THE CRISIS OF INTERPRETATION AND THE TEMPER OF NEW NIGERIAN POETRY by Oko Owi Ocho

Contemporary Nigerian poetry has evolved many conversations lately, especially as regards the idea of aesthetics and consciousness. While these conversations are necessary to set the direction and interpretation of what New Nigerian Poetry is, they all lack the historical variant and erudition on the cultural energy that has driven the poetry toward what some call the Americanisation of Nigerian Poetry or the “Danger of a Singular Trope”—apology to Chimamanda. Due to the shapeshifting tendencies of this generation, missing the link between the poets of the third generation, and the emergence of the fourth at the interstice where they converge and depart, it is easy to accuse contemporary Nigerian writers, especially her poets, of not representing their reality.
In an academic essay titled “This Generation Sef: Theorising the Fourth Generation Nigerian Poets” I classed the period of the fourth generation, following Harry Garuba and Emman Sule Egya’s periodisation approach as beginning from the early 2000s (the Boundary Poets caught between the issues of national narrative and the uncertainty of postmodernity’s defeat of grand narrative) and from 2016 (the emergence of the New School Poets who shifted from uncertainty into the full condition of postmodernity). Understanding the aesthetic splits between this period paves the way to comprehend the condition of contemporary Nigerian poetry.

The Crisis of Interpretation on New Nigerian Poetry
Contemporary literature is a reflection of the cultural energy that has taken hold of the global social construct of postmodernism and its late capitalism-induced approach to profit and individuality. There is a crisis rocking the cultural and literary scene which is prevalent not only in Nigeria but globally, and it is the crisis of a death of grand narrative. In what is one of the earliest revolutionary criticisms of African literature, Omafume F. Onoge argues that “Predictably, the changed political circumstances carried with it the potential for new aesthetic forms and literary attitudes. This in fact has been the case. The literary world of contemporary Africa is marked by the co-existence of different types of socio-political consciousness” (396-396).
While most of the contemporary critics decry what is arguably the death of Nigerian literature, their limitation to understanding that the foundation of the crisis in Nigerian poetry is due to two factors: the triumph of postmodernism and its consumerist aura, and the absence of a revolutionary aesthetic¹ideology to which the poets can hold on to as being responsible for why they engage in what they write has caused a major limitation in critics’ understanding and interpretation of these poets.
What I sense to be the core crisis of interpretation among these critics is their lack of rigour in understanding the historical terrain that forms the writing of the fourth generation. The four essays that went viral within the literary space from Paul Liam (2022), Oris Aigbokhaevbolo (2023), Ernest Ogunyemi (2023), Micheal Chiedoziem (2023), and add Carl Terver (2023), who does not fall within the range of misunderstanding the timeline construct but fails to see the continuum of periodisation and trope.
One of the core points in Ernest Ogunyemi’s essay is his claim: “I don’t think “Nigerian poetry” exists, yet.” His stance for this is because of the global anxieties that deck contemporary Nigerian poetry. He does not know how these poets got here because of a lack of erudition in the trajectory that ushered the fourth generation into their literary epoch. In mentioning the new poets after the third generation, which he does not seemingly have an in-depth knowledge of their work, he states that “This new group of poets include Nome Emeka Partick, Romeo Oriogun, Wale Ayinla, Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Jakky Bankong-Obi, Pamilerin Jacob, Adedayo Agarau, Jide Badmus, Jeremiah O-Agbaakin, JK Anowe, Itiola Jones, Logan February, Precious Arinze, Akpa Arinze, Chekwube Danladi.” With this list, he missed a complete period that connects the dispersal trope of the third generation with what I call the boundary point of postmodern uncertainties of the 2000s to 2015.
Paul Liam, a much older critic and writer than Chiedoziem and Ogunyemi, understands this terrain better as he shows in his “Why Poets Are Rascal” but also makes this same blooper when he states that “The 2010s witnessed a drastic change towards individualism and confessionalism. The emerging poets began to concentrate on dealing with their personal realities with emphasis on attaining self-realisation within the social milieus in which they found themselves.” It seems that Liam’s tone is the tempo that Ogunyemi and Chiedoziem adopted, and this fatally affected their analysis of the timeline that led to what-is-what in new Nigerian poetry. The issue with the lack of historical valuation of the changes is that it affects the critic’s view of how time influences writers. And by this limitation when Liam and Chiedoziem refer to issues of consciousness, it is a faint cry for nostalgia that is not validated by the socio-political realities of the poets. Also, the lack of the critics’ clear-cut ideological foundation leaves them repeating consciousness without any practical path. This is not an excuse for the obnoxious impact of postmodernism on our poetry. Everyone seems to be talking but no one is listening. So even the critic is suffering from the crisis of historical consciousness or clarity of ideas.
While I am not set out to write a metacritical work on these critics, I think that the drive of brashness by these critics is akin to what Susan Sontag labels the “classical dilemma” of our today’s world which “is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability”. While his contribution to contemporary criticism cannot be dismissed, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo often appears to be trying to evaluate Nigerian literature without the erudition that defines periodisation, changing cultural production, and the socio-political factors motivating the changes. Otherwise, how will he declare that Nigerian literature is dead if he understands that the trajectory of our literature is built on aesthetic ruptures with the ideas and beliefs of the various generations?
What is common among the critics is an obvious “notice-me” attempt. This is best exemplified in Ernest Ogunyemi’s essay, particularly at the point where he declares “Without knowing it, [Romeo] Oriogun has sung many praises to homophobia.” Because anyone who wants to be sincere in the interpretation of Nigerian poetry will acknowledge that Oriogun is to queer poetry what Jude Dibia is to queer fiction in the trail of Nigerian literature, a path opener who cannot be ignored.

