Fluent Interventions - Webs of the Literary Discipline

FLUENT IN(TER)VENTIONS: WEBS OF THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE

An inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Ibadan

on Thursday, 14 February, 2013

By

ADEREMI RAJI-OYELADE Professor of Comparative (Africana) Literatures & Creative Writing Faculty of Arts University of Ibadan Ibadan, Nigeria.

UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN

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Ibadan University Press Publishing House University of Ibadan Ibadan, Nigeria.

© University of Ibadan, 2013 Ibadan, Nigeria

First Published 2013

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978 – 978 – 8456 – 10 – 0

Printed by: Ibadan University Printery

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The Vice-Chancellor, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration), Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Provost of the College of Medicine, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Dean of the Postgraduate School, Deans of other Faculties and of the Students, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen. The Honour and the Burden: A Preamble Sometimes we choose occasions in the course of time; at other times, occasions choose us and mark us as players, as agents in the climate of life. Today, I stand before you, a votary in the conclave of letters, a representative of the enduring enterprise of literary scholarship, descended from a long tradition of scholars, writers and philosophers. Permit me to start with an apologia: I did not choose to give an inaugural lecture this season. It is the inaugural occasion that has chosen me. Actually it is the destiny of my occasion that has brought me here. This is an act of faith, an action taken to represent the ivory initials of the Faculty of Arts, the premier Faculty of the premier University in Nigeria. To say the least, I have allowed myself to be persuaded into what is, indeed, a timeous challenge to the standard practice of intellection, disputation and creativity in the House of Letters. I want to thank the Vice-Chancellor for being a stickler for order, for insisting that our Faculty not yield to a second-rung position, and for accepting the option that I present this inaugural lecture, two weeks after notice, five years and five months after my official elevation to the professorship. For what is the spirit of an inaugural lecture if it is not the dare and the confessions of work done and yet to be done? What is an inaugural lecture if not the exercise of a decimal contribution to scholarship, and what is an inaugural lecture if not the unfurling of challenges and triumphs, testaments and appreciation of collaborations and other forms of support?

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Inaugural lectures are nothing but the ceremonies of arrival and return. Inaugural lectures can also be described as rites of endings only if such endings are seen as the provocative turn of new departures, because each sense of completion is indeed an entry into another beginning. Here then, for me, is a Janus-faced moment, the very metaphor of the two-faced membrane of Iya-Ilu, the talking drum. One face is celebratory and prosaic, the other is reflective and poetic, both faces being a symphonic proof of an induction, an introduction, a promise, a debt - indeed, a kind of arrival. I am here this evening to reflect on the routes taken to achieving a certain kind of scholarship. I have checked the records and found that this will be the eighth inaugural lecture to come from the Department of English. Prof. Paul Christophersen delivered the first inaugural lecture in the history of this University on Foundation Day, November 17, 1948. It was titled “Bilingualism”. Prof. Molly Mahood’s “The Place of English Studies in an African University” (1954) was the second from the Department; in 1976, Prof. M.J.C. Echeruo presented “Poets, Prophets and Professors”; the fourth lecture was that of Prof. Ayo Banjo, titled “Grammars and Grammarians” (1981); Professor D. S. Izevbaye’s lecture was entitled “In His Own Image” (1985); Prof. Isidore Okpewho’s “The Portrait of the Artist as a Scholar” was delivered in 1990, and Prof. S. O. Asein’s lecture “Literature and the State: Thoughts on the ScholarCritic as Mediator” (1995) was the seventh. To be joined with this list of great intellectuals is a thing of great pride. It is also a double pride to be giving this inaugural lecture, sixty-five years after the founding of our University, as the first Professor of Comparative (African and African American) Literatures, combined with Creative Writing in the Department of English.

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Salutation I come gently Like the evening rain I come in silence Like the dews of a virgin morn I come suddenly Like thunder, like the rain at noon. Rites of first tuber and leaves to you Oh forbears of redolent words Salute to you who ponder our ways to sunlight Salute to you who hold pestles of songs To the mouths of mortal wrongs. I salute the song I salute the singer I salute the patience of quick proverbs I salute the craft in immortal songs I salute the pebbles I salute the pearls... Give my voice the sonorous strains of bitter kolas Give my voice the slippery depths of colobus bananas Let my eyes curve into the past Like a sickle in the harvest of gladsome songs Let my blood draw the picture of things Gone, going and coming... I come tenderly like the full moon among gasping stars. I come gently like the evening rain. (Webs of Remembrance, p. 11) **** ****

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“Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.” (African Proverbs, p. 31) The topic of my lecture, “Fluent In(ter)ventions: Webs of the Literary Discipline” is a simple but provocative one. I want to begin with a set of assumptions and descriptions in order to aid understanding and intervention. Therefore, I must request your kind attention as I become, momentarily, the protagonist-narrator of D. O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1968), translated by Wole Soyinka as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1982), who said thus: My friends all, like the sonorous proverb do we drum the agidigbo; it is the wise who dance to it, and the learned who understand its language. The story which follows is a veritable agidigbo; it is I who will drum it, and you the wise heads who will interpret it. Our elders have a favourite proverb – are you not dying to ask me how it goes? – they tell it thus, ‘When our masquerade dances well, our heads swell and do a spin.’ Forgive my forwardness, it is the proverb which speaks. (7) The fluency or harmony of interpretation is all that literary scholarship is about. Generally speaking, fluency is the ability to translate, transmit and disseminate knowledge as a plural signifying practice. The literary scholar must be endowed with the proverbial gift of the gab, that is the ability to express and interrogate in metaphoric ways without beclouding the meaning of things or the substance of the idea. Fluency is about clarity and the capacity for illumination. By fluency, I also mean the plural possibilities and impulse of the

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literary imagination, of which the dual skill of expression and composition is paramount. By in(ter)ventions, in the manner that I have troped upon the word, I mean to signify on three related layers of meaning, all referring to what we do in literary scholarship: giving meanings to the structures and signs of literary productions. In(ter)vention is an alphabetic coding of the interrelated activities of invention (i.e. creativity and imagination), interpretation (i.e. functional and aesthetic analyses) and intervention (i.e. the critique of ideas, commitment or engagement). The term “webs” is employed here ambiguously, as a double entendre, to refer to the active operations of critical and literary practices across generations, genres and periods, as well as to the contemporary material ascendancy of the digital revolution and its instances and appearances within literary and critical practices. Beyond the metaphor of Hermes in the linguistic web, I deploy the term as a predictable analogy to the delicate life of the spider, that insect in popular folklore endowed with the character of guile and industry. Therefore, my overall intention is to signify on both the creative and critical energies of the literary product and the discourses that emerge around and about the discipline we generally call Literature. Literary scholarship, to be more direct, is all about the theorising and the illuminations of the literary text, just as it is about the systematic interpretations of texts, spaces and phenomena in societies. In a generalist metaphor, Literature is about, in, and of the world of men, spirits, machines, inventions, legends, histories, myths, philosophies, calculations, permutations and everything else that can be imagined. In the epigrammatic definition of Roland Barthes, Literature is “…anything that gets taught.”

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Arising from this, let me deal specifically with aspects of my own introduction to literary scholarship, reflecting briefly on some influences which provoked particular critical attitudes and which shaped my interests and direction over the years. My training as a literary scholar is in the comparative discourse of African and African American Literatures, exegetically referred to as “Literature of the Black Disapora”, or, advisedly, as “Literature of the African Diaspora”. I will like to acknowledge my teacher, the one I call “othermother” Professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, for introducing me to the course “Black American Literature” in the Department of English, during the 1982/83 academic session, and both Professors Samuel Omo Asein (now late) and Ogunyemi for their memorable lectures in the literary history and periods of African American and Caribbean Literatures during the 1985/86 session. In the study of classical and English literary theories, no attentive student would easily forget the lectures of Professors D. S. Izevbaye (English) and Femi Kujore (Classics); in the study of gender, Marxist and Africanist theories, Professors Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and Chikwenye Ogunyemi were first-class teachers and motivators; and in Creative Writing, it was the duo of Isidore Okpewho and Niyi Osundare before the chalkboard, teaching beyond the recompense of their lean salary, and experimenting with us in the legendary Poetry Club of the days. So these were few of what got taught. Thirty years and one, I have remained a student of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies. I have been “moving without moving” (to paraphrase the paradoxical title of Houston A. Baker’s essay on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man). The umbilical cord of my scholarship is located somewhere in the west wing of the main building of the Faculty of Arts, with my formative limbs in the cognate Departments of Classics, Theatre Arts and Language Arts. I have emerged as a scholar-poet, with literary interests stretching beyond the critical theories of

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Deconstruction and Gender, into the cultural discourse of transgressive paremiology (the ornate terminology for the radical study of unconventional proverbs) as well as the interventional interface of science, technology and literature. Accidents as Design “Ori! lo! mo" ibi e"se#" n!’re#”: The head alone knows where the feet will go. Translated by Oyekan Owomoyela, Yoruba Proverbs, p. 354. How did I come into literary scholarship? At a very young age, I made a foray into literary activism by joining the OPC, that notorious student organisation known as the Olivet Press Club at the prestigious Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo. It was there that I found the nib to overcome a certain brooding tinged with inherited shyness; it was as a member of OPC that I made a name, at one and the same time dreaded and loved by teachers and students alike, depending on whose ostrich had been beaten into submission and exposure by the power of the pen. At Olivet, I was classified as a “Science but Art” student because I dared to combine Geography with Literature and History, enrolled for Higher School Certificate examination, emerging in 1981 with two different certificates, one with Literature and History, and the other with History and Geography. I collected the former and left the latter in the disciplinarian locker of Chief J. I. Popoola, our school Principal. Although I was a full-fathomed Science student at Holy Trinity Grammar School, Ibadan, it was there that I started writing odes, fashioned after the English Romantics. My school library was rich, and you were compelled to read a book beyond your formal subjects. But it was at Olivet

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Heights that I put style into the art of writing, where I first imagined that I was playing the lives of John Keats and William Wordsworth combined. I would go beyond the school’s fish pond and be lost in the thicket for hours, wandering through lonely paths and sometimes reclining on the branch of an average tree, believing that the way to reach my Muse was to go far from the madding crowd. The radical attitude worked perfectly with my nature for I was the brooding type. I kept a distance from the rough routines and escapades of my classmates, and they were many. With eventual admission to the Department of English, my journey to literary inventions and interventions began in earnest in December, 1981. Practising the Theories “We start as fools and become wise through experience.” (African Proverbs, p. 58) Besides other hermeneutic studies, what I considered as a major entry into the world of literary interpretations was my comparative study of African and African American literary traditions, with particular focus on the representative novels of Ralph Ellison, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison and Bessie Head. The study culminated in the development of a theory of reading which I named as “reading kinesis”. As I questioned it in my doctoral thesis: What is, or what do we mean by “reading kinesis”? What is the nature, scope and relevance of this critical apparatus in and for an understanding of the formation and transformation of the fictional persona in the novel? In fact, how does one formulate a reading

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fluidity, out of the cold complicity and fixability of the word which is the graphic nature of writing? Generally by reading kinesis, we mean a dialectic basis of understanding the textual construct and the reading phenomenon as supplements, we mean the temporal and dynamic conceptions of the novelistic text as monument and the force of analysis as revelation of moments. (51) One of my graduate students, who is currently pursuing his doctorate programme at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has extended upon the theory in his close reading of the novels of Ralph Ellison and Daniel Omotosho Black. In the words of Oladipupo Oyeleye: Reading Kinesis, a theory of the novel, propounded by Aderemi Raji-Oyelade (1993)… is a [reading] strategy for tracing the plot of characterization to reveal a pattern/form of movement, growth, and transformation that comes as a result of the process of journeying towards selfhood. It takes an eclectic dimension through a cumulative, transformed whole of connections of Wolfgang Iser’s wandering viewpoint, Tzvetan Todorov’s narrative forms of equilibrium, Umberto Eco’s iconic codes of kinesis, Isaac Newton’s dialectic of dynamics, Houston Baker’s demonstration of mobility in black discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin’s totalizing descriptive analysis of metamorphosis and Edward Said’s travelling theory. This gamut of propositions provides a template for an amalgamation of concepts from structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, psychology, philosophy, biology and physics… [to account for

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the] internal active motion of the protagonist towards the actualization of consciousness in social movement. (13) “Reading kinesis” is both a figurative and a scientistic term, its aim being to compose a formulaic pattern of the growth, movement and development of main characters within the fictional frame of the literary text. It refers to “the activity of the reader who literally moves through the text and figuratively attempts to construct a network of transformative acts of the novel’s protagonist”. It also refers to “the function of the character as he/she evolves in a process of motion introducing, confirming or contradicting and ultimately completing the image of self” (“Reading Kinesis: Character Theory in the Black Novel”, v). My focus therefore was transcendental and dialectic: instead of merely focussing on the significance of plot or character as mutually exclusive constructs, I opted for the fabrication of a reading strategy – the “plot of characterisation”. As a literary scholar with a flair for hard science, I sought my descriptive analogy or correlation in elementary physics, in the definition of momentum as the multiplying sum of mass and velocity: “When an object X is moving it is said to have an amount of momentum given, by definition…momentum = mass of X x velocity (Nelkon and Parker, 17). Let me explain as simply as I can. It is noted that while velocity may vary, given mass is said to be constant: “the mass of an object is constant all over the universe…” (17). However, the difference in the novel points at the changeability of mass if mass is the operative word for character. Consequently, transformation, rather than momentum, becomes a vector quantity in which the animated mass, the character, reacts to change in velocity. Now my

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second adaptation refers to the definition of kinetic energy itself: An object is said to possess energy if it can do work. When an object possesses energy because it is moving, the energy is said to be kinetic, e.g., a flying stone can break a window. Suppose that an object of mass m is moving with a velocity u, and is gradually brought to rest in a distance s by a constant force F acting against it. The kinetic energy originally possessed by the object is equal to the work done against F, and hence kinetic energy = F x s (29). Once the word “object” is replaced with “subject”, this concept of movement becomes more meaningful in the context of a literary text, and the reference to a kinetic energy “originally possessed” is understood as the force of the unconscious or innate capability of the individual. An apt phrase which sums up this operational conflation of semiotic and mechanistic ideas is found in the monumental work of Giambattista Vico with its major objective of constructing a “physics of man”, something akin to Claude Levi-Strauss's notion of a general science of man (Hawkes 12, 32). Published in 1725, The New Science centres on the origin and development of poetic wisdom described at a point as metaphysics. For Vico, the new science is “at once a history of the ideas, the customs, and the deeds of mankind” (296). His discussion of the physics of man shows that man has the robust, unremitting capacity to create and be created and that he also has the authority to formulate the rules of the structuring process in culture. (“Reading Kinesis…”, pp. 59-60)

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Of Subalterns, “Sexclusionary” Acts and the Female Identity Early in my scholarly development, I was aware of the inevitable mandate to engage in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary discourses, not only within the related fields of the humanities and the social sciences, but even across these borders into the seemingly unconnected disciplines of the natural sciences. But more precariously, I was aware of the need to pay greater attention to the development of human intelligence and welfare. This concern led me to an intense focus on the critical interpretation of the female imagination, or the absence of it, in contemporary African poetry. I have always been interested in the theory of gender in African literature. I have interrogated the way the female person(a) has been excluded in literary studies. I have accounted for and interpreted the emergence of new female voices who have refused to be reduced to subalterns in the African literary space, with particular attention on South Africa and Nigeria. Ironically, my gynocritical intervention into the analysis of works produced by female writers has also caused me some interesting discomfiture. An example would do here. Sometime in 2002, I won a travel grant to the Institute of Gender Studies in Pretoria, South Africa. The letter bearing the good news had addressed me as “Ms. Remi Raji”. I did not pay much attention to it. At the visa section of the South African Embassy, I explained the error away as the mistake of an ignorant secretary. But when the designation did not change in other subsequent mails, I wrote a gentle confession to the Director of the Centre that, alas, I was male, and would like to be addressed as such. A long silence followed my confession. Ms. Jennifer Lemon would later reply to apologise on behalf of the Selection Team, for mistaking me for a female scholar. She did not cancel the travel grant but

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noted that I would be the only (and perhaps the last) honorary male grantee in the history of the IGS. My Pretorian experience was an indelible one, and I was the better for it interrogating and understanding the Woman Question in African literary scholarship. My other experience of “sexclusionary” practices in another institution within the same year was not quite as happy. I have related this in an essay entitled “Bondages of Bonding: The Challenge of Literary Criticism in the New Age.” I continue to conduct research in this area and, over time, I have completed a couple of essays including “Notes toward the bibliography of Nigerian women poetry (1985-2006)”, in Research in African Literatures (Vol. 39, No. 1, 2008, 198203), “Representational Exposures: The Album of Nigerian Women’s Poetry”, in Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The Legacy of Ezenwa-Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing, edited by Matzke, C., A. Raji-Oyelade and G. V. Davis, and published by Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York (pp. 293-316), and “Season of Desert Flowers: Contemporary Women’s Poetry from Northern Nigeria”, in African Literature Today (Vol. 24, 2004: 1-20). Professor Ernest Emenyonu, editor of ALT introduced my essay, “Season of Desert Flowers…” as a pivotal and groundbreaking work, acknowledging it as one of the first full-length critical essays on Northern Nigerian female poetry. My mission in that essay was simple: to uncover the double-veiled silence and silencing of the contemporary female poet, North of the Niger, hitherto unknown or invisible and without focal critique. The regional and cultural mandate was necessary in order to achieve close scrutiny and critical provocation. ****

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Of Radical Proverbs and Playful Blasphemies “There is no phrase without a double meaning” (African Proverbs, p. 35) Immediately after completing work on “reading kinesis” - a pet theory generally acknowledged as unique and inventive by the Viva Panel with Prof. Theo Vincent as External Examiner - I thought I needed some time to unwind, to do something different and perhaps more challenging. Although I continued to work as a comparatist critic of the literature of the black Diaspora, I felt the need to return home, metaphorically, like Macon Dead III in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon or the protagonist in Omotosho Black’s They tell me of a home. I needed to engage with my roots in real and virtual terms. I returned to the essential analyst in me by attempting a social critique of the phenomenon of invented proverbs, reflecting on the playful practice of the cultural act, that is, the radical speech act of African modernist proverbs. Of all my critical in(ter)ventions, it is this cultural critique of a subgenre of African oral performance that has taken so much of my time and devotion. This is what I have researched into for two decades, giving the first lecture on the subject in 1995 (as a post-appointment seminar paper in the Department of English, University of Ibadan). I have carried the critical heritage of this speech act with me jealously around the globe, interrogating and extending upon the original thought, orbiting around the exercise and testing my Yoruba examples in other cultures in Africa and other parts of the world, from California to Cambridge and Cape Town, from Stockholm to Faro, and from Lisbon to Berlin. For over 17 years, I worked on the sociolinguistic theory of proverbs, the efforts of which resulted in the publication of a book entitled Playful blasphemies: postproverbials as archetypes of modernity in Yoruba culture (2012).

