Battle by All Means: Udje as Oral Poetry and Performance

Abstract

“Battle” as both a metaphor and a reality in its adversarial implications is at the core of Udje, the oral song-poetry and performance tradition of the Urhobo people of Nigeria’s Delta State. It is a special kind of dance which takes place annually on an appointed day when rival groups perform songs composed with often exaggerated materials about their opposite sides. Each of the two paired groups performs on alternate years for its rival side and large audiences to watch and listen to. Udje is thus a highly competitive oral poetic performance genre that enacts the form of warfare in an artistic manner. This unique traditional African poetic and performance genre has been studied by scholars from different perspectives. While early works on it as of J.P. Clark in the 1960s, G.G. Darah’s and Tanure Ojaide’s of the 1970s and early 1990s respectively were collections of the song-poems and their transcription and translation into English with comments, udje study has advanced into theoretical dimensions in the twenty-first century. One such essay is Ojaide’s “Michel Foucault and the Urhobo Udje oral poetic tradition: madness, power, and resistance” in his Literature and Culture in Global Africa (8–18) on the Foucauldian nature of udje. In other essays, he has interrogated the masculinity in the udje tradition and Henri Bergson’s notion of laughter as regulating human behavior. Also, Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega in “Representation of women in udje, an Urhobo men’s-only oral poetic performance genre” has discussed udje in its minority discourse aspect of excluding women from its major composition and performance activities (Ojaide and Ashuntantang 206–17). Several recent Palgrave and Routledge books have chapters on udje. G.G. Darah’s chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore (2021) discusses udje among other oral traditions. Ojaide’s “Urhobo udje: an indigenous satiric genre” re-examines udje as satire (The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta, 60–72). Adetayo Alabi in his work on Nigerian autobiographies, Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories (Alabi 2021), discusses udje as appropriating features of the autobiographical genre and sees Ojaide’s poetry as exhibiting elements of the oral poetic genre. These academic engagements of udje as an indigenous oral poetic performance genre affirm udje as worthy of serious intellectual discourse.