Gender, Nationalism and Other Interventions in Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo’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. .