A semiotic study of court poetry performance in Nigeria: text and context

Abstract

The tradition and performance of court poetry in Nigeria is popular. This paper examines its performance in four geographical locations where monarchy thrives in the country. It is observed that court poetry performance consists of explicit and implicit systems of communication that are linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesics and para-kinesics. These features orchestrate court poetry discourse. It is against this background that the paper discusses the process of information exchange in court poetry performance in Nigeria. It highlights in particular how kinesics factors responsible for body motion communication such as movements, gestures, postures, silences and breaks enter into mutual relation with literary language for meaning making. The paper also reveals that in the performance of court poetry, the context and the ingenuity of the poet largely influences his ability to shape and reshape his text. It also shows that the characteristic of each performance determines its text and context.