Language and Difference: A Deconstructive Reading Of Niyi Osundare’s “Poetry Is” and Abubakar Othman’s “Wordsworth Lied”

.The paper examines, using Deconstruction as an analytical framework, the desire by Niyi Osundare and Abubakar Othman to resolve the problematics in and around the composition and reading of poetry in particular and literature in general. The analysis of Osundare’s “Poetry Is” and Othman’s “Wordsworth Lied” demonstrates the ways in which language is not a transparent medium for the representation of truth, knowledge, beliefs since the reading of poetry must scrupulously and tenaciously tease out the point at which the texts differ from themselves. Indeed, language may be a medium through which humans express thoughts, feelings, ideas or forge an identity, but it cannot be reduced to a subjective apprehension. Arguably, the play of difference within language is what makes identity possible and at the same time, thwarts it infinitely. Therefore, the paper concludes with the argument that the two speakers in the selected poems are caught up in self-contradiction or auto-deconstruction, in that there are tensions between what they meant and what the texts say.


Introduction
There is always already deconstruction, at work in works, especially in literary works. Derrida (1986). In the case of culture, person, nation, language, identity is a self-differentiating identity, an identity different from itself, having an opening or gap within itself. Derrida (1997). Niyi Osundare is one of the leading figures among Nigerian second generation poets that emerge immediately after the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 and 1970. The emergence of Osundare on the Nigerian literary scene marks a paradigm shift in the composition of poetry. For Osundare, poetry should serve as a transparent medium of human expression, feelings, thoughts through which individuals come to grasp the social, political, economic, and historical reality within their immediate society. To do this job satisfactorily, poets must employ poetic aesthetics that are not rooted "in Grecoroman lore", but are indigenous to all readers irrespective of their social 76 status. Arguably, Osundare's iconoclastic tendency could be seen as a revolutionary stance against Nigerian first generation poets such as Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo whose poetry collections are overwhelmed with "esoteric" dialect "entombed in Grecoroman lore" (Anyokwu, 2015;Ekpenyong, 2014;Garuba, 2003).
Indeed, one of the poems in Songs of the Marketplace entitled "Poetry Is" serves as a viable poetic voice of what poetry should be for both African poets and readers. This poem, so to speak, calls into question the retour aux fixation of "Greco-Roman lore" or modernist aestheticization that informed the first generation writers. It is in this regard that Egya (2014) argues that Osundare, like Odia Ofeimun's "The Poet Lied", dismantles the long-established Euro-American poetic aesthetics in order to formulate a new poetic art that could serve "the plight of the peasant and the poor" (p. 16). Or, as Funso Aiyejina discursively argues: 'Ofeimun's concern with the oppressed, his anger at and impatience with opportunistic artists, public morality, cultural inadequacies, economic mismanagement […] are qualities which he shares with Niyi Osundare" (cited in Egya,p. 17). This argument also finds expression in Osundare's most celebrated essay, "The Writer as Righter", where he derides Soyinka, Okigbo, Clark, and Echeruo because their political and poetic engagement is hinged on "a cacophony of mythmaking and impenetrable idiom" (cited in Egya,p. 32). However, the aspiration of this paper is to explore how this manifesto-poem or meta-poem is implicated in the deconstruction of what it sets out to banish; that is, how tropes undermine the central argument in the poem.

Another revolutionary figure in Nigerian literature is Abubakar Othman. Whereas Niyi
Osundare is occupied with the question of poetic composition, Othman makes waves for a new trend in the criticism of African literature. The argument in the poem titled "Wordsworth Lied" is a case in point. Central to Othman's "Wordsworth Lied" is the proposition that criticism should go beyond the circle of the Romantic tradition of poetic composition and criticism. That is, readers should look beyond authorial sensibility towards a close reading which is not likely to illuminate the authorial feelings and response, to historical space that shapes his personality; the task of reader, so to speak, is to concentrate on the literary artefacts (literariness) of text.
What reader comes to understand about the text is not metaphysically given but rather is progressively discovered through a critical scrutiny of what is at stake in the words on the page; in essence, the reader is concern with content and not form. In similar manner, Othman depicts the problematic inherent in writers' "attempts to reconcile their artistry to the sense of social commitment that confronts them in the literary tradition in which they find themselves" (Egya, pp. 50-51). Therefore, the central problematic of this paper is to demonstrate how the poem fails to vindicate its arguments within the premise of binary oppositions between authorial reading and intrinsic reading, between form and content.

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The analytical framework for this paper is deconstruction with emphasis on Derrida's philosophical thought on reading and interpretation. Deconstruction's defense of textualism does not look forward to a discourse or language that can pin down the truth, reality of things.
Deconstructionists, such as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, and other deconstructionists, argue that language is figurative in nature; language operates on the basis of differentiation. Difference is what makes identity possible and at the same time thwarts it infinitely. Hence, language only offers, so to speak, opinion ("doxa") and not reality, truth or transcendental signified. Thus, inherent in human languages (spoken or written) is the plurality of an irreducible, indeterminant meaning. On this view, interpretation should itself be a kind of textual, rhetorical performance, much like the text it studies. That is, interpretation of text should be an unending dialogue between the text and the readers. To put it in the words of De The act of understanding is temporal act that has its own history, but this history forever eludes totalization (p. 32).
In this sense, both the writer and the reader should only wear the "mask of rhetoric" to offer a discourse that would not allow a desire for closure, or for anything which might exist beyond and outside of the text. This means that neither the author nor the reader, nor context is desirable but the text itself as a differential network of traces, so that both the text and interpretation can go on in their different ways as a moving or an unending chain of signifiers, an open-ended play of signification. Derrida (1988) maintains that "no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation" (p. 136). For Derrida, the word "context" is another name for what he calls "a chain of possible substitutions" without a close or an end. Context can also be described as anything that cannot be apprehended directly, but only through a system of differences, a differential trace, and the interpretive experience. Deconstruction, therefore, posits that discourse should not be attributed or attached to origins to which interpretation could return to unfold meaning. In fact, Derrida (1982) has discursively argued that context is neither a name nor a concept but a moving chain of "non-synonymous substitutions" (pp. 7-12; see also Royle 2003, pp. 71-83). On this note, it is uncritical and misleading for Niyi Osundare and Abubakar Othman to pose the question of poetry and criticism in terms of what "is" without taking into consideration the differential network of traces. Therefore, the central problematic of this paper is to explore how the play of figurative language undermines every attempt to totalize and to homogenize the identity of poetry. It is a reading which tries to find out how the selected texts are caught up in self (auto)-deconstruction.

The Problem of Definition
The title of the poem "Poetry is" and its repetition at the beginning of each stanza conveys the poetic speaker's attempt to define what "poetry is" and what "poetry is" not. The speaker presents the major features that could be used as a yardstick for judging the overall standard of poetry as a genre of writing. In the first stanza, the speaker contends with and pillories the esotericism with which poetry has always been attributed to by Eurocentric poets. Such esoteric language, for the speaker, is not indigenous to the imaginative world of the reader; thereby "excluding" them from the intentionalism of the poem. He further maintains that poetry is a mere medium or device used to gain the attention and recognition of an alien audience. By implication, poetry is not an embodiment of allusion to Greek-Roman mythological representation of experience in the society. The exploration of the richness of the classical texts, for the speaker, is not a vital corrective tool for the prevalent issues that bewailed contemporary society. Poetry, which alludes to "Grecoroman lore", tends to deliberately create an "esoteric whisper", "excluding tongue", "a clap trap", "quiz"; all signifying a sense of ambiguity and exclusion. Poetry of such is personal and only gives an idea of meaning (doxa). Therefore, poetic composition that revolves around issues of "Grecoroman lore" is of then and there, rather Poetry is depicted as an essential figure of being and existence for the subaltern or local people, which serves as an inward exploration of human experience. The word "timbre", in this stanza, suggests the downtrodden in the society who have been isolated from the worldview of the socalled educated elite