Not My Business

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Not My Business is most likely set in Nigeria, Niyi Osundare's country of birth.

He used this poem and others to object to the cruel dictatorship that ruled his country under General Abacha from 1993 to 1998. During Abacha's rule, writing poetry was considered a dangerous activity. Osundare regularly wrote poems for a Nigerian national newspaper which commented on the lives of people in that country. As a result, he was frequently called to account by security agents and quizzed about what his poems meant and to whom they referred. Osundare himself says, "with the kind of poetry I write, I can never be the dictator's friend. So I get a knock on the door at two in the morning a couple of times."

The poem criticises people who allow injustices to go on as long as it does not directly affect them. He suggests that if no one stands up against dictatorship, cruelty, poverty and injustice, it will, eventually, affect their lives.

The poem is divided into four stanzas which contain different instances of injustice.

In the first stanza, a man is dragged out of his house, "beaten soft like clay" and stuffed into "the belly of a Jeep", Osundare using personification to make it sound like a monster. The people who do this are not named or described, but simply referred to as "they"; we assume that they are soldiers or security agents. The last three lines of the stanza show the narrator's reaction as one of indifference and detachment as s/he asks why it is any business of theirs so long as they have enough food for themselves.

The next stanza describes a man being dragged out in the middle of the night to a "long absence". The implication is that he is being taken to jail for an indefinite period of time (people in Nigeria who were identified as dissidents, or rebels, would be imprisoned with no charge and given no specific length of sentence - if they were not simply killed). The last three lines of the stanza are a repetition of those of the first stanza; the narrator still not involving him/herself in the problems of others as long as s/he is not directly affected.

The third stanza describes a woman going to work and being told that she no longer has a job there, "no query, no warning, no probe"; she is given no reason for this unfair treatment. The narrator's reaction (frustratingly for the reader) is exactly the same as in the previous two stanzas.

The fourth stanza is different. In this instance, the jeep has turned up at the house of the narrator; it is his or her turn to be dragged away. The repeated lines from the previous stanzas cannot feature now as there is, apparently, no one left to observe the injustice. The only reaction here is that of the lawn, which is personified as "bewildered".

The structure is integral to the message of the poem. All of the incidents are in separate stanzas, showing that the narrator does not see the link between them; that they are related to the same problem. His/her reaction in the first three stanzas are offset from the retelling of the incidents themselves, as if the narrator has physically distanced his/her reaction as well as emotionally. The repetition of the rhetorical question "what business of mine is it/So long they don't take the yam/From my savouring mouth?" is robotic and feels almost fake and rehearsed. This adds to the careful emotional detachment that the narrator seems to force on him/herself.

The poem is a very good example of the narrator's voice being different from that of the poet. Even if we didn't know of Niyi Osundare's political beliefs, we naturally disagree with what the narrator says, and therefore come to the conclusion that the poet wants. He has used an argument with which he does not agree, to make his readers create their own argument against it; thus, we agree with him by disagreeing with the point of view he has shown us.