CHINUA ACHEBE’S IKEMEFUNA: A POETICS OF THE NIGERIAN SOCIO-CULTURAL NARRATIVE

Abstract

This paper attempted a reconstruction of the Achebe’s prosaic rendition of Ikemefuna’s experience in Things Fall Apart into another form – the poetic form. Thus, we present a spaciotemporal exploration of Ikemefuna of the Igbo cultural setting transformed metaphorically into the Nigerian youth setting. The poetics of Nigerian Ikemefuna is that of mutual suspicion, fear of regional, religious and ethnic domination, aggravated by the hopelessness of a battered national psyche with prodigals in power. The narrative of Ikemefuna is a metaphor for the battered Nigerian youths, scape-goaticism and the Nigerian socio-cultural contradictions. Through the use of literary devices like imagery, metaphor, symbols and juxtaposition we poetized the narrative of Umuofia/Ikemefuna and Nigeria/youths. We adopted Vladimir Propp’s concept of fabula and syuzhet, where the manipulation of the fabula by the author/poet creates syuzhet, variations of fabula. We examined the role of de-familiarization, Barthes view on variations which resulted in the death of the author/poet and Oscar Wilde’s opinion that the critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The syuzhetal defamiliarization technique enabled us to reconstruct Achebe’s prosaic Ikemefuna into a poetic variant – the poem: Ikemefuna. This mode of generating a new meaning in another literary form has not only enhanced poetic innovation, criticism and craft; it has enhanced readers/writers ability to critically and creatively articulate Nigerian diverse socio-cultural experiences.