Against Silence: Confessional Poetry as a Form of Resistance in Postcolonial Nigeria

Abstract

This paper explores Nigerian confessional poetry as a form of socio-political resistance. Drawing on postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and Michel Foucault’s conception of power, discourse and counter-memory, this paper argues that the confessional mode transforms personal pain into a political act. Nigerian confessional poems foreground experiences of familial rupture, domestic violence, body vulnerability, and psychological trauma, exposing how patriarchal authority, colonial legacies, and socio-economic precarity converge to regulate silence and obedience. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative textual analysis of selected Nigerian confessional poems, combining close reading with theoretical interpretation. Poems are examined through a postcolonial and Foucauldian analytical framework to identify recurring thematic patterns, such as trauma, memory, silence, and resistance, and to interrogate how poetic language and imagery produce counter-discourses against dominant cultural and political structures.  By articulating what is culturally repressed or socially taboo, Nigerian confessional poetry disrupts dominant narratives that privilege communal harmony over individual truth. The poetic ‘I’ functions not as narcissistic self-display but as a resistant subject who reclaims agency through testimony. The act of confession becomes an ethical intervention, creating a counter-archive that resists historical erasure and challenges the normative construction of masculinity and nationhood. The paper concludes that Nigerian confessional poetry emerges as a radical practice that reclaims voice, memory, and the body, asserting the personal as an indispensable site of political resistance in contemporary Nigerian society.