1

ODEH DEAN

PG/MA/08/48544

A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ISIDORE OKPEWHO’S THE LAST

DUTY AND HELON HABILA’S WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND LITERARY STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND LITERARY

STUDIES,, FACULTY OF ARTS,, UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA

Webmaster

Digitally Signed by Webmaster‟s Name

DN : CN = Webmaster‟s name O= University of Nigeria, Nsukka

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DECEMBER 2010

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A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ISIDORE

OKPEWHO’S THE LAST DUTY AND HELON

HABILA’S WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

BY

ODEH DEAN

PG/MA/08/48544

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND LITERARY

STUDIES, FACULTY OF ARTS,

UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA

DECEMBER, 2010.

i

A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ISIDORE OKPEWHO’S THE

LAST DUTY AND HELON HABILA’S WAITING FOR AN

ANGEL

BY

ODEH DEAN

PG/MA/08/48544

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

AND LITERARY STUDIES, FACULTY OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIRMENTS FOR THE

AWARD OF A MASTER OF ARTS (M.A.) DEGREE IN ENGLISH.

DECEMBER 2010

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CERTIFICATION

This is to certify that this Thesis: “A Stylistic Analysis of Isidore Okpewho‟s

The Last Duty and Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel”, was personally

written by me, Odeh Dean, under the tutelage or supervision of Professor Sam

M. Onuigbo, and submitted to the Department of English and Literary Studies,

Faculty of Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in partial fulfilment of the

requirements for the award of a Master of Arts (M.A.) Degree in English from

the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Prof. Sam M. Onuigbo ………………… Date………………

Project Supervisor

Professor A.N. Akwanya ………………… Date………………

Head of Department

Professor E.E. Okafor …………………. Date………………

Dean, Faculty of Arts

External Examiner ………………… Date……………….

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DEDICATION

This Master‟s Thesis is dedicated to God Almighty for making everything

possible, expressly paving the way and leading me through the path of a

Master‟s Degree. I say, may honour, adoration and glory be given to Him in

Jesus‟ name. Amen!

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My most profound gratitude goes to my lovely mother, Mrs. Court-ere

Odeh, for all the care and prayers. My gratitude also goes to my younger ones:

Barrister Odeh, Fidelis Odeh, Ebiseride and her husband, Vincent Kemebimor;

Esede Ojoto and Saturday Odeh for their show of total concern for my Master‟s

studies. A big thank you also goes to Mr. C.P. Sibebo, Aunty Deinere Akarah,

Daniel Eniyekedimene, French Akpowei, Demes Lawson Aniseri, Playman

Odeh and Jerry Odeh for their moral and financial assistance during my

Master‟s studies.

My profound gratitude also goes to my project supervisor, Professor Sam

M. Onuigbo, who bore with me and also squeezed out time to attend to my work

and brought my Master‟s Programme to a successful conclusion.

My sincere appreciation also goes to the Head of the Department of

English and Literary Studies, Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas

Akwanya, and to other lecturers and non-teaching staff in the Department, for

giving me prime attentions whenever the need arose.

My heart-felt appreciation also goes to my understanding roommates:

Beal Dumo-opuye Amakiri, Boniface Ogumbe, and Ernest Ernest Ekpor for

their cooperation. A big thank you also goes to my God-send course-mates:

Nwaogwugwu Constance Ijeoma, Chief Sunday Joseph Okoli, Ucheoma

Uwhoeli, Judith Okoro, and Eze Chijioke Jude as well as my good friends:

Augustine Ebi, Commissioner Preye Ombeh, and Koremene Richard Miebo,

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and Victoria Akpan for affecting my life positively in one way or the other

during my Master‟s Programme.

Finally, I express my happiness to Lady Edith Okoso for her concern for

me and my typist and friend, Miss Chidiebere Charity Idoko, for doing a

thorough typing to bring my Master‟s Programme to its successful anchor point.

Thank you and God bless you all!

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ABSTRACT

The various attitudes and dispositions of linguistic and literary scholars

towards the study of literature can be partially attributed to the fact that some

scholars of linguistics see linguistics as a science and, therefore, cannot be

combined with literature which is a creative art. Over the years, this battle

between language and literature has been on and has hindered some literary

critics from analyzing a literary work using the linguistic science. Also, the

existence of a literary language is another bone of contention among linguists

and literary artists. This research is poised to examine the possibility of

analyzing literature using the resources of language in order to show the

existence of a literary language, and how literary or creative writers use

language. The work is divided into five chapters. Chapter one contains the

introduction with so many sub-headings. Chapter two dwells on the literature

review. Chapter three is the linguistic analysis of the individual, stylistic

features of Isidore Okpewho in The Last Duty and Helon Habila in Waiting for

an Angel. Chapter four is on a comparative study of the two novels. Finally,

chapter five is the conclusion.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page - - - - - - - - - i

Certification Page - - - - - - - - ii

Dedication - - - - - - - - - iii

Acknowledgment - - - - - - - - iv

Abstract - - - - - - - - - vi

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.0 Background of Study - - -- - - - 1

1.1 A Stylistic Analysis - - - - - - 2

1.2 Statement of Problem - - - - - 4

1.3 Purpose of Study - - - - - - - 4

1.4 Scope of the Study - - - - - - - 6

1.5 Significance of the Study - - - - - - 7

1.6 Biographies of Authors - - - - - - 7

1.7 Isidore Okpewho - - - - - - - 7

1.8 Helon Habila - - - - - - - 8

1.9 Synopses of the Novels - - - - - 10

1.10 The Last Duty - - - - - - - 11

1.11 Waiting for an Angel - - - - - - 13

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 INTRODUCTION - - - - - - - 16

2.1 The Concept of Language - - - - - 16

2.2 The Concept of Style - - - - - - 19

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2.3 Domain of Style - - - - - - - 22

2.4 Style Theory - - - - - - - 23

2.5 The Concept of Stylistics - - - - - - 24

2.6 The Concept of Foregrounding - - - - - 26

2.7 Theoretical Framework - - - - - - 27

2.8 The Metafunctions of Language - - - - 28

CHAPTER THREE: LEVELS OF LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

3.0 INTRODUCTION - - - - - - - 30

3.1 Syntax - - - - - - - - 30

3.2 Selectional Rules Violation - - - - - 31

3.3 Parallelism - - - - - - - - 32

3.4 The use of Pidgin - - - - - - - 32

3.5 Disfigured sentences - - - - - - 34

3.6 Chiasmus - - - - - - - - 36

3.7 Non-simple Sentences - - - - - - - 37

3.8 Morphology - - - - - - - 40

3.9 Conversion - - - - - - - - 40

3.10 Borrowing - - - - - - - - 41

3.11 Neologism or Coinage - - - - - - 42

3.12 Reduplication - - - - - - - 42

3.13 Affixation - - - - - - - - - 42

3.14 Compounding - - - - - - - 43

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3.15 Graphology - - - - - - - - 44

3.16 Ellipsis - - - - - - - 45

CHAPTER FOUR: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LAST

DUTY AND WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

4.0 Comparative analysis - - - - - - 47

4.1 The Theory of Marxism - - - - - - 47

4.2 Historicism - - - - - - - - 49

4.3 The Structure of the Novels - - - - - 51

4.4 Heroes of Low Mimetic Mode - - - - - 53

4.5 Humour - - - - - - - - 54

4.6 Proverbs - - - - - - - - 56

4.7 A Contrastive Analysis of The Last Duty and Waiting for an Angel 57

CHAPTER FIVE:

5.0 Conclusion - - - - - - - - 59

WORKS CITED - - - - - - - 61-67

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0 Background of study

Language is the supreme tool or means of communication among humans

(Osundare 2003:36). Communication of whatever medium – verbal, written,

gesturing, facial expression or sign is language. Language is got from the Latin

word “lingua” through French langue – meaning “tongue” (Rob Pope 1998:49).

It is synonymous with tongue as the tongue is the main organ for speech

production and primarily spoken and heard (Quirk and Greenbaum 1990:21).

Language is a “species-specific to man and species-uniform” (Syal and Jindal

2008: 4). It is the quintessence of human existence, making us unique and

distinguishing us from other animals. According to Lewis Thomas in O‟Grady

and Archibald (2009:1), “the gift of language is the single human trait that

marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life”.

Language serves diverse roles in our society. It serves as a medium of

information, education, instruction, entertainment, and so on. It is used in

different aspects of our society and this is responsible for its varieties which

include: legalese, religionese, officialese, journalese, commercialese, and so on.

Language in its myriad functions, is also used in literary works and language

use in text is the concern of this research.

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Creative writers often use language in their own ways to achieve beauty

and meaning. They break the rules or norms of the language for a particular

stylistic effect, but in the canopy of the language. Literary writers express their

messages, feelings, attitudes, experiences and world-views by means of

language. According to Northrop Frye (1970:74), “literature is a specialized

form of language, as language is of communication”. Language is the tool or

pillar of literature and each literary writer employs a particular mode of

presentation to express himself.

Every literary artist, in his creative enterprise brings innovations to the

language. For instance, he uses structure or arrangement and specific choice of

words in a specific way for ornamentation and captivation of readers‟ attentions.

Language is open-ended in that it permits the generation of new meanings and

new forms (Leech and Short 2007:97). This creative use of language and the

specific patterns employed in creative works by creative writers bring about

style and stylistics in language studies.

1.1 Stylistic Analysis

A stylistic analysis of a text is a critical dissection of the text in order to

understand the linguistic arsenal of the writer. Style, according to The Chambers

Universal Learners‟ Dictionary, is “a manner or way of doing something, like

writing, speaking, painting, building”. Leech and Short (2007:9) define it as

“the way in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a

given purpose. Text is the natural starting point or place for the study of style

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and stylistics, and to have a mastery of them, a firm understanding of language

in all its dimensions is required. According to Robert Graves in David Crystal

(1997:71), a poet should “master the rules of grammar before he attempts to

bend or break them”.

Both style and stylistics are derived from the Latin word “stilus” meaning

“a writing instrument” (The Chambers Dictionary 1642). Style, therefore, refers

to the linguistic “signature”, “stamp” or “thumbprint” of a writer and signifies

the man – the writer (Luke Eyoh 2005:29). Every writer makes his own choices

on the language which he wants to use as well as the manner he will use them.

This choice and manner that constitute the style of the writer is the pre-

occupation of this research. Studying the linguistic choice and manner of a

writer or speaker is in the domain of stylistics.

Stylistics is the scientific study of the variations in language. It is “a

celebration of language in all its oddity, beauty, fun, astonishing complexity and

limitless variety” (Crystal 1997). Stylistics explores how readers interact with

the language of literary texts in order to explain how we understand, and are

affected by texts when we read them. It is a three -dimensional process of

communication between a reader, a text and a writer (Ofuani and Longe

1996:359).

It is understood that every writer has a style peculiar to him. This is also

true of Isidore Okpewho and Helon Habila. It is against this background that

this thesis analyses Okpewho‟s The last Duty and Habila‟s Waiting for an

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Angel, with a focus on their artistic manipulation of the resources of the English

Language.

1.2 Statement of problem

The problem which this research project intends to investigate is: “A

stylistic Analysis of Isidore Okpewho‟s The Last Duty and Helon Habila‟s

Waiting for an Angel”. Literary writers use language in a particular way for

aesthetic effect and meaning. This is also applicable to Okpewho and Habila.

The research will illuminate and explore what is peculiar or specific to their

language, how and why Okpewho and Habila have employed the resources or

tools of language in these aforementioned texts in special ways. Some works

have been done to explore the literary beauty of these works but much remains

to be done in the area of linguistic investigation. That is the gap which this

project intends to fill.

1.3 Purpose of Study

This research is intended to contribute to the literature on the existence of

literary language. Scholars like Brumfit and Carter (1986) (qtd. in Yeibo

2000:34) argue that there is nothing like literary language as we cannot isolate

or pinpoint what may be called a “literary register” as we have in law,

agriculture, medicine, engineering, commerce, and so on. But Sinclair (1981),

Stubbs (1983), Crystal (1997) believe in the existence of a literary language as

an estranged language different from the ordinary language. Werth (1976) and

Carter and Nash (1983) suggest that, instead of literary language, we should

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rather talk about “language and literariness” (qtd. in Yeibo 2000:34-35). Roman

Jakobson (1921) also believes in the existence of a literary language when he

says: “The object of study in literary science is not literature but “literariness”,

that is, what makes a given work a literary work” (qtd. in Abrams 1981:166 and

Ogum 2002:21). Frye also asserts that literature is an autonomous language in

reading a novel (1970:351).

Secondly, the research is intended to see whether or not linguistics as a

science can be carried out in literature, a pure art. Over the years there has been

a dispute between literary critics and linguists on the application of linguistic

methods to the study of literature, of which some linguists are of the opinion

that the activity is justified. But literary critics think otherwise. The argument is

that while linguistics is a science, literature is inaccessible to science and that

linguistic processing is only preliminary to literary response, so the linguist is

incapable of taking us far enough in an account of literary form and experience.

David Lodge (1966:357) (qtd. in Alabraba (2008:10-11) sheds light on the

difference between the linguistic science and the literary art thus:

One still feels obliged to assert that the discipline of linguistics will

never replace literary criticism, or radically change the bases of its

claims to be useful and meaningful form of human enquiry; it is

the essential characteristics of modern linguistics that it claims to

be a science. It is the essential characteristic of literature that it

concerns value. And values are not amenable to scientific method.

Emmanuel Ngara (1982:II) in Eyoh (2005:32) also refutes the possibility

or capability of analyzing literature with linguistics. According to him, “a

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purely scientific approach to the study of literature can only kill the writer‟s

creative effort”. But Roger Fowler (1996:197) claims that it is possible to

analyse literature with linguistics depending on the linguistic model or choice

employed by the critic and the purpose intended:

One model may have the purpose of accounting for the structure of

particular texts; another may focus on socio-linguistic variation;

another may be concerned to increase our knowledge about

linguistic universal and so on (qtd. in Alabraba 2008:11).

In a nutshell, the research aims at investigating the possibility of

analyzing literature with linguistics and the existence or otherwise of a literary

language.

1.4 Scope of the Study

This research attempts to make a stylistic analysis of Isidore Okpewho‟s

The Last Duty and Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel. The research focuses

on syntax, morphology and graphology. This delimitation is because stylistics is

not language study in all its entirety but saliency, peculiarity, habituality and

individuality. Leech (1969) in Onwukwe (2009:52) gives credence to this

assertion when he declares:

To talk of studying the “style” of an author does not usually

imply a study of everything in the language he has used, but

only an attempt to isolate, define, and discuss these

linguistic features which are felt to be peculiarly his, which

help to distinguish him from other authors.

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1.5 Significance of the Study

A research is expected to play a significant role in the society or

academia. It must be of benefit to humanity. According to Uzoagulu, “if there is

no benefit, then there should be no study. Why carry out the study if there are

no benefits” (1998:38). This research will contribute to scholarship or

knowledge. The goal of the research is to sharpen our awareness of how

language works in literary texts. It will be useful not only to the students but

also to teachers, lecturers and other researchers in the areas of language,

literature and stylistics.

Secondly, the study of language variation and language use is relevant for

the teaching and learning of languages, and for developing the learner‟s

communicative ability.

Finally, the paucity of stylistic materials in the study of Nigerian prose

fiction also necessitates this research.

1.6 Biographies of Authors

ISIDORE OKPEWHO

Isidore Okpewho was born in Abraka in present Delta State in the Niger

Delta area of Nigeria in 1941. Okpewho attended St. Patrick‟s College, Asaba

and the University of Ibadan, where he studied Classics and graduated in 1964

with a First Class Honours. He worked shortly with Longman, Nigeria before he

left for the University of Denver, Colorado, USA, where he had a Doctor of

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Philosophy (Ph.D) in Comparative Literature in 1975 and a Doctor of Literature

(D. Lit) in the Humanities from the University of London.

Okpewho is a prolific writer and a professor of English. He is an expert in

oral history and specializes in African and comparative literatures, with a

specialist emphasis on comparative oral traditions. He was named a

distinguished professor in 2004. Okpewho has taught in various universities

such as the University of Ibadan, the State University of New York at Buffalo,

Havard University, and the University of Binghamton in New York.

Okpewho is a novelist and a scholar who has produced a lot of works

such as The Epic in Africa; Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979),

Myth in Africa: A Study of its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983), African

Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity (1992), The Victims

(1970), The Last Duty, winner of the African Arts Prize for Literature (1976),

Tides, winner of the Common-Wealth Writers Prize for Africa (1993), Call me

by my Rightful Name (2004). He is married with five children and a member of

so many national and international academic or scholarly associations.

1.7 HELON HABILA

Helon Habila was born in 1967 to a Christian Tangale family in

Kaltungo, Gombe State in northern Nigeria. His father, Habila Ngalabak, was a

preacher with white missionaries, and later became a civil servant with the

Ministry of Works. While his mother was a seamstress, Helon Habila was a

good story-teller when he was a little boy in the primary school. In fact, he was

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skillful in weaving stories, a voracious reader who had a flare for writing. He

did his primary and secondary education in Gombe State. He is the third of

seven siblings. Habila lost his parents in a car accident when he was twenty-

two.

Habila‟s father wanted him to become an engineer and enrolled him at the

Bauchi University of Technology and then the Bauchi College of Arts and

Sciences. But he had no interest in Engineering and came home directionless

and despondent. Habila might have been counseled by Jason Cowley and he

studied English and Literature at the University of Jos and graduated in 1995.

At the University of Jos, he met Toni Kan, a young man from Delta State, who

had a similar interest in literature and writing. The two young men entered into

a friendly rivalry that pushed them further in their literary pursuits.

Habila became an assistant lecturer, lecturing in English and Literature at

the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi from 1997 to 1999 and published the biography

Mai Kaltungo, the Chief of his home-town. He later went to Lagos in 1999 and

became the literary editor of the Vanguard Newspaper. He also became

involved with the Lagos chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors. Habila

has written many creative works and had received various prizes and awards.

For instance, his poem “Another Age” won first place in the Musical Society of

Nigeria (MUSON), Festival Poetry Competition in 2000, his short story “The

Butterfly and the Artist” won the Liberty Bank Prize, his collection of short

stories “Prison Stories” submitted as “Love Poems” for the Caine Prize for

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African Writing 2001. Habila published the collection of short stories as the

novel Waiting for an Angel. The novel, which came out in 2002, won the 2003

Common-Wealth Literature Prize for the best first novel by an African writer.

Habila has been at the University of East Anglia in Norwich England

since the publication of Waiting for an Angel. He was awarded a writing

fellowship for two years at the University of East Anglia where he is currently

doing his doctorate. Habila has also been a fellow at the University of Iowa

International Writing Programme, a Chinua Achebe fellow at Bard College in

2005-2006. He currently teaches in the MFA programme at George Mason

University. His other works are: “Birds in the Graveyard” and “After the

Obsession” published in the collection of poetry 25 New Nigerian Poets, edited

by Toyin Adewale and published by Ishmael Reed. His second novel

“Measuring Time” was published in 2007. He has a wife and a daughter.

1.8 SYNOPSES OF THE NOVELS

It is germane to give the synopses of the novels before embarking on their

linguistic or stylistic analysis. According to Onwukwe (2009:56),

The analysis of the style of a text should be preceded by a detailed

synopsis of the text before the analyst proceeds with the

organization of the stylistically significant features at the

phonological, morphemic, lexical and grammatical levels….

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1.9 THE LAST DUTY

Isidore Okpewho‟s The Last Duty is a recast of the Nigerian Civil War of

1967-1970. It was a war between the secessionist Biafran Republic of the

Eastern Nigeria and Nigeria itself. The Nigerian Civil War is fictionalized in

this novel – a fictive world. This fictiveness is seen in the imaginary setting,

events and characters.

The nation or country in this novel is the Federal Republic of Zonda,

while the secessionist tribe is Simba, perpetrating mayhem in Urukpe which is a

border town comprising the people of Igabo and Kweke clans. Urukpe is in the

Black Gold state in the Zonda Republic and it is the war zone or setting in the

novel. The secessionist Simbians occupy and over-power the people of Urukpe,

causing havoc in the town. So, federal military troops come to the town to

liberate them from the terrorists or rebels.

The federal troops occupy Urukpe for over three years, forcing the

secessionist Simbians to flee for their dear lives, although there have been

occasional reprisal attacks by the rebels. The federal troops station in Urukpe to

eradicate rebellion in the Republic. The people of Urukpe welcome the federal

troops, demonstrating their loyalty and solidarity by assisting the federal

soldiers to eliminate rebels and rebel collaborators in the town.

The assistance the indigenes give to the federal soldiers in Urukpe gives

the opportunity to Chief Toje Onovwakpo, a rubber magnate in Urukpe, to

fabricate lies against Mukoro Oshevire, a fellow rubber trader in Urukpe. Toje

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is a very rich, popular and influential rubber trader who gets connected to Major

Akuya Bello, the commandant or commanding military officer in Urukpe. Toje

labels Oshevire a rebel collaborator just to incriminate and get rid of him

because he (Toje) considers Oshevire a stumbling-block in the rubber business.

Oshevire is accused of collaborating with the rebels when he only saves

the life of a little Simbian boy asphyxiating, running away from a bomb blast

and chasing mobs out of pity. He is arrested and detained at the state capital city

of Iddu (33-34). Oshevire is imprisoned for over three years. Toje uses his

influence to make Aku, Oshevire‟s wife, also a Simba, a public enemy in

Urukpe. She is ostracized, kept miserable, hence she suffers hunger, lack,

deprivation and mental torture.

Toje capitalizes on this and takes advantage of the woman‟s predicament

and pretentiously offers to help her out only to seduce and mess her up sexually,

although he is impotent. Toje tactically convinces Major Ali, the new

commandant, who ignorantly offers protection to Aku by ensuring that only

Toje or Odibo, his nephew, visits her. Toje continues to give her and her only

son, Oghenovo, food, money and clothing. The relationship between Toje and

Aku, Oshevire‟s wife, is symbiotic or a fair exchange. Aku needs food, clothing,

maintenance and protection as she is suffering because of her husband‟s

detention. While Toje is in need of self-reassurance of potency to prove his

manhood (133).

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Being impotent, Toje only arouses her. The arrangement is that Toje stays

in Odibo‟s house to make love to Aku while Odibo stays in her house to look

after her son, Oghenovo. Odibo has the golden opportunity of spending a night

with her because it is too late for him to go back home. He satisfies her sexually

and a relationship ensues. According to Odibo, “God never does a job half-

way”. Toje suspects their relationship and attempts to attack Aku but Odibo

stops him and the two men fight each other, butchering each other into coma

and hospitalized.

Oshevire is finally released for want of evidence. Major Ali briefs him

what happened and he divorces his wife, Aku, and sets his house ablaze. Getting

out, he is killed by a gunshot.

1.10 WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel is a novel which x-rays the advent

of the military in Nigerian politics. It shows military dictatorship and bad

governance manifested in wanton killing, illegal arrest, detention, wanton

destruction, oppression, poverty, violence, fear, lack of infrastructural

development, impoverishment, gagging the press, injustice, bribery and

corruption and fuel scarcity as witnessed in Nigeria in the era of the military

junta headed at different times by General Ibrahim Badamusi Babangida (1989

– 1993) and General Sani Abacha (1993 – 1998). Between these two dictorial

regimes was the interim civilian government of Ernest Shonekan who became

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the interim president of Nigeria after the annulment of the June 12, 1993

presidential election of M.K.O. Abiola and Bahir Tofa by IBB.

IBB is synonymous with bribery and corruption as he used them as

veritable tools of governance. He is nicknamed “Maradona” after the Argentine

soccer star, Diego Maradona, because of his ability to dribble the country about.

On the other hand, Abacha used terrorism – more killings, arrests, kidnapping

and so on in his five years‟ regime than in all the military years put together in

Nigeria. So, military years in Nigeria are referred to as Abacha years (227).

The novel is a historical fiction as it narrates historical facts and

happenings in Nigeria. It is a novel of reminiscences – prison notes written in a

diary and entries mostly headed with the days of the week as Lomba, the main

narrator, does to keep himself busy and forget his sorrows in prison and to

express his feelings: “Today I begin a diary, to say all the things I want to say,

to myself because here in prison, there is no one to listen. I express myself. It

stops me from standing in the … cell and screaming…(3).

Lomba, a young journalist in Lagos, under the brutal military regime of

Nigeria, is enthusiastic with soul music, girls and the novel he is writing. He is a

university student studying Theatre Arts but drops out in year two because of

the madness of Bola, his roommate who is beaten to a pulp by soldiers and

incessant riots and strikes. He meets Alice, the long awaited angel, in the

university and they become lovers (90-91).

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Military dictatorship and bad governance spur the masses to action

against IBB and Abacha. There is a strike action taken by students in all the

Federal Universities across the country led by Sankara, a demonstration by the

kerosene-starved housewives of Morgan Street which led to destroying

billboards and signboards for firewood, (113-114). There was the general

protest and epic match by the inhabitants of Morgan Street, now renamed

Poverty Street, to the Local Government Secretariat, headed by Joshua Amusu,

Ojikutu or Mao, and Brother to make their general demands written in an

address by Joshua (180).

At the Local Government Secretariat, some policemen come with tear-

gas, beat and arrest the protesters. Lomba, also at the scene to cover the

demonstration as a Journalist, is arrested. There was also a coup detat against

the Abacha government led by Gideon Orkar. Dele Giwa, the founding editor of

Newswatch Magazine, is killed in a letter bomb; the editors of the Concord and

the Sunday Magazines are arrested and the office building of The Dial, a weekly

magazine of Arts and Society was burnt down; Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, wife of

M.K.O Abiola, Ken Saro-Wiwa, General Yaradua were all assassinated and

other pro-democracy activists such as Olusegun Obasanjo, Abiola, and so on are

incarcerated. It is in fact, an anti-military protest and pro-democracy novel.

16

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 INTRODUCTION

According to Solomon in Ecclesiastes (1:9b) “there is nothing new under

the sun”. Lensmire and Beals (1994: 411) lend credence to this assertion thus:

“We are born and develop, learn to speak, read, and write, awash in the words

of others…. Our words are always someone else‟s words first; and these words

sound with the intonations and evaluations of others who have used them

before, and from whom we learned them (qtd. in Barbara Johnstone 2008: 166 –

167).

This is also applicable to stylistics. It is believed that some research has

been done on stylistics and this chapter intends to review some scholarly views

on language, style and stylistics.

2.1 Language

Language means different things to different people. It is used in this

parlance to mean human natural language in general, not any particular one as

linguistics is concerned with language in general. First, Edward Sapir (1921:8)

defines language as “a purely human and non-instinctive method of

communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of voluntarily produced

symbols” (qtd. in Okolo and Ezikeojiaku 1999:9). This definition implies that

language is basically a human property or endowment and the quintessence of it

is interaction and communication. Human language is non-institinctive as it is

17

not a direct transmission from parent to offspring. In other words, it is not a

biological or genetic inheritance but a cultural transmission as it is a part of

culture and acquired unconsciously at childhood from the environment.

Secondly, it is symbolic. A symbol is an object or a thing that represents

something. Words in language are symbols that represent objects or entities in

the real world. Meanings of words are a collective agreement of the native

speakers of the language. Hence Gamble and Gamble (2002:112) define

language as “a unified system of symbols that permits a sharing of meaning”.

According to them, meanings are in people, not in words and the word is not the

thing as it is the native speakers that give meaning to words.

Communication involves using words to create meaning and expectations

as words and sentences must mean. In fact, there is a twin relationship between

words and meanings. According to Akwanya (2009: 13), “words and sentences

must mean, that they cannot be empty sounds or haphazard marks on paper”.

Although meaning is a communal or cultural ownership – not individual it can

be contextualized, operationalized, or individualized as opined by Ludwig

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953: 43) in Akwanya (2007:

21). Humpty – Dumpty in Lewis Carrol‟s satiric: Through the Looking Glass

also individualizes meanings of words when he tells Alice:

“when I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather

scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean – neither

more nor less”.

(Culled from Otagburuagu and Anyanwu 2002:291).

18

Sapir‟s definition is too myopic as language can do a lot more than only

communicating “ideas” “emotions “and “desires”.

Secondly, Wardhaugh (1972) defines language as “a system of arbitrary

vocal symbols used for human communication” (qtd. in Syal and Jindal 4).

Wardhaugh gives a wider coverage on the function of language as well as its

characteristics. He adds that human language is systematic because it is planned,

structured, ordered or organized. This means that the various parts or elements

work together in a definite pattern and not in a haphazard or amorphous manner.

It is rule-governed as sounds are patterned systematically to form words, words

too are joined to form larger structures or utterances.

Secondly, human language is arbitrary. This means that there is no one-

on-one relationship or correspondence between the words and the objects or

concepts they stand for or represent in the real world. The object, idea, concept

or thing represented by a word is just a matter of conventional or general

agreement by the members of the speech community and not an automatization.

Again, human language is vocalic. This means that it is spoken and heard.

According to Joy Uguru, man‟s vocal system was designed for speech

production and that of animals was not and that chimpanzees do not have the

appropriate voice box for speech production (2009: 19 – 20). So, humans are the

only talking animals hence we are described as homoloquens.

Thirdly, Bloch and Trager (1942:5) sees language as “a system of

arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates” (qtd in

19

Okolo and Ezikeojiaku 10). This definition centres on the unifying function

language performs in its speakers.

Fourthly, Noam Chomsky (1957:13) defines language as “a set (finite or

infinite of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of

elements”. This is a transformational-generative approach to language studies

and it is based on innateness as language is acquired subconsciously at

childhood as a child is born with all the mental facilities for language

acquisition (Universal Grammar). According to Wittgenstein (1953; 199), “to

understand a sentence means to understand a language, to understand a

language means to be master of a technique”. The array of definitions implies

that human language is productive, non-instinctive, symbolic, arbitrary, vocalic

and systematic.

2.2 The Concept of Style

Enkvist (1973:11) sees style as “a common and elusive” concept as it

appears to be simple but technical as it means different things to different

people (qtd. in Asher and Simpson 4375). For instance, the critics see it as

“individuality”, rhetoricians as “the speaker”, the philologists as “the latent”, the

linguists as “formal structures in function”, the psychologists as “a form of

behaviour” (Ogum 2002:22). The Latin word “stilus” meaning “a pointed

instrument used for writing”, is what the concept “style” meant 2000 years ago.

But nowadays, definitions of style do not point to the instrument used by the

writer but to characteristics of the writing itself. Enkvist further defines it as the

20

“sum of linguistic features which distinguish one text from another” (1973:11)

in Asher and Simpson. This implies that “style” is the whole gestalt or oeuvre of

a person‟s use of language which identifies him. Buffon gave a phrase to

describe style: “Style C‟est I homme meme” meaning the style is the man

(Asher and Simpson 4377). Plato also declares that the style “proclaims the

man” meaning that the style is the man himself (Eyoh 27) with the expression

“stilus virum arguit” (Leech and Short 10).

Richard Ohmann (1964) regards style as “a way of doing it” and the

“alternative ways of expressing the same content” in language use (qtd. in Asher

and Simpson 1994: 4375). Ohmann means that “style” is a particular way in

which something is done or a patterned choice in language behaviour. Style is

also construed as “the stable mark of the writer himself” (Akwanya 2004:176).

This means that it is the linguistic fingerprint or thumbprint of the writer which

marks individuality.

Katie Wales refers to style as “the manner of expression in writing and

speaking; just as there is a manner of doing things” (435). So, a person can write

in an ornate style, or speak in a comic style, good, bad, turgid styles

respectively. In language behaviour, Wales defines it as “the set of features

peculiar to or characteristic of an author: his or her language habits or idiolect”

(346). So, we can have Miltonic style, Shakespearian style, the style of Achebe,

Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Gabriel Okara and so on. She further opines that

stylistic features are basically features of linguistics or language. So, style is

21

synonymous with language and hence “the aggregate of contextual probabilities

of its linguistic items (Enkvist 1964:10) in Onwukwe (2009:9-10).

Crystal and Davy consider “style” as “a selection of language habits, the

occasional linguistic idiosyncrasies which characterize an individual‟s

uniqueness”. It is usually … those features in a person‟s expression which are

particularly unusual or original (1969:9-10). While Samuel Wesley sees it as

“the dress of thought” (qtd. in Crystal 1997: 66), Gustave Flaubert says: “style

is life! It is the very life blood of thought (qtd. in Nigel Watts 1996:105). Watts

himself sees it as “not something added to a piece of work, it is the work” (105).

He further adds: “Style is the expression of the writer…. Writing style is not

something magicked out of nowhere, unconnected to the author, it is

undetachable” (105). While Osundare considers it as “that set of propensities

that define an author‟s voice” (30).

This array of definitions of style implies that style is something that has

to do with individuality and personality. The style of an author is the image of

his mind. It is an emanation from his being. In other words, the definitions

suggest that the style is the man as it reveals the inner man, personality and

thought process of the writer and it is individualistic. Gorrel and Laird give

credence to this assertion when they state: “Style is the man. But a good style is

the wise man using words and sentences so that they reveal him faithfully…

(qtd in Otagburuagu et al, 2010:39).

22

Finally, Jonathan Swift defines style as “proper words in proper places”

(qtd. in Crystal 66). This simply means the linguistic choice or habit of an

individual writer and no two people or writers write or speak exactly the same

way as it is individualistic. It is a conscious and careful selection of words for

effective communication or stylistic effect. Literary style is characterized by

elegance, beauty in form and language. According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

prose is “words in their best order” and poetry is “the best word in the best

order” (Toolan 1996:162).

2.3 Domain of Style

Although style is a universal term cutting across all spheres of human life

and endeavour, it has been narrowed down to the study of literature. According

to Asher and Simpson, “Western culture has tended to study literary writing

more than any other form of language” (4377). Style refers to the whole gestalt

of a person‟s use of language, whether written or spoken, or whether the

language user is a literary figure or not. It is as individual as his fingerprints.

Although, style is individualistic or personal, it is sometimes grouped in

line with Hendricks (1976:101-172) (qtd.in Asher and Simpson 4377).

Hendricks maps out group style for a group of writers with the same world-view

or out look, or of the same era or period of time. So, we can talk of Elizabethan

style, Classical style, 18th century style, and so on.

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2.4 Style Theory

Osundare (13) identifies three different but connected concepts to discuss

style. They are: choice, difference and iteration. The concept of choice is the

most author-oriented style as it is the linguistic thumbprint of the writer that

identifies or distinguishes him from others. In other words, style is the

alternative ways employed by the writer to express the same content. Osundare

further identifies two categories of the concept of choice in style-study:

preverbal choice and verbal choice.

The preverbal choice is an epistemic or a thought-oriented choice as it is

concerned with intuition or thinking made by the writer prior to verbal choice. It

is psychological, or cultural but the verbal choice is the alternative or option of

linguistic features made by the writer.

The concept of style as difference is the linguistic variation and deviation

a writer makes on the language to achieve his objectives. Style primarily comes

into being in literature.

Style as iteration, on the other hand, is concerned with repetition on

regularity of striking linguistic features or choices in the text for stylistic effects.

It is more or less a habitualization. According to Asher and Simpson (4376),

“for a style to exist, the same sort of linguistic choice must be repeated in a

reasonably consistent, iterative basis”. It is a statistical and mathematical

approach to the study of literature and often criticized by language and literary

analysts and students as being “unsuited to the humanist discussion of

24

literature”. This statistical and mathematical approach of identifying regular and

habitual linguistic features in texts gives birth to stylometry or stylostatistics in

style study.

2.5 The Concept of Stylistics

Stylistics is the science of style. In other words, it is the scientific study of

style. Michael Toolan defines it as “the study of the language in

literature”(1996:viii). It is basically concerned with the understanding of

technique or the craft of writing. A stylistician brings to the close examination

of the linguistic particularities of a literary work, an understanding of the

anatomy and functions of the language (Toolan ix). Ofuani and Longe see it as

“solely concerned with the investigation of the artistry of language usage in

literature” (1996:359). Ndimele (2001:15) defines stylistics as “a branch of

linguistics which studies the application of linguistics to the study of literature”.

Stylistics is part of applied linguistics and not a core branch. It is a

method of practical criticism to help explain intuitive reader responses to a work

of literature without any criticism of badness or goodness of the writing (Asher

and Simpson 4378). While Philip Anagbogu et al define stylistics as “the

application of the knowledge of linguistics to literary appreciation” (2010:33),

Leech (2008:1) defines it as “the linguistic study of literary texts”. Enkvist

(1973:11) regards it as discipline “concerned with the theory and analysis of

style”(qtd. in Asher and Simpson 4378).But these definitions are too eclectic.

Leech and Short (2007:11) see it as “the linguistic study of style” or “the study

25

of language as used in literary texts, with the aim of relating it to its artistic

functions” (13). Finally, Welleck and Warren (1977: 176) opine that “linguistic

study becomes literary only when it serves the study of literature, when it aims

at investigating the aesthetic effect of language” (Eyoh 2005:29).

Literary work is the field par excellence of stylistics. So, stylistics is a

bridge science, creating a bond between linguistics and literature (Akwanya

2004:163). In other words, it synergizes or sits athwart the boundary between

linguistics and literature; ensuring their interdependence. This is because “a

linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent

to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic method are equally

flagrant anachronisms” as opined by Jakobson in Onwukwe (2009: i).

Onwukwe (2009: I) further condemns the separation of literature from

language and vice versa as students are made to specialize in either of them.

According to her, it is impossible for one to specialize in literature without

being competent in the language in which the literature is written. Conversely,

the mastery of the various levels of linguistics – phonetics/phonology, syntax,

semantics and morphology would be unnecessary if the person cannot make a

resourceful or creative use of the levels of linguistics mastered. Hence stylistics

comes to create a symbiotic relation between language and literature so as to be

competent in both of them.

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2.6 The Concept of Foregrounding

According to Roman Jakobson in Terry Eagleton (2), literature is “a kind

of writing which… represents an organized violence committed on ordinary

speech. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates

systematically from every day speech”. This deliberate deviation or violation of

the norms of the language for prominence is called foregrounding. It is a key

term in stylistics translated by Garvin (1964) from the Czech term “actualisace”

meaning “actualization” coined by Jan Mukarovsky (Wales 1989:181-2 and

Leech 18).

Literature is a de-automatization of language, while language is an

automatization. In other words, language is the background, while literature is

the foreground as literature thrives in deviation which “brings the message to

the forecourt of the reader‟s attention” (Yankson 3). It is the creative use of

language and the creativity is equated with the use of unorthodox or deviant

forms of language for stylistic effects and meaning (Leech 12). Linguistic

deviation is a key feature or characteristic of literary language as literature

always wrestles with words, breaks or bends language, making it to obey a will

(Ogum 41).

Foregrounding makes linguistic features stand out for a second look. This

makes Cyril Connoly to define literature as “the art of writing something that

will be read twice” (qtd. in Ndimele 2009: xxv). Literature is a fine or beautiful

writing derived from the French expression “belles lettres” meaning fine or

27

beautiful writing (Eagleton 2008: 9). Hence it is the beautiful rendition of

imagination in word and action (Ogum 2002: 15). Foregrounding cuts across

every level of linguistics – syntax, phonology, semantics, morphology as well as

graphology and the style of a literary text is a totality of all foregrounded

elements (Syal and Jindal 62).

2.7 Theoretical framework

There are various linguistic theories, models or approaches for the

analysis of human language. For instance, we have the Transformational-

Generative Grammar, Phrase Structure Grammar, Systemic Functional

Grammar, and so on. The approach taken for this research is Michael Halliday‟s

Systemic Functional Grammar. The Hallidayan grammatical model is

considered more appropriate for this work because the research is on language

analysis in texts. According to Halliday, “text is the form of data used for

linguistic analysis; all description of grammar is based on text” (2004:33).

Systemic Functional Grammar is a semogenic or semanticky or meaning-

making grammar. This meaning-making cuts across the three areas of form,

content and context and anchored on a text. The text acts as an object and

instrument to create meaning – the why, how and what of the text. In other

words, the way the architecture or constituency of language in its organized

form is employed to create and express meaning.

Systemic Functional Grammar sees Language as a network of systems

and interrelated sets of meaningful options, alternatives or choices for making

28

meaning. It is “systemic” because it is an “organic whole” as its various strata:

semantics, lexico-grammar and phonetics/phonology are all bound up together;

and functional because it is meaning-centred as language is intended to play a

specific function, purpose or role in human communication (Halliday, 31).

2.8 The Metafunctions of Language

Halliday takes a “trinocular perspective” on the function of human

language. In other words, language is a multifunctional construct consisting of

three metafunctional lines of meaning. They are: the ideational metafunction,

interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction, respectively (Halliday

29-30).

Language is of the mind. It is a habit or representation of thought or

intellection (Akwanya 2005), and gives us the impetus to ideate or imagine.

Language construes human experience. It names things; classifying things into

groups, and it gives us the power of recognition. This is the ideational function

of human language. The ideational function is divided into two: experiential and

logical functions. The experiential function organizes our experience and

understanding of the world. It is the potential of the language to construe or

interpret figures with elements. The logical function works beyond the

experiential and organizes our reasoning on the basis of our experience. It is the

potential of the language to construe logical links between figures; for example,

“this happened after that happened” or, with more experience, “this happens

every time that happens”.

29

The second function of language is the interpersonal one. Language

enacts our personal and social relationships with other people around us because

man is a gregarious and social animal. This function is both interactive and

personal as it is a communication event between people and within a person

who uses language to express personal feelings of doubt, approval, to instruct,

greet, command, and so.

Lastly, language plays a textual function. This textual function refers to

the ways in which constituent structures of the language relate to one another in

a text and to the situations or context in which they are used.

The Hallidayan model, from what we have discussed so far, is

appropriate for this work because it is based on linguistic analysis of discourse

or text; making choices on the vast resources of language, to create and express

meaning as well as spotlighting the different contexts and functions language

perform. We shall see the effectiveness of this theory in the analysis of

Okpewho‟s The Last Duty and Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel.

30

CHAPTER THREE

LEVELS OF LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

3.0 INTRODUCTION

This chapter investigates language use in Okpewho‟s The Last Duty and

Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel – how they have made choices, variations and

iterations on the architecture of language to create and express shades of

meaning in their works. We shall deal with syntax, morphology, and graphology

in this work. But we shall also indirectly bring in semantics as “language

without meaning is meaningless” as opined by Roman Jakobson (qtd in

Fromkin et al 2007:173).

3.1 Syntax

Syntax is the level of linguistics concerned with the structuring of

sentences (Andrew Carnie 2007:3). Language has structure and it is not a hotch-

potch of randomly distributed elements. Instead, the linguistic ingredients in

language are arranged in accordance with a set of rules. Sequences of words are

ordered into phrases, clauses and sentences following the conventional rules of

grammar. For instance, English is an SVO- language with SVOCA as its clause

structure (Quirk and Greenbaum 1973). There are various forms of syntactic

foregrounding such as selectional violation, parallelism, chiasmus, pidginzation,

disfigured sentences, stringing of clauses, and so on.

31

3.2 Selectional Rule Violation

This is the violation or breach of collocational rule (Yankson 1987:2). It

is a semantic constraint on the co-occurrence of words in sentences. Selectional

restriction rules, which became prominent through Chomky‟s Transformational

Generative Grammar (TGG), have become an area of concern in stylistics

because of their violations. Selectional restrictions pose the problem of

grammaticality and acceptability. A sentence may be syntactically well-formed

but semantically ill-formed because of the mismatch of the words in the

sentence. Metaphor and personification are good examples of regular violation

of selectional rules (Katie Wales 1989:414). Okpewho and Habila employ a

mismatch of words in sentences for stylistic effects as in:

1. Lomba flows with the flowing bodies (Habila 218).

2. She flew into Bola‟s arms (Habila 53).

3. The water knows (Habila 38).

4. The uncompleted novel would strangle me to death (Habila 106)

5. Hunger ate us up (Okpewho 133).

6. Anger now knew no verbal language (Okpewho 17).

There is a clear mismatch or collocational violation of words in the above

sentences. The sentences are not acceptable in spite of their grammaticality

because of the incompatibility or incongruity of their syntactic elements.

According to Akwanya (2007:99), “selectional restriction can only apply if it is

based on meaning rather than on syntactic rules alone”. For instance, “Lomba

32

flows with the flowing bodies”. This sentence is semantically faulty because of

the incongruity between the subject “Lomba” and the verb “flows‟. This is

because Lomba is an animate subject and not a mass noun and, therefore, should

take or select a different type of verb than the flow-type. This is also applicable

to other examples in the sentences above where the incompatible NPs and VPs

each group are underlined. For the purpose of acceptability, sentences should be

both syntactically and semantically well-formed.

3.3 Parallelism

This is a pattern repetition. It is the repetition of identical linguistic

structures for stylistic effects (Yankson 14). Both Okpewho and Habila employ

parallel linguistic structures in their works for the purpose of foregrounding.

The following parallel syntactic structures are chosen for exemplification:

7A. My manhood flawed – SV (Okpewho 5)

7b My potency questioned – SV (Okpewho 5)

8A This is power – SVC (Okpewho 26)

8b This is happiness – SVC (Okpewho 26)

9A The audience is calm. – SVC (Okpewho 40)

9b The lawyer is distressed – SVC (Okpewho 40)

10. Conscientious doctor, dutiful father, loving husband, a perfect role model

(Habila 63) – all NPs

11A When I smiled my smile was shaky – ASVC (Habila 82)

11B When I spoke, my words were strangled – ASVC (Habila 82)

12A Boys washed their parents‟ cars outside the houses – SVOA (Habila 67).

12b Dogs stretched their stiff limbs before the front doors– SVOA (Habila 67).

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3.4 The Use of Pidgin

Both Okpewho and Habila employ the use of the Pidgin and it also marks

their style. This is as a result of less formal education of some of the characters

in the works. Okpewho uses pidgin and other informal expressions such as “Oga

money for the drink” spoken by a bar steward at Iddu (125); “Oga” (225),

“whence” (3), malapropism “conceive” in stead of “convince” (101), backyache

(101), “shege” (94 and 107), and so on.

Habila, on the other hand, makes an elaborate use of the Pidgin. It is used

by Brother, Gladys, soldiers, prison inmates, prison warders, drivers, passengers

and so on. Brother uses it to x-ray general poverty in the country, the

dehumanization and corrupt practices as well as bad governance witnessed in

Nigeria during General Ibrahim Babangida‟s and General Sani Abacha‟s

regimes respectively. According to Akwanya (2004: 13), “language is

something chosen for its effectiveness or acuity for the task at hand …The

pidgin… is to show the masses how they are being exploited and dehumanized

by the ruling class”. Brother‟s protest Pidgin is indented thus:

„No! Sharrap!...No. No try deny am. You can‟t. You de laugh at

me because I bravely sacrifice my leg for this country, and now I

am poor because I no fit work with one leg. You laugh at my

friends here because dem no get brothers in the army to thief and

send dem money…‟ But make I tell you something – you de

laugh at the wrong people. Make you go laugh at all the big big

34

Generals who de steal our country money everyday de send am to

foreign banks while their country de die of poverty and disease.

Dem de drive long long motor cars with escort while I no even

get two legs to walk on. I, a hero. I fight...(133-4).

According to Joseph Gibaldi, “the key to successful communication is

using the right language for the audience you are addressing” (2009:49).

Brother has used Pidgin as it best “expresses his thoughts and ideas more

precisely and appears more interesting” to his audience. Pidgin is a common

language that can carry all the oppressed and exploited along.

3.5 Disfigured Sentences

Habila uses fragmented or disfigured sentences which he refers to as “a

tortuous parody of correct grammar in English”. For example, Muftau the prison

superintendent uses disfigured, fragmented or disjointed sentences of English

because of his emotional or psychological disfigurement. This is because of

military dictatorship and bad governance of Abacha and IBB. According to

Henry David Thoreau, “under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the

true place for a just man is also a prison”. Bola, a character in the novel, further

affirms this psychological imprisonment when he says: “The military have

turned the country into one huge barracks, into a prison” (50). Some of those

staccato sentences of the prison superintendent are:

13 These. Are the. Your papers… I read. All (14).

35

14 So. You wont. Talk. You think you are. Tough (9).

15 I will ask. Once. Who gave you. Papers? (8)

16 You are. Wrong.(9)

17 Until. He is willing to. Talk (9).

18 There is nothing I cannot do, if I want. So write. The poem. For me. (18).

Nkem also deviates from conventional grammar thus:

19 Rumour-monging and gossipers full our compound (112).

20 Soon I‟ll be marry her and she‟ll be come to live here. Then you believe

(112)

21 Are you student? (111).

22 One day I must return schooling (111) and so on.

The prison superintendent and Nkem construct unconventional or

ungrammatical sentences to show their emotional derangement. Habila

deliberately employs ungrammatical sentences for individuality, peculiarity and

prominence. According to Leech and Short, “to be truly creative, an artist must

be destructive: destructive of rules, conventions and expectations” (24).

Creative writers seem to be covered with “language immunity” or they have the

“licence” to manipulate language at will to create their unique visions of life.

According to Gustave Flaubert, “one arrives at style only with atrocious effort,

with fanatical and devoted stubbornness”. Taban Io Liyong also gives credence

to this assertion when he says in “The Last Word:

36

So what? Isn‟t each writer an arbitrary maker, ordering or

reordering the world?...if I were on my way to a wedding

feast, and were offered a mariner‟s tale, I would forgo the

feast (qtd in Ken Goodwin 1982:80).

The sentences of the prison superintendent and Nkem are ungrammatical.

In fact, they are sentences produced by a cured deaf-mute testing his or her

voice for the first time, or an aphasic – one who has a language dysfunction as a

result of brain damage – damage of the Broca‟s area which contains the

Language Acquisition Device (LAD) Fromkin et al ( 35,38). The brain is the

source of human language and cognition. It is the centre of understanding,

knowledge and wisdom. Language is localized in the Broca‟s area specifically

in the left frontal lobe or hemisphere of the brain – named after Paul Broca, a

French surgeon who proposed it in 1861.

The damage of the Broca‟s area leads to agrammatism which is “a form

of aphasia in which grammatical elements are lost and the resulting speech of

such a person becomes “telegraphic” consisting mainly of lexical items and

fixed expressions; also slow and hesitant (Peter Matthews 1997:12). In other

words, the person‟s syntax will be impaired and his sentences become

agrammatic as they lack articles, inflections, prepositions and auxiliary verbs.

The prison superintendent and Nkem do not have any physical brain

damage yet they become aphasic emotionally because of military dictatorship,

brutality and dehumanization. Habila confirms this through Lomba, his

authorial voice thus: “I write of my state in words of derision ... to rediscover

37

my nullified individuality”; “loss of self”(3); “you accept the inescapability of

your fate” (4); “our heads bowed, our hearts quaking”(5); “his prison –fevered

mind”(6); “now I realized that I really had no “self” to express; that self had

flown away from me”(23); “this leftover self”(24) and so on.

