Socio-political discourse in contemporary Yoruba written poetry: a socio-semiotic appraisal of Ajanaku's Orin Ewuro and Olunlade's Ewi Igbalode
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Date
2015
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Language & Society Research Committee 25 of the International Sociological Association
Abstract
Nigeria’s political and social experience has been the main issue that have attracted the attention of the Yorùbá poetry writers in the recent time. This study examined how two poets used their texts to accentuate their views on different political and social events in the country. The poems for the analysis were randomly selected from Àjànàkú’s Orin Ewúro (1998) and Olúnládé’s Ewì Ìgbàlódé (2002) and discussed within the theoretical framework of socio-semiotics. This entailed employing context of situation (that is, field, tenor and mode of discourse) and context of culture. Among the findings in the work were that the poets’ field of discourse centred on the insensitivity of the political leaders to the problem of the poor, horrible experience of Nigerians during the military regime, bribery and corruption among law enforcement agents and the generality of the people. The tenor of discourse portrayed hatred and unfriendliness between the political leaders and the masses. The mode of discourse was characterized by highly rhetorical confrontational, incantatory expressions laced with satirical metaphorical devices and parallelism. The context of culture exhibited the use of folktale song and cultural symbols. The study concluded that the deployment of both the contexts of situation and of culture to analyse the poems paved way for an intensive study of Yorùbá written poetry, thereby making their meaning embellishments more readily accessible.
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Keywords
socio-semiotics, context of situation, context of culture