Sorosoke and the Poetics of Righteous Dissidence: Outrage and Memorialisation in Sorosoke: An #EndSARS Anthology

Abstract

The Nigerian youth movement against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in October 2020, produced an ethical clampdown on the extrajudicial powers of state security apparatuses. This movement not only resonated across Nigeria but also through the digital space as a new and necessary formidable mechanism for outrage and memorialisation. It produced Sorosoke: An #EndSARS Anthology collected and edited by Jumoke Verissimo and Yeku James, which suffices within the protest of 2020 and after it, as a way of using poetry as a means of ethical and moral clamour against wanton killings of youths by SARS. #EndSARS, turning on its revolutionary spirit, accrues a poetic outrage and memorialising archive against the erasure by Nigerian government agencies of protesting youths. I conceptualise the demand to speak-up in an oppressive context as captured by Sorosoke as poetics of righteous dissidence. This theorisation reveals how #EndSARS and Sorosoke: An #EndSARS Anthology, a field of power through its protest tradition and archival life, aligns with the claims that literature is a world. Hence, I read poems in Sorosoke: An #EndSARS Anthology to situate #EndSARS within its autonomous yet mediated fields of outrage, dirge, and memorialisation. I draw valuable insights from conceptual underpinnings in Pierre Bourdieu’s Literary Field, particularly Habitus and Pascale Casanova’s Literature as a World. Reading the poems in the anthology reveals that counterpointing the denials of the massacre by the government can be interpreted as righteous dissidence and that it is not only a tool for dirge poetics and archiving of the protest, but also a significant contribution to new modes of digital protest poetry in African Studies.