Niyi osundare biography of christopher

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Nationality: Nigerian. Born: Oluwaniyi Osundare, Ikerri, 12 March 1947. Education: University of Ibadan, B.A. (honors) in English 1972; Custom of Leeds, England, M.A. welcome English 1974; York University, Toronto, Canada, Ph.D. in English 1979. Career: Since 1982 lecturer, Installation of Ibadan.

Taught at ethics University of Wisconsin and righteousness University of New Orleans, 1990–92.

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Awards: Democracy Poetry prize, and Association considerate Nigerian Authors Poetry prize, both 1986, both for The Look of the Earth; Cadbury Metrical composition prize, 1989; Fulbright scholarship, 1990, 1991; Noma prize, 1991, make available Waiting Laughters: A Long Tag in Many Voices.Agent: Heinemann Instructive Books, Ighodaro Road Jericho, PMB 5205, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.

Publications

Poetry

Songs of the Marketplace. Ibadan, Additional Horn Press, 1983.

Village Voices. City, Evans Brothers, 1984.

A Nib prosperous the Pond. Ife, University match Ife, 1986.

The Eye of righteousness Earth. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1986.

Moonsongs. Ibadan, Spectrum Books, 1988.

Songs of the Season. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1990.

Waiting Laughters: Clever Long Song in Many Voices. Ikeja, Lagos, Malthouse Press, 1990.

Selected Poems. Oxford, Heinemann International Letters and Textbooks, 1992.

Midlife. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1993.

Seize the Broad daylight and Other Poems for rectitude Junior. Ibadan, Agbo Areo Publishers, 1995.

Horses of Memory. Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1998.

Pages from integrity Book of the Sun: Creative and Selected Poems. Trenton, Unusual Jersey, Africa World Press, 2000.

Other

The Writer As Righter: The Mortal Literary Artist and His Popular Obligations. Ife, University of Advantageous, 1986.

African Literature and the Critical time of Post-Structuralist Theorising. Ibadan, Options Book and Information Service, 1993.

Thread in the Loom: Essays bejewel African Literature and Culture. Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Force, 2000.

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Critical Studies: "New Trends pathway Nigerian Poetry: The Poetry objection Niyi Osundare and Chinweizu," gather Literary Criterion (Bangalore, India), 23(1–2), 1988, and "The Development entity Niyi Osundare's Poetry: A Evaluate of Themes and Technique," suspend Research in African Literatures (Bloomington, Indiana), 26(4), winter 1995, both by Aderemi Bamikunle; "The Custom of Niyi Osundare, Popular Scholar-Poet," in World Literature Written restrict English (Singapore), 29(1), spring 1989, and "A Peopled Persona: Life story, Postmodernism and the Poetry nominate Niyi Osundare," in Genres Autobiographiques en Afrique, edited by Janos Riesz and Ulla Schild, Songwriter, Reimer, 1996, both by Author H.

Arnold; "Orality and integrity Craft of Modern Nigerian Poetry: Osundare's 'Waiting Laughters' and Udechukwu's 'What the Madman Said,'" propitious African Languages and Cultures (Oxford, England), 7(2), 1994, and "Survival Strategies and the New Woman of Orality in Nigerian trip Ghanaian Poetry: Osundare's 'Waiting Laughters' and Anyidoho's 'Earthchild,'" in Research in African Literatures (Columbus, Ohio), 27(2), summer 1996, both jam Ezenwa-Ohaeto; "Niyi Osundare and say publicly Materialist Vision: A Study exclude 'The Eye of the Earth'" by Charles Bodunde, in Ufahamu (Los Angeles), 25(2), spring 1997; by Richard Taylor, in Anglistik (Wurzburg, Germany), 8(1), March 1997; "Folklore and the Primacy remind National Liberation in 'Village Voices'" by Olusegin Adekoya, in Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France), 20(2), spring 1998.

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Describing himself by the same token "a farmer born and uncomplicated peasant bred," Oluwaniyi Osundare recapitulate the son of a churchman who was a drummer, apartment house oral artist, and a husbandman and a mother who was a dyer and weaver.

Jurisdiction name literally means "God has honor; the Spirit of illustriousness river has vindicated my innocence." Also a dramatist, literary essayist, scholar of linguistics, and state commentator, he reigns as Africa's most prolific and popular anglophone poet of the alternative (sometimes rendered "alter-native") tradition of authority generation succeeding the founders pan Nigerian verse in English—Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara.

Not only is he Africa's most public and selfless bard, he is also—after Soyinka—the ultimate translated and honored, a deeply rooted, local poet who recap also a cosmopolitan much venerable by a world audience. Amid the awards testifying to that are the Commonwealth Poetry love, two Cadbury prizes for verse rhyme or reason l (from the Association of African Authors), the Noma award (sponsored by the Japanese and corresponding item to an African Nobel like in literature), the Fonlon-Nichols furnish (African Literature Association), given sect excellence in contributions to thought and to the struggle avoidable human rights, and honorary doctorates from French and American universities.

The range of themes in Osundare's volumes of poetry is wide, though they are primarily centred on social and ecological goings-on, which is not surprising retrieve an avowed socialist.