and, at the same time, pushed to the backwater side of the society. In essence, poetry forcefully moves the subaltern to action and forewarns the autocratic elite of the consequence of their action. On this basis, poetry serves as a medium of self-evaluation for the 'violent hierarchy between the elite and the peasants. For the speaker, poetry which attempts to explore human experience and predicament would interrogate with different groups of people both learned and unlearned, and with different social forces that shaped and undermined human life and experience. That is, any poem that explores social issues irrespective of gender, status, ethnicity, cultural origin receives lofty attention from the reader. The speaker employs imagery that is indigenous to local people whom he identifies with; such as "timbre" and "pluck." The speaker further defines poetry as a representation of the masses' outcry. The masses are metaphorically referred to as "hawker". The expression "hawker's ditty" suggests the continuous complaints of the masses which have been fallen on the deaf ears of the elite. This gives an insight into the malicious attitude and insensitivity of the elite in their daily interaction with the masses. Poetry should draw the attention of the public ("the eloquence of the gong" and "the luminous ray") to the plight and disillusionment of the local people ("the lyric of the marketplace" and "the grass's morning dew"). The entire stanza three is structured around audio and visual imagery which are typical to the local setting: "hawker", "gong", "marketplace", "grass's morning dew". Hence, in the speaker's view, poetry is not a philosophical discourse ("oracle's kernel") where "philosopher" took to philosophizing with a "stone"; that is, it is not a meta-discourse embellished with figurative language such as "esoteric whisper", "excluding tongue", "clap trap", "learned quiz", and "Greecoroman lore" and among other literary tropes. Thus, the speaker points out that philosophical or theoretical argument has no social and political implications; this implies that philosophy and theory have no useful essence and should be Nietzsche has argued that all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated goes beyond the circle of definition or reappropriation; only that which has no history is definable. In essence, Nietzsche is of the opinion that poetry is a composition of language, figuration that cannot be frozen within a particular intellectual and ideological context. For Nietzsche, poetry is not a stable tradition of writing, a finished product, a meta-language with a furnished meaning. On this premise, poetry is a composition of sign that is devoid of a definite meaning and always in a perpetual quest for its own meaning. The speaker attempts to define what "Poetry is" is a denial of writing as the play within language: the need to "search for the other of language" (Derrida 1986, p. 15), to bring to the fore or uncover what is "unreadable" in the text (De Man 2000), to locate the point in which the text (poem) "turned against itself in the temporal folds of error and irony" (Davis and Schleifer 1991, p. 167), to read where the texts "get into trouble, come unstuck, offer to contradict themselves" (Eagleton 1996: p. 134). The insistence on transparent reference in poetry is precisely an attempt to misread and set aside the way figurative language functions and performs in the entire structure and production of literary work.
Arguably, the speaker's depiction of the task of philosopher and the entire process of philosophizing with metaphorically tool ("stone") is an attempt to demonstrate the ultimate task of intelligentsias, such as the speaker itself, who are visionary for their society. It is the task of writers to philosophize with "stone" in order to liberate man from captivity. The "kernel" symbolizes the power that sleeps within man in the same way an image (a nut) sleeps within unhewn kernel. The speaker, like a philosopher, sees it as his task to educate ("gather timber", "pluck", "harbinger of action", "stir") man how to free himself from the "kernel" in which he is imprisoned by the superior being. The speaker, philosophizing with metaphorical objects like "stone" and "hammer", is synonymous to Nietzsche However, Nietzsche notes that it requires fervent effort and determination on the side the "oracle" or, in the words of the speaker, "a sole philosopher" to liberate humanity from conventional beliefs and norms which have enslaved the critical thinking of man. Interestingly, while Nietzsche philosophizes with "hammer", the speaker, on the other hand, philosophizes 82 with the metaphor of "gather", "pluck" "stir" to envision how poetry could be used to encourage people to stir up a revolutionary spirit in all their struggles to liberate the human thought from an epistemic understanding of human essence and existence. In addition, Soyinka (2018), the son of Ogun, sees himself as one, charged with the responsibility to liberate the oppressed from the shackles of minority "self-recycling geriatrics", to set up a direction for a new generation: [Ogun] has handed me his machete and given marching orders, saying, Son of Ogun, take this machete and cut through the brambles of lies, hypocrisy, double-talk and pontification and insincere sententious. Cut off the tongue of liar so that your people can know some peace (pp. 45-46).
