Negotiating the notion of Affect in Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country

Abstract

Civil war writings in Nigeria are fictional and non-fictional works that project complex socio-political conflicts. Observation has shown that as much as works abound in this direction in linguistic scholarship, very little attention has been paid to the effectual aspects of the Nigerian civil war memoirs. To fill this vacuum therefore, this study sets out to examine the notion of effects in Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country to examine how Achebe employs language to weep up emotions for the Biafrans through Teun Van Dijk’sSocial Cognitive Model of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA), given that CDA sees language as social practice to address power relations, discourse as constituting society and culture, thereby addressing the challenge, power relations or social problems. We found that the distinctive features of affective discourse as the thematization of sympathy and suffering as a superordinate lexeme characterize the memoir. The values are manifested through such linguistic markers as nominalization, generalizations, and foregrounding of such lexical words as death, despair, suffering, and bitterness to effectively account for the discourse of exclusion thereby projecting effectual values of sadness, despair, and sympathy reflecting the different ideological preferences in Nigerian civil war memoirs. The identified aspects of effects are employed to perform three functions in the text: they drive the attention of the audience to see social actors as victims, hide the excluded social actors, and thematize sympathy. This study significantly fills the dearth of work on aspects of effect in Nigerian civil war memoirs, and sets a template for such analysis in linguistic scholarship.