Kunapipi XXVII:1

OYENIYI OKUNOYE
The Margins or the Metropole? The Location of Home in Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter And Other Poems

This essay locates London Letter and Other Poems, a work by the Nigerian poet, Odia Ofeimun, in the context of the growing tradition of postcolonial travel writing, underscoring its inevitable reconciliation of personal memory with colonial history. In arguing that the poet problematises the burden of self–definition, the paper suggests that Ofeimun’s elaborate exposition of his preference for the metropolitan identity that the urban space creates in his theoretical reflection is a metaphor for appropriating the hybrid constitution of postcolonial identity. Lagos and London, which function superficially in the work as opposing spatial designations of the homeland and the colonial mother country respectively, consequently emerge as collaborators in shaping a unique identity that the poet-persona, as a postcolonial writer, shares with others in the in-between space.

Odia Ofeimun is a prominent member of the generation of Nigerian poets that emerged in the seventies to challenge the tradition of ‘apolitical poetry’ associated with an earlier generation of poets, the leading members of which are Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark-Bekederemo. A Political Science graduate of the University of Ibadan, Ofeimun, who was born in 1950 in Iruekpen Ekuma, in Midwestern Nigeria, must be credited with stirring the emergence of socially responsive poetry in the Nigerian context. He has, over the years, been an active member of the Association of Nigerian Authors, the umbrella union of Nigerian writers, having served at various times as its General Secretary and President. He was, in addition, a member of the editorial boards of such Nigerian newspapers and news magazines as The Guardian and The Tempo for more than a decade.

Ofeimun’s reputation as a poet on the Nigerian literary scene for long rested on the success of his first collection of poems, The Poet Lied. The strong statement that the collection makes with regard to the primacy and urgency of the social responsibility of art inaugurated a generational shift in Nigerian poetry, making his work the signature tune for the kind of poetry that was to dominate the Nigerian literary scene from the 1980s to the late 1990s. While the committed art that The Poet Lied promotes was instantly recognised as his major contribution to the making of the Nigerian tradition of poetry and all assessments of his work acknowledged same, it has also turned out to be a major weakness of his poetry. As with all literary works with a clearly defined historical and political focus, the possibilities of reading the work were limited. This is evident in the appraisals of Harry Garuba (1988) and Funsho Aiyejina (1986). An aspect of his work that has not been adequately assessed is craftsmanship. It is in this sense that Olu Obafemi’s ‘Odia, the Critical and Political Craftsman’ (2002) is a necessary, wide-ranging consideration of Ofeimun’s achievement, balancing the exploration of the ‘what’ with the ‘how’ of his poetry.