Below is a brief overview of this Project Work.
Format: MS WORD
| Chapters: 1-4
| Pages: 45
DEICTICS AND STYLISTIC FUNCTION IN J.P CLARK-BEKEDEREMO'S POETRY
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
There is no doubt that J.P. Clark-Bekederemo is one of the leading lights of Nigeria’s first generation of writers. This thesis springs from his historicity, the quantity and quality of his literary procreations and the prodigious critical attention and acclaim these works have attracted across the globe. However, unlike other Nigerian writers such as Soyinka and Osundare, there is an acrite dearth of critical works on the language of the poet. Eyoh’s (1997) J.P. Clark’s Poetry: A Study in Stylistic Criticism remains the only full-scale linguistic investigation of the writer’s poetry. The critical fact is that this work is limited by its triadic focus on the phonostylistic, lexical and paralinguistic affective aspects of the poet’s idiolect.
There is no doubt that language is very crucial to literary procreation and discourse. Todorov (1977) highlights this view when he defined literature as a verbal work of art. The implication is that, to fully grasp the meaning and aesthetics of a literary text (or any text for that matter), there must be recourse to language at all levels of linguistic description, because it is the singular medium of its expression. Dada (2004) explains:
A literary work contains a lot of codes and information that must be decoded in
order to fully grasp the meaning of the work; it has sound patterns, semantic
relations and syntactic organization. All these must be taken into account when
reading a literary text.
The present study, therefore seeks to fill the gap left by Eyoh’s (1997) work in the area of
lexis and grammar, by investigating the role deictic words play in encoding the meaning
Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 2
and aesthetics of the texts. Dever (1998) posits that, in creating any text, literary or nonliterary,
we must combine words to express complex ideas or relationships in sentences
Lyons (1977:249) echoes a similar viewpoint when he averred that “… the function of
language tends to be reflected in its grammatical and lexical structure…” Against this
background, the study demonstrates that lexico-grammatical patterning in a text is as
crucial as any other level of linguistic description in encoding the message and aesthetics
of literary discourse.
2. Theoretical Foundation/Literature Review
Stylistics is the branch of linguistics that focuses on style, particularly in works of
literature. Cluett and Kampeas (1979) refer to it as the judgment of “the tangible
manifestation of style”. According to Allan et al. (1988), the concept
.... studies the characteristics of situationally distinctive use of language and tries
to establish principles capable of accounting for particular choices made by
individuals and social groups in their use of language.
From the foregoing preliminary statements, we can see the water tight relationship
between style and stylistics. It is the workshop of stylistics; the soil on which stylistics is
sown. Hence, Babajide (2000) observes that where there is no style, there is no stylistics.
What then is style? Basically, it refers to the way we do things – dress, talk, pray, dance,
walk, etc. in a linguistic sense, the concept infers the specific manner a particular speaker
or writer expresses himself. Leech and Short (1981) see it as “the way language is used in
a literary text, with the aim of relating it to its artistic (or aesthetic) functions” (p.14-15).
According to Tomori (1977), “there is a style in everything we say; so style cannot be
isolated from language itself; but it is a distinctive aspect of language” (p. 53).
Through the ages, different scholars have come out with various theories to
explicate the concept of language and its use, particularly in literary circles. This fact
underscores the critical place of language in human existence, as it constitutes the
bedrock of human socialization and civilization. The Russian formalism of the 1920s and
the structuralist school of the 1960s postulate the existence of a special “poetic
language”, as distinct from “ordinary” or “scientific” language. Wellek and Warren
(1963) also distinguishes a poetic use of language, in the sense that, it is non-referential,
non-practical, non-casual, etc. This implies that “poetic language” is unique as a result of
its conscious use of linguistic and imagistic devices to foreground aspects of meaning.
