GENDER, NATIONALISM AND OTHER INTERVENTIONS IN AKACHI ADIMORAEZEIGBO’S HAIKU POEMS

Abstract

The focus on form and content has remained one of the major ways
adopted, universally, by critics interested in poetry studies. In modern
Nigerian poetry, however, the experimentation with forms, which,
have tentacles in home grown (oral) sources and external borrowed
forms, has received copious attention. This attention is shared
between oral and western forms relegating other forms that modern
Nigerian poets have adopted in their engagements with the
postcolonial conversations in Nigeria. This article examines the
“haiku poems” in Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo’s Dancing Masks (2013),
Mixed Legacies (2019) and Broken Bodies, Damaged Souls and Other Poems
(2022) to demonstrate the interface between form and content in
modern Nigerian poetry. The article interrogates the popular premise
of “generationalising” modern Nigerian poets and fashions out
standards that rightly place modern Nigerian poets in their respective
generations. The postcolonial premise of the study unravels how the
poet’s penchant for the “haiku form” has objectified the dystopias
within and outside her homeland. The conclusion of the article
identifies the ambivalent texture of the poet’s haiku stanzas as against
the dominant unified focus on gender in her prose titles.