Stasis and Lachrymation in Postcolonial African Poetry: A Contextual Reading of Isaac Shuaibu’s This Country of Ours: A Collection of Poems

Abstract

Poetry has over the years become a vehicle in Nigeria for the expression of the grim historical past which was darkened by cataclysmic events such as slave trade, colonialism, imperialism and the devastation of the Nigerian cultural heritage and social ethos. In the post-colonial era, the poet becomes lachrymal and the lachrymator is but the bad political system and leaders, corruption, capitalism and stasis as a function of the degeneration of socio-political and cultural systems and structures. Lamentation, thus, becomes a dominant theme of postcolonial Nigerian poetry. To this end, this paper seeks to investigate into the presence of lachrymation in the work in focus. It is noted that, there are two levels of lamentation: The poet laments the degeneration of his society using poetry as a medium and the disillusionment of the people in the society which provokes the poetic impulse. It is concluded that, stasis is a major aspect of the postcolonial Nigeria and since there is a massive decline in the standard of living of the people, poets have taken to lamentation as a means of protest and calling the attention of the world and the people to the cancerous growth eating into the socio-political and cultural systems.