Facebook Writers: The Emergence of a New Generation of Nigerian Poets

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In his 2005 article "The Lightness of Being: Re-figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry," the literary critic Harry Garuba accounted for the emergence of the first, second, and third generations of Nigerian poets. But recently, there has been an outburst of new Nigerian poets under the age of forty, who are yet to be properly categorized. This article adopts Garuba's "strategic intervention" as a theoretical framework for the classification of these new poets. In presenting its views that these poets have made strategic interventions in Nigerian poetry by establishing social media literature with Facebook as their foremost publishing platform; mainstreaming digital publishing; influencing a new tradition of queer, self-conscious, and subversive poetry; and earning significant literary prizes, this article revises Garuba's classification and expands the canon of Nigerian poetry to inaugurate these Facebook writers and their contemporaries as the fourth generation of Nigerian poets.