Ben Okri’s Generational Protest Poem, “The Incandescence of the Wind”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12943252 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rosemary Gray (0000-0002-6583-4319, University of Pretoria, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35-46 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Scrutiny2 (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1812-5441 • E-ISSN: 1753-5409 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/18125441.2021.1933152 |
| OpenAlex | W3183061570 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
The central premise in this article is that Ben Okri's generational protest poem, “The Incandescence of the Wind”, first published in An African Elegy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) and republished in Rise like Lions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018), seeks to make sense of a profoundly disturbing encounter with contemporary reality through a revisioning of nationhood and poetic responsibility in war-torn Nigeria in 1982. The argument draws on Wole Soyinka's The Open Sore of a Continent (New York: Oxford, 1996) and aligns its poetic aesthetic with Percy Bysshe Shelley's belief that literature can change the world (“A Defence of Poetry” [1821], in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, edited by V. Leitch, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). The article explores the ways in which Okri intertwines the key threads of doomed nationhood and imaginative transmutation to suggest a road less travelled. As a native-born Nigerian poet, he believes he has a responsibility to remonstrate in order to heal. His is a concern for the political pressures that impinge on a nation at war with itself. His ameliorative guiding vision informs this interpretation of the poem, the characteristic theme of which is imaginative redemption of suffering by re-visioning the imagi/Nation
Art · Art history · Criticism · Elegy · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Poetry · Premise · Theme (computing · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |