Nation, power and dissidence in third generation Nigerian poetry in English

understanding.

1

Introduction

Poems are not mirrors and they are not lamps, they are social acts…

— Jerome J. McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: the Historical Judgement of Literary Work

[L]iterature involves our deepest responses to the facts of human existence and intervenes in those areas of experience where we assume consciousness of our situation with regard to others and to the world.

— Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology

More than a year into the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, not only in his capacity as a foremost African novelist, but also as a war minstrel of the embattled Biafra, was invited to give a talk at a political science seminar at Makerere University College, Kampala. The title of the talk mirrored his status as a minstrel: ‘The African Writer and the Biafran Cause’. It did more than that: the title, as the propagandistic body of the essay showed, was to direct the sympathies of writers and intellectuals towards a justification for Biafra. At the beginning of the talk, Achebe made a statement which some saw as vital, even if prescriptive: ‘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). This comment, made in 1968, under the influence of war, a year after the protean Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, had made such a demand in perhaps stronger terms, makes the invocation vivid for the purposes of this book. Soyinka in his 1967 essay, ‘The Writer in a Modern African State’, first delivered at the Swedish Institute, had made a sweeping attack on African writers that he considered fixated on ‘the fascination of the past’ (Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 19). These writers were, in his view, either self-compelled or compelled by cultural, political, and continental nationalism (negritude, pan-Africanism) of the time to romanticise the past of Africa. Soyinka declared: ‘When the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience, he must recognise that his choice lies between denying himself totally or withdrawing to the position of chronicler and post-mortem surgeon’ (Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 20).

The foregoing invocations are important to this work in two senses. Firstly, the Nigerian civil war, which influenced Achebe’s stand, and to some extent Soyinka’s, was the culmination of the social unrest, the political instability, the intense ethnic disaffection and mistrust, sparked off by the first military coup, and counter-coup, in Nigeria.¹ It will be seen later on that the second time such a condition would manifest itself in the Nigerian polity was in the aftermath of cancelling the 1993 general elections by the dictatorship of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. This is a phenomenon that inscribes itself as the core of the historicity of this book. Secondly, Achebe and Soyinka’s standpoints (which are really prescriptions) on what the writer should concern him/herself with, that is, on the thematic exploration of the writer who sees him/herself as African, has had far-reaching consequences on Nigerian writing, including the poetry with which this book is concerned. This provides an ideological, cultural, even textual connection among what are seen as ‘generations’ of writers in Nigeria today.

The individual poets studied here find themselves implicated, by birth, by circumstances, by comradeship, and most importantly by personal will in a cultural struggle in the sense prescribed by their precursors (such as Achebe and Soyinka above). By becoming aware of their given social circumstance, mostly dictated by the socio-political and cultural goings–on in their society; by choosing to engage in the practice of manipulating what Stephen Greenblatt calls the ‘general symbolic economy made up of the myriad signs that excite human desire, fear and aggression’ (‘Culture’, 12) in their society, the poets have a sense of involvement that locates them in the wider sphere of what has come to be broadly regarded as social engagement in African literatures. In this sense, the poems studied here come together, or are perceived, as a discursive attempt, having a shared sense of poetics, a shared historicity, to generate a subversive regime that has the will or the tendency of becoming in its counter-hegemonic move, hegemonic. Hegemony is used here in the Gramscian sense.² The question of relevance – that an artist, a writer, must make herself relevant by concentrating on the most pressing socio-political issues – has long legitimised what are seen as important literary writings in Nigeria.³ It is in fact in the formation and entrenchment of the sub-tradition of Nigerian writing that emerged immediately after the war, with such powerful exponents as Niyi Osundare, Festus Iyayi, and Femi Osofisan, that we feel the presence of a strong cultural hegemony in the field of literary production.

It is thus the main contention in this book that the poems critiqued here are produced by very conscious activists, radical poets who, in textualising the event of the repressive rule of the military regimes of the 1980s and the 1990s in Nigeria, have raised, through poems, a hegemonic discourse that installs itself as a political struggle towards unclenching the fists of what they consider viperous regimes on the land.⁴ For the purposes of considering these poets with regard to the cultural and socio-political formations in which they interact, this researcher would use ‘military era’ as a historical marker for these poems as well as for the poets.⁵ The engagement with the poems centres on reading them as a historically conditioned, culture-situated discourse category. The poems constitute an active production of language objectivised by power discourse, in which case the tropological strengths of the poems engender a discursive formation if, and only when, located within a specific historical era whose event they have textualised. History, as part of the entire cultural matrix, overwhelmingly asserts itself here. It is in this sense that the cultural materialist practice of reading a work of literature in the wider context of its articulation, its production, its interaction with other practices, and its political effect, becomes vital to this analytical exercise.

When the British Marxist theorist Raymond Williams got dissatisfied with orthodox Marxism, he formulated what he called cultural materialism. Driven by what he saw as ‘radical changes in the social relations of cultural process within British and other comparable societies’ (Problems in Materialism and Culture, 245), Williams jettisoned the ‘received formula of base and superstructure’ and recast important Marxist categories such as culture, language, materialism, mainly rejecting as simplistic and reductionist earlier conceptions of them. It is not in the scope of this book to offer an analysis of Williams’ work, since what is of interest to this research is the influence his work has had on the modern scholarship practices called cultural materialism and the new historicism. Evidently, the influence is mainly located in Williams’ assessment of culture. In his view, ‘meanings and values’ are produced by ‘specific social formations’ where language is central, where ‘complex interaction both of institutions and forms and of social relationships, formal conventions’ (Problems in Materialism and Culture, 243) take place. This he defines as ‘culturalism’. His argument is that cultural productions emerge out of a complex interaction of social forces. In this complex interaction, Williams refuses to privilege literature as a social practice or see other practices as being merely reflected by it. ‘[We] cannot’, Williams writes, ‘separate literature and art form from other kinds of social practice in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws. They may have quite specific features as practices, but they cannot be separated from the general social process’ (Problems in Materialism and Culture, 44). This informs cultural materialists’ and new historicists’ conviction that a work of art is one of the diverse practices in culture and history, and to understand it one has to situate it within a cultural and historical sphere to comprehend the complex interaction that begets it and in which it actively participates. Also of importance is Williams’ revaluation of language in a society; the idea of language as reflection of reality is, to him, inadequate. In Marxism and Literature, Williams writes of language being ‘constitutively human’ (24), that is, ‘a persistent kind of creation and re-creation: a dynamic presence and a constant regenerative process’ (31). Writers, such as the poets studied in this book, regard language as in fact the most vital constitution of their artistic struggle. The poet’s greatest strength is located in her power of articulation; in the capacity of her poetry to engender a powerful discourse as a contribution to ongoing cultural struggles. Williams’ ideas, and the ideas of other cultural theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci, the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse and power influence the reading practices that in British scholarship is known as cultural materialism, and in American scholarship the new historicism.⁶

What is now taken as the manifesto, as it were, of cultural materialism is contained in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s introduction to their Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. They propose a practice of reading based on ‘a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis’ (vii). Their reason for this is expressed in these clear terms:

Historical context undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text and allows us to recover its histories; theoretical method detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeks only to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commitment confronts the conservative categories in which most criticism has hitherto been conducted; textual analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored. (vii)

This materialist reading, from the outset, proves itself to be eclectic, as its concept of ‘theoretical method’ embraces all theories. Coming as it did (along with the new historicism) against the institution of the Anglo-American New Criticism, this practice proclaims itself to be openly political. Cultural materialism ‘does not pretend to political neutrality. It knows that no cultural practice is ever without political significance’ (Dollimore & Sinfield, viii).

The major propositions of cultural materialism namely the privileging of contextuality, the constitutive position of a literary work in a cultural domain, its desire to subvert major voices of power in a literary text or in a culture and to draw attentions to marginalised voices, among others, are similar to those of new historicism. In his introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt outlines a strategy for reading which, in a broad sense, has today become the practice of the new historicism. In his words, ‘literature functions […] in three interlocking ways: as a manifestation of the concrete behaviour of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behaviour is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes’ (4). His interpretive practice embraces these three ways. He goes on to argue that any reading that limits itself to the behaviour of the author only turns out to be a biography of the author; any reading that only concentrates on literature as expression of ‘social rules and instructions’ risks being reductionist in its sociological perspective; and any reading that conceives of literature as ‘a detached reflection upon the prevailing behavioural codes’ would turn out to be an exercise in formalism in which literature is regarded as a closed system. A reading that collapses the three, as Greenblatt advocates, is based on what he calls ‘a poetics of culture’. It is a cultural criticism that is ‘conscious of its status as an interpretation and intent upon understanding literature as a part of the system of signs that constitutes a given culture’ (4). One vital attribute of this criticism is that it does not demarcate ‘one type of discourse from another or [does not separate] works of art from the minds and lives of their creators and their audiences’ (5). This is tantamount to cultural materialists’ refusal, following Williams, to place literature above the entire cultural system in the scale of things. Greenblatt points out, ‘if an exploration of a particular culture will lead to a heightened understanding of a work of literature produced within that culture, so too a careful reading of a work of literature will lead to a heightened understanding of culture within which it was produced’ (‘Culture’, 13).

Culture is perhaps the major operative term here. Both cultural materialism and new historicism think of culture as a broad domain for individual, social and institutional interactions – interactions that are, in the least, complex. Consequently, it cannot be a sphere of unity, as interests, dominant and non-dominant, clash. Dollimore, in expatiating a cultural materialist concept of culture, identifies three aspects of cultural process namely consolidation, subversion and containment. In his words, ‘[the] first refers, typically, to the ideological means whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself; the second to the subversion of that order, the third to the containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’ (Political Shakespeare, 10). The emphasis is on culture as a sphere of struggle. The tussle is between the established institution, what is otherwise called power, and the marginalised institution. Similarly, Greenblatt conceives culture in terms of what he calls containment and mobility. ‘The ensemble of beliefs and practices,’ he writes, ‘that form a given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models to which individuals must conform’ (‘Culture’, 11). There is therefore that desire by any given culture to control individuals, and this is what Greenblatt calls containment. But most individuals, if not all, do not want to be contained, to be policed, as it were, by a set of beliefs imposed on them by the dominant elements in the culture. Hence, the idea of mobility – that a culture also serves as ‘the regulator and guarantor of movement’ (‘Culture’, 14); this movement is possible through what he calls ‘improvisation’. Here, according to Greenblatt, literature plays a vital part as it often becomes a medium for improvisation, which he defines as ‘a set of patterns that have enough elasticity, enough scope for variation, to accommodate most of the participants in a given culture’ (‘Culture’, 14). A work of literature such as a poem or a drama is not only capable of bringing to its readers’ attention the set of limits within which they live in a given culture, but also offers its readers a direction towards a reconstitution of cultural boundaries. That is to say, writers, by absorbing a given cultural context in their works, either reinforce or challenge social-cultural norms in the society; and, works of art can go beyond that as they can also reinforce or challenge literary boundaries. With this premise, the term ‘absorption’ cancels any dichotomy between text and context. To put it less crudely, context is not seen as a background to a text. Cultural contexts are not outside the text, the text absorbs them. Elsewhere, Tony Bennett proposes this kind of collapsing of text and context in what he calls ‘reading formation’. He writes, ‘[the] concept of reading formation […] is an attempt to think of context as a set of discursive and inter-textual determinations, operating on material and institutional supports, which bear in upon a text not just externally, from the outside in, but internally, shaping it – in the historically concrete forms in which it is available as a text-to-be-read’ (‘Texts in History’, 72).

In this political, materialist reading, this research views the military era poetry in Nigeria studied here as absorbing the cultural contexts of Nigeria during its emergence. It is embedded in the historicity and culture that form the condition of possibility for its production. As an active part of the culture, the poetry comes through as a dissident discourse in an arena where the dominant elements were the military authorities and their collaborators, and non-dominant elements were the poets and those unprivileged masses whose voices were silenced by military despotism. This poetry finds itself side by side with other diverse cultural practices (media, music, painting, personal narratives) struggling to dislodge military oppression. The reading takes the view that the language used by these poets does not merely reflect events but absorbs and relativises events by way of ideological contestation. Therefore, a typical political poem from the military era in Nigeria is better viewed from a performative dimension whereby it is not only a site for ideological battle, but also itself an action of the struggle. In other words, it performs the struggle.

The notion of performativity – that a poem is an act in a society, performing a certain action – is central to this work. To read the new Nigerian poetry here as a mirror or medium of events that took place is to deny, in a simplistic way, the textual, discoursal hegemony that emerged out of a complex interaction during the military era in Nigeria. Jerome McGann elaborately develops the concept of the poem as an act in his book Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgement of Literary Work. Expounding his ideas from what he sees as ‘four influential modes of discourse’ namely historicism, formalism, deconstruction, and Marxism, McGann attempts to unveil the illocutionary force of a poem, most importantly its performative dynamism. ‘[Every] poem,’ McGann declares, ‘is an action, and the text is its residual form’ (55). This is most appropriately true of what, in Jeyifo’s words, is ‘the new poetic ‘revolution’ (‘Afterword’, 609) in Nigeria since the civil war. This revolution, which in Jeyifo’s view is largely in the aspect of ‘poetic diction’, is hinged on the view that poetry is a utilitarian art. Language, for these poets, goes beyond merely reflecting reality; it constitutes reality and, further, becomes a site for verbal action against oppressive regimes. Individual intention in the form of a socialist credo prefaces the poem; almost all the poets have prefaces to their collections that express the utility of poetry in time of peril.⁷ These expressed intentions are central to the view that poetry, for these poets, transcends the phenomenon of craft; it is active engagement; it is an instrumental discourse in an ideological struggle.

