Paper short abstract:

Uche Nduka presents an interesting problem for our understanding of contemporary African poetry. Born in Nigeria in 1963, Nduka, who has lived in “exile” in Europe, (Germany) and the United States was very active in the Lagos poetry revival of the late 1980s and early 1990s, until he left Nigeria following the fallouts of the June 12, 1993 elections. Often experimental and allusive, Nduka’s poetry indicates a break from the formalism of contemporary African poetry, and charts its own path, and reach for a coherent worldview situated in a very cosmopolitan poetic style. But within Nduka’s “cosmopolitanism” rests the thrust of a “Black Atlantic” poetic that questions, even as it amplifies our understanding of a new “black Diaspora.”

Paper long abstract:

Uche Nduka’s poetry, particularly in his collection Eel on the Reef has been described as “anti-narrative,” by the critic Sara Valentine. It positions Nduka as a remarkably inventive and experimental poet who packs more than clear-cut meaning in the dense, often elusive movements of his lines, much indeed like the “eel.” In this paper however, my contention is that Nduka presents more than an allusive, or even if deliberately elusive “anti-narrative” trope, but a rhizome of zeugmas that explore vast terrains of worldly, interstitial imagery, sometimes disconnected and fractured, but on the whole organic narrative staged in the tri-Atlantic space that connects his African world to its diasporas. I contend that the ruptures in the speech act are like the eel signifying Nduka’s slippery, disruptive stance, a subtle synecdochal move that hides as well as tells the story of new, diasporic migrancy exemplified by Nduka’s own location(s) within this “new Black Atlantic.”