Poetic imagination and Nigerian Pidgin in contemporary Nigerian poetry

Abstract

In Nigerian scholarship, there is a research deficit on the expanding role of Nigerian Pidgin in literary discourse. This article investigates the expanding domains of Nigerian Pidgin by examining how poets creatively manipulate its linguistic resources and African oral literature to foreground issues of environmental degradation in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, endemic poverty and the wanton avarice and autocratic tendencies of Nigeria’s rulers. Five Nigerian Pidgin poems were structurally analysed using Halliday’s systemic functional grammar to establish the link between form and meaning, alongside a socio-semantic reading of other style-defining linguistic features of language use. Apart from enriching the discourse on the expanding role of pidgins and creoles in literary discourse, the findings show that the use of oral literature, conversational discourse structure, graphology, syntactic structure, lexical sets, collocates, negation and noun phrase/substrate code alternation constitute significant stylistic strategies for projecting the poems’ meaning. Finally, we conclude that the poets’ use of Nigerian Pidgin is a significant expansion of its domain and a unique innovation in the discourse of African literature.