| Abstract: |
This paper investigates distanciation strategies in Niyi Osundare’s poetry. These strategies include local imagery and symbolism, persona-switching, and elements of Yoruba oral tradition carefully juxtaposed with European poetic features. They distance Osundare’s poetry from imitative
tendencies, obscurity and esotericism, while promoting natural, collective and universal themes that generate an aura of “marketplace” aesthetics. At the same time, the poems address environmental degradation and pervasive socio-political corruption. The study undertakes a close
reading of four selected poems: “The Politician’s Two Mouth,” “The Horseman Cometh,” “They Too Are the Earth” and “Our Earth Will Not Die,” drawn from Osundare’s Songs of the Marketplace and The Eye of the Earth. Adopting a qualitative, descriptive and interpretive approach, the study draws principally on Brechtian distanciation, supported by postcolonial Marxist poetics and African oral aesthetics, to examine Osundare’s poetry as an alter-native tradition in African literature. The findings show that Osundare’s distanciation strategies neither
reject social commitment nor function merely as aesthetic devices. Rather, they perform important ironic and ideological functions by promoting critical awareness, social mobilisation and the transformation of private experiences into collective consciousness. |
