We are happy to announce that our PhD candidate Ndubuisi Martins Aniemeka, MA has a new chapter published in Dissidence, Gender, and Psychosocial Tempers in Contemporary Nigerian Poetry (edited by Bartholomew Chizoba Akpah and Thomas-Michael Emeka Chukwumezie). Read the abstract of his chapter “Akin Bello’s Flying Universe as Histopoetics” below:

Akin Bello is a Nigerian poet, dramatist, and novelist who has not at tracted considerable critical attention despite producing outstanding literary works and finally winning the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in 2014. In his poetry collection, Flying Universe, Bello imaginatively recounts a complex history of writers and writing,  with its associated philosophical depth and apprehension pervading the timeless imaginative work of writers all over the world. While his tory assumes content in his poetry, it also becomes a reflective circuit, allowing a reader to approach it as a poetics of history. Without exempting himself, Bello seems to bear witness to his life and his encyclopedic wanderings around writers in history and the history of writers. Thus, in this article, I attempt a text to theory inquisition and formulation of Bello’s collection of poems as histopoetics, which merges the materials of the poeticising history of writing and writers like himself not only as a theme of discussion but also as a method of writing poetry about history. Therefore, I examine closely selected poems at various levels of meaning and narrow in on the poetics of history highlighted and related in Bello’s poetry while also questioning his poetry as belonging to the Nigerian poetry corpus. This close reading aligns with its conceptual matters by drawing attention to how Bello presents the spheres of writing across different times and epistemological arenas. Writing is influenced by various factors such as imaginative reactions to other writings, scepticism around financial prosperity, imaginative sterility, and the pursuit of fluency by literary craftsmen. It also involves existential conflicts that lead to despair, yet some writers like Bello find considerable fulfillment in this trajectory of artistic pluriverse. I argue that contemporary readers with limited knowledge of the history of writing and of poetics encounter the many lenses, settings, and historical events depicted and poetically witnessed by an accomplished poet, dramatist, and novelist like Bello. This submission advances the argument that Bello’s poetry, which revolves around history and inspires writers within history, leans towards the conceptual framework of histopoetics.