I wish to thank Niyi Osundare for authorising me to quote extensively from his poems.

1In privileging the poetry of Niyi Osundare within the corpus of recent African poetry of English expression, informed critical opinion (Aiyejina, Osofisan, Olafioye) has drawn attention to the strategies and preoccupations it shares with the works of his contemporaries, notably Tanure Ojaide, Kofi Anyidoho, Frank Chipasula, Jack Mapanje, Odia Ofeimun, Tijan Sallah and Syl Cheney-Coker. Tanure Ojaide draws the generational boundary between contemporary African poets and their predecessors. It underscores the fact that the greater responsiveness of the writers in the last two decades of the twentieth century must be read as reflecting their desire to make a definite impact within their society: Contemporary African poetry is marked by a shift from culture, nature, individualism, and lyricism of the later 1950s and the early 1960s to the national socio-economic, political, and class awareness of the 1970s and 1980s… There is also movement from the private self, the individualistic and the universal to the public and socially relevant. This by itself is movement from a non-political conservative stance to a radical ideological posture”. (Ojaide, 70-71).

2Osundare enjoys more critical attention than many of his contemporaries because, in addition to being exceptionally productive, his work also represents much of their collective achievement in the sense of projecting the values that have come to characterize much of African poetry written since the eighties: the conscious search for indigenized and popular poetic practices, intense social responsibility and commitment to public advocacy. It is understandable, therefore, that Osundare has acted most of the time as a mouthpiece of his generation in the sense of expounding, clarifying and justifying the values associated with it, even if this necessitates being critical of earlier generations of writers. His rejection of the learned poetic idiom adopted by such older Nigerian poets as Soyinka and Okigbo is the most remarkable way he has expressed this in his theory and practice of poetry. This has led Biodun Jeyifo, one of the earliest critics to appraise his work, to observe that “Niyi Osundare’s central, looming position in the new poetry…derives first of all, from this use of language” (316). In a more recent study entitled “Niyi Osundare and the Poetic Statement of A Generation”, Ezenwa-Ohaeto argues that Osundare is “clearly a writer whose works exhibit not only his achievements but also the collective poetic highpoints of his generation” (38).

3This paper focuses on the concern with the poor and the marginalised in Songs of the Season, an Osundare collection that has not been given adequate critical attention. The study proceeds from the assumption that the dreams and desires of the poor, the powerless and the disadvantaged enjoy rare privilege in the poetry of Osundare. It also assumes that a proper reading of Osundare’s work must proceed from appreciating its indebtedness to a variety of traditions, the most important being Yoruba popular poetry of the secular variety, and an egalitarian outlook rooted in a materialist persuasion. This becomes necessary so long as Osundare’s poetics is not a simplistic restatement of either Yoruba poetic conventions or socialist creative principles. His work presents a striking fusion of both as mediated by his artistic philosophy.

4Songs of the Season inhabits a unique space in Osundare’s creative project. In a sense, it represents the best of his early poetry which also anticipates his later work. In this sense, it may be seen as a bridge between the two phases in the development of his poetry. The collection is, most importantly, greatly indebted to Osundare’s artistic philosophy. Yoruba traditions of popular poetry, which are sustained by oriki (praise poetry) and the song of abuse, provide the enabling creative impulse for the work. Located essentially within the public space, Yoruba popular poetry secures its practitioners a great deal of immunity in the discharge of their duty. Whatever contradiction is inherent in the laudatory and censorious intents of the oriki and Yoruba convention of the song of abuse, respectively, is, however, resolved in the ethical motivation behind them – making the poetic subject an omoluabi (well-bred person). Thus, oriki celebrates on the basis of defined ethical principles, while the song of abuse (which is variously known as efe, ajagbo or opelu in different Yoruba communities) indicts and ridicules misconduct so as to effect behaviour modification in erring members of society. The immunity of Yoruba traditional poets in the correction of wrong-doing enables them to satirize anybody within the community so long as they are objective and project the values of the community. But the satirical act is only licensed within the context of particular communal festivals. Even though Osundare cannot transfer the privilege and protection guaranteed the singer within the traditional Yoruba society to his operation in the larger multi-ethnic Nigerian society, he can at least discharge the traditional duties of the town crier which include mobilizing, informing and enlightening the public. This, in a way, affirms the principles of agency and social responsibility that underlie much of Nigerian poetry from the 1980s. The alienation of the indigenous ruling elite from their people in the post-independence era apparently engineered the conflict between African writers and members of the political class. This informs their consistent identification with the common people. The logical consequence of this has been their persecution, which has taken different forms in different contexts, ranging from censorship and banishment to exile, to incarceration.

