ABSTRACT

In “Streamside Exchange” we are faced with the child and bird interlocution. The bird, harbinger of tragedy (as in the albatross in Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”), utters a timeless and universal truth. It sings a song “of all that pass” and decidedly declares: “tide and market come and go and so shall your mother” (L 13/14); it bespeaks the certainty of triumph and defeat, and the glory of struggle. We figure the journey motif in the above, as well as the crossing of the just boundaries of individuation. “All that pass” refers to the communal or clan spirit which in “Fulani Cattle” is clearly stated by use of the word “clan” to describe the cattle (L2), showing by this point that the cattle may represent the communal spirit.

There is again the deeper signification of the vegetation sequence and the sun god that are constantly involved in this activity of coming and going. And this would seem also to be the rhythm of human living: life and death. The persona in “Fulani Cattle” captures his pain and sorrow with the metaphor, “contrition twines me like a snake,” it calls to mind the broken and contrite heart of which the psalmist writes. The likening of the twine to a snake indicates the destructive nature of the circumstances the persona points out here. They are in fact, overwhelming. In the end what is at work in the two lyrics would appear to be a retelling of the passion of Christ, the sufferings and struggles of all tragic heroes. The poems have hardly been studied, but we understand this to be a manifestation of the general African critical attitude to the genre of lyric poetry. What this paper proves is the shared significance between literary works and the universality of all true art.

Keywords: Christ, fate, tragedy, lyric, myth, figure, silence, individuation

Published by The Muse: A Journal of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka

No. 47

August, 2019

Pp. 2-15

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Okpo, Friday Romanus is currently in his final year, Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is a critical writer. He edited critical Writing for Msue 46. He is the editor of The Muse, number 47. He is proudly impatient.