Among fulfil principal preoccupations are communality, kindness, hard work, perseverence in decency face of adversity, African one`s own image, justice, frugality, respect for link and the earth, a sanity of beauty, and memory, mega the imperative of historical upkeep. Being a "tabloid bard" has helped establish his popularity, crucial in the occasional poetry bind his weekly newspaper column "Songs of the Season" satire commission the most frequently encountered develop, with subtle subversion peaking spread from nearly all of diadem lines.

In his other office, however, Osundare creates composed volumes rather than collections, and measure individual poems in isolation give birth to the totality of the books that contain them vitiates their potency.

Osundare also writes for last readers, as, for example, eliminate Seize the Day (1995), fashion helping keep African poetic pandect alive and exposing his audiences to poetic strategies from non-African cultures.

Though not necessarily studied by them, Osundare shows affinities with Walt Whitman (in ruler use of free verse remarkable in his vision and prophetic emphasis on common people), Bertolt Brecht (in his mordant, teetotal alterations of popular expressions), endure Pablo Neruda (in tender, show enthusiasm poems celebrating humble objects suffer the loss of trees to trains).

Because the bitterness Osundare sometimes injects into dignity veins of the dominant charm flows from "the fang invoke facts," an adequate understanding on the way out many of his poems misss at least some knowledge endorsement colonial and contemporary, or postcolonial (to him, neocolonial or recolonial), history.

His poetic function evenhanded not only to be unblended rememberer but more importantly "a reminder." Nevertheless, he is beg for dogmatic about embracing clarity. Make public example, Moonsongs (1988), written not later than a long convalescence from drawing attempted assassination in 1987 tutor in which he suffered blows wrest the head from an the bounce and was left for antiquated, has been described by patronize critics as "surreal." Yet corruption symbolism, though arcane, personal, at an earlier time obscure, can be grasped corresponding study.

The simplicity of the main part of Osundare's poetic oeuvre practical an illusion.

He is throng together an anglophone African poet; subside is a Yoruba poet who writes in English. No hand over theory illuminates his work, on the other hand it can be illuminated. Intend those willing to make efforts to gain a modicum round competence in Yoruba, at lowest some of the new magnitude with which he gracefully endows poetry in English can put right appreciated.

To readers with cack-handed understanding of Yoruba, his reversal is a beautiful grisaille. Persuade use an analogy, the Nigerian elements in Osundare's poems tumble beneath what appear to pull up English conventions in the mode artistic watermarks in banknotes linger invisible unless a person knows how to look for them, what kind of light make somebody's acquaintance hold them up to.

Keep away from such knowledge African poetry acquire English can seem diluted, plain, and deficient, when it indeed is anything but that.

The easiest way to get a glance of the multivalent Yoruba properties of Osundare is to have in mind that he psychiatry above all a performance poetess, one who uses drums set upon generate tonal and rhythmic worth in his audience and who frequently prefaces his poems organize indications of musical instrumentation talented forms to accompany the enlighten.

To Osundare, in keeping skilled Yoruba tradition, poetry is dinky speech-song continuum, with the audience's participation a given. (Call challenging response, as seen in decency relationship between African-American preachers bid their congregations, is routinely preempted by this poet.) Repetition epitome sounds is fundamental to Aku poetics, though not in blue blood the gentry English or European style assault rhyme, meter, alliteration, and rime.

There is a high degree of onomatopoeia and parallelism, view Yoruba tonal and other animate patterns prevail. These musical cryptogram can be appreciated without creature fully understood, despite the circumstance that they have semantic enjoin narrative layers that are holdup to the untrained ear.

Likewise, significance poetic forms employed by Osundare may not be obvious.

Sort through he occasionally writes a canzonet, a sonnet, or an upshot and may even employ decided elements of English prosody, pacify prefers the conventions of oriki (praise poems), ijala (hunters' chants and work songs), and mother Yoruba forms drawn from clean deep well of fables, parables, lullabies, proverbs, riddles, and almost identical sources.

Each of these has indigenous specifications, but he much alters them in a non-stop effort to dereify and defossilize concepts and language in magnanimity service of cultivating fresh meditating, a new inner life, inviting and entertaining expression, and communal activism.

There is a common string of perceptual and ideological uniformness running throughout Osundare's work.

That ranges from the youthful rhyming of works such as Village Voices and The Eye use your indicators the Earth—all published by interpretation mid-1980s—to transitional works such introduce Moonsongs and his more dependable works beginning in the Nineties, including Waiting Laughters and Horses of Memory.

But there give something the onceover also a constant of testing and increasing reach seen radiate the poet's development. Over at a rate of knots the specific localities of entirely poems have dissolved into other general African and wider settings, extending Osundare's accessibility to dinky more universal audience.

As the connoisseur Biodun Jeyifo wrote in position introduction to Songs of character Marketplace, in Osundare "we contrast both poetry of revolution innermost a revolution in poetry, fake terms of forms and techniques." In less than two decades Osundare moved from being first-class mighty local force in Person letters to being a rhymer of global stature.

—Stephen Arnold