3.6 Chiasmus

This is a figure of speech or technique used in writing or speech in which

the sequential order of words, ideas or elements in one clause or sentence is

repeated in a reversed form in another which follows. It is used for the purpose

of expansion. For example,

23 I greeted nobody. Nobody greeted me (Okpewho 66).

24 Here comes Odibo. Here he comes (Okpewho 132).

The second example here is a syntactic deviation because it is a

disorganization of the clause structure of English. It ought to have been

“Odibo comes here”, or “he comes here” to give us the normal clause

structure “SVA” and not “AVS” as the writer presents it. It is used in this

form for the purpose of foregrounding.

We also see the following example in Waiting for an Angel:

25 To say exactly what he means, to mean exactly what he says (Habila

193).

3.7 Non-simple Sentences

Bolaji Aremo (2004: 1 and 374) identifies two categories of English

sentences: simple sentences and non-simple sentences respectively. It is simple

38

if it contains only a single idea and non-simple if it contains at least two

separate ideas joined together. The non-simple sentences are always formed by

stringing or combining two or more simple sentences together in different ways

– different ways because the combination is contingent on the conjunction used.

Non-simple sentences are called “compound” or “double” if two separate

simple sentences of equal grammatical status or rank are joined together by a

coordinating conjunction such as “but” “or” and “and”. Each clause in a

compound sentence is an independent or main one as it can stand on its own to

make a complete meaning without appending or attaching itself to any other

clause or element in the sentence to complete its meaning.

A non-simple sentence is a multiple one if three independent simple

sentences are joined together by such coordinators and complex if two sentences

of unequal grammatical status are combined. We have one main clause which

makes the main idea and a subordinate clause which is introduced by a

subordinator and which makes the subordinate idea; or compound complex if

we have one main clause and two or more subordinate clauses or two main

clauses and one or more subordinate ones. The simple sentence is a kernel or

basic one which is acted upon by transformational rules such as the “Tnot” for

negativisation, “Tp” for passivisation, “Tq” for interrogation and “T and” for

compounding of clauses and “Taf” for derivation of the correct forms of verbs

in sentences ( Tomori 1977: 69- 75) to make them non- kernel or non -basic.

39

Writers employ the normal clauses and sentences –simple, compound,

complex and so on, and vary them to avoid monotony of sentences in their

works. This is also applicable to Okpewho and Habila. But what is remarkable

in Okpewho and Habila and their novels is the continuous coordination or

linking of clauses and sentences and the fronting of subordinate clauses to delay

the main statement or idea contained in the sentences. This implies that

Okpewho and Habila make an elaborate use of periodic sentences – a complex

sentence situation whereby subordinate clauses come before the main ones as a

way of delaying the main idea till the end of the sentence (Wales 442). In

linguistics, fronting a subordinate clause is regarded as a left-branching

structure which is different from right-branching structure where the main

clause normally appears at the sentence-initial position. In Okpewho‟s The Last

Duty, we have the following sentences for illustration:

26 After all, this is my house, I built this home, I own it, I married a wife and

got these children and, if I cannot exercise my right of question as much

as of positive control, who else is there to be called to account when any

crisis comes to this home? (24) This is a very long and complex

interrogative sentence showing complex ideas and products of Toje‟s

private thoughts and emotional state.

27 When I pay a man good money I expect good service … And when a man

pays me for any service he gets his money‟s worth (165).

40

28 When he was certain the Landrover was on its way, he picked up his

loaded S.M.G (Okpewho 17).

29 When he arrived, the vehicle was there alright (Okpewho 17).

30 After a quick look around he made for the bedroom (Okpewho 17).

31 When the big soldier started to talk to my mother in his big voice and told

her to shut up and stop crying, and mother was crying and crying and

crying, and the big soldier was talking more and more in his big voice

and asking my mother to shut up, i began to cry and cry because i was

afraid of the big soldier and i thought … (219-220).

Okpewho uses language to reflect or portray the dormant

psychological disposition of characters. Oghenovo‟s language matches

with his psychological state as his thoughts are captured, unedited most

of the time, in one continuous stream linked loosely by coordinating

conjunctions ( Nwahunanya 296). In other words, his style is rambling

and his sentences are a piling up of repetitive phrases and clauses linked

together by simple conjunctions, each sentence consisting of a whole

incident and sometimes more than one. We also see this stringing of

clauses in Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel.

32 And when you looked and hoped and waited and finally realized that I

was never going to come, that you had just made a finally irrevocable

choice…(79).

41

33 When I smiled my smile was shaky, when I spoke my words were

strangled (82).

34 They picked up my mattress and shook and sniffed and poked (7).

35 On the last day Lomba went to the hospital, the women were not there

(Habila 96 – 97).

36 In the two weeks since he first saw Alice outside the hospital, Lomba had

watched her mother… (Habila 97).

37 When she spoke, there was deep melancholy in her voice (Habila 97).

38 When she spoke, her voice was stronger (Habila 97).

39 Bell- ringing commodity hawkers offering a bargain, or a miracle healer

plying his trade, or a fight, or a robber being lynched, or a preacher

…(67) and so on.

3.8 Morphology

This is the “branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal

structure and how they are formed” (Aronoff and Fudeman 2005: 1 – 2).

Okpewho and Habila employ different word formation processes such as

conversion, borrowing, affixation, compounding, neologism, reduplication and

so on in their works.

3.9 Conversion

This is the derivation of a word from another without any affixation. It is

a mere change of lexical category which leads to a category rule violation in

stylistics (Syal and Jindal 91). We see this in the following from the texts:

42

40 People here… used me “to police” their prejudices (Okpewho 59).

41 His wife had been “prostituting” herself to somebody else (Okpewho 72).

42 Tears started “streaming” down her face (Okpewho 98).

43 The whole twenty-five of its detainees – leaving this prison in one “go”

(Okpewho 148).

44 They were trying “to humour” this fanciful child (Habila 182).

45 The Amnesty International… came… “to pressure” the government

(Habila 30).

46 James says, pointing to the “verandahed” doorway of a bar (Habila 208).

47 He raised his hands to “silence” the calls (Habila 169).

48 He “leafed” through it (Habila 129) and so on.

All the words or expressions in inverted commas in numbers 40 – 48

above are shifted from their original word classes or grammatical categories to

another. It is a functional shift and a violation of the category rule in grammar.

3.10 Borrowing

This is the act of taking and using a word from another language.

Borrowing is brought about by contact and used to enlarge the vocabulary of a

language (Syal and Jindal 94). Okpewho and Habila write in English but borrow

words from their native languages and other foreign languages in their texts. In

The Last Duty Okpewho uses words like agbada (39), garri (53), eba (64),

ukodo, a mouth-watering delicacy cooked with fish or meat and plantain or yam

43

without oil in Urhobo and Ijaw languages (76), migwo „genuflecting‟ (68), vren,

doh „get up, thank you‟, kai (99), baba (142), Allah (203) and so on.

We also see the following lexical borrowing in Habila‟s Waiting for an

Angel: ole (40), molue (114), oga (42), ka chi foo (Ibo), oda ro (Yoruba), sai

gobe (Hausa) – all meaning good night. (128), meigad „gate-keeper‟ in Hausa

language (67), ogogoro (110), aso-ebi (127), igbo „Indian hemp‟ (127) and so

on. Lexical borrowing from our native languages shows the Africanness of the

work as well as the plurality of languages in our country. Habila also employs

words from foreign languages such as devaju (114), dues ex machine (228),

papier-mache (15), tsunamis (187), aluta continua Victoria acerta (49) and so

on.

3.11 Neologism or Coinage

This is a new and strange word coined which was not observed in the

language before (Haspelmath 2002:39). It is an intentional creation. Habila

freely coins words in Waiting for an Angel to capture particular phenomena

such as squandermania (224), Khakistocracy, militocracy, Kleptocracy (68), and

anti-Abacha (143), face-me-I-face-you (110) and so on.

3.12 Reduplication

Reduplication simply means doubling. It is a word formation process

whereby part of the base or the whole base is copied or repeated to create a new

word with a different meaning or different word class (Edward Finegan 47).

This reduplication is either partial or full and before the word (prereduplication)

44

or after the base ( postreduplication) (Haspelmath 24). Habila employs

reduplication which also marks his style such as glassy-glossy (14), boy-boy

(70), gewgaw (75).

3.13 Affixation

This is the process of attaching or appending an affix which is a bound

morpheme to a root or free morpheme (Ofuani and Longe (88-89). In English

this appendage is either prefixal or suffixal to the root. An affixation is either

inflectional or derivational. It is inflectional if it does not form a new word but

only forms a grammatical function of plurality or number, tense, and

comparative and superlative degrees. It is derivational if a new word is derived

or formed by the affixation (aronoff and Fudeman 45).

Our concern here is the derivational morphology. Okpewho and Habila

use the derivational morphology to form new words in their works. For

instance, Okpewho derives the adjectives “untalking” “unsmiling” from the

verbs “talk and smile” (117). Habila uses wrong affixations and wrong

segementations of words such as: Prison. Misprison. Dis. Un. Prisoner – words

of derision or scorn as a result of emotional torture as a prisoner (93). He also

freely uses derivational affixes to form words like de-professionalism,

politicization, polarization (226), uncrossed, uncurling (26), non-deliberate (28),

unfeeling (30), unmade (122), unwell (136) and so on.

45

3.14 Compounding

This is the combination of two separate words or bases to form a single

word. Habila freely compounds or joins words in Waiting for an Angel which

also marks his style. For example fetch-water, half-blocking (71), mud-caked

(71), fast-disappearing (70), baton-carrying, prison-fevered, table-banging

(142), letter-bombed, housedress (202) flowerpots (202), doorbell (202), low-

flying (201), chicken-hearted (198), rain-patterned (7), rain-washed (42) bar-

room (110), brief-case-carrying (167), barbed-wire-topped (167), anaemic-

looking (169), placard-waving (166), and so on.

It is pertinent to say that all the above word formation forms, and few

others not discussed in this work are distinct stylistic features of the two texts.

According to Jonathan Culler in Eyoh (16), “it does not matter whether a word

is a coinage and archaism, or a dialectal term, they all work to engage us in a

proliferation of particularities”.

3.15 Graphology

This is also known as orthography. It refers to the study of the writing

system of a language (Syal and Jindal 21). Every language has its own alphabet,

spelling system, punctuation marks, spacing, paragraphing, capitalization,

italicization, underlining, bold print and so on, and are generally used according

to the norms of the language. For the purpose of foregrounding, Okpewho and

Habila flout or deviate from the norms of these graphological devices in their

works. For instance, Oghenovo in The Last Duty employs small letters to start

46

proper nouns and first person pronoun “I”, small letters to begin paragraphs and

after full-stops, and so on. For instance, Odibo is written odibo, onome,

oghenovo, god, iddu, mukoro, “i”, toje, and so on.

