STYLE-IDEOLOGY NEXUS IN THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR NARRATIVES OF ACHEBE’S THERE WAS A COUNTRY AND ADICHIE’S HALF OF A YELLOW SUN

Abstract

Civil war narratives are fictional and nonfictional works that project complex socio-political conflicts. Existing studies on Chinua Achebe’s and Chimamanda Adichie’s Nigerian Civil War narratives have largely concentrated on thematisation, characterisation, and pragmatic investigation with little attention paid to style and ideology. The study was, therefore, designed to examine the style and ideology nexus in Achebe’s and Adichie’s Nigerian Civil War narratives in order to establish how style is deployed to project ideology in the texts.

Social Cognitive Model, and Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics were adopted as framework. Interpretive design was used. Therewas a Country (Country) and Half of a Yellow Sun (Sun) were purposively selected based on their ideological contents. 320 relevant excerpts from Countryand 105 from Sun were identified and subjected to critical discourse analysis.

The stylistic features used to projectideological leanings in the texts are passivisation, nominalisation, intensity marker, mitigating strategy, dysphemism, euphemism, aggregation, hyponymy and hyperbole. While dysphemism, passivisation, euphemism and mitigating strategies are foregrounded inSun; passivisation, nominalisation, intensity marker, mitigating strategy and hyperbole are prominent in Country. Five ideological leanings are identified in the texts: individualist, collectivist, ethnocentrist, feminist and humanist. Hyponymy, passivisation, and nominalisation reflect sympathy as an aspect of humanist ideology in both texts. Through passivisation, nominalisation, dyspshemism, aggregation and intensity marker, ethnocentrism is implied in the discourse structures of both Country and Sun. While passivisation, nominalisation and hyperbole express individualist and collectivist ideological leanings; passivisation, euphemism and nominalisation reflect feminist ideology. Passivisation and nominalisation are constant with all the ideological leanings discovered in the two texts.In Country,Achebe does not foreground feminist ideolology,whereas in Sun, Adichie uses feminist ideology to reflect class differences and gender oppression of women among the Igbo during the Nigerian Civil War. Both texts contain humanist, individualist, collectivist and ethnocentrist ideological leanings. Two sets of “Us and Them” are found in the texts: the first is realised at the inter-ethnic level among Yoruba, Hausa/Fulani, Igboand the minority groups. This contains collectivist, ethnocentrist, individualist and humanist leanings; and it is found in both Sun and Country. While humanism and individualism, as properties of ‘Us’, are over-emphasised; collectivist ideology as a property of ‘Them’ is de-emphasised. The second set of “Us and Them”,mediated through the feminist ideology, manifests in the relationship between the privileged and the less privileged ethnic Igbo. This second set of “Us and Them” is found only in Sun.

Stylistic features such as passivisation, nominalisation, intensity marker and aggregation function to express different ideological preferences in Chinua Achebe’s and Chimamanda Adichie’s Civil War narratives.