Another fundamental aspect of the language of poetry is its deviant character. The
language of poetry inherently and overtly deviates from linguistic conventions or norms,
at all levels of its use i.e. semantic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc, because poets
enjoy what has been referred to as poetic license. Hence Widdowson (1984) contends
that, “it is common to find instances of language use which cannot be accounted for by
grammatical rules,” in poetry (p.162). According to Crystal (1987), it is this deviant and
abnormal feature of the language of poetry that stylistics focuses on. Chomsky’s (1957)
Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), is also germane to the present discourse,
3 Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry
as it postulates the disparity and relations between deep and surface structures. The
relevant point in Chomsky’s TGG is that the meaning of surface linguistic constructs like
poetry is retrievable only in the deep structure. This point also underscores the fact that
meaning in poetry texts is multi-layered and multi-faceted.
However, since the primary concern of the present study is on the functional
aspect of language, we shall adopt M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar
(SFG), as our analytical model, in the sense that it focuses not only on the structure of
language, but also on the properties of discourse and its functions in specific social and
cultural situations. Specifically, the study adopts Halliday’s three meta-functions of
language viz.: ideational, interpersonal, and textual for the textual analysis. The
ideational metafunction focuses on the subject matter or field of discourse, while the
interpersonal meta-function refers to the tenor of discourse i.e. the social relationship that
exists among participants in a given discourse situation, which has the potentials to
influence or shape language use. The textual meta-function is particularly relevant to our
study, as it focuses on the internal organization and communicative nature of a text. The
pre-occupation of this study is to show how deictic words are organized with contextual
considerations in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, to foreground aspects of meaning and
aesthetics in the texts.
Thus, our adoption of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar for textual
analysis, is necessitated by its sociological and functional appeal. According to Opara
(2005), Halliday’s claim in this theory is that language structure reflects the social uses to
which language is put. In other words, we agree with Osakwe (1995) that “the language
of the poet mirrors the function and purpose of a poem – like any other linguistic text
which is also dependent upon major situational factors” (p. XIV). The critical point is that
the linguistic-stylistic approach that we have used in the study enables us to examine and
characterize the structural and functional aspects of a writer’s idiolect. Ayemoni (2004)
posits that the approach offers three major benefits. Firstly, the analyst will be aware of
the structural pattern of language permeating a text, to enable him identify the prominent
or foregrounded stylistic features of the text. It also enables the analyst to be consciously
aware of the kind of social variations, which the inherent linguistic features are identified
with. Finally, the approach also enables the analyst to know the technique of putting
down these features systematically in order to reveal the internal patterning of texts.
3. The Concepts of Deictics and Stylistic Function.
Deictic elements (also called shifters), which are particular words whose referential
meaning shifts with every new speaker or occasion of use are very critical in the analysis
of referential items in stylistics and pragmatics. Generally, pronouns function as deictic
words, i.e. personal pronouns such as I, me, you, she, he, it, and pronouns that refer to
places and times such as here, there, now, then, respectively. Deixis that indicate the
position or environment of the speaker in relation to spatial location such as locative
adverbs (i.e. here, there) and demonstratives (this/that) are called “spatial deixis”, while
temporal adverbs such as now, then, which place a speech event in a specific or
Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 4
approximate time frame, are referred to as “temporal deixis”. Personal pronouns such as
I, me, you, she, it, etc., are called “person deixis”.
Deictic words are important in stylistic and pragmatic analysis of texts as a result of their
absolute dependence on context, for their explication or interpretation. The situational
context from which the reference is made constitutes the “point of view” that must be
understood to interpret the statement (Wikipedia online Encyclopedia, 2009) Wikipedia
(Ibid) illustrates this point inter alia:
If Tom is speaking and he says “I”, he refers to himself,
but if Tom is hearing Betty say “I”, then the Origo is
with Betty and the reference is to Betty.
In most languages, deictics function in two ways. These are termed proximal and distal
deictic references. The first refers to things and places that are closer to the speaker; the
other refers to things and places that are far from the speaker and/or closer to the hearer.
Thus, the English language, for instance, has pairs such as this/that, and here/there. Some
other languages have a three-way deictic system viz.: proximal, medial and distal i.e. near
the speaker; near the hearer; far from both. Romance languages generally function in
three ways.
