“The Wall is Still Tumbling Down”: Revisiting Dialectics of Dysfunctional Society in New Nigerian Poetry

Abstract

Nigerian poetry, from the early beginning till date, is predicated on its strong connection with societal happenings within the ambits of its production, reception and criticism. Those happenings which bedeviled and still bedevil the Nigerian society with its ugly impacts on the wellbeing of the people as a result of oppressive political system are succinctly captured in the works of her pioneer poets and recently by the new poets, in lending their proactive voices against what seems to be recurring inhuman existence in the present-day society. It is in this light of situating such decaying society in Nigerian poetry, that this paper explores recurring socio-political happenings in dysfunctional Nigerian society in the poetry of three new Nigerian poets−Dami Ajayi’s Clinical Blues, Servio Gbadamosi’s A Tributary in Servitude and Su’edddie Vershima Agema’s Home Equals Holes: Tale of an Exile. This paper adopts Marxist oriented literary criticism with special bias on Georg Lukacs’ theory of socialist realism in analyzing four poems each, purposively selected from the aforementioned collections. The findings of this paper, revealed that the experiences of the hapless masses in Nigerian society are the main focus through which the poets draw their inspirations from, as new poetic voices. It equally shows unfortunate dispositions of the political class in deepening the plight of the masses. The paper concludes that the trio-poets, through judicious deployment of imagery, share similar interest of exposing evils against the downtrodden by the political structures in Nigerian society as found in their respective poetic expressions.

Keywords: Nigerian society, Dysfunction, Poetry, Ajayi, Gbadamosi, Agema

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/9-12-01

Publication date:June 30^th 2019