On 30 March 2023, over a month after the publication of Aigbokhaevbolo’s essay, the young maverick of Nigerian literature, Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí, published an equally polemical treatise asking: ‘Is Contemporary Nigerian Poetry “Nigerian”?’ Ògúnyẹmí would answer in the negative. For one, Ògúnyẹmí does not ‘think “Nigerian poetry” exists, yet.’ This is because ‘[m]any of today’s Nigerian poets are working within a tradition that is not ours, a tradition that is mainly American.’ In my essay, ‘A Principle for the New Nigerian Poetry’ (SEVHAGE Publishers, 2023), I explain why this is essentially a misdiagnosis. Indeed, American confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, as Ògúnyẹmí and Lakanse before him argue, have a considerable influence on the new school of Nigerian poetry. However, national literatures across the world are not now so idiosyncratic in their techniques, poetics, and aesthetics as to differentiate them convincingly. For instance, I was recently reading Antonella Anedda’s book of poems, Historiae (NYRB, 2023) translated from the Italian and Sardinian by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart, and if not that the edition is bilingual, there is no way I or anyone could tell that such poems in the book as ‘In Front of the Closets of the Dead’, ‘Lisbo 2015’, and ‘December’ are inherently Italian in translation. Or American for that matter, which is the immediate cultural idiom of its two translators. Although self-contradictions would seep into the essay when Ògúnyẹmí declares the likes of J. K. Anowe, D. M. Aderibigbe, and Pamilerin Jacob as writing ‘thoroughly Nigerian poetry’, it is impossible to overcast the accomplishment of the essay with criticisms as petty and invertebrate as the ones directed at its acerbic tone and structure. 

In ‘The Miseducation of Nigerian Poets’, the essayist, Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera, enters the conversation from a similar perspective as Ògúnyẹmí, with the same diagnosis that this vocational miseducation is American-born. While Ògúnyẹmí gives a detailed account and examples of what Nigerian poetry was, has been, and should be—the same way Chukwudera does of what it has been at the beginning of his essay, albeit in a summarizing facture—Chukwudera’s exegesis has a chronological structure to it. He begins with the discussion of the Nigerian traits in poems of the first three generations, namely J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s ‘Ibadan’, Christopher Okigbo’s poems in Labyrinths, Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’, Niyi Osundare’s ‘Not My Business’, and Kanma Oduwegwu’s ‘Their Fates Might be Mine’ [sic]. Also, he argues that our new poets’ discovery of foreign literary magazines, which is a considerably good thing for Nigerian literature and its performers, is not all perfect. In hindsight, according to Chukwudera, this discovery ‘became a correspondent to the American literary magazine culture… [which] resulted in a situation where many poets began to write similar poems about similar issues and, worse, with similar diction.’ But more on this later. 

For once in recent Nigerian intellectual history, our literary intellectuals showed great restraint against silence as well as ideational uniformity. For once, each interlocutor of the great debates refrained from regurgitating the earlier analysis and judgements on the issue of the disintegration of cultural authenticity from our literary process. With almost every essay coming out against or for the issue at hand, the next always addressed the issue from a different perspective that, if not completely unique, was at least well-grounded. Out of this admirable intellectual tradition, came such an essay as Bestman Michael Osemudiamen’s ‘Much Ado About the Criticism of Fourth Generation Nigerian Poetry’ which, I think, has made not only the most important but the most convincing argument yet on why Nigerian literature is in its current state. The core of Osemudiamen’s argument is that culture, which our new literature is lacking according to critics like Ògúnyẹmí, ‘evolves side-by-side with societal organisation—both on political, economic, and social grounds,’ which ‘reflect on the consciousness of the poet and critic.’ 

Each response that comes after Aigbokhaevbolo’s essay has engaged in purely theoretical arguments on what Nigerian literature is or should be. For instance, Ògúnyẹmí’s and Chukwudera’s projects have, as their unpronounced ambition, an attempt to change the ways our new writers go about expressing themselves. Their ‘nativistic’ tendencies—to use Kanyinsọla Olorunnisola’s nomenclature in ‘Our Literature Has Died Again’—want our new literature to be more Nigerian according to how both of these critics define it. ‘I aim to inspire consciousness about the artistic forces that elude the poets of my generation,’ writes Chukwudera towards the end of his essay. Meanwhile, the transformative tone adopted by the aforementioned critics is also inflected in Oko Owi Ocho’s challenging-to-follow retort to the great debate in ‘The Crisis of Interpretation and the Temper of New Nigerian Poetry’, an essay in which the critic concerns himself with ‘the link between the poets of the third generation, and the emergence of the fourth at the interstice where they converge and depart.’ I agree with Osemudiamen’s judgement that Ocho’s treatment of this concern is somewhat unsatisfactory. For instance, Ocho claims the ‘intention of this essay is to show the missing link that led to where we are today’, but I do not see how his analysis of the historical relation between the third and fourth generations improves upon or corrects, as he asserts, the thematic and stylistic analyses of our new literature by Liam and Terver respectively, both analyses Ocho curiously judges to misunderstand their subjects. ‘Though evaluative at its best’, Osemudiamen also notes, ‘his essay still falls short of the same problem it raises: “the crisis of historical consciousness and clarity of ideas.”’