SOURCE: Ofuani, Ogo A. “Digression as Discourse Strategy in Okot p'Bitek's Dramatic Monologue Texts.” Research in African Literatures 19, no. 3 (fall 1988): 312-40.

[In the following essay, Ofuani examines the effects of digression in p'Bitek's poetic monologues.]

This paper discusses the use of digression as discourse strategy in Okot p'Bitek's dramatic monologue texts: Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol, Two Songs (Song of Prisoner, Song of Malaya).

What marks a digression is precisely the fact that “it is not directly related, syntactically, semantically, and even pragmatically, to the main conversational distribution of its adjacent utterances.” In short, a digression does not fit into the “mainstream of conversation.” It breaks the pattern which consists in each utterance adequately “responding” to the preceding one, a pattern which seems to characterize any nondigressive stretch of conversation (Dascal and Katriel). However, the presence of digressions in utterances often does not necessarily make them incoherent. Indeed, digressions are not rare conversational incidents; they permeate all conversations. Nor do they consist of marginal residual conversational material; they have definite roles to play in regulating and sustaining the conversation and in contributing substantially to it.

Digressions are a very common feature of any prolonged discourse, but have been studied mostly in relation to conversational texts.¹ In African literature some interest has been shown in their exploitation in the oral narrator's art.² Therefore, the corpus for analysis in this paper is different, for monologue, whether dramatic or not, is formally different from conversation. Monologue texts are characterized by more phonological, grammatical, and lexical cohesion than many conversational texts: pronouns and demonstratives are, for instance, more likely to have an intratextual referent. There is about them a considerable amount of linguistically realized completeness. They often rely less than conversation on shared experience between speaker and hearer(s), or on features of the immediately and perceptually present situation. The situation created by the language itself tends to be more important than the extralinguistic situation. This means that monologue usually has more apparent continuity and self-containedness than much conversation.³

p'Bitek's dramatic monologue texts involve direct speech from their “singers” who may report or quote addressees not present, situationally. In poetic texts, generally, the possibilities of exchange between interactants are minimal, and in dramatic monologues exchange is almost impossible. Dramatic monologues are “one-sided speech” (Preminger et al. 529). There is the presence of an addresser from whose perspective all is said. The addresser, therefore, attempts to specify the audience and give the message a focus (via apostrophe), to make the communicative chain complete. The feelings, whims, biases, and so on, of the addressee are reported by the addresser himself (often at the risk of distortion!). Dramatic monologues are thus one more step removed from the normal communication process than other literary genres. The utterances in such texts consist of words that the reader is to suppose to have been uttered by the main narrator. Consequently, as he or she tries to create a vivid situation in which all the details are presented, the monologuer adopts a variety of strategies, one of which is the digression.

In p'Bitek's Songs, the singers use digression, in several ways, to add substance to their arguments as they try to persuade the reader-listener to “buy” their points of view. The use of this technique of the traditional storyteller pervades almost all aspects of p'Bitek's poetry. Digressions are part of the repertoire of the oral performer who uses them to achieve different artistic functions. At one point he uses digression to maintain the attention and interest of his audience by entertaining them with an anecdote that is not immediately part of the mainstream of his narration but offers a diversion from his rather monotonous story. In such cases the digression performs a function akin to that of comic relief in drama: to ease boredom while heightening suspense (if introduced at a climactic point in the narration). The relationship between the digression and the mainstream may not be direct but could be thematic, in which case their subject matter differs but the ideas expressed are similar.

A digression may also provide useful analogy to the mainstream of narration, as a kind of parallel or justification for some action(s) described in the narration. Its function may be purely didactic, to stress a lesson which is related to the story. It may perform the function of the flashback. Whatever the function of digression in oral art, it is not often used haphazardly. It serves a stylistic function: its use is measured, and so the storyteller knows when and when not to use it. Isidore Okpewho aptly describes the storyteller's use of digressions in the following words:

The bard's fertile imagination has a tendency now and then to digress from the main track of his story. A word or an idea suggests various associations; a line or an idea recalls an event or a tune; and the imagination is drawn off a tributary trail. The bard may also feel like giving a few explanatory details on a point that he has made—because he wishes to impress his audience with his fund of knowledge, or because he considers his meaning unclear, and his impact inadequate without the explanation; he therefore has little hesitation in making a deviation. To be able to continue with the main subject of his performance, he often has to return to the locus ex quo by repeating the word, line or idea that gave rise to the digression.

