Historical Remembrance as a Strategy for the Re-Invention of Africa in Odia Ofeimun’s A Feast of Return and Under African Skies
Historical Remembrance as a Strategy for the Re-Invention of Africa in Odia Ofeimun’s A Feast of Return and Under African Skies

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores Odia Ofeimun’s two poetry collections: A Feast of Return and Under African Skies. The aim is to underscore Ofeimun’s deployment of the folkloric tradition, invocative poetry and mytho-historicity as aesthetic designs in the re-invention of modern Africa. The objective is to demonstrate how the foregoing aesthetic designs foreground Ofeimun’s African gaze and poetic imagination with which he locates Africa in glorious and heroic moments of the past, just like the Negritude poets did, yet, in his poetic imagination of Africa of the past, Ofeimun shows how the issues of the moment in Africa draw from a complicated past event in Africa. This paper adopts Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading as a hermeneutic practise and a qualitative descriptive, analytic method. In the findings, this paper notes that Ofeimun does not offer a superficial or exaggerated romanticisation of Africa’s past; instead, by showing a connection between Africa’s past with Africa’s present, Ofeimun deepens the conversation and debate on Africa’s history, epistemology, identity and the subject of euro-western colonialism, particularly in Southern Africa. This paper concludes that Ofeimun’s poetic imagination of the past speaks of historical remembrance configured as trance and memory. This historical remembrance is a strategy of re-invention and a panacea for charting a new course for modern Africa today in terms of self-re-conceptualisation.

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