5Confirming the responsibility imposed on the contemporary African writer in his acceptance speech for the Noma Award in 1991, Osundare said: “In our part of the world, we see the writer not only as a writer but as the voice of the people” (3). This outlook essentially reflects the social responsibility of the artist, a notion that underlies creative practice among the Yoruba and some other African groups. He expounds his understanding of the urgent need for writers in the developing world to get involved with the process of social transformation in The Writer as Writer. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue and Nancy Easterlin, Osundare further clarifies his understanding of the contextual conditioning of poetic practices in the developing world, saying: “Basically, I think the literature of the rich and powerful has to be different in certain important respects from that of the impoverished and unfree, so that the role of the writer in Africa, a developing part of the world, is different from what it is in the developed, industrial part of the world… What this boils to is that the African artist has always had a political role” (211). He has perhaps best demonstrated this in Songs of the Season.

6The Osundare of Songs of the Season is the confident advocate of the public in the mode of the town crier. The motivation for the work, its idiom and the discursive terrain it maps confirm the operation of his creative imagination within the tradition of Yoruba popular poetry. The collection is significant because it is the only Osundare collection that can only be properly read when located within the circumstances that surrounded its production. In this sense, it betrays the uniqueness of Osundare’s poetic effort, especially the centrality of the quest for a new poetic idiom to his creative effort. It emerges as the most typical of Osundare’s works by revealing the essence of his poetic engagement. Songs of the Season appeared in 1990 as Osundare’s seventh collection of poems, having grown out of the poet’s contributions to the Ibadan-based weekly, Sunday Tribune, from 1985. The collection is the product of a deliberate effort at evolving a poetic idiom suitable for the poet’s project of mass-mobilisation. This necessitated adopting the newspaper as his medium, and the engagement of issues and matters of public importance, all of which underlie the functional essence of the project. Reflecting on this experiment in the Preface to the collection, the poet says: “From the very outset, Songs of the Season has been empowered by a definable style and purpose: to capture the significant happenings of our time in a tune that is simple, accessible, topical, relevant and artistically pleasing; to remind kings about the corpses which line their way to the throne, to praise virtue, denounce vice, to mirror the triumphs and travails of the down trodden who ever so often the big books forget; to celebrate the green glory of the rainy season and the brown accent of the dry, to distil poetry from the dust and clay of our vast, prodigious land” (v).

7The audience-consciousness of Osundare in Songs of the Season should point to the fact that the work is, in reality, intended to occupy the creative space between written and performed poetry. This recognition is vital for its critical assessment. Thus, the poems, even though written, are closer to the experience of performance than written poetry in general. This is apparent in the deliberate arrangement of the poems to approximate the structure of a performance in which the presence of the audience is almost always taken for granted. The collection thrives on the construction of a marginal discourse and the poet is far from being an objective chronicler or a disinterested commentator; he emerges as a passionate defender and promoter of the cause and aspiration of the violated. This discursive act derives its legitimacy from an awareness of the necessity of interrogating state-sponsored propaganda that suppressed the neglect, dehumanisation and exploitation of the Nigerian masses right from the Nigerian Second Republic. In a sense, the work provides a basis for gauging the poet’s commitment to the social obligation of art. The note on which an essay documenting his practice of newspaper poetry ends confirms this: “Songs of the Season is a humble attempt to intrude upon the world, to create ‘a new aesthetic democracy’ locked in a historic, regenerative conflict with the protean monster of our underdevelopment. It is a demonstration of my long-cherished belief in the transformative, emancipatory power of art, of poetry (“Bard” 18). In articulating the anger and righteous indignation of the poet, Songs of the Season therefore represents Osundare’s empowerment of the margins.