Stylistic function, on the other hand, is an aspect of language function. According
to Alo (1998), language function can be explained in two ways. Firstly, it refers to the
specific use to which a writer or speaker puts the language (i.e. description, explanation,
argument, persuasion, humour, etc.). Secondly, in stylistic description it refers to the
communicative value or role of specific language categories (i.e. sentence, clause, word
group, collocations, word and morpheme), in given social situations. Language function,
therefore, implies varieties of language that are defined according to use. Halliday (1978)
labeled language as a “social semiotic” in the sense that it evolves in a context and the
environment in which people deploy language to serve communicative needs can shape
its form and meaning. The analysis of the texts would demonstrate that J.P. Clark-
Bekederemo’s poetry under study is dense with deictic words which not only preserve
and project the expressive beauty of the works, but also help to capture intentions more
vividly and produce desired meanings and effect on the audience or readers.
4. Brief Biography of the Poet
Born December 6, 1933 in Kiagbodo in the Ijaw area of present-day Delta State of
Nigeria, to Ijaw and Urhobo parents (His father was Ijaw and mother Urhobo), Johnson
Pepper Clark-Bekederemo had his primary school at Okrika (1940-1948) and Jeremi
(1948), before proceeding to Government College, Ughelli, for his secondary education
(1948-1953). He attended the University of Ibadan between 1955 and 1960. At Ibadan,
together with a handful of other writers, he played a prominent role in establishing
Nigeria and the continent of Africa as one of the major centres of Literature in English in
the twentieth century. Of his Ibadan years, Wren (1984) remarks that Clark-Bekederemo
5 Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry
“showed the most precocious talent that West African literary history had yet seen.” The
poet has worked as an information officer, journalist, and University professor. Apart
from his poetry, Clark-Bekederemo is also a frontline African dramatist and scholar. He
has also written a novel (travelogue) America, their America (1964), which is an account
of his sojourn in America as a Parvin fellow at Princeton University (1962-63).
5. Contextual Issues in the Poetry
That language and context are two inseparable phenomena is a fact that has been long
standing and established (see Leech, 1983:13). Morley (1985: 4) points out that, “context
serves to itemize those aspects of the situation which have a bearing on the form used”.
The critical point in that, context is an important aspect of language use. As we shall
demonstrate in the analysis of the texts, the true meaning of a text can be thought of as a
relationship between its linguistic elements and whatever contextual evidence is available
for clarifying it. In J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, certain variables constitute the
context of situation. These include: genre type, background experiences of the poet,
socio-political realities, and subject-matter.
6. Textual Analysis
The analysis in this section is based on poems purposively selected from A Decade of
Tongues (1981, contains poems written between 1958 and 1968), State of the Union
(1985), Mandela and other poems (1988), A Lot from Paradise (1999), Of Sleep and Old
Age (2003) and Once Again A Child (2004), in order to strike a temporal balance between
the writer’s early, later and latest poetry.
The critical point is that, in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, the use of the
personal pronouns ‘I’ me’; the locative adverbs ‘here’, there/elsewhere’; and the temporal
adverbs ‘now and ‘then, is a significant discourse strategy. These deixis run through the
entire texts and help the poet to relate his propositions to specific persons, places and
times, respectively, which is absolutely relevant for their understanding and
interpretation. In other words, they help the poet to relive his experiences and register his
visions within specific spatial or temporal frameworks. We shall now discus each of these
aspects of deixis in the following sections, to show their stylistic and pragmatic
significance in the texts under study.
6.1 Person Deixis
In the words of Cornish (1986:1), a pronominal involves the avoidance of redundancy or
repetition by the use of a semantically attenuated expression in place of a full lexical
expression initially used. In English grammar, there are three levels of pronominalization
viz: first person pronoun (singular: I, me; plural: we, us); second person pronoun
(singular and plural: you); and third person pronominal (singular: she, he it; plural: they,
them). The reference of a pronominal could be inclusive (as in we and us) or exclusive
(as in he, she, it, they, and them). Brown and Yule (1983:214) point out that pronominals
are used to refer to already given entities but their presence in texts brings about cohesive
relationships. One stylistic feature of the poems under study is the preponderance of
Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 6
inclusive pronominal expressions in the writer’s latest poetry (i.e. 1999-date). Over 90%
of the 29 poems in A Lot from Paradise, 44 in Once Again a Child and 58 in Of Sleep
and Old Age contain or are dense with such pronouns as ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘me’, ‘us’ and
adjectives such as ‘our’. This stylo-statistics clearly indicates that these collections or
volumes are biographical materials other than volumes containing texts of creation.