For the speaker, poetry is conceived as a rhythmical composition which becomes meaningful only when "Grecoroman lore" collapsed. The understanding of human plights and struggles from a foreign or Greek-Roman perspective is inadequate because, as he argues, such allusion tends to "exclude" certain group of people, and serves as "a clap trap/for a wondering audience". Therefore, the speaker philosophizes with ordinary language as a medium to give voice to "the hawker's ditty". It may be pertinent and productive to maintain that literary texts, like poems, are writings that require rhetorical readings and contextual analysis. Culler (2000) rightly contends that "[o]ne striking signal of this is that philosophical texts have become literary in the classic sense that, like poems, they are not supposed to be paraphrased: to paraphrase is to miss what is essential" (p. 286). To typecast poetry is to slot it into a certain tradition of writing rather than to perceive it as a performative act. Despite the speaker's claims to the contrary, the argument in the poem is still imbricated with the task of philosophizing with poetry. In fact, the speaker, Nietzsche (a Greco-roman philosopher), and Soyinka ("nationalistmodernist") are all men of the same skill.
The speaker of "Poetry Is" sets out to dismantle literary works which are written in condensed language (tropes) at the expense of ordinary language so as to demonstrate the total effect, potency and superiority of local imagery over the "Grecoroman lore". Thus, rather than the speaker to neutralize the hierarchical oppositions of figurative and literal poetic aesthetics-by undermining the notion that there can be the transcendental foundations for meaning-the speaker eventually demonstrates the superior virtues of ordinary language as the "center" which gives meaning and identity to poetry. This unwarranted presumption of language by the speaker needs to be confronted. The separation of figurative language (tropes) from ordinary or pedestrian language in the literary-critical composition and pedagogy is groundless, facile, and superfluous. This fact is so baffling that it leads Derrida (1976, p. 158) to argue that writers write within a system and logic over which they have no absolute control. White (1978: p. 98), 83 Fowler (1981) and Laird (1999) also vindicate this argument respectively. For them, there is no fictive domain in language and writing; or separation of "esoteric whisper", "Greecoroman lore" and "the eloquence of the gong", "the lyric of the marketplace" because both signifying images are linguistically homogeneous in style and trope. Thus, both figurative and ordinary languages are inseparable (whatever "meanings" are attributed to them) because they are both rhetorical and not representational. Also, De Man (1971) avers: "All language is, to some extent, involved in interpretation, though all language certainly does not achieve understanding" (31). Or as Nietzsche (1968) succinctly puts it that there is no such thing as "natural" or "ordinary" language as opposed to figurative of rhetorical language; that is, language is purely rhetorical or "clap trap" and does not reflect reality beyond and outside itself (p. 516).
The Greco-Roman culture and language, with which this practice is implicated, insists, despite the speaker's argument, on using customary interpretive procedures. Arguably, the speaker first deciphers what poetry is or could be in the traditional way of the Greeco-Roman poetic composition and discourse. To decipher poetry through the reading of Grecoroman lore is not, theoretically speaking, a way of rehearsing and preserving the cultural heritage inscribed in the lore. It is an analysis which attempts to investigate how the thoughts and ideas "entombed in Grecoroman lore" work and do not work, to demonstrate the play of contradictions, ambiguities, paradoxes, heterogeneity within the Grecoroman lore. So, the task of a deconstructive critic is to find out the deconstructive process at work in the differential play of meaning. While the speaker conceives poetry as originary to Greek heritage, Derrida (1997) strongly maintains that: This heritage is the heritage of a model, not simply a model, but of a model that self-deconstructs, that deconstructs itself, so as to uproot, to become independent of its own grounds, so to speak, so that, today, philosophy is Greek and it is not Greek… So, we have to go back constantly to the Greek origin, not in order to cultivate the origin, or in order to protect the etymology, the The implicit assumption that poetry is an autonomous activity of the critical efforts of "man", presumably the author or the reader, needs to be taken up and refined. For the speaker, the implicit foreknowledge of a poetic text exists ontologically prior to the text itself. Since, for the speaker, meaning comes into existence as a result of "man's" experience, it is unclear whether to seek the meaning of the text through the authorial psychological disposition or through the intentional structure of literary form or through the subjective apprehension of the reader.
