The Beleaguered State, the Archetypal Patriot, and the Hope for National Rebirth: a Stylistic Criticism of Remi Raji’s Lovesong for My Wasteland

Abstract

Existing studies on the political poetry of Remi Raji have largely focused on the critical appraisal of its themes, technique and style against the backdrop of the context in which the poetry is produced, without paying close attention to linguistic evidence with which the poet engages his world and unveils his artistic vision and social commitment. This paper stylistically analyses Remi Raji‟s collection, Lovesong for My Wasteland, which captures the dilemma of an archetypal patriot given Nigeria‟s sordid history in about the first five decades of independence. It analyses six purposively sampled sequences out of the forty-five sequences of the long-breath poem. Engaging the tools of stylistic criticism, the paper identifies and analyses some style markers with which the reader‟s subjective impression of the text could be verified, objectified, and validated. The article reveals that the poet uses certain schemes and tropes which strikingly portray Nigeria‟s sordid post-independence national life, the persona‟s disillusionment/dilemma and remarkable demonstration of patriotic feelings, with the tropes of „love‟ and „hope‟ anchoring the prevailing message of national rebirth. Generally, the study demonstrates that truly the poets of the third generation of Nigerian poets, like their predecessors in the second generation, have abided by the stylistic peculiarities of the „alter-native tradition‟, pushing to the background the style of obscurantism of the first generation of Nigerian poets in their bid to effectively convey their message of social regeneration to the people.