Emergent Poetry of Northern Nigeria within Digital Space

Abstract

The author of this article presents an analytical study of a poetry forum at kanoonline.com, which targets Northern Nigerian readership. The forum reflects emerging literature as it sets out to shape its own standards of literary creativity, transmission, circulation, as well as communication reality and perception in cyberspace. Poetic texts are created in a digital medium, a means that presents itself as an inexhaustible source for the rapid circulation and unlimited distribution of texts. The emergence of a text as a digital unit ensures the immediacy of its communication to an audience, which simultaneously generates intensive reader feedback. Based on an analysis of selected topics, the author discusses metatextuality as being the essential nature of a digital text. The posting of a text, which is obviously a completed product of individual creation, serves as a starting point for a further creative process. The agent of this textual reworking is the audience which generates different interpretations of a given literary piece. What we witness is a switch from an individual creative process to an impersonal collective deconstruction, a process engendering metatexts. Most of the abovementioned forum’s experimental poetic formations can hardly be captured, identified, comprehended or interpreted well in terms of both content and form for several reasons. The shape of virtual texts may be viewed as awkward, chaotic, and confusing. And the contents of the texts, while definitely reflecting African modernity, on the other hand, is determined by subjectively portrayed day-to-dayness, freely displaying open mundane experiences in a fragmentary and momentary way. Forum poetry — poetic creation, performance, publication, reading, and perception altogether — within the virtual space has an explosive effect, which is unpredictable, uncontrolled, chaotic and momentary. Moreover, poetic content often makes a strong reference to certain immediate and fragmentary environments of African everyday life which are most urgent and alive at the very time of creation, performance and perception. Thus, capturing virtual texts within this broad context — the context of author/reader interaction, communication and creation — enables one to read both the content and formal properties inherent in the genre of web-forum poetry.