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From Proverbs into Postproverbials “He who upsets a thing should know how to rearrange it.” (African Proverbs, p. 54) “Where there is a will, there are five hundred relatives.” (Anonymous) In a 1995 essay on this subject, first published in Research in African Literatures (1999), I propounded a cultural theory of an African verbal art and named the radical speech act as postproverbials. I defined postproverbials as “alternate creations derived from and which stand against traditional proverbs” (75). As inventive and subversive verbal acts, they are produced either in jest or ignorance of conventional and generally accepted and anonymous proverbs in a given culture. They are found in numerous formations in contemporary poetry, the novel, drama, the film, music and other ancillary genres like talk shows, sermons and speeches. Even as they mutate as retorts or as prostheses over time and space, they have received little critical attention. The only essay I was to encounter later on the emergence of such modernist proverbs was Alaba Olugboyega’s “A!gbe"ye#$wo$ O!we I!wo$yi"”, published earlier in 1986 in a Yoruba language journal, La!a"n!gba"sa". In further rendition, I have shown that the postproverbial is translatable in Yoruba as a#s"a#kas"a#, that is, the dynamic act of the cultural deviant, the prodigal text which always attempts to overwrite its own source. As I put it in the Playful blasphemies…(2012): Inherent in the formation of the typical postproverbial utterance, as supplementary and subversive act, is the discursive strategy of

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mimicry, in which received wisdoms are queried, tested and subjected to textual rupture. In other words, the idea of the playful blasphemy is one which thrives on the capacity of the speaker’s exuberant disdain for the traditional proverb. Postproverbials are structurally deconstructive and thus logophagic, and logorrhetic in nature. I have defined both logophagia and logorrhoea in the context of postproverbiality as “the condition of verbal cannibalism and banalization…doing modernist savagery to native wisdom” and as “the potential for sententiousness, verbal diarrhoea to be precise.” Postproverbials are also migrant texts in the tradition of oral traditional performance, moving from people to people and getting transformed in the moment of travel; “migrant” in both senses of space and time: moving freely and bifocally between the rural and the urban space, fluid and doubly transitory. In both invention and reception, as much as the site of creation may seem to be frequently urban, the postproverbial also finds convenience and favorable condition for its exercise in the open space of the cultural sphere, be it urban, peri-urban or rural. Thus, postproverbials are the recent ‘posterity’ of traditional sayings, the posterior reaction or response to conventional wisdom and native intelligence; they are what I assay to call the futuristic rump of a verbal art form prone to every kind of transfigurations associated with cultural dynamism. (69-70)

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Some examples of representative pairs or multiple supplements of proverbs and postproverbials will be presented here:

(i) p1: Afe"#fe"# ti fe"#, a ti ri" fu$ro$# adi$ye#. [The wind has blown, we have seen the anus of the fowl.] p2: Afe"#fe"# ti fe"#, a ti ri" ohun to" n" du"n ni"nu"u redio. [The wind has blown, we have seen the transistor secrets of the radio.] (ii) p1: Agbo"ju" l’o"gu"n, fi ara re#$ f’o"s#i$ ta. [He who depends on the inheritance, leaves himself as pawn to poverty.] p2: Agbo"ju" l’o"gu"n, o" fe"# je# n"’be$# ni. [He who depends on the inheritance, surely wants a share of the property.] (iii) p1: A!i"si" ni"le" olo"o"gbo$, ile" d’ile" e$ku"te". [The cat is not in the house, the home becomes the playground of rats.] p2: A!i"si" ni"le" olo"o"gbo$, e$ku"te" n" sa" ka"a$kiri. [The cat is not in the house, the mouse runs (fools) around.] p2: A!i"si" ni"le" olo"o"gbo$, ti" i" mu" “me$-ha"ya$” fi" n" di “me$gi"da"”. [The cat is not in the house, (and) the tenant suddenly becomes the “landlord”.] p2: A!i"si" ni"le" olo"o"gbo$, ti" i" mu" e$ku"te" jo#ba ni" “ki"nsi$nni$”. [The cat is not in the house, and the mouse becomes “king in the kitchen”.] (iv) p1: A!i$te$te$ m’o"le$, ole$ n" mo"lo"ko. [In the hesitation to catch the thief, the thief arrests the farmer.]

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p2: A!i$te$te$ m’o"le$, ole$ n" sa"lo#. [In the hesitation to catch the thief, the thief scampers away.] p2: A!i$te$te$ m’o"le$, ole$ gbo#"n si"i. [In the hesitation to catch the thief, the thief proves wiser.] (v) p1: Aye" l’o#ja$, o#$run n’ile". [The world is a marketplace; heaven is the home.] p2: Aye" l’o#ja$, a$mo#", e# fe$#mii" le$# s’o#"ja$. [The world is a marketplace; so, leave me in the market.] (vi) p1: Bi" o$ke"te" ba" da$gba$ ta"n, o#mu" o#mo# re$# ni"i" mu. [Once a rodent gets old, it sucks its child’s breasts.] p2: Bi" o$ke"te" ba" da$gba$ ta"n, o" ti to" yi" la"ta. [Once a rodent gets old, it’s good enough to roast as food.] p2: Bi" o$ke"te" ba" da$gba$ ta"n, ki"ku" ni"i" ku". [Once a rodent gets old, it dies.] p2: Bi" o$ke"te" ba" da$gba$ ta"n, inu" iho$o re$# ni" i" jo"ko$o" si". [Once a rodent gets old, it stays in its hole.] p2: Bi" o$ke"te" ba" da$gba$ ta"n, e$ku$ro"# to" ti to"#ju" ni"i" maa" je#. [Once a rodent is old, it eats its own reserved palm kernels.] p2: Bi" o$ke"te" ba" da$gba$ ta"n, a" d’aru"gbo". [Once a rodent is old, it grows older.] (vii) p1: E#ni ti" a ba" tori" e$# pa adi$ye#, iwe ni" n"’je#. [The person on whose behalf the hen is sacrificed, eats the gizzard.]

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p2: E#ni ti" a ba" tori" e$# pa adi$ye#, ori" ni" n"’je#. [The person on whose behalf the hen is sacrificed, eats the head.] p2: E#ni ti" a ba" tori" e$# pa adi$ye#, gbogbo re$# ni" n"’je#. [The person on whose behalf the hen is sacrificed, eats it all.] (viii) p1: E#ni to" ji$n si" ko$to$, o" ko"# ara" i$yo"ku$ lo"#gbo"#n. [He who falls into the pit serves as a scapegoat to others.] p2: E#ni to" ji$n si" ko$to$, oju re# lo fo#. [He who falls into the pit must be blind.] p2: E#ni to" ji$n si" ko$to$, o" fe"#e"# na"wo" fu"n do"ki"ta$ ni. [He who falls into the pit is billed to spend money for doctors.] p2: E#ni to" ji$n si" ko$to$, o" fe"# di" ko$to$ ni. [He who falls into the pit is eager to fill the pit.] p2: E#ni to" ji$n si" ko$to$, ko$ wo ibi ti" o" n’lo# ni. [He who falls into the pit is probably unconscious of where he’s going.] (ix) p1: E#yin ni" n" di a$ku$ko#. [The egg becomes the cock.] p2: E#yin ni" n" di a$ku$ko#, ti" wo#n o$ ba" se$-e" je#. [The egg becomes the cock, if it is not cooked and eaten.] (x) p1: Igi gogoro ma" gu$n-u"n mi lo"ju", a$to$ke$re$ lati n" wo$o". [So that we may not be blinded by the tall, pointed tree, one must watch it from afar.] p2: Igi gogoro ma" gu$n-u"n mi lo"ju", ma$a" do#"o#$ji$ e$# ni. [So that I may not be blinded by the tall, pointed tree, I will dodge it.]

