| Aderemi Raji-Oyelade | University of Ibadan |
Aderemi Raji-Oyelade teaches African and African American literatures, literary theory and Creative Writing in the Department of English, University of Ibadan , Nigeria. He is a Fellow of the American Studies Summer Institute at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and a recipient of the Ford Foundation (West Africa) Research Grant for Culture, Literature and the Media. his scholarly essays have appeared in Ariel, Research in African Literatures, Wasafiri, Presence Africaine, and Glendora Review of Books, among others. Dr. Raji- Oyelade's seminal essay introducing Northern Nigerian women's poetry in English is forthcoming in African Literature Today, No. 24. A 1997 winner of the highest national prize for poetry, his collections include A Harvest of Laughters (1997, 2003), Webs of Remembrance (2001), and Shuttlesongs America: Poetic Guided Tour (2003). "Lovesong for My Wasteland" is forthcoming. He has served as Resident Poet and Professor of Cultural & Social Diversity at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He was appointed as the Year 2002 Harry Oppenheimer Visiting African Scholar to the Center for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Dr. Raji-Oyelade is currently the General Secretary of Nigerian Center of PEN International. |
Asakasa: Typologies of Yoruba Postproverbials |
Asakasa is a telegraphic term used to refer to the lyrics - usually seedy, inventive and banal - of a sub-type of contemporary Yoruba music known as Fuji. Asakasa is the performative evidence of the phenomenon of deviant utterances now popular among contemporary speakers of the Yoruba language. I have noted that the emergence of blasphemous speech/proverb acts - postproverbials - is the result of a number of social and linguistic factors including cultural contact, industrialization, and transformative imagination. In this paper, I attempt a formal categorization of types of postproverbials based on observations of peculiar ruptures or violence done to traditional wise sayings. The postproverbial is a potential utterable and alterable mutant in Yoruba quotidian discourse; as supplementary act, it must displace or build on an extant structure in order to effect its own construction. In focusing on the significant areas of super(im)position whereby blasphemous play occurs, I assert that the pool of original proverbs in Yoruba culture is constantly under pressure, threatened and endangered by modernity and mis-education. In spite of or because of this, the significance of the new tongue resides in its usability, flexibility as well as in its potential for multiple formations. |