Abstract
Niyi Osundare is a foremost Nigerian/African poet, who has enjoyed rich scholarly attention and already assumed a trailblazer in poetic influence for many Nigerian poets. Much work in the area of theory of his poetry is not done, or it is inadequate considering the hybrid ideas that his poetry contains.
In this study, I propose a conceptual reading of, Osundare’s poetry and its connection to signifying chameleon, drawing from the idea of Jung's myth-motifs, to mean the blending of, in Osundare’s corpus, oral materials like legends, proverbs, myths, riddles., with various modern forms and received poetic references and text styles. Thus, by signifying chameleon, I refer to the concept of poetry that straddles the unconscious and conscious currents, and as well move beyond the superficial meaning of an animal which blends with the colour of its environment.
This is to relate the hybrid complexes in which Osundare’s poetry is processed and received. Useful in my study is a dislocation and reconstruction of Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic frame of the collective unconscious aimed at instituting a textual framework, signifying chameleon, for reading not only Osundare’s poetry, but also other works that pervasively reinvent cultural tropes with changing currents of poetic techniques.
For Osundare’s affinity to mutant (un)conscious poeticisation, I investigate the hybrid materiality of Osundare’s Waiting Laughters and the Word is an Egg, to foreground their internal, self-referencing-cum external, processes articulation of the currents of the (un)conscious modes of interpretation of his hybrid technique of structure and theme, as signifying chameleon. The paper submits that Osundare’s poetry is a signifying chameleon, as both its multiple folk-motifs, western structure, technique and thematic currents often point to.