collectivism with respect to the nation holds water only as long as there is a consensus
no matter how uneasy that may be despite the people’s disparate cultures and histories.
Such consensus is to respect the spatiality forced upon them by the designs of capitalist
modernity.
Therefore, Oguibe affirms the link that he has with the nation by virtue of his birth in the
land whose main insignia, “blood”, strengthens his sense of nationalism and the
awareness of his rootedness in the soil. This also strengthens the metaphor of the nation
as an arborescent essence. Because of the rootedness precipitated on birth “blood” or the
blood shed in the Civil War for the nation to remain onefor “blood” in this context
assumes an indismissible ambiguitya vision is reaffirmed which is essentially territorial.
It explains why “my vision is blurred”. Put another way, the sense of belonging rules out
the suggestion of transcending its frontiers for the purpose of coping with the pressing
existential problems with which he is faced. Such avowal calls to mind the epic
illustration of the attachment to the land even in the face of state adversity in Osundare’s
Waiting Laughters where what is demanded is the uncommon strategy of patience: “oh
teach us the patience of the Rain/ which eats the rock in toothless silence...” (25) For as
long as the knowledge of patience remains, the suggestion of deterritorialization or
uprooting is disingenous.
Yet as a poet, a sense of alienation pervades Oguibe’s consciousness in the metaphoric
sense. But his sense of alienation is set off by the passion to simultaneously identify with
the “sweat ...of the men”, fellow men whose “million feet...plod/ The dust of streets”
that make up this land with which he identifies (16). The manner of identification with
the rest of the people is reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin (2004: 22) regards as the
metaphor of the lone rag picker on the street and whose vocation and condition find
comparison in the solitude of the vocation of a poet. Although Benjamin’s analysis is
immediately in reference to the peculiar art of Baudelaire, there is a sense in which this
finds semblance in Oguibe’s poetry. The difference however is that his identification is
not with only one rag picker, but with the “million feet”, the state under the headship of a
military tyranny has trampled upon so much so that they form part of the “refuse” on the