Hence Osofisan (2011:260-261) observes that Clark-Bekederemo’s “new poetry” is a rich
assemblage of the spirits and sounds of his native kiagbodo, “… evoking now
autobiographical details, now the family’s general genealogy, and now some significant
but forgotten fragments of history …” We shall now draw specimens of features from the
texts in tabular form, to illustrate these views for further clarification (all underlinings
mine):
Exponent of Specimen texts Source
i. I find the photograph of an old man. “A Photograph” (Of Sleep and Old Age)
ii. Sleep for me is now the active state… “A Time to Sleep” (Of Sleep…)
iii. How can I string out… “Untold Story” (Of Sleep…)
iv. My grandmother, konomo, into whose
arms I was delivered
“My Grandmother konomo” (Once Again a
Child)
v. When my mother woke us up…….. “The Mainly Rite” (Once Again a Child)
vi. My father took the tough line. “A Night Act in the Day” (Once Again …..)
vii. A woman of my own blood “A Night Act in the Day” (Once Again …..)
vii. We were playing in an outer courtyard….. “A Witch’s Touch” (Once Again….)
ix. For three days and three nights, we stood
in turns around your bed.
“Two Loves” (A Lot from paradise)
x. You who gave me a lot from paradise. “Land of the Gods” (A Lot from Paradise)
xi. You wondered who I was within my house on the
lonely cliff across our river.
“Icon in the Library” (A Lot from Pradise)
As we can glean from the table above, the repetitive use of the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and
‘my’ particularly foregrounds this aspect of meaning, as it continually draws our attention
to the autobiographical character of these poems, as the pronominal referent centres on
the poet. The implication of this strategy is that the poems give a more or less personal
story of J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, thus fulfilling his pledge in “A pledge” (Once Again a
Child), to write “a poem of every matter of interest” he could “salvage” from the stream
of his life. Based on this strategy, it can be further said that Bekederemo’s latest poetry is
a documentation of his life. The strategy makes these poems overtly experiential and
realistic.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
There is no doubt that J.P. Clark-Bekederemo is one of the leading lights of Nigeria’s first generation of writers. This thesis springs from his historicity, the quantity and quality of his literary procreations and the prodigious critical attention and acclaim these works have attracted across the globe. However, unlike other Nigerian writers such as Soyinka and Osundare, there is an acrite dearth of critical works on the language of the poet. Eyoh’s (1997) J.P. Clark’s Poetry: A Study in Stylistic Criticism remains the only full-scale linguistic investigation of the writer’s poetry. The critical fact is that this work is limited by its triadic focus on the phonostylistic, lexical and paralinguistic affective aspects of the poet’s idiolect.
There is no doubt that language is very crucial to literary procreation and discourse. Todorov (1977) highlights this view when he defined literature as a verbal work of art. The implication is that, to fully grasp the meaning and aesthetics of a literary text (or any text for that matter), there must be recourse to language at all levels of linguistic description, because it is the singular medium of its expression. Dada (2004) explains:
A literary work contains a lot of codes and information that must be decoded in
order to fully grasp the meaning of the work; it has sound patterns, semantic
relations and syntactic organization. All these must be taken into account when
reading a literary text.
The present study, therefore seeks to fill the gap left by Eyoh’s (1997) work in the area of
lexis and grammar, by investigating the role deictic words play in encoding the meaning
Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 2
and aesthetics of the texts. Dever (1998) posits that, in creating any text, literary or nonliterary,
we must combine words to express complex ideas or relationships in sentences
Lyons (1977:249) echoes a similar viewpoint when he averred that “… the function of
language tends to be reflected in its grammatical and lexical structure…” Against this
background, the study demonstrates that lexico-grammatical patterning in a text is as
crucial as any other level of linguistic description in encoding the message and aesthetics
of literary discourse.
