Harnessing Social Concerns in the Poetry of Jared Angira
Harnessing Social Concerns in the Poetry of Jared Angira

Summary/Abstract: Socio-political consciousness of literature in African society is an inevitable phenomenon which has remained an enduring, even necessary motif in African poetry. Murky politics of post-independent African countries has constantly provoked contemporary African poets to outrage and to near-fatalistic vision of history of their respective countries usually rendered in acerbic tone in their poetry. As may therefore be imagined, the discussion of social issues in African poetry is often graphic and accusatory. Jared Angira is a politically-committed poet whose radical ideological position is explicit in his poetry collections: Juices (1970), Silent voices (1972), Soft Corals (1973), Cascades (1979) and The Years Go By (1980). For Angira, social concern is not optional: it is the very basis of his work, and he has brought a marxist-oriented class analysis of society to bear upon his writing. In doing this, Angira conformed to Louis Althusser’s notion of art as being ‘’’to make us see’, and what it allows us to see, what it forces us to see, is ‘the ideology from which it is born’’’ (Bennet and Royle, 132). Consequently, in Angira’s poetry social issues are not perceived as being the result of chance and circumstance, rather, they are seen as emerging from clearly discernible socio-political and economic factors whose workings could be subjected to detailed scrutiny and rigorous analysis. This paper examines how Jared Angira has entrenched social concerns in his poetry for the purpose of proffering solutions to the perceived social and political problems in Kenya.

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