Understanding Contemporary Nigerian Poetry from its Journey
Nigerian poetry and the claims of its critics that it follows an American stream are partly true and partly exaggerated. The claim by critics is aggravated by their limitation of historical rootedness, which makes them think that the fourth-generation is the first group of poets to hop on the next ship bound to the West or break the chain of a grand narrative. And, not understanding the continuum between the third generation and how the fourth generation found their own voices will make us miss the chief signs and suggest the relevant consciousness that ‘should’ drive our age. For instance, Ogunyemi missed the major marker in his essay when he declares that the new generation is not reading their predecessor. He fails to see the continuum in the periods. The third generation began with the poetics of dispersal and exile, gravitating towards a postmodern lure. This shortcoming is because, while Ogunyemi is versed in the writing of his contemporary who are internet poets, he lacks the depth of the journey of their arriving there.
When Harry Garuba compiled Voices from the Fringe (1988), the anthology that is said to have introduced the third generation, he already noticed that “Instead of plumbing the depths of myth and ritual to structure and give coherence to experience and the poetry itself, these new poets reside within the conflicted terrain of the unresolved, acknowledging incoherences, contradictions and multiplicities without seeking the resolution and coherence that a grand narrative provides” (65) [my emphasis]. Despite this reality, it is crucial to note that some of them still sailed toward a grand narrative of protest. This is fully captured in Prof Sule E. Egya’s Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English. Before these poets lurched into postmodernism, the protest narrative was not fully realised nor impacted our national critical discourse the way the first and second generations of Cultural Nationalists and Marxists did. Egya sums it up perfectly that: “even before militarism was dislodged, the spirit of the nationalist imagination weakened, giving in, not necessary to the ever-mutating exertion of constituted violence, but the lures of postmodernity. The Othman-Raji [third] generation failed to pursue its social vision to the end” (17).
The breathing point of the fourth generation—although they were already writing and active within the literary circuit—was solidified with the emergence of Dami Ajayi and Emmanuel Iduma’s edited/curated Saraba Magazine in 2009. But their social vision and the quest for understanding their age is properly laid from 2013 with the publication of Dami Ajayi’s Daybreak and Other Poems. In this chapbook, Ajayi already, albeit subliminally? prophesies the doom not only on our art but our cultural essence moving towards an American imitation. He shows the triumph of postmodernism and Euro-American hegemony over our life. The trap of postmodernity is best understood by Tejumola Olaniyan’s definition as a cultural turn “which dehistoricizes culture, and demeans and sacrifices the concrete sociopolitical struggles which most African scholars believe to be where the solution to the continent’s unending exploitation by the West lies” (639). This understanding of postmodernism helps to lay bare the crisis inflicting contemporary poetry.
In “You Are My Flagellation”, Ajayi’s persona, talking to his lover states that:

But isn’t life a novel, a television series,
An endless love song? And in films don’t people
Fuck and fall in love?

Yes, they do. And they also watch the sunset.
Growing old with their bent spouse’s hands
In theirs. That is the life. Life is the American
Film to which we all aspire. (16) (Italicisation mine)

This last line shows the concern of the poet as a witness. Take note that Ajayi does not criticise this new movement of our lives aspiring towards an American movie. He is rather a witness who reports with a level of detachment, and this detachment is what Emmanuel Iduma calls “uncertainties” in the introduction to the chapbook. The definition of our life in this poem is what Guy Debord chronicles as a life “of conspicuous over-consumption of representation” which is a burden of Postmodernism. Ajayi is a witness to this move.
The uncertainty of postmodern reality and the call for the writer’s function is the exact place to locate this group I call the “Boundary Poets”. They are caught between the boundary of an aesthetic split from the third generation and their dispersal trope and the Achebean-Soyinkaesque prescriptive literary derivative.
This tone of uncertainty is not peculiar to Ajayi. The writers of every period are bound by certain thematic ‘certainties’ that they might not even be aware of. Kirk Curnutt in discussing the expatriate modernist age of Hemingway and his contemporaries notes that: “Writers who live at a particular time often feel a certain commonality of purpose. They respond in similar ways to the conditions that they face. They share, in some degree, a conviction of the expressive possibilities” (viii). And this is also true of the Boundary Poets of the Fourth generation.
In Su’eddie Vershima Agema’s Homes Equals Holes: Tales of an Exile, his persona also swims within the water (forgive this trope, again) of uncertainties. One notices this in the poem, ‘Borders’ thus:

There’s a place
where we meet and depart
the confluence of our tears and fears…
the joint of our longing loves
of our lasting hates. (41)

The polarity of being is expressed through the metaphor of a place in Agema, while for Ajayi, it is between the world of dreams and reality etched in a metaphor of sex. Caught between this border of their very existence, they are shown to be struggling with accepting individualism as a mode of expression or a national narrative.
Richard Ali’s The Anguish and Vigilance of Things expresses this uncertainty in clearer terms by announcing his rejection of the grand narrative but, through antiphrasis ends up projecting the contradiction of their turn which at the end draws more attention to the issues he claims not to talk about:
They talk of politics
Of history and nation

They talk of honour
And the pride of tribe

They talk of sharia
Of OPC and Bakassi boys

They talk of youth
And blissful years

I write poems
For Djarabi. (9)

The boundary poets are the link between the third generation who began the episode of mass migration from the continent and the new school poets that have completely turn their gaze towards the West for validation and the dollar.