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(xi) p1: K’o"ju" ma" ri"bi, e#se#$ loo$gu$n un re#$. [That the eyes may not witness calamity, the leg is its solution.] p2: K’o"ju" ma" ri"bi, gbogbo ara loo$gu$n un re#$. [That the eyes may not witness calamity, the whole body is its solution.] (xii) p1: Ma$a"lu$ ti" ko$ ni"’ru$, Olu"wa ni"i" ba a" l’es#in. [As for the cow that has no tail, God is its repellant against flies.] p2: Ma$a"lu$ ti" ko$ ni"’ru$, o" wa$ ni" Sa"bo". [The cow that has no tail is available at Sabo.] p2: Ma$a"lu$ ti" ko$ ni"’ru$, o" wa$ ni" Ka"ra$. [The cow that has no tail is available in Kara.] p2: Ma$a"lu$ ti" ko$ ni"’ru$, o" wa$ ni" Sa"nn"go. [The cow that has no tail is available in Sanngo.] p2: Ma$a"lu$ ti" ko$ ni"’ru$, o" wa$ ni" O!je". [The cow that has no tail is available in O!je".] p2: Ma$a"lu$ ti" ko$ ni"’ru$, o" wa$ l’O%yi$ngbo$. [The cow that has no tail is available in Oyingbo.] [See Playful blasphemies, 2012; pp. 131-146] In his Foreword to the book, Wolfgang Mieder offers the following comments: The numerous examples that Raji-Oyelade has collected from the mass media, literature, music, and by way of a questionnaire are, and this needs to be stressed, for the most part excellent examples for the subversive nature of African postproverbials. It is an absolute delight for a

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non-African scholar to read these texts and RajiOyelade’s informed commentaries. I am thoroughly convinced that his theoretical framework hits the proverbial nail on the head. (18) What, if we may ask, is the implication or the value of this cultural phenomenon of rupture and suture? Postproverbials are signs and evidence of a new consciousness of African modernities. I have highlighted the following points as the reasons that make the production of postproverbials possible: Among other factors, the making of the postproverbial text has been due in part to the vanishing of the real village or community square tradition which provided for constant transference of traditional wisdom through the knowledge and use of traditional proverbs; the decline in the deployment of the standard resources of Yoru!ba" language among educated elites and members of the vanishing middleclass in Yoru$ba" societies; the indifferent or triumphalist sense of overcoming Yorùbá with the use of the English language by the youth (English being an important marker of upward mobility among the “elite”); and even when attempted, the intervention and corruption of Yoru!ba" conversations with words, phrases, and slangs borrowed from other languages, including Arabic, English, Hausa and Nigerian Pidgin; and most pertinently, the suspension or de-emphasis of the teaching of the forms of Yoru!ba" proverbs in both private and public elementary schools in the country. (125)

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I have constantly reflected on how to do things, how things are done, and how knowledge is re-packaged or reproduced by the appropriations of the postproverbial imagination. I continue to seek similar transgressive incidences in other African cultural spaces and texts where postproverbials work. My work has engaged and provoked reactions among literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, poets, playwrights, musicians, film artists and others in the cultural sciences. My ultimate mission is to highlight and theorise the brilliant dynamism of the radical proverb and the questionable (in)competence of the users of the invented speech act.

Literature and Technology: Learning IT in Bits and Bytes “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” (African Proverbs, p. 23) So what is my other interventional indulgence? As I know it, the study of Literature has always yielded itself to interconnection of disciplines. No doubt, the Humanities, of which Literature is a central preoccupation, has always been flexible to disciplinary companionship. I have been taught that there are various and related extrinsic studies of Literature including Literature and Psychology, Literature and Sociology, Literature and Psychiatry, Literature and Biology, Literature and Medicine, Literature and Computer Science. Now I turn to my work in the interconnection and intervention, intercourse of literature and technology. Here I want to deal with aspects of digital literacy, cultural literacy, intermediality, secondary orality, or multimedia orality. Then, I will signify on what I call the four eventual examples of the digital il/literati in Nigerian scholarship.

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Although my interest in the interventions of technology in literary and critical discourses is more recent, the crossdisciplinary work is really not new: the first memorable essay on the subject was Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Science, published in 1882. I want to acknowledge my colleague, Dr. Obododimma Oha, who was the first to teach a course entitled Literature and the New Media in the Department of English. Actually, he it was who developed the course in the 2004/05 session and would teach it until my return from Germany in August 2007. Teaching the course (ENG 747) has afforded me the opportunity of concentrating closely on certain key issues in the ascendancy of the digital revolution and the implication of the electronic revolution in the teaching, reading and interpretation of the literary text. In the digital age, the configuration and dissemination of the literary text (Literature) becomes more verdant, viral, flexible and explosive. In the digital age, aestheticism itself is a function, while the functionality of the text emerges through various aesthetic media. It is crucial for the literary scholar to be engaged in the discourse of the interface of technology and (literary) imagination, the advantage as well as the challenge of writing in an age that prides itself as electronic, the age of the digital divide. When we use the term “new media”, what do we mean? We refer to the practice and tools of retrieving and disseminating information, narratives, histories, performances, and ideas in a way that both collation and delivery, as primary acts of writing, are qualified by the immediacy of virtual or mass circulation. In our own time, that is in the late cusp of the twentieth century and on the lip of the twenty-first century, the tools of the “new” media would include the radio, the television, the cable or digital satellite, mobile telephony, the personal computer, the world wide web of the Internet, as well as the several audio and video resource materials which are unified as tools of the electronic age. They are either powered electronically, or

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configured to access, transmit and share electronic materials; descriptively, these tools or facilities are tangible intimations of a secondary orality, the age which privileges speech and audio-visual acts over traditional scripting. New media, new writing, new terminologies What are the new terminologies in the dialectic relations of writing and science, literature and technology? These include hypertext, hypermedia, blog, cyberart, virtual reading and a virtual critical space. Alongside these new terms are other conventional or old terminologies that get revised and challenged by the relations of literature and technology, such as “copyright”, “piracy”, and “subscription” (incorporating “encryption” and “decryption”). In the digital age, a crucial paradigm shift has occurred in knowledge about the concept of literacy, without great or conscious awareness by many. The binary concept of “illiteracy” and “e-literacy” has created versions or levels of cognition among so-called educated people including bureaucrats, technocrats and other professionals. Being Literate, Il-literate and E-Literate Working on the dialectic relations of literacy, illiteracy and eliteracy, I have come up, at the present time, with four major synthetic identities based on reaction to the resources of the digital age. Moving beyond the different typification of literacies as identified earlier, I take into consideration the cultural and infrastructural context of the Nigerian space in categorising the following knowable digital literati. These are the four identities based on the qualitative scales of competence, incompetence or neuter competence: the eliterate literates, the e-illiterate literates, the illiterate eliterates, and the “pretendant” e-literates.

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(i) The e-literate literate The e-literate literate is the classical networked person, a well-educated and virtual web citizen – netizen of sort, who feels at home with the operative manuals of the new media. The e-literate literate is an adaptive user of digital technologies, who has acquired adequate or relative competence in the launching of applications, softwares, use of search engines, executable files, tools etc. He can manage his path in the complex trace of the digital web. (ii) The e-illiterate literate This is a person who has conventional literacy but lacks the lateral literacies of the new media; he is incapable of finding his path in the labyrinth of the digital space. He belongs to the group of impaired elite, even academics, ill-equipped with the demands of the digital web-age. There is also another group of e-illiterate literates who can be described as the indifferent and impervious constituency, that is, those who have the potential of access to the new media but are generally or deliberately lethargic in their own impaired competence. Therefore, the e-illiterate literate is ill-equipped because he is incapacitated; or indifferent and impervious because he wants to make a reactionary statement by not using the tools; in either case, the conventionally literate person opposed to the digital shift, exponentially or inadvertently, becomes locked in a certain box of e-illiteracy. (iii) The illiterate e-literate The term illiterate e-literate is used to describe the different groups of poorly educated or mis-educated folks, undereducated or informally educated people, who are self-trained in the half-measure use of the basics of internet and electronic knowledge. The illiterate e-literate depends on the symbol rather than the alphabet of the language to manage his path in the digital web. These are the DIY-literates - “illiterates” in the conventional sense of the term - whose illiteracy is cancelled out by the relative competence of their e-literacy.

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(iv) The “pretendant” e-literate The group of people who count on the assistance of e-literates to cover their own “e-illiteracy” can be referred to as “pretendant” e-literates. The catchment is broad. This category includes the poorly, fairly or adequately educated, sometimes potentially e-literate but practically e-illiterate person. He who depends on the expertise of a proficient eliterate person is better referred to as an e-dependant. For instance, those researchers who hire the services of another computer-literate or network-literate person in order to execute a programme, surf the web or resolve demanding data problem (e.g. chi-square, ANOVA, quantitative analyses) are e-dependants or e-pretendants. In the digital revolution, the writer is offered both opportunities and demands, both privilege and potential, both burden and bounty. The option is before him or her to explore, to initiate, to learn and master, and to overcome the challenges posed by the operations of the new media in the service of literature. A literary scholar or writer who does not appropriate the advantage of technological advancement does so at his own peril. Without the inventive appropriation of digital literacy, the literary scholar stands at the gateway of ignorance and self-inflicted stasis. Therefore, the twenty-first century scholar, literary or non-literary, has to be amenable to the rites and codes of the digital revolution. No better words capture this than Alfin Toffler’s dictum: “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” (Source: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3030.Alvin_Toffler)

The unstable character of the book in the electronic age brings us to the challenges that this poses for the Nigerian author because it is apparent that the highlighted benefits have their limitations, their own burdens. The flexibility attainable in publishing imprints upon the text the tendency of

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impermanence. The virtual space of the internet is not that certain for the Third-world Nigerian author to operate because the space is hindered by low web presence of the Nigerian reader, inadequate knowledge of the internet itself and where the knowledge exists, the unavailability of constant electric power supply, lack of efficient ISPs… A major burden in the way of Nigerian author in the digital age is the plain fact that the book market is a hard-copy driven market; many publishers, authors and their readers have been reluctant to imbibe the tradition of the open book, the electronic book in the virtual space. More daunting is the issue of copyright in the ascendancy of the new media. With the benefits of search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Teoma and Yahoo!), metasearch engines (Dogpile, Ixquick, Metacrawler, Profusion and Search.com), special sites (gigapedia.com and megaupload.com, and more recently libgen.org), and softwares (Internet Download Manager, Free Download Manager), it is easier now to secure electronic versions of essays or whole books as portable document file (PDF) or in other formats. However, the endemic problem of the piracy of hard copies of books is compounded for the e-book, because the trail of the pirate becomes much more difficult to follow in the case of the electronically published book. Of Netizens and other Digital Citizens The two terms frequently used in categorising the mode and nature of individual and group access to digital literacy are “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”. In the words of Marc Prensky, Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet…those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted

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many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants. (1-2) To these terms, I will add two fundamental categories to account for the situation of some Third World citizens in relation to the new digital language: these are the “Digital Refuseniks”, that is those who, out of their own determinate indifference, fail to process, adopt or appropriate the facility and tools of the digital age; and secondly, the “Digital Subalterns”, that is those who are not capable of accessing the new language and tools of the digital age by reason of low income economy or lack of the technological infrastructure. I also think that those who are technologically impaired or technologically incapacitated, more than the refuseniks, can also be imagined as “digital refugees”. The Possibilities of New Media for the (Humanities) Scholar The crucial term of the roots and the routes of what I have called digital information literacy is access. Access is, again metaphorically speaking, the key of the information age; it is the syntax of digital coding, uncoding and decoding, the virtual pass into the space/s of knowledge production and knowledge retrieval. The humanities scholar working in this age encounters the door of limitless media possibilities. The scholar needs to emerge from that encounter with an additional language and knowledge of the interface of technology and the literature of his discipline. This encounter, and the knowledge of interface that I refer to, are the necessary conditions of access. Literary culture in the digital age is therefore a question of access. There are different kinds of access, as highlighted by Cavan McCarthy in The Internet Encyclopaedia. These include remote access,

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simultaneous access, 24/7 access, free access, and browser access (505-506). Other possibilities of digital resource matters for literary, linguistic and cultural scholarship abound. Let us examine a few of them: (a) Network Literacy: network literacy is the means of overcoming the unnecessary limitation of past researches where scholars depended solely on manual textbooks, in which access was only based on the struggle for paperback editions of primary and secondary reference texts. The shift from the hard copy of texts to huge online databases (Gutenberg project, Muse project) as well as the option of different e-book formats (pdf, epub, djvu, mobi) will continue to impact on the quality and output of scholarship. (b) Information Literacy: The cultivation of access to a network of online library catalogues, including (open) access to journals (JSTOR, Project MUSE, HINARI, AGORA) is an inevitable way of doing research in the digital age. (c) Digital Literacy: Access to digitised literature is also possible through the immediacy of purchase of ebooks and direct downloading which the new media make available. There is also the option of purchase of hard copy books via such e-book stores as Amazon.com, thus exploiting the facility of the new media to blend convention with invention. (d) Global Literacy: Virtual learning becomes absolutely virtual, with all its benefits as well as its burdens. The humanities scholar becomes a beneficiary of the huge matter of knowledge available in his discipline in relation to other disciplines; the chronotope of interdisciplinary scholarship becomes fully disseminated and democratised in the imagination of the e-literate humanities scholar. Many more

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open source books are being printed by huge publishing companies like de Gruyter. (e) Computer/Bit Literacy: In the computer age, applications and other tools of learning become more advanced and practical for use by the e-literate scholar. A good illustration of these functional e-literacies is the project on digitisation of world languages being undertaken by Morphologic, a programming institution based in Hungary. The program is called HUMOR, the acronym for High-Speed Unification Morphology, applicable to all languages and used by different computer tools. With HUMOR, African languages can be introduced to the digital world, and the benefits are enormous. In collaboration with Morphologic, and drawing on the expertise of other scholars in Linguistics and Technology, I intend is to raise a team to unpack the facility of HUMOR for the Yoruba language project, tentatively termed DIYUU - Digitizing Yoruba for Universal Users. HUMOR will be employed to create an interactive Yoruba dictionary, in relation with other HUMOR-digitized languages (English, German, Russian, Croatian, Hungarian, etc...), equipped with a hyphenator, thesaurus, and a spelling checker, following a text-to-speech recognition tool. There is indeed the possibility of developing a multi-lingual project of this nature on a continental scale for Africa. Limitations of Digital Information Media This is not to say that there are no challenges in the acquisition and exploitation of e-literacy. Clearly, the overinvoicing of information may be a sore point in the ascendancy of digital information technology because the preponderance of information, otherwise known as “information binge”, requires a certain level of critical

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literacy, intelligence and critical discrimination. However, I think that the serious challenge to the legitimation of the new media, with its literacies, revolves around the three-pronged issues of copyright, piracy and cybercrime. There have been publications and policies against the misuse and abuse of the electronic highway to ambush, extort and even kill. Three interesting books on the negative implication of e-literacy and digital information literacy and web interconnectivity include Cyber Crime: Issues, Threats and Management, 2 vols. (2005) edited by Atul Jain, Crime and the Internet: Cybercrimes and Cyberfears, edited by David S. Wall (2001) and Copyright in the Digital Age: Highway or Dead-End? produced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, Bern. Beside these threats, I would like to add that for the average e-literate literate person - digital native and immigrant - the potential diagnosis of the future will be called IAD – Internet Addiction Disorder, that is, a condition of over-dependence on the infrastructure of ICTs, including the devotion to computer networks, games, applications, smartphones and other electronic gadgets. As more time is spent online, in the virtual space, away from the non-digital real world, the tendency of distraction can become extremely destructive. While responding to the debate on the desirability or otherwise of computers and other technological teaching/learning aids, D. M. Kellner had this to say: A critical theory of technology is aware that technologies have unforeseen consequences and that good intentions and seemingly good projects may have results that were not desired or positive. (157)

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The In(ter)ventions of the Creative Impulse: Poetry and Cultural Diplomacy I prayed to God to put fire in my voice He answered with an inferno of choice (Gather my blood rivers of song, p. 93) From the natural sciences to the cultural science of literary scholarship, from my high experimental theory of kinesis, my bias for deconstructive and gender theories, through the radical theory of postproverbials, to my interest in the mediation of literature and technology, Poetry has always accompanied me. So if Destiny had not put me in the lap of my mother with my father’s prayer to see his first son through university education, if Providence had not elected for me a mother who was strong-willed, fair-and-square, I would have landed surely in one of three popular professions in my county of Ibadan: if I tried hard, I would have become a taxi driver; if I tried harder, I would have been an abattoir chief; but whether tried or not, I would certainly have become a Fuji musician with at least four women as trophies. For I have always been fascinated by the operative magic of the lyrical word. Before introduction to formal education, I had had my share of musical demonstrations about town. At 9, I was lead singer of the “Adegboro Youngstars” (not youngsters!); the year before, I had been given up for lost or kidnapped because I missed my way home following the mob of a popular “Fuji exponent”, missing my turn - instead of southwards in the direction of Kudeti - I strayed northwards beyond River Gege and headed out of Ibadan in the direction of Abeokuta, past the train station at Dugbe, past Idi Moli, where dutiful policemen retrieved me and delivered me safely in the middle of the night into the purgative hands of my

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father. After then, I lost all interest in combing the streets as kid-singer. Years of stern restrictions and formal education and training in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have blunted the edges of my rough native compositions. Also, years of deliberate unlearning and re-learning of other world’s poetic traditions (African-American, Latin American, Chinese, Hebraic and Japanese) alongside a systematic recuperation of traditional Yoruba poetry have intervened and imbued me with a redemptive spirit. I am therefore not surprised when the average Western critic of my writing expresses wonder at the metaphoric turns and “mis-turns” of my poetry in English expression.

Poetry is my Laboratory I want my words to be the naked fist the seething teeth against the flesh of tyrants the lacerations in the goitre of emperors. Gather my blood rivers of song, p. 143. I have emerged from my years of apprenticeship under Niyi Osundare, Isidore Okpewho and Harry Garuba with my own original definitive statements on poetry and its contents and discontents. In her book of essays, Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles, the African American poet, Nikki Giovanni reflected on the power of poetry and its function as an archival and procreative force. She said: “We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline, …nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people” (61). Giovanni was writing back to the days of the glory of the Black Arts Movement in the United States, of which she was a prominent member. For her, poetry offers the possibility of

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telling the truth about oneself and about one’s space in very topical and intimate ways that other disciplines and genres are incapable of doing. In a short essay entitled “Between dream and rage: the African experience in poetry”, I queried the worth and value of poetry: What do I understand as Poetry: the Word as spoken, the Word as sung, the Word as performed, as spectacled, as electrified beyond its conventional means and purpose, I mean poetry that accumulates all of the possibilities of conventional and radical writing, expressively for pleasure, for reflection, for action, or/and perhaps for nothing tangible. Poetry offers us the capacity to plumb memory; poetry grants us the freedom and the indulgence of anticipation and envisioning. Over the years, poets have dreamt; they have lived in the real world of dreams, living the subterfuge existence, or ethereally as superhumans who dreamed the impossible in the world. Homer and Lucretius have composed histories and dreams into their epics; Ai Qing dreamt a great and freer China; Pablo Neruda dreamt a tender and forgiving world; Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, and the other mystics dreamt a world healed in its own pain and ignorance; Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish dreamt beyond the agonies of their peoples’ imposed destinies; Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire dreamt a brighter African world freed from the burden of that despicable epithet - the Dark Continent; Agostino Neto foretold the dream of a free geography of the mind; and Christopher Okigbo, Nigeria's symbolist poet, dreamt enough to see the conflict that ravaged his land; then in the failure of that dream, he moved into the other realm,

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the ultimate act of rage. Okigbo swapped the pen with the bullet and paid the supreme price. In a state of absolute trance, the poet says: If I don’t learn to keep my mouth shut, I’ll soon go to hell I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron-bell.