Further, the interpretive practice here places emphasis on the entire process of the production of this poetry. According to McGann, ‘[the] options that writers choose in the areas of initial production, as well as in printing, publishing, and distribution – the options that are open to them in these matters – locate what one might call the ‘performative’ aspect of the poetic: what poems are doing in saying what they say’ (74–75). To study the Nigerian poetry of the military era without recourse to the entire range of choices that the new poets made in publishing their poetry is, in the view of this research, undermining a crucial component of their aesthetics of rage. For a poetry that emerged during the intensity of both military government censorship and self-censorship, its unabashed, provocative, confrontational, even militant, encounter with power is only fully mapped and critiqued with a consideration of the temperament of the publishing industry during its production. This is in fact a main factor in mapping this poetry as a distinct discourse category, as a distinct utterance of a generation, as this book does. The seminal, generation-making, anthology Voices from the Fringe, and all other anthologies that follow are mostly self-published. Self-publishing here extends to private publishing corporations that, in reality, may fund a publication but does not, or cannot, offer it all the perks that come with conventional publishing.⁸ Self-publishing, or private-publishing, at a time when conventional publishers such as Heinemann, Longman, and Macmillan implicitly declared Nigeria an intellectual graveyard, or at a time when the extreme militarisation of Nigeria led to intellectual apathy, goes beyond the mere play of ego.⁹ The poets of the military era did not go through the difficulty of funding their publications, as hard and harsh as life was then, only because they wanted to be recognised as the next heroines and heroes of Nigerian writing, but because they had been hurt into writing poetry, they felt compelled to circulate within the culture a poetic discourse that could realise their anxiety for a nation adrift, and their combative spirit against military oppression. Even before publishing individual volumes, there had been a fraternising spirit of poetry or writing clubs, of peer reviews, of chapbook publications, and of campus literary activities. Interestingly, these activities were carried out in some places, such as Lagos, Ibadan and Nsukka with a certain measure of anti-military activism.¹⁰ Newspapers became a viable medium for, especially, poetry that sought to speak to power (see Bodunde and Osundare). Beyond ensuring that the Nigerian literary production did not altogether collapse into limbo, these poets, and writers, undoubtedly, had a conviction of their art as a potent machinery for checkmating what they saw as the strangulation of Nigeria and its people, by a cabal of military generals.¹¹ It is in this context that the idea of nation as a community, whether imagined or concrete, is central to this reading. For the poets concerned with here, the cleavages and contradictions in the nation-state offer a sociological platform to validate, through tropes, their extra-ethnic confidence in the existence of Nigeria as a nation-state. Their poetry, as would be demonstrated in the coming chapters, exemplifies Clara A.B. Joseph’s view that ‘the contradictions and differences that the nation attempts to remove are in fact constitutive of the concept of the nation. The nation is constituted by the very difference it seeks to overcome’ (57). Fredric Jameson’s highly contested phrase ‘national allegory’, if excised from the Jamesonian context of unguarded generalisation (‘All third-world texts are necessarily […] national allegories’), comes as an apt epithet for this poetry of the military era in Nigeria; in the specific sense of their historicity, the poets’ works pose as national allegories.¹²

It is the contention of this book that these poets, in their artistic endeavours, and in their choices and struggles, were at that specific period negotiating their way through the appropriation and symbolic acquisition of social events and energies to speak to power in the form of military oppression. Michel Foucault’s theory of power attends to the kind of dynamics that exists between the dominant hegemonic discourse of the military and the counter-hegemonic discourse of the poets. In his The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault points out that ‘power is everywhere [...] because it comes from everywhere’ (93); that is, there is no institution, group of individuals, or any sort of entity that has the monopoly of power. In Foucault’s view, power can come from above; it can also come from below; it in fact has no permanent abode and is better viewed as a circulating phenomenon with a complex nature. Foucault goes ahead to declare that power ‘is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’ (93). The military establishment in Nigeria actually thought it had and wielded power, but it soon became known to the actors of the establishment that power did not reside with them alone and that those who had appeared less powerful in the society, such as poets and