The use of small letters for proper nouns shows the psychological

childishness of Oghenovo (Victoria Alabi 1999:183). According to

Nwahunanya (296), alluding to Okpewho‟s African Fiction (423), “the author is

abusing language not simply as an index of linguistic proficiency but also as a

vehicle of consciousness and vision”. This excerpt from the text also practically

shows this deviation: “i want to be like the big soldier, so that i can give onome

a good beating. calling my father a thief saying the soldiers took away my

father…” (114). According to Leech, “to be stylistically distinctive, a feature of

language must deviate from some norm” (55). Okpewho has deliberately flouted

the rule of capitalization and the full-stop or period for the purpose of

foregrounding.

Other graphological devices such as italicization (118, 136, 30, 239-240,

136, 116, 177 10-11, 46, 86-7, 60, 64 etc); capitalization (30), dashes (84, 106,

71, 59, 98, 51, 34); indentations, hyphenations and so on are used for the

purpose of clarity and emphasis and to captivate the attention of the reader.

Habila also makes a prominent use of graphological devices in Waiting

for an Angel. First he flouts the use of the full-stop or period in English. The

full-stop is only used at the end of complete statements, but he uses it even

when there is no complete statement as in: these. Are the. Your papers. (14);

47

papers. And pencil. In prison. (8). This is a blatant abuse of the full-stop in

English.

Besides the period, Habila also employs the italics in pages (13,14, 79),

indentation (81-82,85-86, 92, 100), capitalization (16,52,30), hyphenation (48),

dash (197) – all for prominence.

3.16 Ellipsis

This refers to the deliberate act of omitting a word or words from a

sentence without distorting the meaning because of the surrounding words and

sentences. It is used to avoid repetition and redundancy and for the purpose of

compression. The omission is indicated by the use of three dots (…) or a dash (–

). Ellipses are used as a result of brain lapses or memory failure, lack of words

or digression or shift of thought. Okpewho and Habila employ it for

compression. In Okpewho‟s The Last Duty, we have: I swear… it wasn‟t easy…

it wasn‟t (124); I… you…I … believe me Toje, it wasn‟t easy. I tri – (124);

oh… em… I have a pain in my neck (150); you come to accuse me of – (25);

my father stole something and…for that reason…the soldiers…shut up (118)

and so on.

Habila also uses ellipses for compression: I thought you were … (31); I

am glad you two are in love. Don‟t play…(97) and so on.

48

CHAPTER FOUR

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LAST DUTY AND

WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

4.0 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

This chapter is aimed at making a comparative analysis of Okpewho‟s

The Last Duty and Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel to bring to the limelight their

similarities and differences. These two novels are indisputably related or similar

in many respects and dissimilar in some other minor perspectives. In the first

place, they are similar because they are of the same ideological stance of

Marxism, historicism, structure, heroes of low mimetic mode, humour, multiple

narration and so on. These shall be discussed and illustrated from the text.

4.1 The Theory of Marxism

This is the socio-political, economic and reactionary ideology of the

German Karl Marx (1818 – 1883). According to Marx, “the history of all

hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” (qtd. in David

Mclellan 1980: 177). Marx makes a social stratification of the people in the

society into two main classes: the bourgeois capitalisists and the proletariats.

The bourgeois capitalists are the owners of the means of production, the

employers of wage labour, the rich at the corridors of power who often use their

socio-economic and political prowess to oppress, exploit, and marginalize the

proletariat. On the other hand, the proletariats are the poor labourers in the

49

capitalist society being down-trodden by the bourgeois capitalists (Mclellan

178).

The proletariats become conscious of their oppression and exploitation

and gather themselves up to fight against and overcome the bourgeoisie to bring

about an egalitarian society. As Abrams puts it, “the struggle between classes is

the essential dynamic of society” (154). Georg Lukacs, an Hungarian

philosopher, asserts that literature and art should be a “reflection of reality”

(Abrams 179). Okpewho and Habila, aware of the capitalist oppression and

exploitation in Nigeria, reflect it in their novels. This ideological stance of

Marxism makes them employ or adopt this particular style of writing.

Paraphrasing the words of Udenta O. Udenta, Chibuzo Asomugha defines style

as “a consequence of ideology” (2008: 220). According to Udenta (1993: 15) in

Asomugha (220),

That when class stratification becomes acute and social relations

of production glaringly unequal and oppressive, the only viable

approach in balancing the equation is a class approach – an

approach that affords one historical perspective and correctness of

vision.

Cliff slaughter (1980) argues that literature should be deployed for

human emancipation (qtd in Asomugha (220) while Achebe in Ohaeto (2003)

(qtd in Asomugha (221) opines that “good literature will do a little bit of

crusading for a cause”.

We see the manifestation of the Marxist ideology in Okpewho‟s The Last

Duty in the Civil War between the secessionist Simbian rebels of the Kweke

50

clan in the Black Gold State versus the Federal Republic of Zonda (3 – 4, 20) as

a whole. Marxism is also seen in the cutlass fight between Odibo and Chief

Toje Onovwakpo butchering each other into coma (217) as the former gains

consciousness and attempts to get freedom, egoism and respect from the latter

who treats him as a non-human.

We also see Marxism in Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel in various

episodes such as the kerosene-starved women of Morgan street‟s demonstration

(113 – 114), the students riot (68 – 73), the street name changing demonstration

at the Local Government Secretariat headed by Joshua Amusu, Brother and

Mao which leads to the death of Hagar, Michael and Eniola, a pregnant

asthmatic, the beating and incarceration of Lomba and sustenance of injuries by

so many (166 – 179), the Gideon Orka led coup, the first putsch in Nigeria on

the 15th

of January, 1966, led by Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu (224), the Civil

War between the Republic of Biafra and Nigeria in 1967 – 1970 (133 – 134)

and so on.

4.2 Historicism

Both Okpewho‟s The Last Duty and Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel are

historical novels or works. Okpewho and Habila have adopted a style of

blending history and literature, thereby emphasizing that a work of literature is

not autotelic and does not end in itself but goes out to the outer world.

According to Derrida in Akwanya (2007:249), “the world is in the text”. This

51

admixture of literature and history is what Paul Ricoeur (1981: 183 – 184) terms

historicism Ricoeur opines:

The general tendency of literary and Biblical criticism since the

mid-nineteenth century has been to link the contents of literary

works, and in general of cultural documents, to the social

conditions of the community in which these works were produced

or to which they were directed. To explain a text was essentially

to consider it as the expression of certain socio-cultural needs and

as a response to certain perplexies localized in space and

time….[a] trend, which was subsequently called historicism

(Ricoeur 1981: 183 – 184) in Akwanya (2007: 248).

Okpewho and Habila have put some historical and socio-cultural

phenomena into their works. For instance, both novels are historical ones as

they all refer to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 – 1970.

Habila does not only make reference to the Nigerian Civil War, but also

other socio-historical and political phenomena such as the annulment of the

1993 June 12 Abiola-Tofa presidential election in Nigeria, coups detat in this

country, Abacha‟s, IBB‟s and Ernest Shoenekan‟s regimes, the death of

Abacha, the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the killing of Dele Giwa in a letter

bomb, Diego Maradona of Argentina, assassination of Kudirat Abiola, the

imprisonment of M.K.O Abiola, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, General

Muhammadu Buhari, Wole Soyinka, the detention of Olusegun Obasanjo,

General Yaradua, the use of names of actual places like Lagos, Warri, Ibadan,

Port-Harcourt, Jos and so on – all live happenings, people, events and places

(Nwahunanya 2007: 279 – 280).

52

In addition, both texts are literary works of the third epoch or period – a

post colonial period or era of political disillusionment in Nigeria and Africa at

large. It is an era of political disillusionment as all the hopes and aspirations of

Africans for independence become futile or abortive. Africans hoped that things

would be better for us all when we gain independence from the colonialists. But

the reverse is the case as our own indigenous leaders are worse than the colonial

masters. According to Augustus Adebayo (1993), our indigenous African

leaders are Whitemen in black skin. In other words, they are Whites in the

disguise of black. This is simply because our African leaders have a similar trait

of oppression and exploitation with the Whites.

African leaders of the post colonial era are oppressive, exploitative,

brutal, corrupt, lawless and power-drunk. In fact, they regard themselves as

daemons, demigods or lords and rule tyrannically. This is referred to as

“internal colonization” where the dominant part of a country treats a group or

region as it might a foreign colony (Anne McClintock 2007:631). Oppression

and exploitation in the third era of African literature always ends in

nonconformity as the oppressed and exploited often fight for freedom or

equality as we can see in Okpewho‟s The Last Duty and Habila‟s Waiting for an

Angel.

4.3 The Structure of the Novels

Both The Last Duty and Waiting for an Angel are similar in structure or

physical outlay. In other words, they have the same visual or physical

53

appearance. In the first place, they are all prose fictions – prose because they are

written in a free-flowing or discursive manner without being patternened into

any metrical or rhythmic unit and written with the everyday language (Abrams

148 and Akwnaya 2006: 121).

Secondly, both of them are chapterless and non-sequential as the stories

are told in form of reminiscences and presentations from the consciousness of

different characters who tell the stories from different perspectives and in no

definite causal relationship. In fact, the plots of both novels are episodic. This

episodicity is as a result of the disillusionment caused by the military

dictatorship and war (Asomugha 223). This chapterless narrative technique is

for the purpose of foregrounding and individuality. In addition, the multiple

narration is for authenticity as it is the participants or horses‟ mouths or eye-

witnesses that are telling the stories. Again, it is a style the novelists employ to

distance themselves from the narrators never to share with their views but to

make or have a direct intimacy with the readers. The readers, after getting the

subjective accounts of characters can now make their objective interpretation

(Ofuani and Longe 361 – 362).

Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel is even a reversed form of narration as the

first episode which begins the novel is supposed to be at the end of it and vice

versa.

Thirdly, both works employ poetry as a narrative style. Okpewho uses

poetry pastiches at the beginning of each part of the three part-divided novel. He

54

uses poems of Salvatore Quasimodo, John Pepper Clark (1), Christopher

Okigbo (91), and Soyinka (171). Quasimodo‟s is the first poem and it is an

admonition to mankind to repent:

But from the deeps of your blood with no

pain, in the just human time

we shall be born again.

