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Analysis Of Nigerian Civil War By Chinua Achebe

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Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) is best known for his novel Things Fall Apart, in addition to writing novels, Achebe was a critic and a poet. This paper intends to analyze and discuss Achebe's war poems. The poems that Achebe wrote in the time of the Nigerian civil war which lasted for three years and Nigerian people suffered a lot because of that war, Ogaga Okuyade in his article Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry states that: "The Nigerian civil war is about the ugliest moment in the history of post-colonial Nigeria – a moment of hatreds and sufferings." (Okuyade in Emenyonu. 128). Poets of civil war, including Chinua Achebe, try to show the pain and suffering of the Nigerian people due to that war and what follows it from poverty to killing and starving of children and women. …show more content…

In his collection of poems in 2004, Achebe has divided his collection into five main sections: In Lieu of a Preface: A Parable Prologue, Poems About War, Poems Not About War, Gods, Men, and Others, and Epilogue. The concentration of this paper is on Achebe's war poems, and it will try to read his view of the civil war and how he describes the war, and whether he is with or against the war, with some critical analysis of the poetical aspects of Achebe's war poems and whether the African war poems are affected by the poems of the First World War in themes and images, or it has its unique

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