Abstract
This study examines Tunde Olusunle’s deployment of logoclasm as a reconstructive poetic strategy in A Medley of Echoes and Fingermarks. Moving beyond the conventional understanding of logoclasm as mere linguistic fragmentation or stylistic disruption, the study argues that Olusunle’s poetry mobilises logoclastic techniques–neologism, typographical fragmentation, semantic inversion, irony, oral-traditional forms, and metaphorical reconstruction–as instruments for dismantling false consciousness and rebuilding ethical, political, and social awareness. Drawing on a close textual reading of selected poems, the paper develops a tripartite framework of reconstruction: ideological reconstruction, political reconstruction, and social reconstruction. The analysis demonstrates that Olusunle’s poetry first exposes the ideological structures that naturalise religious deception, political fatalism, and institutional dysfunction; second, it delegitimises the symbolic and linguistic apparatus of state power while reconstituting a vocabulary of accountability; and third, it restores communal memory, dignity, and collective agency in the face of violence, economic decline, and social betrayal. The study concludes that Olusunle’s logoclasm is not an aesthetic of destruction but an ethics of renewal: a poetics of rupture that clears discursive space for critical consciousness, moral reckoning, and national regeneration. By foregrounding language as both a site of domination and a medium of resistance, this paper contributes to contemporary African literary scholarship on the relationship between poetic form, public ethics, and postcolonial reconstruction.
Keywords: Accountability, Ideology, Logoclastic Reconstruction, Neologism, Reconstruction, and Social Critique.
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.019
author/Clement Eloghosa Odia, Ph.D
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(2) | June 2026
