Mahmoud Darwish and Tanure Ojaide: Poets of exilic consciousness and representatives of oppressed nations

Abstract

Darwish, the spokesman of Palestine, and Ojaide, the voice of Nigeria, are endowed with a faculty for articulating a message, a vision or an opinion for their nations. They are intellectuals essentially tied to the needs of their communities. Both poets belong to countries that witnessed different types of political, economic, and social turmoil. They inspire the oppressed nations to persist in their struggles against the regimes which deprive them of their right to live happily and peacefully. Darwish experienced many displacements that turned him into an embodiment of exile, in both existential and metaphysical terms, beyond the external, and the metaphorical, in his interior relations with self and poetry. His poetry of exile mirrors the socio-political atmosphere under the Israeli occupation. He utilizes poetry as a weapon in his fight to achieve freedom and independence. Similarly, Ojaide’s poetry is engaged with the crises of his homeland, the Niger Delta. He belongs to the generation of Nigerian writers who used their literary productions as a weapon against social injustice and an instrument in resisting imperialism. To him, there is a direct relationship between literature and social institutions. The principal function of literature is to criticize these institutions and eventually bring about desirable changes in society. This study aims at examining Darwish and Ojaide as poets of exile by observing their exilic experiences and investigating certain poems that typically help dive into their external and internal sense of displacement. The study also highlights the concepts of home and homelessness. It brings to light the poets’ deep yearning for a sense of belonging and their insistence on regaining the motherland toward which they show a profound attachment and permanent commitment. They use words as a therapeutic means to compensate for the lack of a physical homeland. A comparison between the two poets is also provided.