Even so, I am aware that poetry of the ideal and committed thrust is serious business, as well as a dangerous business. There is either a wedge or corridor of mis/understanding between the establishment and the author; there is on one hand, the authority of the dictator, of the viral emperor who hates self-expression and freedom of speech, tyrants who would cut down the intelligence of the writer who dares to create, make fun or engage his land in a dialogue. On the other hand, there is the supreme confidence of the typical author endowed with the gift of the word, dedicated to change and challenge. This is the story of my real and virtual experience as poet. All over the continent, the colonial enterprise provoked a brand of written poetry championed by nationalists and moralists. The poetry of cultural nationalism which appeared first in the works of the Negritude writers became the primary culture of artistic expression in the 1960s. In the subsequent decades after the rise of postcolonial nations in Africa, the pattern of revolutionary poetry became noticeable, a pattern which saw the emergence of such poets as Okot p’Bitek and Jared Angira in East Africa; D. P. Kunene, Dennis Brutus, Oswald Mtshali, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Jack Mapanje, in Southern Africa; and, in West Africa, poets like Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Lenrie Peters, Kwesi Brew, Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho, Syl Cheney Coker, Okinba Launko, Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, etc. The poetic experience in Africa is one which places a lot of responsibility on the author: the poet is the conscience of his society; the poet is

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moral barometer of the community; the poet is voice of the voiceless; the poet is the beacon of truth, the bearer of light to areas of darkness and ignorance and hypocrisy; the poet is both a dream and dreamer; and the poet is memory too. I belong to a generation of poets whose writings became noticeable in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in Nigeria. Known as “third generation” authors, this is the group which bears the African genius of survival, perseverance and brilliance, against all odds. Many of the writers of this generation were born around the 1960s, which accounts for the reference to the group as post-Independence writers. We witnessed the dream of a new nation with promise; we experienced both the freedom and the war of nationhood; we reaped both the boom and the gloom of national development. We survived the years of the hyena. Some of my contemporaries were persecuted for their writing or association with other writers and organisations. A number of these writers left the shores of my country, becoming exiles in Europe and America on both economic and political grounds. From there, new writings have emerged which begin to interrogate our existence as a people, our peoplehood. Our dreams have connected and parted ways; we have a common rage against things not done right, and, as I insist, poetry has been my saviour. We are many, known and unknown, composers of dreams in the realities of things: Afam Akeh, Toyin Adewale, Ogaga Ifowodo, Uche Nduka, Olu Oguibe, Obi Nwakanma, Amatoritsero Ede, Maik Nwosu, Chiedu Ezeanah, Nduka Otiono, Ogochukwu Promise, Lola Shoneyin, Tade Ipadeola, Unoma Azuah, Angela (Agali) Nwosu, Emman Shehu, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, Akeem Lasisi, Pius Adesanmi, Austyn Njoku, Emman Egya Sule, Cecilia Kato, Mabel Evwierhoma, Tolu Ogunlesi, Jumoke Verissimo, Ibukun Babarinde, Niran Okewole, Perpetual Eziefule…and many more in the

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dispersed clan. I am one of the inheritors, and I am privileged, by all means, to speak on behalf of those who speak for others. My journey over two decades and a half as a scholarpoet has been marked by a constant negotiation between dream and rage. Each time I compose a collection of poems, I keep working on a balancing act: to seek out the bright lights in the heavy dullness of things around, and to marshal a tsunami of metaphors against the inertia, against the deadness and against the indifference around me. Yet, I have also noted, too, that poetry, the hallowed and the most revered of all the traditional genres of literatures, has been demonised, its quality having been diminished by the quack practices of hack writers. It is saddening that the poetic imagination has taken leave from many who pretend to be poets simply because very few now have the patience, promptitude and perseverance to spend periods of apprenticeship… Poetry is the traditional space for the exploration of human emotions; it is the calibration of a people’s sense of being, their civilisations and primitiveness expressed in words, colour, music and gestures; poetry then could be the index of a people’s sophistication, and by that the intellectual and social quotient for the (re)birth of a nation-state. There is indeed a sense in imagining Literature, and Poetry at its heart, as an integral variable in the qualification of the emergent nation. The poet, then, in the classical sense of the term, the creative artist, is the health of the nation, and the nation’s literary culture, for want of a better analogy, is a crucial organ in the determination of the intelligence, the sophistication and the mental health of a people. Poetry has been crucial to the making of epochs, and the poet is a mythmaking historian, the universal archetype of the light of truth, the pathfinder…

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My simple argument is that a nation cannot be without its culture, and Poetry is the creative quotient of that culture; it is given that national rebirth is only possible with an awareness, a strong awareness of one’s culture in interaction with other cultures; poetry is, therefore, a strategic performative element of national rebirth… The poet is thus an important contributor to the memorisation and the re-orientation of a national psyche. S/he cannot exist outside his or her culture, and s/he is influenced by his or her culture as s/he functions as an octant icon of his or her culture. My other argument is that nations don’t just become when they celebrate their literary icons, their literary intelligence; nations are reborn when they calibrate the intelligence of their writers. The rebirth of nations always almost involves the celebration of creative writers, because the literary genius is an important material of any cultural renaissance. To repeat: there is no nation without culture, there is no culture without poetry… and there is no poetry without a sense of culture and being. From immemorial time, from the mythical days of Sokoti, from the legendary time of Ogotommeli, the raconteur has been very important in the inscription of history, and poetry is the stuff of legends and folktales of a people. The poet bears the burden of his/her culture, and s/he is influenced by that culture as s/he influenced it. The rebirth of nations always almost involves the celebration of creative writers, because the literary genius is an important material of any cultural renaissance. Rebirth begins from within, it involves a revolutionary twist in the collective mind/unconscious; above all, the desire to speak truthfully, even if this leads to the road of self-immolation, is without doubt the main piston to the chambers of a national rebirth.

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Germany has its Goethe, Heinrich Heine and Rainer Maria Rilke, Slovenia its France Prešeren, Croatia its Dragutin Tadijanović, Chile its Cesar Valejo, Peru its own Pablo Neruda, France has its own Charles Baudelaire, and America its own Robert Frost and Walt Whitman… Even for their symbolic examples, we still await the time when public institutions and facilities like roads, universities and theatre halls will bear the names and signatures of our own legendary scholars and authors – Achebe, Soyinka, Echeruo, Banjo, Bamgbose, Izevbaye, Irele, Obiechina, Okigbo, Osundare, Femi Osofisan, for a start. We all try to react to the sense of nation, either through denial, appropriation or reversion of the existing or developing national culture. I think we contribute in our own ways to the “rebirth”, death or stillbirth of our nation, depending on our imaginative response to the concept of nationality. When in 1988, Harry Garuba led a band of young poets and editors to produce Voices from the Fringe, the affirmative collection of new remarkable poetic voices to the Nigerian literary space, an intellectual rebirth was in place in a lower frequency. I think rebirth is not all about the quality or absence of our science and technology, nor is it only readable through the index of our gross national product, because poetry itself takes strategic point in the structure of scientific revolutions. In a recent interview conducted by M. Aleksa Varga and H. Hristova-Gotthard, translated into both Hungarian and German, I was asked if I believed that a poet can cause change in social and political relations in a country? To this, I replied: Absolutely, I believe that a poet can change things with words. All our philosophers, from antiquity to the recent present time are poets! Makers of words,

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like makers of rains, make impact. Some impacts are indirect, some are immediate; some impacts are remote while some are instantaneous. The Negritude movement was willed into being by poets. The Civil Rights movements have been associated with the activism of poets. If poetry is advanced speech, if it is the salt of oratory, then the most impactful politician, economist or scientist needs the gift of the word to change things. Poetry doth things change! So, how is this possible? I believe that the magic of poetry, great immortal poetry I mean, is in the truth that it spins. The true poet thirsts after the truth, feeds others with the tablet, however sour or bitter, but the quality of his or her success inheres in the ability to embellish and say things in beautiful measures. I believe that a combination of conviction and creativity is required for that poet who must influence others. (5) I have been lucky, operating both as perpetual student and teacher of Creative Writing, always eager to experiment and too impatient with the sluggish metaphor. In spite of the hard socio-economic fact that the practice of Poetry does not pay, I have been unusually lucky. In “This garland too light yet on creation day”, a poem dedicated to Niyi Osundare, the poetic persona wonders if truly poetry does not pay: I thought they said poetry doesn’t sell... I thought they said poetry is prattle. These lines are actually a simple distillation of the tale of the legendary corn-pap seller of I!de$re$ in the narrative poetry of

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Ifa, as recorded in Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa. Apa Kiini (1968) by Wande Abimbola. In “Ese Eketa” of “Irosun Meji”, the story is told of the corn-pap seller of Idere who will become rich, resplendent in her trade, a thousand brocade of colourful dress in her treasure, yet who will claim to be insolvent when it was time to pay the priest for services rendered:

Olo"wo" o" wa"; Ala"wi$n o" wa"; Asie$re$ e$e$ya$n Ni" m"be# ni"di$i" e$#ko#; E!e$ya$n ti" o$ lo"wo" O% ma"a gbo"o$o"ru$n le#"ku$le"; A di"a" fu"n e#le#"ko# I!de$re$, E!yi" ti" o" lo#$o#"ro#$ Ka"le"#le#" o" to"o" le#". Oju" ni" n"po"#n e#le"#ko# I!de$re$. O!u"n le$ lo"wo" lo"#wo"# ba"yi$i"? Ni e#le"#ko# I!de$re$ di"fa" si". Nwo"#n ni" e#bo# ni" o" wa"a$ ru". O% ru"bo#, nwo#"n s#efa" fu"n un. Ko$ ro"wo" Ifa" na"a$ san Ti" a$wo#n awoo re$#e"# Fi s#awo lo# si" Apa" o$kun i$la$ji$ o#sa, I!gba$$ ti" nwo#n o" fi de" lo"#du"n ke#ta, E#le"#ko# I!de$re$ ti dolo"wo". S#u$gbo"#n ni"gba$ ti" a$wo#n awoo re$#e"# be"e$re$ owo"

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Lo#"wo"#o# re$#, O% ni" o$un o$ lo"wo" lo"#wo"#. Ni a$wo#n awoo re#$e"# ba" n"fii" s#orii"n ko#. Nwo#"n ni" be"#e$# ge"#ge"# Ni awo a$wo"#n n"s#e#nu rere" pe’Fa". Olo"wo" o" wa"; Ala"wi$n o" wa"; Asie$re$ e$e$ya$n Ni" m"be# ni"di$i" e$#ko#; E!e$ya$n ti" o$ lo"wo" O% ma"a gbo"o$o"ru$n le#"ku$le"; A di"a" fu"n e#le#"ko# I!de$re$, E!yi" ti" o" lo#$o#"ro#$ Ka"le"#le#" o" to"o" le#". E#le"#ko#o$# ’De$re$, S#e bo" lo o$ je$re$, E#le#"ko#o$# ’De$re$, S#e bo" lo o$ je$re$. O ro"s#o du"du", O ro"s#o pupa; O fa$yi$nri"n gba$ja", O le" kenka$; O fa$po"ti" ti$di", O le" kenka$; E#le"#ko#o$# ’De$re$, S#e bo" lo o$ je$re$. (63-64)

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Let the rich come; Let the poor come; The mad person sits by the corn-pap; He who has no money Let him stay and smell the aroma in the backyard; As it was divined for the corn-pap seller of Idere, She who would be rich Before the night fell. Her poverty was so chronic That she wondered, would she ever be wealthy? This made her to seek Ifa’s intervention. They asked her to make a sacrifice. She did, all propitiations made. She did not have enough money to pay for Ifa’s work Up till the time the priests left for A long trip beyond the border of rivers, When they returned after the third year, The corn-pap seller had become rich. But when the priests asked that she pay her debt, She said she had no money. Then the priests made a song out of it. They said such exact manner things are That they compose a song in praise of Ifa’s deed. Let the rich come; Let the poor come; The mad person sits by the corn-pap; He who has no money Let him stay and smell the aroma in the backyard; As it was divined for the corn-pap seller of Idere, She who would be rich Before the night fell. “The corn-pap seller of Idere, Did you not say you gained nothing.

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You wear the rich black dress You wear the rich red dress You gird your waist in sash of ocean blue Resplendent in your richness You sit regally Resplendent in your richness The corn-pap seller of Idere, Did you not say you gained nothing.” (my translation) As in the traditional example offered here, my practice of poetry has afforded me the privilege to overturn the popular belief that poetry does not sell! As creative writer and scholar, my poetry has given me wings to fly, it has afforded me the opportunity of going to places where neither English nor Yoruba is spoken. I have peddled my poetry in part due to the advantage of media revolution, through translation, through a combination of multimedia access, and in spite of the naked belief that poetry does not change things, the performance of my poetry has opened many golden doors. I have had the opportunity of meeting and dining with statesmen, Nobel Laureates, world leaders and policy makers including the Presidents of Germany, Slovenia, South Africa and Senegal. At different times, I have been visiting scholar/poet to institutions across the world: Barcelona, Lleida and Palma de Mallorca (Spain), Salzburg (Austria), Berlin, Bonn, Braunschweig, Aachen and Bayreuth (Germany), Durban, Pretoria, Cape Town and Johannesburg (South Africa), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Mexico City (Mexico), Stockholm and Uppsala (Sweden), Zurich, Basel, Lugano and Geneva (Switzerland), Bled (Slovenia), Lviv and Kiev (Ukraine), Tavira (Portugal), as well as several cities in North America, among others.

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Contribution to Knowledge, and So What? “No matter how full the river is, it still wants to grow.” (African Proverbs, p. 17) As I have revealed now, the intervention of the creative impulse has been very crucial and constant in all my literary engagements – critical or creative, whether I do a review, produce an essay or invent a poem; I operate as poet in scholarship, and when writing poetry, I audition as scholar. There is a fluency in the flux of my Janus-faced role as scholar-poet. To that extent, I am radical and unconventional. But in the traditionalist sense of literary scholarship, a scholar does not ventilate on his achievement; either as scholar-critic or scholar-poet, the desire for disputations and interrogations or engagements is what matters. Literary scholars, as philosophers, do not give recommendations or medications, unlike the apothecaries of yore! Therefore, the usual attempt to query the pound of “contribution to knowledge” from the flesh of every scholarship is to me generally contrived. If there is a gauge, some kind of “philosophometer” to measure the impact of the abstract capsule that is called knowledge, shall we turn the argument around and ask: by what name shall we call the absolute gauge which we must deploy to measure the philosophometer itself? So dear listener or reader, I am in full consonance with Fagunwa’s protagonist-narrator, and I will appreciate it if you accept the confessions of my lecture as one long and extended proverb.

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Appreciation In the course of my growth and development as a literary scholar, I have enjoyed the support and patronage of a host and groups of individuals and institutions. To appreciate everyone who matters here will be an impossible task, for that is to build a whole city of acknowledgements on a decidedly fixed and limiting soil. Therefore, forgive me if I fail to mention your name here, for it is written indelibly in my thankful heart. Much appreciation to the teaching lot including all my tutors at Nurul Islamiyya Mission Primary School, Holy Trinity Grammar School, Olivet Baptist High School and the University of Ibadan between 1968 and 1994; my former colleagues at the St Andrew’s College of Education, Oyo (1987-1993) and Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (1994-1995); and my colleagues in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, since 1995. At the time when travel grants and scholarship funds were lean, I benefited from the kindness of the following teachers: Chikwenye Ogunyemi (who gave a personal grant which enabled me to pay my postgraduate school fee on December 5, 1985), Niyi Osundare (who provided the seed money on March 12, 1997, for the publication of my first collection of poetry), and Femi Osofisan (who sponsored my flight to the millennial symposium on African-African American Literatures which held at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in February, 2001). Harry Garuba, my doctoral supervisor at UI, Professor and former Chair of Centre for African Studies at UCT, South Africa, has been a very great motivator, wonderful teacher and friend. It is to him that I owe my knowledge of the basic understanding of deconstructive strategies in literary

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scholarship. To my own students who have now become my friends – Niyi Okunoye, Gbemisola Remi Adeoti, Tayo Ogunlewe, Kayode Adeduntan, Lola Shoneyin, Senayon Olaoluwa, Oluwafiropo Ewenla and Charles Akinsete – much appreciation for being engaging and tasking. Professors Akinwumi Isola-Orojide, Olu Obafemi, Kola Owolabi, Festus Adesanoye, Lekan Oyeleye, Francis Egbokhare, David Ker, Rasheed Na’Allah, Charles Bodunde, Gani and Kassey Garba, Idowu Olayinka, Demola Dasylva, Pius Adesanmi, Kunle George, Tayo Adesina, Debola Ekanola, Flora Veit-Wild, Susanne Gehrmann, and Wolfgang Mieder; Drs. Akin Adesokan, Sule E. Egya, Sola Olorunyomi, Nike Akinjobi, Akin Odebunmi, Toyin Jegede, Obododimma Oha, Nelson Fashina, Tunde Omobowale, Tunde Adegbola, Yinka Egbokhare, Bisi Olawuyi, Christine Matzke, Wumi Raji, and Isidore Diala; Lisa Combrinck, Chiedu Ezeanah, Afam Akeh, Toyin Akinosho, Jahman Anikulapo, Unoma Azuah, and a host of others: each of these has been a fellow sojourner, collaborator or patron or acolyte in my kinetic movement to this very hour. This hour would not have been possible without the absolute love of God who has blessed the dream and sacrifice of my father – (A$ka#nbi! O"lo!"jo"wo#"n, ara! O$o#ku#a#, o"mo" A$re# pagida! so"’gi baba a# re d’e#ni#ya#n) and the perseverance, love and devotion of my mother (A$be"#bi! O$gu!n, O"mo" yawu! Olo!gun, o"mo" a#gba#lagba# oye$), both of whose colourful memories accompany me each day, all the time. First blacksmiths of words, illiterate but educated as you were, you gave me good breeding. May I be blessed to feed my children with the same discipline and love that you gave me in your time! I thank my siblings: Mr Kamorudeen Oyelade, Engr Tunde Raji and Mrs Sade Falade for their support and prayers always.

