Aesthetic Metamorphosis Oral Rhetoric in the Poetry of Tanure Ojaide

The writer's imaginative craft is usually inspired and shaped by the environment s/he hails from. This in turn gives room for constant communication between the creative mind and the immediate physical social world; the environment becomes a determinant of the writer's experiences. The influence of the Urhobo oral tradition on the poetic corpus of Tanure Ojaide is remarkable. The poet's cultural background occupies a looming space in his choices of generic style. Close examination of Ojaide's poetry reveals the exploration and appropriation of the orature of the Urhobo people, which ranges from myth, folksongs, proverbs, riddles, indigenous rhythms to folktales. Ojaide deploys orature to criticize contemporary ills as well as to locate solutions for Nigeria's socio-economic problems. The aim of this essay is essentially to demonstrate that orality accounts for the distinctiveness of Ojaide's writing. Also interrogate is the mingling of the oral and written in Ojaide's art. This approach will, it is hoped, open up what has been a restricted economy, through the inscribing of orature as a cardinal and integral constituent of the poet's art.