Reading, to be sure, is an irreducible process of scattered practices that goes beyond the circle of subjectivism or meta-reading. To read and evaluate a literary text is not to seek for a predetermined interpretive model of reading because reading itself is an infinite crafty play of meaning. In the same vein, Macherey (2006) argues that literary objects "have no prior existence but are thought into being" through critical practices (p. 5). This simply means that the object of interpretation is not given in advance of interpretation but is gradually discovered through a differential play of traces. In other words, interpretation is not to give the meaning of the object but the addition, the differential, the supplementarity within the object of study. The reading of literary work (for instance, poem) demands close attention to the working of its language. Therefore, a close reading of language enables the reader or critic to explore tenaciously the identity of the text through a rigorous scrutiny of paradoxes, tensions, discrepancies between what is said (content) and how (form) it is said in the poem.

Poetry and Relativism
Abubakar Othman's "Wordsworth Lied" is a sequel to the preceding analysis of Niyi Osundare's "Poetry is", but it takes a different form and approach. Whereas Osundare, as discussed above, sets out to liberate poetry from the modernist tradition of poetic composition Central to the speaker's tone of cynicism against "Wordsworth" (one of the leading theorists and writers of the Romanticism movement) is that experience cannot be achieved and sustained 85 by mere emotion. In the context of the poem, Wordsworth is not the flesh and blood writer of the Romanticism period (a historical self), but rather a symbolic representation or an eponym of the Romantic-Humanist tradition (a textual entity) for whom "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" that are "recollected/ In tranquility":

Wordsworth lied
That poetry is emotion feeling inscribed in the text without making reference to any critical judgment outside the psychological disposition of the text: "I have one request to make of my reader, which is, that in judging these poems, he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others." To evaluate and grasp the overall meaning of a text is for the reader to establish a connection between the text and poet's personal experience as "recollected in tranquility".
On the contrary, the speaker pitches the whole concept of "emotion" into crisis. It is not the medium of expression, the speaker argues, that "matter[s]" in evaluating the emotion of the poem but rather the ultimate meaning derived from "words" on the page. Contrarily to Wordsworth's notion of "tranquility", the speaker likens the outpouring of emotion to "When words drop from my pen/ Like arrow from the quiver". Therefore, for the speaker, the ultimate identity of a poem lies not in the emotional effect recollected in the "words". Rather it seeks to locate and understand the condition under which the intentional structure of literary form of a poem can chart the ways of making meaning of "emotion". The speaker maintains that the identity of the writer is not fixed and recoverable in the text; only the intentionality incorporated in the words on the page is fixed and remained. By implication, the very moment the "I" writes, it enters into its "death". To "die" metaphorically means that no appreciation or criticism can ever return again to the hand that "wrote a poem". Put another way, the textual narrator (the writing "I"), to be distinguished from the flesh and blood author, is always and prior a dead man's name, a name of death. What returns to the textual "I" never returns to the historical "I".
No authorial or reader subjective apprehension of the text can "reduce" the very identity of the text since "words" presume unity of meaning. The poem serves as a credo for deconstruction's tenets of presence and language; a poem being a performative act, illimitable in different contexts, is structurally readable beyond the death of the "I" that "wrote a poem". The speaker desires to "edit" (furnish it with unified meaning), but it is impossible to do so.
There is this desire on the part of the speaker to resolve the contradictions, tensions, paradoxes, ambiguities inherent in the endless chain of signifiers, which, paradoxically, differs reading and writing to irreducible interpretation. In this light, Spivak (1976) discursively points out, in "Translator's Preface,", Of Grammatology: "The desire for unity and order compels the author and the reader to balance the equation that is the text's system. The deconstructive reader...
[seeks] the moment in the text which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of 87 hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction" (p. xlix). The speaker is, to be sure, conscious of the figurative nature of language and the workings of the differential trace.