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To my children, Olayombo, Oluwadabira, Olasubomi, I thank you so much for trying to understand your kind of father. And my wife, friend and lover, my number one fan, Adesola… Adesolape Adenike (nee Ajibade), I do this for you. You know as I do, that I always re-invent my love for you, and because you have always been with me, through the storm and the fair weather, may you continue to inspire me to do great exploits. Do you remember the lines: my love for you is like the moon’s in its fullest smile above the supple sea and skin of earth my love is the rainbow’s true grin beyond iced dessert of empty passion… Conclusion: Doing In(ter)ventions in the Literary Web I continue to engage in other literary in(ter)ventions. As scholar-poet, my international collaboration over the years has not been limited to my roles at different and intervening periods as editor, as consultant, as cultural diplomat, sojourner in the labyrinths literary. I have been working with other scholars and international research groups including the Scientific Committee on International Proverb Scholarship (Portugal and the USA), and the International Group for Folklore and Linguistics (Hungary). I am currently in collaboration with Morphologic to develop a software for the functional use of African languages. I am also a consulting partner to the German literary institution – LiteraturwerkstattBerlin, in a project aimed at presenting a variety of African poetry on the web (www.lyrikline.org). It is my intention to return to the lifetime of deconstructive playfulness, to connect with other scholars across Africa in the development of a database of African postproverbials.

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All things said, it is just appropriate here to remark that our science must humanise and our humanities be scientific. After all, in one of the most developed and logical languages that I have come across - Deutsch, only one term or its variants are used to refer to scholars as producers of knowledge in their different fields and specialisations. The term is Wissenschaftler(in) – researcher, research scientist, or academic, creator, fabricator of knowledge. Everything else is descriptive. It must be repeated here that the interface of the artistic and the scientific in intellectual discourse is inevitable even in the practical project of national development. As long as the unpacking of the cultural is treated as a mere token in our narratives of growth and development, our civilization can best be described as what it is actually now - mere vehicles without enabling wheels. The conventional economist’s calculation of the indices of growth and national productivity or the hard scientist’s combination of reagents, integers and equations, without appropriate understanding of the real covariance of our cultural values is more like the proverbial castle in the air - superstructures without base, values without velocity. If language is key, and literature is keyword/keyboard, it is given that technology is tool, and the summation of the nation’s cultural values the toolkit. Mr. Vice-Chancellor, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for me to conclude. I have tried to account for aspects of my activity as an acolyte of the cultural sciences of literature and language, with special interests in deconstructive and gender discourses, the radical theory of postproverbials, the interconnection of literature and technology, as well as the poetics of my poetry, being bound to the aesthetics of presentation and re-presentations.

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In plain terms, I have been primed and lucky to be what I have turned out to be: a scholar-poet of the radical skin, always inspired to be an agent of fluent in(ter)ventions. I will like to draw a point from the inaugural lecture of Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo who, in 1981 (the very year of my admission to the Department of English) envisioned the making of the new scholar who must be thoroughly bred in the nuances of language and literature. In Grammars and Grammarians, Banjo noted: …it is by no means an impossibility to have a stylistician and a conventional literary critic rolled up in one and the same individual. Indeed, I venture to say that this is the kind of creature we attempt to breed in our Department of English. (17) I am, happily, one of those creatures.

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REFERENCES Abimbola, ’Wande. 1973. Ijinle ohun enu Ifa. Apa kiini. 1968. Glasgow: Collins. 2nd imprint. Aleksa Varga, M and Hristova-Gotthard, H. Nov/Dez 2010. “Poesie kann Dinge verändern: ein interview mit dem nigerianischen Dichter Remi Raji„. Afrika-bulletin 140: 4-5. Baker, H. A. Jr. 1987. To move without moving: an analysis of creativity and commerce in Ralph Ellison’s Trueblood episode. Speaking for you: the vision of Ralph Ellison. Ed. K. W. Benston. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 322348. Banjo, A. 1981. Grammars and Grammarians. Inaugural Lecture. Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press. Egya, S. E. 2011. Poetics of rage: a reading of Remi Raji’s poetry. Ibadan: Kraftbooks. Fagunwa, D. O./Soyinka, W. 1982. The forest of a thousand daemons. Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd. Giovanni. N. 1988. Sacred cows . . . and other edibles. New York: William Morrow. Hawkes, T. 1977. Structuralism and semiotics. London: Methuen & Co. Rpt. 1982. Kellner, D. M. 2002. Technological revolution, multiple literacies, and the restructuring of education. Silicon literacies: communication, innovation and education in the electronic age. Ed. I. Snyder. London & New York: Routledge; 154-169. Leslau, Charlotte and Wolf. Comp. 1962. African proverbs. New York: The Peter Pauper Press.

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McCarthy, C. 2004. Digital libraries. In The Internet Encyclopaedia Vol. 1. Ed. Hossein Bidgoli. Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 505-508. Nelkon, M and Parker, P. 1983. Advanced level Physics. 5th ed. London: Heinemann. Olugboyega, A. 1986. A!gbe"ye#$wo$ o!we i!wo$yi". La!a"n!gba"sa": Jo#!na" Is#e#! Akada! ni! E$de" Yoru"ba" 3: 51-66. Owomoyela, O. 2005. Yoruba proverbs. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Oyeleye, O. A. 2012. Journeying to the past: A study of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible man and Daniel Omotosho Black’s They tell me of a home. M.A. project. Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. vii + 78 pages. Prensky, M. 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon 9.5: 1-6. Raji-Oyelade, A. 1994. Reading kinesis: character theory in the black novel. PhD thesis. Department of English, Univeristy of Ibadan, Nigeria. xi + 265 pages. __________. 1999. Postproverbials in Yoruba culture: a playful blasphemy. Research in African Literatures 30.1: 74-82. __________. 2004. Season of desert flowers: contemporary women’s poetry from Northern Nigeria. African Literature Today 24: 1-20. __________. 2008. Bondages of bonding: the challenge of literary criticism in the new age. The postcolonial lamp: essays in honour of Dan Izevbaye. Eds. A. Raji-Oyelade and O. Okunoye. Ibadan: Bookcraft. 59-72. __________. 2012. Playful blasphemies: postproverbials as archetypes of modernity in Yoruba culture. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.

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Raji, Remi. 2001. Webs of remembrance. Ibadan: Kraftbooks. __________. 2009. Gather my blood rivers of song. Ibadan: Diktaris. __________. Feb. 3, 2011. Between dream and rage: the African experience in poetry. Presentation with Catalan poets. L’Horiginal, Barcelona, Spain.

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BIODATA OF PROFESSOR ADEREMI RAJI-OYELADE Born on November 23, 1961 to the family of Alhaj Raji Oyelade Akanbi Ojoekun, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade attended Nurul Islamiyya Mission Primary School, Oke-Oluokun and Holy Trinity Grammar School, Old Ife Road, both in Ibadan. He had his Higher School Certificate education at Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo between 1979 and 1981. He gained admission into the University of Ibadan, to read English, graduating in 1984 with a Second Class Upper degree. In 1986, he completed his Master's degree in the same department with specialisation in African and AfricanAmerican Literatures. Although his first appointment was at the Rivers State College of Education, Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, Professor Raji-Oyelade's teaching career did not begin until he was offered a second appointment at St. Andrew's College of Education in November, 1987. He completed his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Harry Garuba in January, 1993, was examined in February, 1994 and listed as a graduand in November, 1995. Between 1994 and 1995, he taught for a session each at the Ogun State University, AgoIwoye and at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. Professor Raji-Oyelade joined the Department of English formally as a Lecturer II, on April 1, 1995. He was promoted in 1998 as Lecturer I, Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2004 and full Professor in 2007. Professor Raji-Oyelade has published a number of books and essays in African, African American and Caribbean literatures, literary theory, contemporary Nigerian poetry, cultural studies and creative writing. A visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine, University of Cape Town, South Africa,

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Stockholms University, Sweden, and Cambridge University, UK, his scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Known in literary circles as Remi Raji, he is the author of five collections of poetry including A harvest of laughters (1997), Lovesong for my wasteland (2005) and Gather my blood rivers of blood (2009). His works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Latvian. He was the Acting Head of the English (2009-2011) and the substantive HOD (2011-2012) until his election as Dean, Faculty of Arts on October 23, 2012. Until recently, Prof. Raji-Oyelade was the Chairman of his Faculty’s ICT Committee and the PG Workshop Committee. He is the first person to serve the Faculty of Arts in both capacities, at different times, as Sub-Dean, General (1997-1999) and as Sub-Dean, Postgraduate (2003-2004). Among other positions, he is currently the Chairman, Senate Business Committee; Member, Senate Truth Committee; and the University Orator. Professor Raji-Oyelade has been External Examiner to a number of institutions including the Osun State University, University of Ilorin, University of Abuja, Ajayi Crowther University, University of Ghana, Legon, and Humboldt University, Germany. He was member (and later Chairman), of the Literature Committee of the Joint Admissions & Matriculation Board, between 1997 and 2001. In 2004, he was appointed by the Nigerian National Commission for UNESCO to serve as a member of the National Jury for the “Bridges of Strugga” International Poetry Award. He is married to Mrs. Adesola Adenike (née Ajibade), and the marriage is blessed with three children - Olayombo, Oluwadabira and Olasubomi.

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