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'Looking Back Is Looking Forward: Towards a Theory of Tradition in Niyi Osundare's Poetry'

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'Looking Back Is Looking Forward: Towards a Theory of Tradition in Niyi Osundare's Poetry' View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Flinders Academic Commons ‘Looking Back is Looking Forward’: Towards a Theory of Tradition in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry Christopher Anyokwu Introduction It feels somewhat odd, if not a bit heretical, to presume to talk of tradition in the work of a self-confessed socialist-Marxist poet, since, as we all know, the Marxist ideology does not countenance any form of atavism which some might take tradition to mean. This feeling of oddity is partially assuaged by the knowledge that tradition is taken for most people as the take-off point or the entry-point in the discussion of literature and cultural production in general. However, for Niyi Osundare whose work is clearly rooted in and informed by his native Yoruba oral poetics, it will be myopic, in fact, insensitive of anyone not to investigate the place of tradition in his ever-burgeoning oeuvre. Moreover, besides his overwhelming reliance on his indigenous world view coupled with all the ramifying formal and contextual implications of this, his relation to the socialist-Marxist ideology invites us to also interrogate the extent to which the poet has been able to marry these nativist and foreign epistemologies. Does the epistemic wedding spawn good poetry or does it create disharmonious or discordant eclecticism? Does the poet’s neo-traditionalism, indeed, lead to a betrayal of his avowed espousal of Marxism? Seriously speaking does Osundare’s embeddedness in ‘tradition’, finally, result in regression and ahistoricism, or, to put it differently, does it make him a progressive traditionalist? What can we say is the theory of tradition in Niyi Osundare’s poetry? Tradition Before we go further in our discursive inquest into the theory of tradition in Osundare’s poetry, there is need for us to furnish an operational definition of tradition. In The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm defines what he calls ‘invented tradition’ as ‘a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’. In an attempt to provide a basis for this phenomenon of the invention of tradition, Hobsbawm goes on to argue that: It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the ‘invention of tradition’ so interesting for historians of the past two century.1 Hobsbawm rightly differentiates the two categories of tradition and custom, arguing further that custom gives ‘any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history’. While ‘custom’, according to 1 Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 1-3. ‘Looking Back is Looking Forward: Towards a Theory of Tradition in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry’. Christopher Anyokwu. Transnational Literature Vol. 6 no. 1, November 2013 http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html Hosbawn, ‘cannot afford to be invariant’, ‘tradition’, by nature, is open to invention, or, to reconfiguration.2 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English3 defines tradition as ‘a belief, custom, or way of doing something that has existed for a long time’. All things considered, tradition may be said to designate a pattern of social behaviour whose warrant is usually rooted in the communal folk wisdom. While this pattern of social behaviour covers the entire gamut of social life, we are more interested in how the artist expropriates and utilises the constitutive elements of tradition in his work, both in terms of content and form. What, then, do we mean by tradition in Osundare’s poetry? What are the elements of tradition discernible in his verse? In so far as poetry is concerned, our reference to tradition will necessarily be limited to the artistic dimensions of the past; that which T. S. Eliot has called ‘the existing monuments’4 and John Wain, on his part, clarifies as ‘the masterpieces of the past’.5 ‘Looking Back’: The Usable6 Past As Common Backcloth For in the intricate dialectics of human living, looking back is looking forward; the visionary artist is not only a rememberer, he is also a reminder.7 This excerpt exemplifies Niyi Osundare’s philosophy of poetry, if we may so term it insofar as in this brief statement we can flesh out the major ideo-epistemic planks of his literary engagement. The term ‘dialectics’, for instance, is vitally crucial in the overall hermeneutics of Osundare’s work, given his Marxist orientation. And as such, it behoves us to pause awhile to ponder the role of dialectics in his poetry. In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought 8 ‘dialectics’ is defined in part as ‘the conflict of opposites driving reality onwards in an historical process of constant progressive change, both evolutionary and revolutionary, and in its revolutionary or discontinuous changes bringing forth genuine qualitative novelty’ However, according to Holman and Harmon, ‘the most frequent system is that of Hegel, a modification of which Marx employed, in which the material at issue is analysed in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis’.9 Dialectics in Niyi Osundare’s poetry may be said to refer to the relational type, namely, the movement of history. ‘Oppositions’ and ‘resolutions’ abound in the historical process since nature – both in the phenomenal and human worlds – is intrinsically conflictual and contradictory. It is this contradiction – ridden human experience that Osundare in the excerpt above refers to as the ‘intricate dialectics of human living’. He goes on to stress the existential idea of ‘looking back’ [as] looking forward’. This is where we need to observe the greatest caution if we must pin down the theory, of tradition in Osundare’s work. What, then, does Osundare mean by ‘looking back’? And what does ‘back’ in this regard imply? A very convenient starting-point in our search for the essence of this 2 Hobsawm, 3. 3 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1978) 1534. 4 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1933) 13-23. 5 John Wain, Anthology of Modern Poetry (London: Hutchinson & Co. Publishers, 1963) 21. 6 By the ‘Usable Past’, we assume that the past is not a perfect idyll or an elysium which the living poet must deploy wholesale in his appeal to Tradition. Thus, he is constrained to be selective in his expropriation of Tradition. 7 Niyi Osundare, The Eye of the Earth (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1986) xiv. In his paper entitled The Writer as Righter: The African Literature Artist and His Social Obligations, (Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2007) 31, Niyi Osundare notes: ‘The past becomes not only a stepping stone, but a vision tower, for “looking back is to look ahead” ’(Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1979) 172, This goes to show that the conceptual building-blocks of Osundare’s poetics of Tradition actually derived from Ayi Kwei Armah, who, himself was inspired by his Ghanaian oral culture. 8 Tom Bottomore et al., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983) 120. 9 C. Hugh Holman and William Harman, A Handbook to Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 478. 2 ‘back’ is to assume that it refers to the ‘past’. And what exactly is this ‘past’ and where do we draw the dividing line between past and present, given the overarching presence of the past? The past may be thought to cover or stretch from prehistory (including mythic time and folklore) through recorded history to colonial and post-colonial era, that is, the recent past. In this vast and varied stretch of time, human society has always been governed and regulated by certain norms of behaviour, belief-systems and cultural practices. And, expectedly, in traditional society, moral codes and ethical standards were clearly enunciated, with virtuous behaviour rewarded and encouraged and, conversely, vicious acts duly pilloried. It is this reward structure or system which undergirded the socialisation mechanism or process in ancient society. Coming closer to home, in the Yoruba (African) society, virtuous behaviour was and is still highly regarded as such character traits as honesty, hard work, love or compassion, neighbourliness and hospitality, integrity and honour and communalism were seen as the moral building-blocks of society. Deviance or/and anti-social behaviour such as sexual immorality, dishonesty, laziness and selfishness were discouraged. At this juncture let us emphasise that while those oral poets and storytellers were composing their songs without the aid of the technologies of writing or audio-visual, they nonetheless availed themselves of literary tropes and figures of thought, speech and sound such as simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, idiophone, irony, satire, and litotes. The use of these poetic tropes by Yoruba oral raconteurs and poets demonstrates the universality of these rhetorical and stylistic elements as they are found in all oral cultures as well as in chirographic and typographic ones. Additionally, these oral poems, stories and songs relied for effect on such syntactic elements as repetition, parallelism and tonal counterpoint (see Olatunji10, Babalola11, Okpewho12, Ong13 and Osundare14). By
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