Socio-Cultural Patterns in Henri Lopes’ Le Pleurer-Rire and Uwemedimo Atakpo’s Edisua

Abstract

The innovative deployment of any language by a creative writer, and in this case, African writers, creates a distinct style through which s/he reaches out to his/her audience. This issue of language deployment for creative productions can refer to the wider question of choice of linguistic codes for African literature in the light of colonial heritage, hence, the critical questions; first, in what language should socio-cultural productions be expressed—the bequeathed code of the colonial masters or each writer’s indigenous African language? Second, what happens to the linguistic non-conformity in these texts if they are to be translated into another language for pedagogical use? Third, will the radical shift from the known linguistic conventions be a barrier for the translator to maintain the cultural import in them? Style, therefore, becomes an important aspect in the literary analysis of a text, irrespective of the genre of literature the literary text is picked from. A socio-cultural analysis of Henri Lopes’ Le Pleurer-rire and Uwemedimo Atakpo’s Edisua demonstrate to the reader how the writers deploy and manipulate language in an attempt to achieve different levels of language use and the effect(s) of such manipulations. Lexico-syntactic patterns and morphological features are stylistically analyzed using the approach that describes style as the linguistic choice of a writer. This study finds out that each of the linguistic choices has an identifiable function it performs in the text. These linguistic elements contribute meaningfully to the understanding of the writers’ world-view and the central message of the texts.