Refiguring Blackness and Decolonisation in Femi Abodunrin’s It Would Tke Time: Conversation with Living Ancestors and Other Poems

Abstract

This article focuses on Femi Abodunrin’s poetry in order to reflect on the ideological conditions from which his articulation of Blackness and decolonisation emanates. Although Abodunrin’s creative oeuvre transcends a single poetry anthology, the study nevertheless restricts itself to one poetry anthology, It Would Take Time: Conversation with Living Ancestors, and excerpts from three other poems, “Whatever I Hang,” “The Pursuit of Happiness” and “Going to Meet the Man,” published in Splinters of a Mirage Dawn: An Anthology of Migrant Poetry from South Africa. Arguably, Abodunrin’s poetry is a quintessential postulation on Blackness and decolonisation in a postcolonial context. Hence, his work represents a coherent response, a reappropriation and refiguring of the syncretic experiences of Black Africans within the circumstantial whole of a postcolonial social reality. The phenomenology of decolonisation, depersonalisation and an inhabitation of an alienating and somewhat fragmented reality are some of Abodunrin’s thematic interests. His tactic to subvert a Eurocentric approach to the politics of African identity, literature and culture, Africans’ displacement and the psycho-affective dimension of this tussle confirms that despite the struggles, Africans can assert their presence and agency in the conception and articulation of their culture and identity. It Would Take Time and Abodunrin’s other three poems are reflective of the uphill efforts channelled towards recentralising African agency, refiguring Blackness and also emphasising the triumph of a unique ideological outlook on decoloniality without ambiguities of reference.