The new historicist practice and the conception of the Dibia as the poet persona in African poetry in English expression: Nze James Chinonyerem’s The changing songs and The shattered pot and other poems

Abstract

The paper begins by positing that African poetry in English expression has produced four generations of poets and then emphasises that the study is focused on the postmodernist generation, which is the latest generation of African poets in English expression. In the postmodernist generation, there are different kinds of poetic practices, but the one that is of interest in the paper is called a new historicist practice. This is explained as having to do with ‘the shifting and contradictory representations’ of ideas, issues or histories between one generation and another. This practice dominates the works of most poets of the postmodernist generations. This is further demonstrated using Nze James Chinonyerem’s The changing songs and The shattered pot and other poems. In these works there is a shift from the usual poetic traditions of the generations before them. Unlike other poets of the postmodernist generation, whose poetry falls in line with the pattern of the new historicist practice, we see a new kind of shift that is radically different. The poet contradicts the ideology behind the poet persona as a town crier as made popular by Christopher Okigbo–the famous poet of the modernist generation–and in place of it he creates a relatively new poet persona, the Dibia. :