Title: Inter/art/iculations of Violence in Contemporary Nigerian Poetry and Graphic Art
Abstract: Focusing on a recent collection of poems and graphic art, this essay explores their joint articulation of violence and violation in the contemporary military rulership of Nigeria. interaction of the art forms at the discursive plane implicitly subverts the univocal tradition of the dictatorship. Verbal texts and visual images are generally perceived as being distant relatives -- a kinship oxymoron which has much to recommend it. That is, insofar as both modes function as signs they have a family resemblance, both serve rhetorical purposes, and both belong to the larger art of interpretation. distance element, in turn, pertains not merely to the way that as signs they signify differently but also to the way that their relationship sometimes appears to be unfriendly if not openly hostile. Thus frequently critics speak of the way that the verbal dimensions of a text operate as a rupture of its visual dimension (Rose 1104), a situation which W. J. T. Mitchell traces to the antagonism that is perceived to operate between culture and nature: The image is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as...natural immediacy and presence. word is its `other; the artificial, arbitrary production of the human will that disrupts natural presence by introducing unnatural elements into the world--time, consciousness, history, and the alienating intervention of symbolic mediation (1107). Yet as Roland Barthes notes, the polysemous nature of images means that the visual too can play a disruptive role, whereby the function of the linguistic element is to provide anchorage or control and to prevent the proliferation of meanings (40). In this way, ironically, the visual and verbal again rejoin; both are engaged in a mutual process of rupturing and translating each other, and the primary value of this interaction is to ensure that the reading experience will always be incomplete. More than that, the interdependence of the visual and verbal may be totally essential when it comes to articulating experiences which are in themselves too complex for any one mode of rhetoric to handle, just as academic theorizing about the politics of word/image relationships acquires a much more meaningful and urgent sense when it comes to texts concerned with real political situations and violent encounters--as in the case of the recent collection of poems and graphics by Nigerian artists entitled For Ken, for Nigeria. Published in 1996, the volume constitutes the response on the part of sixty-two poets and one graphic artist to the suppression of freedom of speech under the current military dictatorship in Nigeria, specifically the silencing of Ken Saro-Wiwa, environmentalist and minority-rights activist, who was hanged in November 1995, along with nine other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Saro-Wiwa, a former chairperson of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), was also a writer whose works, especially the soap opera Basi and Company, were fairly well received in Nigeria; his execution aroused national and international rage against military rule and its violent actions, and occasioned many interrogations both of the execution itself and the censorship that it represented. Viewing such censorship as a form of monologic discourse, my purpose in the following essay is to explore the way that the collaborative and interarts format of For Ken, for Nigeria functions as a particularly effective way of responding to the political situation. Moreover, I wish to argue that the interaction of the poems and graphics in this collection is in keeping with the general aesthetic tradition of Nigerian art and its cultural heritage. Thus I will begin by providing a brief overview of the cultural and sociopolitical scene, focusing on the general conflict in these two dimensions. Then I will turn specifically to For Ken, for Nigeria and explore the ways that the two modes of rhetoric in this text interactively construct images of violence and dehumanization and through their mutual inter-art-iculation subvert the monologism and self-representation of the military dictatorship. …
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
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