THE RE-ARTICULATION OF HOPE FROM GRIEF: NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR POETRY AS LEDGER

This paper attempts to re-examine the poetry of the Nigerian civil war to bring to the foreground the disasters it brought upon Nigerians and to caution the generation who did not experience the war, especially the youths on the dangers of resolving socio-political crisis through violence even if some crisis cannot be resolved without one. Invariably, the essay examines poetry written by soldiers who were directly involved in the war, civilians who experienced the war closely or remotely and poets who wrote two decades after the war. From a contrapuntal reading, the poetry of the Nigerian civil war becomes a documentation of hope for a wounded society because of the substantive way it dealt with the traditional themes of the integrity of the individual or the viability of the nation’s collective destiny during and after the war. To give the paper its theoretical base, I argue that since the testimony of the Nigerian Civil War has translated into an historical reality, the war story will continue be of strategic importance for Nigerians.