Niyi osundare biography for kids

Osundare has a wife, Kemi, and three children. Inhe accepted a teaching and research post at the University of New Orleans. In Osundare was caught in Hurricane Katrina, and he and his wife were stuck in their attic for 26 hours.

Niyi osundare biography for kids: Niyi Osundare, (born in Ikere-Ekiti, Ekiti

The last stanza rejects despair by exploding the fateful sense of closure associated with the circle and revitalizes the proverbial saying about the stammerer, which reappears as a positive leitmotiv throughout A Nib in the Pond. For instance, in the poem "When We Write the Epitaph of Apartheid"dedicated to Nelson Mandela, the cumulative repetition announces an inevitable positive outcome:.

These lines have a prophetic ring indeed, now that the vicious circle of apartheid has historically come to an end, now that, after much "stammering," its epitaph is written. Here, the poet crosses boundaries to look ironically again at "the transience of power"; he relishes antitheses like "humble" and "noble" as well as the polysemy of "lumpen" associated with "royal," thus deflating all power-mongers who, whether kings or generals, should know they are as vulnerably human as any pariah.

The poem carries the debunking process further with a Yoruba chant that derides dishonourable rulers; then—with mocking repetitions that echo children's songs or nursery rhymes —it demystifies the king's body and emblems of power:. Osundare himself calls most of his works "composed volumes, not collections," 13 as collections would imply that the poems have been written independently, without a clear thread linking them together.

Apparently, the poems are orchestrated in such a way that they can be read as a kind of subversive symphony—to deflate "sinphoneys"? The words, relentlessly repeated throughout, become so many obsessive chants that reverberate or are reappropriated from one composition to another, sticking in the reader's memory. This suggests that Osundare's written poetry is also meant to be the kind of performance poetry that can initiate the public into a new type of communal experience.

And even if it can be argued that "phrases never concentrate themselves into the shape of a dagger," 15 that searing words or "metaphorical guillotines" are impotent in the face of parcel bombs and fire-guns, the debate on whether artists can directly influence the course of history is still open.

Niyi osundare biography for kids: Niyi Osundare (born in

At least, in Nigeria, they can become instrumental in further strengthening the resilient stuff their public is made of. Meanwhile, writers will go on with the "quickening touch" of their pens, mediating Village Voices or "Odes to Anger" :. The middle stanza from this poem—published by Osundare in January in the Nigerian Post Express —could allude to "the judicial crime" which the Abacha military government committed against writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists.

When he was in detention, Saro-Wiwa had managed to send a letter to the editor of the London Guardian in which he stated that, when after a year in prison, "sixty five days in chains, weeks of starvation, months of mental torture," he was taken to appear before a kangaroo court, he knew that "a sentence of death against which there is no appeal is a certainty.

The men who ordain and supervise this show of shame, this tragic charade, are frightened by the word, the power of ideas, the power of the pen; by the demand of social justice and the rights of man. Nor do they have a sense of history. They are so scared by the power of the word, that they do not read. And that is their funeral. Saro-Wiwa also accused the governments which supply "arms and credit to the military dictators of Nigeria" and pilloried all those who "denigrate humanity" world- wide, yet he remained hopeful because he knew there were people committed to fighting them.

And this allowed him to write; "Whether I live or die is immaterial. And though the hangman's noose was not metaphorical, his words have survived as writers and journalists keep fighting with "the barrel of a pen" Ngugihammering out their anger to their readers or listeners. Niyi Osundare stated that "[Ken Saro-Wiwa]'s pen was getting too large, his images too disturbing" for the powers that be.

He was subsequently charged with treason by the Nigerian military; if he had stayed in the country, he stated, he would have faced a fate similar to that of Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Niyi osundare biography for kids: Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet,

A coup later, with new "pampered emperors on purchased thrones," we have come full circle … To conclude, and to make a long story short or various long poems-cum-symphonies into one short story for "a certain unique or single effect," I shall stammer once more, quoting again from Niyi Osundare's "medley of voices" and "metaphorical guillotines":.

Adapted, of course, from Wole Soyinka 's novel Season of Anomy. Arnold, Stephen. Jeyifo, Biodun. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Soyinka, Wole. Gramophone record. Niyi Osundare has published a body of poems, which deserves serious study, over the past two decades that have acquired a pattern of what he does and does not do. The poet's Yoruba background, his university education, and the Zeitgeist and Volkgist of the late s through the s in particular, combine with other factors to shape the direction of his poetic explorations.

It is in light of these factors that I intend to examine his poetic choices and how these choices impact on his work. To the poet, many poetic choices are made available, depending on one's interests and objectives. Some of these aims affect thematic and aesthetic considerations. Like an explorer, the poet's interests determine the choices of what to experience.

With Osundare, some choices appear forced upon him by conditions of the time, as others arise from personal options and considerations. Thus he is influenced at certain times to "imitate" and at other times to react against. Admiring or disliking somebody or something elicits various responses, which can be seen as aspects of influence. For example, if admiring the later poetry of Christopher Okigbo makes Osundare musical, and if disliking Wole Soyinka's obscure and difficult poetry in Idanre makes him write what he considers to be accessible to the generality of poetry readers, there is a strong influence of both writers.

Like every artist in one way or the other, Osundare makes such choices that he feels will meet the demands of fulfilling his poetic role and expectations. A prime molder of Osundare as a poet is the education he received at the University of Ibadan from to It is not that the other universities he attended much later for graduate studies, such as Leeds and York, did not influence him, but his formative years as a poet were spent at Ibadan.

Having the personal experience at the University of Ibadan at about the same time as him and knowing Osundare as a fellow student in the same English department, I know that the university curriculum and student activities of the time have had a lasting impact on him. In the English department, we had started to read African literature primarily side by side with British literature.

