Morphological Deviation in Africa’s New Brood by Timothy Wangusa

Abstract

This article attempts to examine the use of morphological deviation as a style of foregrounding in Timothy Wangusa’s poetry collection -Africa’s New Brood. According to Geoffrey Leech, “poetic language may violate or deviate from generally observed rules of the language in many ways, some obvious, some subtle. Both the means of and the motive for deviation are worth careful study” (Leech, 1969, p. 5) It is this careful and licentious use of language in poetry that brings “…about an alienation of poetic language from everyday language” (Leech 1969, p. 19). With morphological deviation, the focus will be put on morphemes or words being the lowest meaningful unit(s) of syntactic organisation. Morphemes are building blocks for words. One way of producing morphological deviation is by adding an ending to a word it would not normally be added to. This is achieved by affixation (adding prefixes and suffixes to words). Morphological deviation concerns the use of morphemes (building blocks of words) (Short 1996, p. 51). Morphemes are either said to be “bound” if they are part of others or “free” if they can stand alone as complete words. This article will also explicate the reason(s) for which Timothy Wangusa uses morphological deviation in his poetry. Previous studies on Timothy Wangusa are on issues of originality and conclude that Timothy Wangusa’s poetry was greatly influenced by classical and western literary traditions (Alfredo Okello 2005). Other studies on Timothy Wangusa are on novels and his short story and as such, they focus on aspects like themes and narrative techniques but not morphological deviation. This leaves much to be studied on the variable of morphological deviation in Timothy Wangusa’s Africa’s New Brood. This study is intended to exactly fill such gaps and create new insights into Timothy Wangusa’s poetry. This justifies why this research article is worthwhile as it evaluates how Timothy Wangusa employs morphological deviation to create foregrounding.