Animal Metaphor in Niyi Osundare’s Random Blues

Abstract

Metaphor is a significant rhetorical device in poetry and African poets often adopt it to describe and reveal social realities by mapping two different objects together and revealing the attributes of one through the other. While scholars have extensively studied Osundare’s poetry thematically from socio-political perspectives as well as from linguistic and literary stylistic perspectives, there is little attention on his appropriation of animal metaphor. Therefore, this paper examines animal metaphor in Osundare’s Random Blues by identifying the animals that are represented in the collection and how they reflect leadership maladministration. Eyoh Etim’s Post-postcolonial Theory is employed to account for the mapping of the animals’ attributes to political leaders and their maladministration in Nigeria. The use of animal metaphor in the collection exposes leadership aberration, highlighting political leaders as shepherds of impoverishment, masters of misgovernance, and insensitive elites. Animals such as crocodiles, orangutan, baboon, whale, shark, louse, leech, maggot, cat, and parrot are used as both linguistic and ideological devices to inscribe leadership maladministration.