols and images with the intent to drive home the message [...]" (196).
Raji's generation, however, in its drive to convey meanings to the audience in a manner simple, surrenders to a literary language that "wallows in watery diction" (Egya 67) and sags with the burden of theme. The language is sick of cliche, which Harry Garuba has noticed here (though not with contempt): "The poetic style favours the simple rhyme or even the cliche that matches the movement that clinches the pattern of the dance steps" (xi). Charles Nnolim and Osundare are, however, contemptuous about the apparent looseness in the literary language of the third generation of Nigerian writers. For instance, Osundare is worried that the Nigerian poets today are so fascinated by the way the world shrinks to a global village that they are abandoning their orature. He alerts us that
there is a hip hop hysteria in the present atmosphere: an exogeneist mentality that urges one to take leave of one's very self and assume the borrowed, clinched mask of the...
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