Title: Exploring Activist Poetics and the Nigerian Leadership in Ndubuisi Martin’s Answers through the Bramble

Bartholomew Chizoba Akpah

Department of Languages and Literature
William V. S. Tubman University
Harper, Liberia

Abstract

Ndubuisi Martins, one of Nigeria’s young contemporary poets, reincarnates the vagaries of Nigeria’s neo-colonial desolation, which reflects a culture of mediocrity in Nigerian leadership and the continuous suffering of the masses. He lays bare in his poetry a strict disapprobation of dysfunctional and catatonic conditions that continue to widen the gap between the disadvantaged Nigerians and the political class that this study investigates. Thus, the significance of the study lies in the intervention of poetry as activism by Ndubuisi Martins to excoriate and negotiate better living conditions for the Nigerian masses. The study adopts
Marxism literary theory which explores the consciousness of class struggle in the interpretation of five selected poems: “To a returning general”; “When you said…”; “silence is spirit”; “The Reports”, and “Naija is a badly behaved poem”. The selected poems were critically analyzed as reflections of Nigeria’s leadership complexities that impose hardship on the Nigerian masses. This is what Martin’s poetry fustigates in answers through the bramble as a literary activist and intellectual voice against the tyranny of the ruling class in Nigeria.

Keywords:

Ndubuisi Martins, Nigerian leadership, activism, Marxism, Nigerian masses

How to Cite this Paper:

Bartholomew, C. A. (2023). Exploring Activist Poetics and the Nigerian Leadership in Ndubuisi Martin’s Answers through the Bramble. Atras Journal, 4(1), 150-170

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