8By grouping the poems based on shared thematic or technical inclination, the collection betrays the fact that the poems were generated by recognisable creative modes, hence the classification into six sections: isihun, songs, dialogue, tributes, parables and sundry strivings. The rhetorical logic that underlies the arrangement of the sections privileges thematic progression in the sense that each section necessitates the subsequent one, and the entire collection consequently reads as one long poem. The section entitled songs comes after isihun. The third section, dialogue, presents poems that dramatise the social reality that the poems in songs inscribe. Those in tributes equally provide a necessary pause in the dramatisation of anger, as they draw energy from the memory of a rare breed of men in the tradition of the oriki and orin aro. The next section, called parables, is made up of poems created in an idiom that betrays the atmosphere of censorship and insecurity within which some of the poems were written. The temporal conditioning of the poet’s sensibility is a necessary factor in evaluating the entire collection. Not only are the poems an enduring product of the chaos represented by the tumultuous Nigerian Second Republic that spanned 1979 to 1984, they equally capture the failure of the military era with striking sensitivity. In this sense, the poet is a self-confessed advocate of the poor with an incredible capacity for chronicling popular experiences.

9The “isihun”, which the poet himself translates as “voice opener”, is not cast in the mode of ijuba, (invocation) which, in the tradition of Yoruba poetic performances, tends to solicit the legitimising consent of traditional authority. The fact that Osundare’s poetic philosophy does not locate the source of his poetic inspiration in any factor or entity outside the world of men makes it unnecessary to acknowledge dependence on any muse. This confirms the fact that his creative practice operates within the domain of Yoruba secular art. The opening poem merely empowers the discourse of the Nigerian nation and nationalism, an enabling factor for the performance that Songs of the Season constitutes.

10In the face of the crisis that has come to characterise the discourse of the Nigerian identity on account of the complexity of her ethno-cultural constitution, “a song for my land”, originally written to mark the twenty-fifth independence anniversary of Nigeria in 1985, invents an identity within the Nigerian socio-political space which erases established, negative inscriptions that characterise the construction of the Nigerian union in the local media. A proper reading of the poem is essential for an informed apprehension of the entire collection. The commemoration of Nigerian independence apparently called for an intense expression of admiration for the Nigerian idea and ‘Nature’ provides the poet a viable and credible idiom for exploring the Nigerian heritage in view of the decadence that characterises the sphere of the nation’s social life. The Nigeria of “a song for my land” is therefore the ingenious creation of the poet, indicating the possibility of realising the unlimited potentials of the most populous black nation. By granting visibility to the abundant and undeniable resources of Nature within the Nigerian geographical space the poet implies that the human factor accounts for the woes of the land. This should not be difficult to appreciate because the sphere of social intercourse in Nigeria bred ethnic tensions, corruption, oppression and other forms of injustice, while political instability and ineptitude on the part of successive leaders have dented the nation’s image. One can only appreciate the dream of unity nursed in the poem in the context of an idealised perception of Nigeria: “I have mounted Mandara tops./ And seen one land, one people, one future,/ Sliced into countless pockets./ By the glistening blade of political tongues” (5). The vision of nationhood that “a song for my land” generates is logical in the world of the performance that the collection is to authorise the critical reflection that is its main engagement. In this sense, the isihun, which utilises the oriki (praise poetry) tradition in order to invent a romanticised Nigeria, is a necessary component of Songs of the Season. It betrays the patriotic passion that is the driving force for Osundare’s creative project and empowers the underlying quest for social renewal.