The New School Poet: Looking West, and…
The second epoch, and the ongoing phase of the creative expression of the fourth generation are the new school poets. These poets came into maturity, in a manner of speaking, within the arms of social media, the ones who rode on the full throttle of postmodern lures. If the boundary poets are caught between uncertainties, the new school poets gave in to the dehistoricized ethics of postmodernism.
These poets have been called many names: Facebook Poets, Lost Generation, and as labelled by Uduma Kalu—the Suicide Generation. While Saraba Magazine was the initial haven for the Boundary Poets, other platforms, prominently Kukogho Iruesiri Samson’s Words, Rhymes & Rhythm (WRR), Praxis Magazine and Brittle Paper served the same purpose for these poets.
The intention of this essay is to show the missing link that led to where we are today, where what matters to the poet is survival rather than the value of poetry to the development of society. They met a generation that compromised the revolutionary aesthetics that informed the Nigerian literary domain created by the Achebe to Osundare generations.
I will not bore us with the complaints made by other critics like Oris Aigbokhaevbo, Paul Liam, Carl Terver, Michael Chiedoziem, and Ernest Ogunyemi on the shortcomings of this group of poets—the validity or not. I only want to give depth to what I feel is the lack of critical rigour in understanding the condition and temper of contemporary poetry. As far back as 1974, Onoge already notes that “in the contemporary “post-colonial” milieu, the justification for social concerns no longer exists. If the literature is to “mature” they argue, it must move from the “public” to the “private” domain of the artist” (398). This lament, we might pretend is part of the ideal of individual freedom. It is also the triumph of capitalist commercialisation of art.
The writer tired of the failing economic and political structure of the neo-postcolony gives in to the embrace of the West. Contemporary Nigerian poetry ‘published abroad’ is a tireless orchestration of the triumph of postmodernism and its late capitalist logic of consumerism. We must survive, the Nigerian poet screams on twitter! Sound like us and we are willing to open our dollar door, the American magazine responds. It is survival.
Besides the issue of survival is also the identity crisis robing Africans. This is shown in the need by the artist/writers to attain “global relevance”. There is nowhere this is properly captured than in Egya’s “Diaspora Positioning, Identity Politics and the Crisis of Contemporary Nigerian Literature” where he notes that:

The moves to reach the West, to attain globality, and to remain relevant at the global stage, call for, and in fact emerge out of, an identity politics that requires, strange as it sounds, self-objectification and a talent for survival dramatised in desperation for West-based literary agents, literary narcissism in the form of media self-staging, self-immersion in literary debates and controversy, among others. (144)

The effect of this is that the West gets to decide what is authentic contemporary African literature. This signals a great retrogression in the struggle of decoloniality in dismantling Euro-American epistemological hegemony.
So when Chiedoziem talks about consciousness in his essay, he is the most realistic of the critics because his essay calls for the what-next question after stating that contemporary Nigerian literature—poetry which is our focus here—needs to redefine it. Although his call is not new. This has been the core argument of several scholars. Our literature needs to return, and I suppose this return is to redefine our narrative towards a consciousness built on the ideas of decoloniality.
Contemporary Nigerian critics, in their criticism, fail to take the sociopolitical changes that have affected the narrative of this age, and by so doing, they are not able to place the crisis into a proper perspective. What this has caused is a near leave-my-neck conversation between the writers and the critics, because even the critics are suffering from the same death of ideas that they lament about. A criticism of doom-crier such as the one Oris initiated in his “The Death of Nigerian Literature” lacks the theoretical and ideological framework to initiate any cogent conversation that will lead towards the growth of Nigerian literature. In fact, while what he is saying about writers travelling and failing to be as productive as they were in the country, or writers moving into tech, is not a new conversation, his approach of presentation reeks of an intellectual potentate that thinks he is seeing what others are not seeing.
The temper of New Nigerian Poetry is responding to the general crises bedevilling our cultural, political, and economic pattern down on its knee before the altar of imperialism. If there will be any change in the way our art responds to this quagmire, it will be to ensure critical aesthetics that proffers a revolutionary turn. Also, the critics cannot focus on what is being written and published abroad, ignore the poetry written by Nigerians at home, and bear the Nigerian readers in mind, and lament that contemporary Nigerian poetry is only looking West. It shows the contradiction in their life; what critic embrace the canon created outside and use it to justify a national literature? It is great that we have conversation starters, but we must also ensure a critical rigour follows so that we don’t lose direction.

¹Read Udenta O. Udenta’s Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process, 1993.

Oko Owi Ocho, poet and critic, lives in Abuja and Makurdi, Benue State. He is the author of We will sing water.