In the final stanza, the speaker defines "Poetry" as a spontaneous overflowing of emotion "like" a sudden "death" of an infant. This definition undermines and stands in sharp contrast to the slow and careful scrutiny of the sensibility and intent outside the organic unity of "words" on the page ("pain"). However, it could be argued that the speaker's view is unsuccessful in its attempt to privilege textual meaning over authorial meaning. The speaker's radical approach against the romantic assumption of poetry (or literature) as an autonomous entity of the mind is centered on the nature of the whole complex interrelationship between form and content. For the speaker, the "recollection" and "tranquility" of "pain" can never lead to the real meaning of the mental calisthenics, since the paradox between "pain" and "emotion" cannot be resolved by mere "recollection" and "tranquility".
The speaker's argument of the ontological existence of meaning ("pain") prior to the poem goes some ways toward explaining the autonomy and unity of the poetic consciousness ("words").
The speaker argues for an intrinsic reading of poetry without inference and reference to the intentional meaning of the authorial intent. Poetry, he stresses, is not merely an imitation of "emotion recollected/ In tranquility" but ordering and unifying of emotion through a corresponding order of verbal structure ("words") which in turn serves as a final inward direction to meaning. What difference does it make if emotion is "recollected/In tranquility" or "Like arrows from the quiver"? The speaker is short-sighted to realize that the poem could be read without the recollection of "pain" inscribed in the "words"; the play and critique of the warring forces of signification (language) in the poem automatically dismantle inheritance and difference, any given sign is a moving chain of differential traces since it always serves as a signifier for more signifiers. A deconstructive reading, in practice, does not seek to rehearse how the arguments for and against the thesis on "tranquility" or "pain" can heighten the overall meaning of a poem, but rather explores how the forward and sideways movement of language produces and infinitely twists, postponed meaning. The speaker's formula defining poetry as "a recurrent emotion/That shatters tranquility/ Like the bewildering death/Of an innocent child" is only necessary if it allows discourse to remain at the textual surface without delving deeper for final "pain they paint" and "create" for poetry. The partial failure of the speaker is due to its insensitivity to the performative acts of "words" that can never come to a rest but continuing signifying de infinitude.
However, there are significant points which need to be explored. The speaker invites its readers to imaginatively recreate the "pain" or experience of other human beings. In this sense, poetry is a moral phenomenon that deepens and sharpens the reader's emotion of human "pain" without actually having to "recollect it in tranquility." It is "pain" by the virtue of its form that matter, rather than the "emotion" inscribed in the poem. George Eliot makes similar assertion when he argues that: "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures" (cited in Terry Eagleton 2013, p. 56). Both the speaker and Eliot are of the view that it is the effect poetry "paints" on the mind of the reader that should be the focus of reading and interpretation, one which gives access to the inner lives of others, rather than being held spellbound in the "recollection of tranquility." This argument is a beautiful and tremendous critical effort, but limited. The speaker is unable to acknowledge that not all literary works invite readers to term with moral phenomenon. Thus, "pain" is not at all the only medium of understanding "the emotion" in poetry. In this sense, the speaker's argument is an attempt to make the reader to empathize with others. On the contrary, empathy hinders and blunts the sheer pleasure of reading in readers' attempts to understand and pass judgmental on the "pains" of others.
Although, poetry may attempt to invite the reader to empathize with its subject matter; it is the task of critics to scrupulously critique the formal and thematic paradoxes, tensions, contradictions in the poem, and not to dance to the intent and intentionality of the poem.

Conclusion
The above analysis is an attempt to problematize the whole concept of identity in poetry and, by implication, in literary works. The aporetic aspects of the Niyi Osundare's "Poetry Is" and Abubakar Othman's "Wordsworth Lied" lie in their attempts to foist identity of what poetry is or could be. Their persuasive arguments of what "poetry is" and the whole empathetic effect of poetry are bent out of true by the workings of language. Put another way, the language of the poems garbles identity and turns contradictions on their head. This paper is not an abdication of pitfalls or illusion inherent in critical thoughts or refusal of intellectual efforts; rather, it is a demonstration of the impossibility of definite identity. On the whole, the paper concludes that every attempt by the speakers in the poems is a self-destructive one in which the murder becomes suicide. Whereas the poems invite readers to term with the genre of poetry and the sensitive appreciation to be devoted to it, this paper in turn illustrates the impossibility of reducing literary works (poetry, novel, drama) and criticism to a seamless whole.