Of Jeremiahs and Jeremiads: Protest, and Hope in Tanure Ojaide's The Endless Song

Abstract

This paper examines protest and hope in Ojaide's The Endless Song. Tanure Ojaide's stature as an accomplished and canonical African poet is incontrovertible. However, the critics of Ojaide have mostly quarried his poetry vis-à-vis his Niger Delta connectedness ignoring other larger spectrums embodied by his poetry. This article, seeking to cover this gap, contends that Ojaide's poetry transcends such territorial confinement to a broader engagement with the dynamics and convoluting pulse of his society. Published in 1989, The Endless Song inaugurates Ojaide as a patriotic poet charged with the responsibility of re-directing his society through his satirical verses. Deploying sociological theory as a theoretical anchor via a textual analysis of the primary text, the study foregrounds Ojaide as an 'angry poet', whose poetry is emblematic of protest, jeremiads, and revolutionary calls to save the soul of a nation going awry. Further, against this backdrop, the paper conjectures that Ojaide's protest and revolutionary poetry engenders a sense of hope and optimism crucial to nation building. The study places Ojaide in the proper mapping as a national poet whose poetry transcends beyond Niger-Delta tirades to offers perspectives that challenge the perpetuation of the ethics of national disintegration and engender viable togetherness in Nigeria.