To oil the songs: Tanure Ojaide’s Dissemination and Udje aesthetics

Abstract

Oil is at the root of the waves of conflict in Tanure Ojaide’s Niger Delta region. The region is the belt of Nigeria’s oil production. It is also the hottest site of resource-conflict in the Gulf of Guinea. This conflict has become a strong motif in the poetry of Ojaide. And Ojaide enunciates this situation by adopting the aesthetics of his oral tradition. There are two keystones in the aesthetics of Ojaide’s DissemiNation. They are the bolsters of Udje and the construction of place. Both are, however, connected because the solvency of medium is tied to the poet’s commitment to place. Ojaide’s poems are deeply rooted in the habits of thought and aesthetics which underlie the Udje oral tradition of his nativity. This paper takes two trajectories: it locates Ojaide in the soil of Udje, and it goes further to show the bolsters of Udje in a selected number of Ojaide’s poems on oil conflict.