In praise of Ịjọ folklore: A Sailor’s Son by Christian Otobotekere

The intersection of modern African poetry and folklore is a much-researched topic in African literary scholarship. However, literary scholars have not examined this relationship in the poetry of Christian Otobotekere, a king and poet whose cultural productions have been mostly studied from the perspective of ecocriticism. Therefore, in this article, I look at the place of Ịjọ (also spelt “Ijaw”) folklore in Otobotekere’s A Sailor’s Son 1: In the Wake of Games and Dances (2015). I find that, in this collection, Otobotekere frequently employs the folklore of his people, including dirge, drum poetry, lullabies, moonlight stories, dance patterns, and musical styles, as well as elements of Ịjọ songs such as simplicity, repetition, allusion, dialogue, and direct address. I further discover that Otobotekere’s incorporation of Ịjọ folklore makes his poetry performative and helps it to achieve the quality of what is usually referred to as “written orality”. I argue that Otobotekere makes it his main aim to showcase these aspects of folklore to the non-Ịjọ reader and to document them for future generations in the Ịjọ community in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region. This study appeals to scholars in the fields of literature and folklore as it contributes to the decades-long conversation on the interaction between the two disciplines.