Wole Soyinka, Ogun Abibimañ

Craig McLuckie (Okanagan College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.2.3: Anglophone African Writing and Culture: Subsaharan.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1976

Places

Nigeria (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

“But how can we ever be enriched ... if we do not recognise the tragic prelude to the moment of triumph?” (Wole Soyinka, Six Plays. London: Methuen, 1984. xviii)

Ogun Abibimañ (Rex Collings, 1976; Opon Ifa, 1976; Ravan, 1997) is a poetic tour de force; or, as the author would have it, a “revolutionary joie de vivre”: in his sense of a celebration of human responsibility and agency (Soyinka, Six Plays, xviii). Specifically, these 483 lines of loose blank verse, with occasional anger-induced line fractures, comprise an epic poem that celebrates President Samora Machel's decision to end a fruitless process of dialogue with the white minority regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and his …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

855 words

Citation: McLuckie, Craig. "Ogun Abibimañ". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 April 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12843, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article