11The enabling form for the poems grouped as songs is the Yoruba song of abuse which, among the Ekiti, the Yoruba sub-group to which the poet belongs, is called Ajagbo. “Songs of abuse”, Olusegun Adekoya, states, “constitute a distinct form of satirical poetry in the traditional Yoruba society”, where they “serve to correct social misdemeanours like adultery, drunkenness, and larceny at festival times” (81). By extending the utility of this satirical tradition beyond the Yoruba cultural location where it is easily understandable, Osundare has also broadened the possibilities of the satirical act beyond the atmosphere of the festival, with the implied forfeiture of the immunity and protection conferred by the traditional Yoruba environment. But a far more significant departure from received tradition in Osundare’s practice of satirical poetry is the extension of the poetic engagement beyond the domain of personalised assaults as practised among the Yoruba. He at once adopts a communal voice and exercises a great deal of authority, which derives from recognising the incredible latitude that the operation of satirical poetry enjoys. The target of Osundare’s satire remains the privileged and self-seeking minority dominating the spheres of politics, society and the economy. Consequently, his commitment to the legitimate expectations of the majority defines the subjectivity that energises his work.

12There is no better way to affirm the estrangement of the rich from the poor and the fact of their irreconcilable interests in the poems grouped as “songs” than placing “not for the poor” first in the section. The poem derives its strength from graphically representing the sense in which Nigerians were impoverished in the Second Republic. The era redefined the essence of political power because political power came to be seen as guaranteeing economic mobility, which in turn engineered the alienation of politicians from the populace and their woes. By underscoring the alienation of the powerful and rich politicians from the impoverished electorate, the poem reveals the tragedy of self-governance in many parts of Africa: the breeding of self-seeking ruling elite. The immoral disdain of the political class for the poverty-stricken majority creates the basis for rationalising this disparity. The poem itself is set to the tune of a Yoruba song which registers the insensitivity of the rich to the plight of the poor. The rhetorical sarcasm that sustains the poem equally acquires reinforcement through privileging the active presence of the rich. Their collective voice gives expression to their damnable attitudes and practices. In asserting the inevitable demarcation between the rich and the poor, the speaking voice also validates the link between political power and rapid socio-economic mobility. This becomes more significant in the face of such IMF-inspired economic recovery programmes as the austerity measures of the Shehu Shagari administration, the Structural Adjustment Programme of the Ibrahim Babangida junta and the inflationary trend that Nigerians have had to live with since the 1980s:

In the entire world this is the only country
Where air is free for every breadth:
The beggar, the tramp, may gorge themselves
Without a kobo to the national purse
Hence our sleep, hence our sloth
Hence a nation perpetually broke
So tax the air, rate the breath (…)
The poor may die if they so desire
Who says we suffer a shortage of graves? (10).

13Incidentally, “not for the poor” is the only poem that tolerates the presence of the alienated elite. Others, like “songs of the jobless graduate”, “song of the street-sweeper”, “retrenched” and “cometh the bulldozer, represent the Nigerian crisis solely from the perspective of the victims. They project the shared agonies of the jobless, the exploited and violated majority, survivors of the trauma that the various acts of aggression of the rulers unleashed on the nation. The functional transformation of the rhetorical refrain, from marking the collaborative interaction of performer and audience, to serving as a booster of intent in “not for the poor”, “the road to Abuja”, “song of the tax-gatherer” and “shout of the people” reflects the constraint of the popular ‘performance’ within which the poems were originally experienced by the newspaper audience. This is also true of Osundare’s frequent manipulation of conventional rhyme patterns. Hyperbole and humour reinforce suggestions of failure, ignorance and senselessness in relation to the leaders on the one hand, and the frustration, hopelessness and utter neglect of the ruled, on the other. The insecurity of the leadership emerges as the constant reminder of their isolation, creating the basis for scrutinising their policies and projects. This, for instance, necessitates the creative reflection on the policies of successive regimes purportedly aimed at creating a better society. Their economic policies made them retrench workers; environmental sanitation programmes made the demolition of so-called illegal structures inevitable, while efforts at ensuring the security of lives and property also brought incidents of accidental killings by law enforcement agents. Appropriate songs – “song of the jobless”, “and cometh the bulldozer”, “retrenched” and “song of the straying bullet” – capture this with considerable passion.