(194-95)

To the best of our knowledge, this aspect of the narrative technique of p'Bitek's poetry has received little attention. This paper, therefore, attempts to describe the stylistic significance of these digressions as discourse strategies in the texts in which they occur.

II

All the singers—Lawino, Ocol, Prisoner, and Malaya—digress. The nature of these digressions differs perceptibly from one singer to another to such an extent that it seems necessary to separate the real digressions from the digressional shifts. A shift would involve a change from the main topic, as in all digressions, but the coherence level between the main topic and the newly introduced one is very high. They are so topically related that there is no absolute break between them. In a real digression, on the other hand, there is first a switch in topic, followed by an extended period of abandonment of the original topic, then a return to the original topic. This two-way distinction is made as a matter of degree rather than as an all or none affair. The shift and the digression per se are “digressional” in the general sense of involving a deviation from the original topic.

Song of Lawino provides a good illustration of discourse shifts. Lawino does not, like Ocol and the other singers, digress in the first section of her song. There is an unmistakable sense of urgency in her monologue even in this first section. She is so hurt, so emotionally involved in her complaints about Ocol and what he says or does, and in establishing the conflict between them, that she does not seem to have time for embellishments or distractions. But having established the confrontation in that section, she changes her pattern in the second section. She informs us that the conjugal conflict is unresolved. She shows us, through a description of her physical form, what Tina, the cause of her neglect and rejection, looks like. Her attention then shifts from her personal plight to a description of Tina and back to herself. Her shifts follow the pattern illustrated below.

Section 2 begins with

(1) Ocol rejects the old type.
                    He is in love with a modern woman,
                    He is in love with a beautiful girl
                    Who speaks English.

(21)

In (1) apostrophe helps mark Lawino's disposition: she does not talk to Ocol directly in spite of the use of his first name in line 1. She is complaining to another addressee. The parallel structures in lines 2 and 3 begin in the third person (“her”). The shift from first name to third person indicates present distance between Lawino and Ocol. If the tense of these lines is compared with that of the next stanza (example 2 below), we easily see the basis for nostalgia and hence the shift. In the past they sat together; now, Ocol is in love with a “modern woman,” “a beautiful girl.” The parallel form in (1) emphasizes the present physical difference between Lawino and Tina, Ocol's mistress. The narrative time is from present to past. We easily recognize that Lawino has become “the old type.” So we expect a description of the modern woman. But, instead, in (2) Lawino goes on a nostalgic reminiscence triggered off by the expression “But only recently” used, as an opening bracketing device,⁴ to introduce the narrative shift:

(2) But only recently
                    We would sit close together, touching each other!
                    Only recently I would play
                    On my bow-harp
                    Singing praises to my beloved.
                    Only recently he promised
                    That he trusted me completely.
                    I used to admire him speaking in English.

(21-22)

In (2) “But” is a contrastive transitional term, and the contrast is elaborated by the adverbial phrase “only recently” that is used three times in parallel structures which have the effect of emphasizing her regret (lines 1, 3, and 6). In each case the described shared action is in the past (“would sit,” “would play,” “trusted”). “Only recently” also indicates that the habitual action in line 8 has stopped (“used to admire”). The loss of habit is thereby two-way: Ocol no longer sits with Lawino; Lawino no longer admires his English speech. Example (2) is thus topically closely related to example (1) because of the cohesive relation of anaphora that exists between them and establishes a logical cohering relationship between their ideas.

In the next four stanzas of section 2, Lawino describes Clementine who “dusts dirt ash all over her face” and “looks like the guinea fowl” (22). In the seventh stanza, Lawino shifts from Tina's appearance to make a general statement about the effect of the smell of “carbolic soap” and “powder” (ironic accoutrements of Tina's makeup). In the eighth, she links her dislike for powder with Tina:

(3) I do not like dusting myself with powder …
                    But when a black woman has used it
                    She looks as if she has dysentery;
                    Tina looks sickly.

(25)

Line 4 of (3) carries the comment about Tina's physiognomy. Lawino's prolixity is becoming obvious: one of the demands of her monologue discourse situation and its constraints which makes her provide a background that she can only narrate or report.

