English Language and Literature Studies; Vol. 3, No. 2; 2013 ISSN 1925-4768 E-ISSN 1925-4776 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 62 Memory and Homecoming in Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth Gamal Muhammad A. Elgezeery 1 1 Faculty of Education, Suez University, Egypt; College of Arts and Humanities, Taibah University, Saudi Arabia Correspondence: Gamal Muhammad A. Elgezeery, Department of Languages and Translation, College of Arts and Humanities, Taibah University, P.O Box 344, Al-Madinah Al-Munawwara, 41411, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Tel: 966-059-409-0321. E-mail: elgezeery@gmail.com Received: March 31, 2013 Accepted: April 26, 2013 Online Published: May 17, 2013 doi:10.5539/ells.v3n2p62 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v3n2p62 Abstract This article studies Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth (1986) as a homecoming journey that reveals the traveller’s complex relationship with time and place. In this journey, the poet revisits distinguished symbolic places that stand for significantly nourishing and spiritual values for his people, and establishes a dialogue between the past and present of these places in order to question the recent economic and political changes that have led to the deterioration and degradation of the journey’s destinations. At each destination, the poet holds a comparison between what has been and what lies before him, recalling the images that are stored in his memory of the past of these places. This act of recollection is not used as an escapist nostalgia that romanticizes the past in order to present a self-complacent image. Rather, it used as a means of presenting a forward-looking vision that derives inspiration from a past that can be exploited in reminding the poet and his people of what has been inflicted upon earth and the country so that they can regenerate their land and their way of life. Throughout his journey, the poet has a high sense of the different images and effects of time on place and his own conceptualization of the land and its landmarks. Keywords: animism, conceptions of place, homecoming, memory, Nigerian poetry, Niyi Osundare, nostalgia, time 1. Introduction Niyi Osundare (1947-) belongs to the second generation of Nigerian poets whose poetry is “marked by stylistic accessibility” (Balogun, 2004, p. 187). These poets use oral Yoruba traditions to widen the scope of Nigerian poetry readership. They also try to “make important political statements and redirect people’s thinking towards positive change” (Egya, 2007, p. 112). Osundare has written numerous poetry collections starting with Songs of the Marketplace (1983). His most recent poetry book is City without People: The Katrina Poems (2011). The Eye of the Earth (1986) is his third collection, and represents a journey into the poet’s homeland where he encounters a landscape that creates tension between what he sees before him and what he recollects out of his memory. It has received many critical treatments from different perspectives such as materialism and Marxism (Bodunde, 1997), fertility and pluvial aesthetics (Ngumoha, 2011), environmental commodification (Nwagbara, 2012), and nature poetry (Jeff, 2009). No critical study has dealt with this collection as a homecoming journey that uses memory as a confluence that merges time and place in revisiting the poet’s spatiotemporal past. The purpose of this study is to explore the connection of the poet’s memory and historical landscape knowledge with his poetically ritualistic homecoming journey that is largely undertaken in the first programmatic movement of the collection and furthered throughout its other movements. I have chosen this approach because the collection employs a speaker who believes that disconnection from the earth and its connotations has deteriorating effects on his own life as a human being and on the life of his people. Osundare makes a journey “back to earth” with an eye on what supports life, enriches the speaker’s character, energizes memory, and achieves a reconnection with a “soulful” earth that can provide him and his people with a forward-looking vision and worldview. This article is divided into three mains parts and a conclusion. The first part studies how the poet’s journey within the forest recalls his memories of this forest in the past and reflects upon the present conditions that mutilate green earth and paradoxically make the poet employ his journey back in time and space as a means of a forward-looking quest. The second part of this article covers another aspect of the poet’s homecoming journey which is represented in revisiting the rocks of Ikere, the poet’s hometown, in order to rethink and reassert his relationship with these spiritual guardians of the harvest spirit. The third part deals with the stage of Osundare’s journey that