Place and the postcolonial poetry of Nigeria

This article examines postcolonial engagements with place in modern Nigerian poetry. By foregrounding the mutual implication of text and place, it attends to the transnational struggles over spatial representations and alterity. It also explores how similar tensions are replicated on a smaller scale in terms of nation, region, and ethnic geography. Such a focus on the literary articulation of both the local and the global demonstrates the fractal dimensions of colonialism, as well as the spatial consequences of coloniality within the (Nigerian) postcolony. Four works–Tade Ipadeola’s A Time of Signs, Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems, Niran Okewole’s The Hate Artist, and Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth–provide the basis for the analysis. The article also sets out the importance of poetry, which tends to be marginalized in studies of modern African literature, as a crucial dimension of the African postcolonial interrogation of place.