COMMITMENT IN NIGERIAN LITERATURE: A STUDY OF NWACHUKWU-AGBADA’S PRAYER BEADS OF A SILENT SUPPLICANT

Abstract

Commitment in literature is a conscious engagement of writers with the socio-political, cultural and economic realities of their environments. These writers use literature as a tool for advocacy and social transformation. Commitment in modern African literature began with cultural activism associated with the colonial era and progressed to the disillusionment of the post-independence era. It is a veritable ideology that highlights a writer’s belief in an egalitarian society and has become a means through which writers participate in nation-building. Commitment in art has established writers as critical thinkers, philosophers and clairvoyants of their societies. Achebe, for instance, published A Man of the People and shortly afterwards, Nigeria’s first military coup took place.  In his Prayer Beads of the Silent Supplicant (2005), J.O. J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, a professor of Literature expands the epistemic boundaries of literature of commitment in Africa. The collection has 78 poems written on varied issues in Africa. The paper selects four verses from the anthology due to the constraints of time and space – poems which profoundly justify the poet as a committed writer. The Reflectionist theory – the idea that literature reflects the social, political, cultural, economic and ethical realities of the society that produced it – has been applied in the analysis of the poems. The methodology of the research is qualitative – requiring close reading, analysis and interrogation of selected poems. The research findings highlight Nwachukwu-Agbada as a socially committed writer who makes extensive use of of metaphor, rhetorical question, parallelism, repetition, irony and sarcasm to describe the inept leadership of the Nigerian society, which is complicit in the social inequalities in the land.