There were courses in African literature, such as modern African poetry taught by Dan Izevbaye, modern African drama taught by Oyin Ogunba, and modern African fiction taught by Theo Vincent. These modern African literature courses were taught along with modernist poets, like T. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. Yeats, courses on Shakespeare, metaphysical poetsand other areas and periods of English literature.

There was a strong interest in modern African poetry that was written by J. Clark Bekederemo, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka, among others who did not have the advantage we enjoyed of reading African literature. I can recollect in lecture halls, tutorials, and the creative writing club that there were heated discussions about these three Nigerian poets.

Most of us seem to have chosen models from among them. Okigbo's untimely death in the war gave a great boost to the popularity of his poetry among young students of English. Soyinka's detention during the war also made him very popular among us. Niyi Osundare, no doubt, was part of this group who was fascinated by the poetic persona cut by Okigbo, the musicality, and word play of his po- etry.

One can adduce Osundare's interest in poetic musicality, in the forms of chant-like niyi osundare biographies for kids and the use of figures of sound—especially alliterations, to this Okigboesque disposition of most of us "budding" undergraduate poets at the University of Ibadan in the late s and early s. Okigbo's last poems, "Path of Thunder: Poems prophesying War" and the experiments, such as his elegiac homage to W.

Yeats, were familiar reading materials among undergraduates of English then. Okigbo, 69 and Selected Poems, The use of incantation rhythms, alliterative sounds, and word play has become part of Osundare's poetic signature. The "Eye of the Earth" best illustrates this aspect of Osundare's poetic choice. Here is "Earth" :. In using incantation rhythms, Osundare balances one line against another as each couplet further reinforces the previous one.

He also uses oriki rhythms in Moonsongs. While later I will talk of Osundare choosing simplicity over difficulty and obscurity, as in Soyinka's Idanre, this use of Yoruba poetic models has been attempted earlier by Wole Soyinka in poems like "Koko Oloro" in Idanre and "Muhammad Ali at the Ringside, " in Mandela's Earth. Here, both poets share experiences of poetic forms of their native culture.

Closely related to the poetic infatuation with Okigbo's musicality and play on words is a certain resistance to obscurity and difficulty of African poetry as in Soyinka's Idanre phase. Many young Nigerian poets of the early s might agree with some of the points made by Chinweizu in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature about the euromodernist excesses of modern African poetry even though criticisms were made.

In the English department of the University of Ibadan, during the period of Osundare's undergraduate program, lecturers and students had wondered what Soyinka meant in many of the poems—especially the title poem. Most of us left the classroom to the creative writing club and carried with us, from one place to the other, arguments as to what poetry should be.

As much as we respected Wole Soyinka to the point of reverence, many of us did not want to write poetry in his manner. As I said earlier, the model was usually Okigbo and sometimes J. A "budding" dramatist like Shadrack Agbagbarha might have had a better inclination to Soyinka's drama, but plays like A Dance of the Forests and The Road might not have endeared to some of us because of their perceived niyi osundare biography for kids.

The obvious reaction to the euro-modernist aspects of modern African poetry, as in Soyinka's worst cases in Idanre, no doubt geared Osundare and many other undergraduate poets to write more comprehensible poetry, as in J. Clark Bekederemo's "A Reed in the Tide. In fact, his "Poetry Is" can be seen as a poetic manifesto of the younger generation of Nigerian poets of the early s and as an indirect jibe at Soyinka's type of poetry.

Among my coevals at Ibadan, including Osundare, the deep respect that extends to reverence for Soyinka did not endear many of us too much with his Idanre phase of poetry. Osundare's poetic choice at the beginning of his poetic career was for poetry that communicates directly. To him. World politics of the Cold War era, diverse implications for Africa, non alignment, and Marxism also helped to shape Osundare's poetic direction.

Osundare's days at Ibadan involved radicalized student union politics. There were frequent demonstrations against policies of European or North American governments that ran contrary to African interests. Students were bussed to Lagos to demonstrate when Portuguese mercenaries invaded Guinea Bissau. Most students seem to have aligned on the part of revolution, no matter how well they understood its implications.

This infatuation with revolution was manifested in student union politics in when Osinowo ran for the secretarial position, which he won by distributing posters emblazoned with "Osinowo, Revolution. The death of Kunle Adepoju in a student demonstration in was perhaps the apogee of this student radicalism against their administrators and anti-African interests.

Osundare imbibed many Marxist ideas, and in fact, he declared himself a Marxist in the s and early s. In any case, his proletarian ideas form part of the bedrock of Village Voices, Songs of the Marketplace, and Moonsongs. Unlike the earlier generation, with poets like Clark-Bekederemo, Okigbo, and Soyinka, the major conflict now had nothing to do with African and Western influences but with class.

This class conflict stared Osundare in the eye in two areas of Lagos:. The contradictions of society, as expressed in Marxism, became more glaring after the energy crisis of the early s and after the political corruption worsened the economic plight of the common people. Osundare adopts a communal voice, rather than an individual voice, in many of his poems in Village Voices and Songs of the Marketplace.

Osundare believes that there is no choice for the African poet but to be political: "You cannot keep quiet about the situation in the kind of countries we find ourselves in, in Africa. When you wake up and there is no running water, when you have a massive power outage for days and nights, no food on the table, no hospital for the sick, no peace of mind; when the image of the ruler you see everywhere is that of a dictator with a gun in his hand; and, on the international level, when you live in a world in which your continent is consigned to the margin, a world in which the colour of your skin is a constant disadvantage, everywhere you go — then there is no other way than to write about this, in an attempt to change the situation for the better.

He also wrote the poem "They too Are The Earth". Career [ edit ]. Publications [ edit ]. Documentary [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Premium Times. Retrieved 19 March Daily Trust. Retrieved 4 October