14Much as Osundare subscribes to the unity of Nigeria, he does not see the development of Abuja, the nation’s new capital, as an attempt to create a symbolic corporate identity. The Abuja project, for him, is only an excuse for the political class to loot the nation’s treasury. This mistrust justifies his demonising the political class and discrediting the fraud-ridden Abuja project. It may be easy to dismiss many of the poems in Songs as topical just because the urgency of responding to particular events necessitated their creation. But “song of the tyrant” inscribes a profound reflection whose significance attests to the timeless value of some of the poems. Proceeding from graphically evoking the world of tyrants to effect a polyphonic mapping of their genealogy, psychology and fate, the prognostic confidence which generates its judgement dramatises the capacity of poems created in the atmosphere of popular performance for profound statements. Osundare’s reading of the tyrant is a function of his creative outlook and consciousness of the extended exposure of Nigeria to military misrule. The last two stanzas of the poem constitute an epigrammatic summation of informed contemplation, betraying a progressive view of history:

But our world is a book of yester-scenes
Scourge of tyrants and their wormy sins
Hitler hit the pall in a rayless tomb
Zia came to earth in a nameless bomb.

The tyrant’s will and the wheel of the world
Are different lots, a different mould
The door once locked by the tyrant’s whims
Are thrown ajar by History’s fumes (29).

15The way Songs of the Season represents the Nigerian social landscape creates the impression that the crisis that the twin factors of power and powerlessness create permeate virtually every sphere of life. R.N. Egudu suggests that this phenomenon is a common feature of Nigerian poetry in general, but that while the older poets “are contented with depicting and satirizing the misdeeds and actions that offend social justice, the younger poets (published between 1970 and the present) not only deal with similar issues with like satirical attitudes, but also overtly try to inspire and mobilize the oppressed to fight injustice and change their piteous plight for the better” (Egudu, 79). In “At the Senior Staff Club”, this takes the form of a humorous celebration of the impoverishment of the middle class, a major threat to its existence. In “retiring into farming” it emerges as a biting exposé of the corruption of retired Nigerian military officers, while “buka banter” hints at the dehumanisation of the masses to suggest that they are incapable of meeting their basic needs. In almost every case, the poverty of the average Nigerian is read as both illogical and incredible just because it contrasts with the wealth of the nation. But the emasculation of the people is not only material; the worst form it takes is the deliberate use of the instrument of the Nigerian state to repress, censor and eliminate legitimate opposition. Thus, the success of “only four” as a humorous indictment of the Babangida dictatorship comes from its ability to articulate its devaluation of human life. The killing of four helpless students by the police in 1986 created the occasion for this reflection. In registering the event in the collective memory of Nigerians, the poem underlies the shock that the dictator would have expressed at the public outcry against the killing of “only four” students: “The students assailed my comfort/ For just a few hours/ And I called the police to quell the row/ My guests fired their guns/ (After all, the mob too fired/ Their volleys of noisy chants)/ And a few students decided to die (…)/ The Press then screamed/ As if it was all a senseless massacre;/ But when I counted the corpses/ They numbered a meagre FOUR/ Four, yes only four!/ From a crowd of a dozen thousand/ How can FOUR dead be such a crime?” (51).

16In the face of the terror, insecurity and insanity that an irredeemable ruling elite promoted, the inevitable response of the town crier is to collaborate with the forces of change. Thus, “may day song”, which passionately expresses solidarity with Nigerian workers in commemoration of the annual Labour Day on May 1, is a fitting point to conclude the section. In the world of the poem, the working class constitutes the major formation in the community of nation-builders which is also the constituency of the exploited: “I salute the hands/ Which make and mould/ the hands/ which think and set/ I salute the hands/ which vow/ that those who sow/ must also reap” (59). Osundare intervenes in restoring national heroes, a subversive act which is consistent with the project of redefining the values of the nation. In constructing a new roll of honour, Songs of the Season discredits the norms and principles that license the celebration of personages who should otherwise have been declared enemies of the Nigerian state. The heroes that people the world of Songs of the Season – those celebrated in tributes – are recovered from the margins, having been either demonised or subjected to incredible neglect in official quarters. The inscription of these personages on the Nigerian collective conscience is an act of restitution, a way of endorsing the values they represent. Some of the tributes posthumously acknowledge the exemplary, principled but misunderstood nation-builders who, in their almost messianic missions, endured the rejection and scorn of their nation, and died as unfulfilled men with their lofty ideas and dreams. The celebration of the values and principles that the dead among these heroes lived and died for, suppresses the sense of loss and sorrow that the fluid Yoruba elegiac form (orin aro) activates. The poems execute a counter-discursive act in a way that makes identifying with the subaltern unavoidable.

