Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T20:26:38.490Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Poetics of Landscape: Representation of Lagos as a ‘Modernizing’ City in Nigerian Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2020

Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Lagos, as a modern city, has remained significant in the real and in the imaginary. It is perhaps the most commercially and culturally strategic city in Nigeria. It is home to the headquarters of many industries, the largest international airport in Nigeria, many electronic and print media houses, and, above all, Nigeria's biggest coastal gateway for importation and exportation. Until the early 1990s, when the seat of federal government moved to Abuja, it was Nigeria's political capital city. Besides housing the National Theatre complex, the city is known for its literary and book festivals, literary and cultural organizations and events, and indigenous publishers. In the imaginary, Lagos is the most thematised city in the Nigerian literary imagination, its character framed in diverse tenors as a city of life, of chaos, of survival, one that best exemplifies Nigerian modern life. In this essay, I am interested in how Lagos as a modern city is framed in Nigerian poetry. How do poets, one might ask, in their formation of literary alterity, contemplate the many attributes of Lagos, some of which are its disorderliness, environmental pollution, and displacement? My question is ecocritical, as my emphasis is on how the city, its landscape, and modern pressures on its environment influence the habits of its inhabitants, and how it is, in turn, influenced by their habits. Modern pressures refer to negative fallouts of urban development after colonialism. In its drive to be modern in the European sense, the city becomes vulnerable to urban political realities that shape its landscape. Nigerian poets have been keen in representing these realities – and most of the poets are anthologized in Lagos of the Poets, edited by Odia Ofeimun, a poet known for his passion for the city of Lagos. Ofeimun brings together previously published poems from collections, his main aim being to present Lagos as imagined by poets across Nigeria. The diversity of the poems is such that the anthology, in the words of the editor, ‘seeks to provide a broad mirror of the city’ (xlv). With a theoretical framework based on ideas from postcolonial ecocriticism and urban political ecology, this study reads selected poems from the anthology.

Type
Chapter
Information
ALT 38 Environmental Transformations
African Literature Today
, pp. 37 - 49
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×