The aesthetic sublimation of pain in Niyi Osundare's City Without People

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in the volume, before proceeding to argue that the poet's pain, largely psychic, is a product of losses of various kinds. The article goes further, demonstrating how the poet worked through the pain to attain wellness. Relying on insights from trauma theory, complemented by some assumptions about the concept of scriptotherapy, the analysis of poems drawn from across the collection demonstrates the paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain.

Automated summary

This article examines the narration of Nigerian poet-scholar Niyi Osundare's painful experience and memories in his poetry volume titled City Without People, in which he versified his experience of being a victim of Hurricane Katrina. The article explores the thematization of pain in the collection and argues that the poet's pain, largely psychic, is a result of various losses. It further demonstrates how the poet worked through the pain to attain wellness, utilizing insights from trauma theory and assumptions about scriptotherapy.