Validating the subversive

Abstract

In textual analysis of literary texts, critics have either repudiated or maintained their distance from the texts perceived to break their society’s moral code. Some of these texts have been restricted to tertiary institutions where their readers are young adults but banned in secondary and primary schools due to the texts’ perceived immoral effect on the society’s young mind. Yet a closer reading of these texts reveals laden sex images and jokes with realistic cultural references to gender and power relations as well as manhood and (im)morality. This study undertakes an analysis of Okot p’Bitek’s selected poetry Song of Malaya (1971) to validate moral subversion captured by the various sex images and ideas which draw relations between parts of human body and power relations. The study will use the post-colonial and semiotic theories as tools of analysis. The study findings are expected to open up similar studies in other literary texts that may have hitherto been condemned by critics to obscurity and rebuttal.