The politicization of aesthetics

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore the literary responses to the Nigerian civil war. The texts that will be examined over the course of the paper are, Gabriel Okara’s poem titled “Suddenly the Air Cracks”, Chinua Achebe’s poem, “Christmas in Biafra (1969)”, and Ben Okri’s short story “In the City of Red Dust”. The formal qualities of a text is often overlooked in favor of the content with regards to many of the postcolonial narratives. As such, this essay aims to eschew such tendencies in labeling postcolonial narratives as being solely political and will illustrate how the aesthetics of a text are intricately intertwined with the subject matter.