2. Theoretical Foundation/Literature Review
Stylistics is the branch of linguistics that focuses on style, particularly in works of
literature. Cluett and Kampeas (1979) refer to it as the judgment of “the tangible
manifestation of style”. According to Allan et al. (1988), the concept
.... studies the characteristics of situationally distinctive use of language and tries
to establish principles capable of accounting for particular choices made by
individuals and social groups in their use of language.
From the foregoing preliminary statements, we can see the water tight relationship
between style and stylistics. It is the workshop of stylistics; the soil on which stylistics is
sown. Hence, Babajide (2000) observes that where there is no style, there is no stylistics.
What then is style? Basically, it refers to the way we do things – dress, talk, pray, dance,
walk, etc. in a linguistic sense, the concept infers the specific manner a particular speaker
or writer expresses himself. Leech and Short (1981) see it as “the way language is used in
a literary text, with the aim of relating it to its artistic (or aesthetic) functions” (p.14-15).
According to Tomori (1977), “there is a style in everything we say; so style cannot be
isolated from language itself; but it is a distinctive aspect of language” (p. 53).
Through the ages, different scholars have come out with various theories to
explicate the concept of language and its use, particularly in literary circles. This fact
underscores the critical place of language in human existence, as it constitutes the
bedrock of human socialization and civilization. The Russian formalism of the 1920s and
the structuralist school of the 1960s postulate the existence of a special “poetic
language”, as distinct from “ordinary” or “scientific” language. Wellek and Warren
(1963) also distinguishes a poetic use of language, in the sense that, it is non-referential,
non-practical, non-casual, etc. This implies that “poetic language” is unique as a result of
its conscious use of linguistic and imagistic devices to foreground aspects of meaning.
Another fundamental aspect of the language of poetry is its deviant character. The
language of poetry inherently and overtly deviates from linguistic conventions or norms,
at all levels of its use i.e. semantic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc, because poets
enjoy what has been referred to as poetic license. Hence Widdowson (1984) contends
that, “it is common to find instances of language use which cannot be accounted for by
grammatical rules,” in poetry (p.162). According to Crystal (1987), it is this deviant and
abnormal feature of the language of poetry that stylistics focuses on. Chomsky’s (1957)
Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), is also germane to the present discourse,
3 Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry
as it postulates the disparity and relations between deep and surface structures. The
relevant point in Chomsky’s TGG is that the meaning of surface linguistic constructs like
poetry is retrievable only in the deep structure. This point also underscores the fact that
meaning in poetry texts is multi-layered and multi-faceted.
However, since the primary concern of the present study is on the functional
aspect of language, we shall adopt M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar
(SFG), as our analytical model, in the sense that it focuses not only on the structure of
language, but also on the properties of discourse and its functions in specific social and
cultural situations. Specifically, the study adopts Halliday’s three meta-functions of
language viz.: ideational, interpersonal, and textual for the textual analysis. The
ideational metafunction focuses on the subject matter or field of discourse, while the
interpersonal meta-function refers to the tenor of discourse i.e. the social relationship that
exists among participants in a given discourse situation, which has the potentials to
influence or shape language use. The textual meta-function is particularly relevant to our
study, as it focuses on the internal organization and communicative nature of a text. The
pre-occupation of this study is to show how deictic words are organized with contextual
considerations in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, to foreground aspects of meaning and
aesthetics in the texts.
Thus, our adoption of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar for textual
analysis, is necessitated by its sociological and functional appeal. According to Opara
(2005), Halliday’s claim in this theory is that language structure reflects the social uses to
which language is put. In other words, we agree with Osakwe (1995) that “the language
of the poet mirrors the function and purpose of a poem – like any other linguistic text
which is also dependent upon major situational factors” (p. XIV). The critical point is that
the linguistic-stylistic approach that we have used in the study enables us to examine and
characterize the structural and functional aspects of a writer’s idiolect. Ayemoni (2004)
posits that the approach offers three major benefits. Firstly, the analyst will be aware of
the structural pattern of language permeating a text, to enable him identify the prominent
or foregrounded stylistic features of the text. It also enables the analyst to be consciously
aware of the kind of social variations, which the inherent linguistic features are identified
with. Finally, the approach also enables the analyst to know the technique of putting
down these features systematically in order to reveal the internal patterning of texts.
