“Not Even the Akudndukud Foresaw” A Postcolonial Pragmatics Reading of Eno Nta’s Poetry (1).pdf

One core feature of postcolonial writers, especially Nigerian writers, is the intermixing of codes. Despite such productive language-mix, even a cursory survey of the literature points to inadequate research in this direction. Thus, in an effort to account for this scholarly lacuna, this chapter purposively selected Eno Nta's Prayer for my Children and other Poems by examining the poetry text from a postcolonial pragmatics perspective in order to unpack the poet's microcommunicative formulation of postcolonial identities. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, the 40 code-switched items that were analysed revealed the poet's intermixing of English with six indigenous Nigerian languages: Efik/Ibibio, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ejagham and Beni in order to index social solidarity, identity construction, and politeness in different socio?discursive contexts. Five pragmatic categories of code switching, namely, music and dance, address and honorific terms, clothing and skin marks, greetings, and food were also identified to have been calibrated by the poet to indicate her multisocio-cultural world view. The chapter further highlighted the poet's linguistic consciousness, that is, the matrix of multilingualism and hybridised identities as exemplified in postcolonial literary works. It concluded that strict Western frameworks which are largely individualistic in nature cannot adequately account for the diverse postcolonial African writings which mostly thrive on collectivism. Language and Literary Studies in Society 167Stephen Magor Ellah, God'sgift Ogban Uwen & Romanus Aboh The first part of our essay's title, "Not Even the Akudndukud Foresaw", which was lifted from Eno Nta's poetry collection, Prayer for my Children and other Poems, readily invites the reader to, perhaps, read the poems with a measure of anxiety. Such linguistic construction is embedded with multivalent pragmatic significations. First, it is a clinical explication of the kind of linguistic system that has tendentiously emplaced itself in the literary expressions of some postcolonial writers. Second, apart from bringing readers face-to-face with the linguistic choices of postcolonial writers, such use of language, code-switching to be specific, opens windows to "sociological/anthropological reading of African literature" (Ngugi, 2018, p. 2). Explaining the pragmatism that underpins African writers' use of language in their writing vocation, Ngugi notes that "the idea of an African literature existing solely in European languages was not the way to grow an African literary tradition into the 21st century and beyond" (2018, p. 52). Third, Ngugi's argument is a furtherance of Achebe's (1975) idea that although the African writer does not need to abandon European languages, "the African writer has to calculatingly 'make' English carry the burden of his or her dynamic and complex experience" (Aboh, 2018, p. 6). In their opinion, especially in relation to the meta-function of language in Nigerian literature, Aboh and Uduk (2015, p. 166) claim that "while this linguistic modality [of interspacing English with indigenous languages] is a linguistic and literary counter-attack from the former colonised against the coloniser; it is a linguistic strategy of making the words to heave with the identity of the writer". However the question of language is viewed, it should be recalled that the language palaver that took the centre stage at the 1962 Makerere Conference will always look us in the eye whenever the discourse limns the intertwined relation between the use of language and literary composition in Africa, and perhaps, other postcolonial societies (Aboh and Uduk 2015, Ngugi 2018, Ukam 2018).