17In pressing oriki to service in the poems, Osundare plays down the factor of personal achievement to eliminate vain and ego-boosting adulation that often characterises Yoruba praise songs. The significance of those celebrated is not a function of their ancestry, wealth or self-centred quests as is often the case in Yoruba lineage chronologies. Oriki proves amenable in Osundare’s handling for recognising people who have facilitated positive social engineering. Tributes dramatises the reordering of values that is central to Osundare’s quest for collective renewal and those it celebrates are men who can people the nation of his dream. The value the tributes share with the mainstream oriki tradition (for even those cast in the orin aro also incorporate the oriki element) is the promotion of their subjects as exemplary members of the human community. In negating the official denigration of teachers and the teaching profession in Nigeria, the first and longest poem in this section, “for Chief Fal Adeniran”, estimates the debt of the poet-persona to a teacher. The voice of the exuberant and impressionable teenager in the poem effectively makes amends for the disregard for the knowledge industry as well as the neglect of the unsung patriots that sustain it in contemporary Nigeria. The unity of vision that runs through “for Femi Falana”, “letter to Fawehinmi”, “for Dele Giwa”, “for Ayodele Awojobi”, “for Chief Obafemi Awolowo”, “for Fela Anikulapo-Kuti” and “for Tai Solarin” testifies to their emergence from the same consciousness. The memory of the maverick Ayodele Awojobi, outstanding Nigerian scholar, lawyer, visionary social critic and patriot, for instance, draws attention to how Nigeria has wasted many genuine patriots. The voice of the poet merges with the collective voice of those it represents in articulating the responses of the Nigerian people to such unpopular developments as the torture of incarcerated politicians, borrowings from the International Monetary Fund and the curtailment of the freedom of the Press in most of the poems in fables and sundry strivings. Not surprisingly, the last three poems in the collection, “when I am dead and gone”, “this I believe” and “Song of all Seasons” reaffirm the poet’s desires, all of which are rooted in his view of the artist and his vocation: a longing to see his work outlive him, the centrality of the liberty of man and the primacy of social responsiveness and responsibility to his poetic project.

18This study has drawn attention to the collaboration of received practices and Osundare’s creative initiative in the making of his work. The fusion of the critical and the laudatory to a common intent is a quality that Songs of the Season shares with the work of such Yoruba poets as Lanrewaju Adepoju and Kunle Ologundudu. Departures from tradition in this case validate Abiola Irele’s contention that the Yoruba literary tradition perpetuates itself by affirming and interrogating shared practices. His effort in this sense is best understood as a way of making tradition relevant to the realities of his time. Osundare’s enduring interest in the marginalised members of his society leads logically to demonising the powerful and the privileged. A similar tendency is evident in Village Voices, an earlier collection which prioritises the rural environment. One can only properly appreciate Osundare’s discursive location by paying attention to the way that the notion of artistic responsibility within the Yoruba culture has impacted on his sense of mission. It is in Songs of the Season that Osundare’s sympathy with the violated and true patriots finds its most articulate expression. By suggesting that sane, patriotic and visionary members of the Nigerian society operate from the fringes of society where they endure the pangs of exclusion, impoverishment, censorship and political victimisation, he executes a serious indictment which those familiar with post-independence African writing in general will easily appreciate. Surprisingly, the world of Osundare’s marginalised majority in Songs of the Season is essentially the world of men in which women are almost invisible. While this is not replicated in such other collections as The Eye of the Earth and A Nib in the Pond, it hints at the complex nature of the politics of representation, for the poet ends up, even if unconsciously, excluding a significant category.