The aesthetic sublimation of pain in Niyi Osundare’s City Without People
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9003351 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu (0000-0002-5071-8032, University of Ibadan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 627-644 |
| Publication date | 2021-11-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00219894211031808 |
| OpenAlex | W3212953196 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 15 |
Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in the volume, before proceeding to argue that the poet’s pain, largely psychic, is a product of losses of various kinds. The article goes further, demonstrating how the poet “worked through” the pain to attain wellness. Relying on insights from trauma theory, complemented by some assumptions about the concept of scriptotherapy, the analysis of poems drawn from across the collection demonstrates the paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain
Aesthetics · Alternative medicine · Art · Geography · Hurricane katrina · Literature · Narrative · Natural disaster · Pain and suffering · Poetry · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Sublimation (psychology · Comics and Graphic Narratives · History · Humor Studies and Applications · Law · Medicine · Mental Health via Writing · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |