Suchergebnisse

AbstractLike most conflicts across the world, the Niger Delta crisis has generated a body of works now labelled Niger Delta literature. These cultural art forms, which are not only programmatic in thrust but also carry a dissenting temper that is laden with counter hegemonic rhetoric, are primarily geared towards underpinning a brutish kind of colonization and corporate greed which has become the stamp of toxic dreaming and dubious progress in Nigeria. This literature draws attention to the debility of the Niger Delta people and to the fact that they are trapped under double hegemons – the Nigerian government and transnational oil firms – that have strategically transformed or reduced this precarious geography and its inhabitants to mere commodities. A close reading of texts on the Niger Delta makes one aware of the politics and structure of the Nigerian economy and the corporate cost of petroculture; moreover, issues of ethno-regional identity, the inequity in the distribution of resources, the near absence of government presence in the Niger Delta and the continuous decay of state infrastructures provide a fertile ground for explaining the resentment expressed by these heavily marginalized people. By protesting their marginality, these poets frame a kind of identity that "others" the Niger Delta people, thereby holding the state accountable for its deplorable conditions and the abysmal underdevelopment of the region considering the quantity of wealth it generates for the Nigerian federation. Paying significant attention to the relationship between the representations of landscape and processes of political and economic transformation and how the landscape becomes the defining index for identity formation in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide and Ibiware Ikiriko, I argue that these poets point to the way in which colonialism and environmental devastation are interlocking systems of domination within the Nigerian nation.

Although a number of studies of the African bildungsroman exist, they hardly explore the utility of journeying in the development of the protagonist. Some of these studies continue to reiterate the existence of the postcolonial African bildungsroman and its structure or how postcolonial writers have subverted this genre to narrativize the African experience of growth. However, the crucial role of travel in the African bildungsroman remains to be discussed comprehensively. It is my intention, therefore, to address this oversight and begin to fill the gap. My central contention is that travel is an essential catalyst in the process of personal growth. Chimamada Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus will function as my primary text for analysis, but I also make reference to other narratives as ancillary texts in order to accentuate the functionality of journey, its metaphoric implications, and its structural application to Purple Hibiscus as a postcolonial African bildungsroman. In order to understand how mobility facilitates the construction of consciousness in Purple Hibiscus, I situate Kambili's personal growth around a kind of mobility which resides within the usual-everyday kind of journey, which is by no means mythic, to articulate a template that foregrounds Kambili's struggle for individuation—familial confinement, separation-cum-isolation, initiation, and return.

The writer's imaginative craft is usually inspired and shaped by the environment s/he hails from. This in turn gives room for constant communication between the creative mind and the immediate physical social world; the environment becomes a determinant of the writer's experiences. The influence of the Urhobo oral tradition on the poetic corpus of Tanure Ojaide is remarkable. The poet's cultural background occupies a looming space in his choices of generic style. Close examination of Ojaide's poetry reveals the exploration and appropriation of the orature of the Urhobo people, which ranges from myth, folksongs, proverbs, riddles, indigenous rhythms to folktales. Ojaide deploys orature to criticize contemporary ills as well as to locate solutions for Nigeria's socio-economic problems. The aim of this essay is essentially to demonstrate that orality accounts for the distinctiveness of Ojaide's writing. Also interrogate is the mingling of the oral and written in Ojaide's art. This approach will, it is hoped, open up what has been a restricted economy, through the inscribing of orature as a cardinal and integral constituent of the poet's art.