3. The Concepts of Deictics and Stylistic Function.
Deictic elements (also called shifters), which are particular words whose referential
meaning shifts with every new speaker or occasion of use are very critical in the analysis
of referential items in stylistics and pragmatics. Generally, pronouns function as deictic
words, i.e. personal pronouns such as I, me, you, she, he, it, and pronouns that refer to
places and times such as here, there, now, then, respectively. Deixis that indicate the
position or environment of the speaker in relation to spatial location such as locative
adverbs (i.e. here, there) and demonstratives (this/that) are called “spatial deixis”, while
temporal adverbs such as now, then, which place a speech event in a specific or
Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 4
approximate time frame, are referred to as “temporal deixis”. Personal pronouns such as
I, me, you, she, it, etc., are called “person deixis”.
Deictic words are important in stylistic and pragmatic analysis of texts as a result of their
absolute dependence on context, for their explication or interpretation. The situational
context from which the reference is made constitutes the “point of view” that must be
understood to interpret the statement (Wikipedia online Encyclopedia, 2009) Wikipedia
(Ibid) illustrates this point inter alia:
If Tom is speaking and he says “I”, he refers to himself,
but if Tom is hearing Betty say “I”, then the Origo is
with Betty and the reference is to Betty.
In most languages, deictics function in two ways. These are termed proximal and distal
deictic references. The first refers to things and places that are closer to the speaker; the
other refers to things and places that are far from the speaker and/or closer to the hearer.
Thus, the English language, for instance, has pairs such as this/that, and here/there. Some
other languages have a three-way deictic system viz.: proximal, medial and distal i.e. near
the speaker; near the hearer; far from both. Romance languages generally function in
three ways.
Stylistic function, on the other hand, is an aspect of language function. According
to Alo (1998), language function can be explained in two ways. Firstly, it refers to the
specific use to which a writer or speaker puts the language (i.e. description, explanation,
argument, persuasion, humour, etc.). Secondly, in stylistic description it refers to the
communicative value or role of specific language categories (i.e. sentence, clause, word
group, collocations, word and morpheme), in given social situations. Language function,
therefore, implies varieties of language that are defined according to use. Halliday (1978)
labeled language as a “social semiotic” in the sense that it evolves in a context and the
environment in which people deploy language to serve communicative needs can shape
its form and meaning. The analysis of the texts would demonstrate that J.P. Clark-
Bekederemo’s poetry under study is dense with deictic words which not only preserve
and project the expressive beauty of the works, but also help to capture intentions more
vividly and produce desired meanings and effect on the audience or readers.
4. Brief Biography of the Poet
Born December 6, 1933 in Kiagbodo in the Ijaw area of present-day Delta State of
Nigeria, to Ijaw and Urhobo parents (His father was Ijaw and mother Urhobo), Johnson
Pepper Clark-Bekederemo had his primary school at Okrika (1940-1948) and Jeremi
(1948), before proceeding to Government College, Ughelli, for his secondary education
(1948-1953). He attended the University of Ibadan between 1955 and 1960. At Ibadan,
together with a handful of other writers, he played a prominent role in establishing
Nigeria and the continent of Africa as one of the major centres of Literature in English in
the twentieth century. Of his Ibadan years, Wren (1984) remarks that Clark-Bekederemo
5 Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry
“showed the most precocious talent that West African literary history had yet seen.” The
poet has worked as an information officer, journalist, and University professor. Apart
from his poetry, Clark-Bekederemo is also a frontline African dramatist and scholar. He
has also written a novel (travelogue) America, their America (1964), which is an account
of his sojourn in America as a Parvin fellow at Princeton University (1962-63).
5. Contextual Issues in the Poetry
That language and context are two inseparable phenomena is a fact that has been long
standing and established (see Leech, 1983:13). Morley (1985: 4) points out that, “context
serves to itemize those aspects of the situation which have a bearing on the form used”.
The critical point in that, context is an important aspect of language use. As we shall
demonstrate in the analysis of the texts, the true meaning of a text can be thought of as a
relationship between its linguistic elements and whatever contextual evidence is available
for clarifying it. In J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, certain variables constitute the
context of situation. These include: genre type, background experiences of the poet,
socio-political realities, and subject-matter.
