Visiting Nigeria

1.In 'Visiting Nigeria', Adiche gives us a tourist's perspective of a vast, spiritual and magical experience of Nigeria. Adiche proficiently creates a gentle atmosphere and portrays Nigeria to be a sort of enchanted destination that is gradually unraveled through this poetry. She efficaciously talks about the enveloped incidents of the tourist's whilst they are on this journey.

The irregular stanzaic structure that Adiche uses helps to capture the aspects of a journey as it allows the reader to understand the depth of the unexpected that one may encounter and yet leading the reader with hope to more cheerful and positive occurrences. She also doesn't follow any particular rhyme scheme, which adds to the interpretations that a reader may make on both the journey itself and also Nigeria. It allows us to contemplate as to whether Adiche attempts to portray Nigeria as a collection of astonishing and unanticipated yet surprisingly pleasant sights. However, she is able to do this in a chronological order by beginning this piece with 'at first' and ending with 'and at last'. In between these stanzas Adiche uses repetition by beginning each stanza with 'then' which carves out profound imagery for the reader and leaves the reader with a wanting of more vivid descriptions.

She also uses a variety of literary devices in this piece which adds to the colour and meaning of language. In the first stanza of the poem Adiche successfully captures sensory imagery. She uses words such as 'goggled', 'sprawling and vast expanses' which allow the reader to create an image of what she is trying to describe using the sense of sight,but also gives a sense of space. By using 'scorching' she is able to build on the sense of touch as it gives the reader a feeling of heat and burning. 'Magical drums' not only describes the sounds that can be heard by the tourists but also further relates to when she further goes on to state 'then the Niger... housing its mermaids, it's watery gods'. The use of adjectives like vast, magical and sprawling conveys the beauty and largeness of Nigeria.

Through the course of the poem Adiche talks about the different seasons and uses alliteration to describe the 'brown, bare' earth. Her specific choice of adjectives such as 'lush wealth' of green and 'spicy' dew provides verbose excitement. 'the joyous tears of wise and wrinkeled ancestors tricked, and the poured down' refers to the happiness of the ancestors because they felt the monsoon coming which meant harvest but also indirectly relates to the rain which at first comes down gradually and then 'pours' down. Adiche also uses personification twice; 'the vast expanses bearing heads of grain... that noddes-swayed in the evenings' allows the reader to improvise on the description giving