Besides Quasimodo‟s, each of the rest poems in the novel is used to sum

up each part of the novel. For instance, Okigbo‟s poem is used to sum up the

intrigue Toje plays on Oshevire and that it is only a critical investigation that

this intrigue can be unravelled:

Except by rooting,

Who could pluck yam tubers from their base? (91).

On the other hand, Lomba writes Love and Prayer poems in Waiting for

an Angel. Lomba‟s poems are personal creations or a slight change of poems of

Donne John, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Graves and so on.

Okpewho and Habila may have used poetry because of the psychological

disfigurement of the characters in the novels and because of the war and

military dictatorship. Poetry, according to Plato in his Meno (1956:156) (qtd in

Akwanya 2004:31), is created out of divine madness. According to Plato, it is a

muse which is a god or goddess that inspires one to write poetry. So, a poet does

have any knowledge of what he is saying because it is the god that speaks

through him. Akwanya likens a poet to a pen that does not know what it is

55

writing. It is after writing that the poet regains consciousness when the god

leaves him. As Paul Coates (1986:1) in Akwanya (2004:31) opines:

Once the trance of composition has passed, the poet finds

himself in the position of a literary critic attempting to

comprehend a work that appears to have been conceived by

another person.

William Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous over flow of

powerful feelings recollected in tranquility” in Ihiegbunam (2006:143). Or they

may have used poetry for picturesqueness or embroidery as, according to

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poetry is the best words in their best order”

(Ihiegbunam: 143).

4.4 Heroes of Low Mimetic Mode

Aristotle identified five categories of heroes: the divine hero, romantic

hero, the hero of the high mimetic mode, the hero of the low mimetic mode and

the ironic mode (Frye 33 – 34). Okpewho and Habila employ the low mimetic

hero in their works. The low mimetic hero is one who is neither superior to

others nor to his environment. This implies that the hero is just one of us (Frye

34) and we jubilate, empathise or sympathise with him in any situation he may

find himself.

Mukoro Oshevire in Okpewho‟s The Last Duty and Lomba in Habila‟s

Waiting for an Angel as well as their fellow sufferers are all characters among

the hoipolloi or plebeians and their arrest, imprisonment, suffering and so on

instill in us fear, pity and purgation of emotions. Both novels are works of

56

interpretive literature – literature “written to broaden and deepen and sharpen

our awareness of life” (Laurence Perrine 1974:3). According to Eustace Palmer,

…all great literature, whether English, African, American or

European, has the capacity to enrich our understanding of life,

extend the range of our sympathies, develop our minds, satisfy

our curiosities and even deepen our knowledge of the social,

political and historical issues that African countries and

universities seem to be so pre-occupied with…(1986:1).

4.5 Humour

This refers to the identification or appearance of funny sayings, events

and actions in literature. Both novelists create humorous episodes or events to

ease tension in the novels. Habila uses it in the episode where Muftau, the

Prison Superintendent, punishes Lomba for writing poems but later gives the

same poems written by Lomba to his girlfriend, Janice, claiming to have

personally written them and further asking him to write more for him as he

(Muftau), being the Prison Superintendent, can make life easy for him as there

would be nothing he cannot do if he wants to. Again, the Prison Superintendent

writes some personal love poems to Janice, his girlfriend, but he copies

Lomba‟s poems and Lomba makes a sarcasm or caricature of him thus:

Sir, your poem is both original and interesting, but the part

that is interesting is not original, and the part that is original

is not interesting (17).

Lomba further satirises him thus:

57

There is nothing I cannot do. You can get me cigarettes, I am

sure, and food. You can remove me from solitary. But can

you stand me outside these walls, free under the stars? Can

you connect the tips of my upraised arms to the stars so that

the surge of liberty passes down my body to the soft downy

grass beneath my feet? (18).

We also see these humorous, sarcastic and satiric episodes in The Last Duty in

the character of Toje Onovwakpo. Toje claims to be a respected celebrity of

Urukpe (133), a big man and rubber magnate and, one of the few names that

lend respect, recognition, credit and catapults or brings the community to the

limelight, yet he indulges in the devilish acts of intrigue, maligning, character

assassination, and adultery and gets venereal infection and loses his potency or

erection. Again, Toje often claims and brags of being an illustrious and

prominent son and at the top echelon of Urukpe and its environs. Yet he is not

enlisted in the Igabo Progressive Union and subtitled Great Sons and Daughters

of Igaboland Almanac (105) – all to make a caricature of him.

4.6 Proverbs

Proverbs are short sentences or statements that express wisdom, and

universal truth. Ruth Finnegan ( 1970:393) defines it as “ a saying in more or

less fixed form marked by shortness, sense and salt and distinguished by the

popular acceptance of the truth tersely expressed in it” (qtd in Dumbi Osani

2008:96). Proverbs are an African cultural practice and African oral literature

58

elements. They embellish or spice up oral conversations in Africa. According to

Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1958:6), “among the Ibo, the arts of conversation

is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are

eaten”. African literary writers use them to show the African flavour. In other

words, to show the Africaness of the work. Okpewho and Habila, being

Africans, employ them in their works to show the local colour. In The Last Duty

we have:

49 A little ache can spoil a good head (48).

50 Only a foolish traveler starves his camel of water (48).

51 If you spare your scabies the harsh scrub of the sponge, merely because it

will hurt your skin, you may later be faced with a malignant boil (109).

52 A man does not suddenly reject his brother simply because he has

contacted yaws (188).

We also have the following proverbs in Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel:

53 The drunkard‟s handshake had gone past the elbow (147).

54 Lightning only strikes the tallest tree (183).

All these examples show the African culture and orality.

4.7 A Contrastive Analysis of The Last Duty and Waiting for an Angel.

In spite of their similarities, The Last Duty and Waiting for an Angel are

dissimilar in some other perspectives. First is on the area of syntax. Although

they all employ parallelisms, chiasmi, pidgin, simple and non-simple sentences,

Habila employs staccato, disfigured, jerky, truncated and disjointed sentences

59

of agrammatic aphasics which are not employed by Okpewho in The Last Duty.

In addition, Habila uses Pidgin and other varieties of non-standard English more

elaborately than Okpewho. In fact, Okpewho uses a highly standard variety of

English more than Habila.

Secondly, on the aspect of morphology, Habila employs compounding,

derivational morphology, and borrowing more elaborately and more freely than

Okpewho. In fact, Okpewho uses such word-formation processes very

sparingly.

On the graphological level, both novelists use graphological devices

such as the period, dash, hyphenation, capitalization, italicization, poetry,

ellipsis and so on. But Habila uses them more elaborately than Okpewho. More

so, Habila uses indentations but Okpewho does not. Again, Okpewho abuses the

use of the capital as we can see in the sentences of Oghenovo who uses lower

case letters to begin the first person singular pronoun “I”, proper nouns and

beginnings of paragraphs and after periods. But Habila does not employ this

graphological deviance.

Habila alludes to other scholars in diverse fields of study, directly quoting

their works and statements in Waiting for an Angel. For instance, he quotes

Wole Soyinka‟s The Man Died and the quotation: “the man dies in him who

stands silent in the face of tyranny (48 and 68); Amilcar Cabral: “every

onlooker is either a coward or a traitor” (48); Martin Luther King: “It is the duty

of every citizen to oppose unjust authority” (49); Franz Fanon: “Violence can

60

only be overcome by greater violence” ( 158) and so. He also alludes to

Shakespeare‟s Macbeth, (153), Charles Dickens‟s Oliver Twist (151), Karl

Marx‟s Das Kapital (123), Kafka‟s Great World of China (96) and so on.

The reference to all these texts implies that there are prior texts and prior

discourses to any text or discourse. In other words, there is an intertextuality and

interdiscursivity in every text and discourse as opined by the Russian linguist

Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s and 1940s which was introduced by Julia Kristeva

a French scholar in 1986 (Johnstone 2008:164 ). The reference to all the

aforementioned works is a vertical intertextuality as it is not intratext or within

but intertext or between. It is intertexual or vertical because it is a paradigmatic

reference.

The quotations and allusions to scholars in other fields of study are shown

by Habila in Waiting for an Angel which are not employed by Okpewho.

61

CHAPTER FIVE

5.0 CONCLUSION

Stylistics aims at investigating a writer‟s gestalt or oeuvre of language

use in a literary text. It describes and interprets how the writer has made

particular, peculiar or individual choices on the language to aesthetically

express his message and how his chosen or selected or regular choices reveal his

personality as the style is the man. This analysis is text-based as the text is the

data-base or raw material with which linguistic analysis or description is carried

out. This necessitates the Hallidayan model employed for this work.

Foregrounding is the cornerstone term in stylistics. Literary writers

individualize the common property of language by deviating from the norms of

the language for embroidery and thus make features of the language stand out to

captivate the attentions of readers for a second look. This deviation for

prominence cuts across all the levels of linguistic descriptions, ranging from

phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax to semantics.

Okpewho and Habila, as creative writers, make an aesthetic or a cosmetic

use of the language to drive home their points and feelings in The Last Duty and

Waiting for an Angel respectively. They make choices, deviations and iterations

on the architecture of language for specific stylistic effects and meanings. These

cut across all the levels of linguistics. But this work concentrates on and treats

foregrounded features of syntax, morphology and graphology as well as the

socio-historical background or influence of the novels.

62

We have also seen that there is a literary language which is a conscious

and special language distinct from the everyday language. This, therefore,

settles the long-driven battle of supremacy between linguistics and literature as

well as the existence or otherwise of a literary language. Stylistics acts as a

bridge as it sits at the boundary between linguistics and literature, merging them

together.

It is also possible to analyse literature with linguistics in spite of the tense

debate on the impossibility of this. This analysis can be on form, content or

context as Michael Halliday opines in his Systemic Functional Grammar.

This work has given us the awareness on how language works on the

parlance of literature. The work will be of immense benefit to its readers as they

appreciate the language application of any work of literature as well as being

able to use language ornamentally.

Finally, the work, being a work on stylistics, synergises or merges

linguistics and literature ensures that literary students should understand the

various levels of linguistic analysis before they bend or break the conventional

rules of language as literature always thrives on deviation for foregrounding.

Equally, students of linguistics should not only master the rules at the various

levels of linguistic analysis but also apply the resources of language in their

analysis of literature.

63

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