6. Textual Analysis
The analysis in this section is based on poems purposively selected from A Decade of
Tongues (1981, contains poems written between 1958 and 1968), State of the Union
(1985), Mandela and other poems (1988), A Lot from Paradise (1999), Of Sleep and Old
Age (2003) and Once Again A Child (2004), in order to strike a temporal balance between
the writer’s early, later and latest poetry.
The critical point is that, in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s poetry, the use of the
personal pronouns ‘I’ me’; the locative adverbs ‘here’, there/elsewhere’; and the temporal
adverbs ‘now and ‘then, is a significant discourse strategy. These deixis run through the
entire texts and help the poet to relate his propositions to specific persons, places and
times, respectively, which is absolutely relevant for their understanding and
interpretation. In other words, they help the poet to relive his experiences and register his
visions within specific spatial or temporal frameworks. We shall now discus each of these
aspects of deixis in the following sections, to show their stylistic and pragmatic
significance in the texts under study.
6.1 Person Deixis
In the words of Cornish (1986:1), a pronominal involves the avoidance of redundancy or
repetition by the use of a semantically attenuated expression in place of a full lexical
expression initially used. In English grammar, there are three levels of pronominalization
viz: first person pronoun (singular: I, me; plural: we, us); second person pronoun
(singular and plural: you); and third person pronominal (singular: she, he it; plural: they,
them). The reference of a pronominal could be inclusive (as in we and us) or exclusive
(as in he, she, it, they, and them). Brown and Yule (1983:214) point out that pronominals
are used to refer to already given entities but their presence in texts brings about cohesive
relationships. One stylistic feature of the poems under study is the preponderance of
Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 6
inclusive pronominal expressions in the writer’s latest poetry (i.e. 1999-date). Over 90%
of the 29 poems in A Lot from Paradise, 44 in Once Again a Child and 58 in Of Sleep
and Old Age contain or are dense with such pronouns as ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘me’, ‘us’ and
adjectives such as ‘our’. This stylo-statistics clearly indicates that these collections or
volumes are biographical materials other than volumes containing texts of creation.
Hence Osofisan (2011:260-261) observes that Clark-Bekederemo’s “new poetry” is a rich
assemblage of the spirits and sounds of his native kiagbodo, “… evoking now
autobiographical details, now the family’s general genealogy, and now some significant
but forgotten fragments of history …” We shall now draw specimens of features from the
texts in tabular form, to illustrate these views for further clarification (all underlinings
mine):
Exponent of Specimen texts Source
i. I find the photograph of an old man. “A Photograph” (Of Sleep and Old Age)
ii. Sleep for me is now the active state… “A Time to Sleep” (Of Sleep…)
iii. How can I string out… “Untold Story” (Of Sleep…)
iv. My grandmother, konomo, into whose
arms I was delivered
“My Grandmother konomo” (Once Again a
Child)
v. When my mother woke us up…….. “The Mainly Rite” (Once Again a Child)
vi. My father took the tough line. “A Night Act in the Day” (Once Again …..)
vii. A woman of my own blood “A Night Act in the Day” (Once Again …..)
vii. We were playing in an outer courtyard….. “A Witch’s Touch” (Once Again….)
ix. For three days and three nights, we stood
in turns around your bed.
“Two Loves” (A Lot from paradise)
x. You who gave me a lot from paradise. “Land of the Gods” (A Lot from Paradise)
xi. You wondered who I was within my house on the
lonely cliff across our river.
“Icon in the Library” (A Lot from Pradise)
As we can glean from the table above, the repetitive use of the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and
‘my’ particularly foregrounds this aspect of meaning, as it continually draws our attention
to the autobiographical character of these poems, as the pronominal referent centres on
the poet. The implication of this strategy is that the poems give a more or less personal
story of J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, thus fulfilling his pledge in “A pledge” (Once Again a
Child), to write “a poem of every matter of interest” he could “salvage” from the stream
of his life. Based on this strategy, it can be further said that Bekederemo’s latest poetry is
a documentation of his life. The strategy makes these poems overtly experiential and
realistic.
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