Locating the Sacred: “Claimed” and “Unclaimed” Spaces in John P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Remains of a Tide and Harry Garuba’s Animist Chants and Memorials

Abstract In this article I argue that the sacred in John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo’s Remains of a Tide (Ibadan: Mosuro, 2018) and Harry Garuba’s Animist Chants and Memorials (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2017) evokes a contestation of meanings involving “claimed” and “unclaimed” spaces of the sacred. In the analysis of these poetry collections, I apply Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory of memory, and concepts of mythology and mysticism. The unclaimed space in the two collections remains impenetrable, deified, and fetishised, but the claimed space is accessible, liberal, and imaginable. In interaction with the unclaimed space, the claimed space breaks the barriers insulating the unclaimed space to interrogate the real and unreal. The claimed space also accommodates the depiction of symbolic objects of interest by the two poets. For both Clark-Bekederemo and Garuba, landscapes, introspection, and recollection are symptomatic responses to experiences of rupture between the claimed and the unclaimed spaces. This article also illustrates that during a rupture, the unclaimed space can take on new meanings and stereotypical symbols can be reshaped. The sacred in literature is complicated by a structure that blends elements of the familiar and the strange in unusual configurations. The sacred in the two poetry collections is delineated along imagined and reimagined spaces.