She continues with descriptions of Tina's physical appearance until the twenty-first stanza, when she shifts from Tina (the cause of her rejection) to her plight (the effect of her husband's neglect). She does so in three stanzas, and from the twenty-fifth stanza to the end of the section, she goes on a self-justifying crusade: “I am not unfair to my husband, / I do not complain” (27). This face-saving ploy does not work, since she has actually been complaining. She extols her virtues and those of Acoli womanhood in which the husband is the center of attention and the pivot of the homestead. She implies that the competition between Tina and herself is not balanced, since Tina and Ocol do not seem to have given her a chance (“I do not fear to compete with her,” 29). She is, therefore, surprised at Ocol's preference. Ocol should stop insulting her, should not despise their Acoli culture and its values, and must not uproot the basis of their communal existence, “the Pumpkin.”

Therefore, thematically and structurally, the whole of section 2 is a coherent unit. All that Lawino says is textually and topically relevant. There is no point that needs explanation; there are no extended metaphors or similes, no anecdotes. Her changes in narrative momentum are only shifts. They are not real digressions as the original topic is never dropped and a new topic introduced, which in turn is dropped and replaced by the old topic which is reintroduced.

Lawino's digressions are mostly shifts of the type described above. There is usually no sharp topical break between the mainstream and the point of shift. They tend, therefore, to correspond chiefly with what have been called “utterance-based digressions” which “are characterized by the fact that some kind of ‘content’ relation holds between the mainstream utterances and the digressional ones” (Dascal and Katriel 214). There is a whole range of instances in which, although certain utterances are relevant to the topic, and even to the main “topic” of the discourse, they are perceived as somewhat digressional. Among these cases are those in which relations of analogy, substantiation, instantiation, reason, generalization, and so on, obtain between the mainstream and the digressional utterances.

Lawino's digressions usually take a specific pattern. First, there is a kind of premise that is a report of what Ocol says or does to Lawino; there is Lawino's restatement of her stand, providing a kind of counterpoint; then she elaborates, illustrating with various examples that actually provide the basis for digression; she ties up her argument/complaint with a conclusion.

Section 5 of Song of Lawino (entitled “the giraffe cannot become a monkey”) amply illustrates this pattern. The proverblike statement in the title sets the tone for the section. It provides a thematic focus so that when Lawino reports that Ocol says that she has no idea of beauty, we guess the direction of her argument:

(4) My husband tells me
                    I have no ideas
                    Of modern beauty.

(51)

Thus, Lawino reports Ocol's statement in the present, as it still affects her (hence the use of the verbs “tells” and “have”). The reader-listener is her direct addressee.

This pattern recurs in several stanzas in this section. For instance, Ocol's reported statements trigger Lawino's counterpoint:

(5) Ask me what beauty is
                    To the Acoli
                    And I will tell you;
                    I will show it you
                    If you give me a chance.

(52)

The directives in lines 1-2 of (5), while seeming to be addressed to Ocol, could well have been meant for Lawino's initial addressee in passage (4), the reader-listener. This ambiguity rests on the neutrality of “you,” especially as it is not followed by a person-deictic apostrophe. It initiates Lawino's argument/lament (considering her use of the conditional clause in line 5) and acts as a digression-opening bracketing device. It acts as a cue for her to “show” Ocol (and anyone else willing to listen) what beauty means to the Acoli. She digresses in the form of a flashback to substantiate her claim, and the tense also changes to suit narrative time (“you once saw me, / You saw my hair style / And you admired it,” 52). She also elaborates, providing illustrations of Acoli beauty and how beauty differs according to race and culture:

(6) The hair of the Acoli
                    Is different from that of Arabs;
                    The Indian's hair
                    Resembles the tail of a horse; …
                    And is different from that of a white woman.

(53)

The tense in (6) reverts to the present with its timelessness because Lawino is making statements she sees as facts; hence she adopts the verbs “is” and “resembles” and other similar forms in other elaborations she provides (53-58). The different images she uses to give leverage to her argument center round the same theme: the relative nature of beauty.

After a series of digressions, Lawino reintroduces the initial subject of Ocol's denigration of Acoli culture. This refocuses attention on the subject matter, and for elaboration, she digresses further. She describes Tina and modern hairdressing. The picture she paints is awful. As in the first part of this section, the digressions in this second part are contrastive, all aimed at showing the differences between Tina and herself. Of note is her description of the constant supply of water in Ocol's house (60-61). One does not immediately see the import of this description until she gives a contrastive turn to it by saying:

(7) But the woman
                    With whom I share my husband
                    Does not wash her head.

(61)

Passage (7) refers anaphorically to Lawino's earlier description of Tina (“She washes her hair / With black ink,” 60). Lawino is being satirical. But instead of her usual ironic description, her criticism is now outright and direct. Her gaze focuses on the traditional trend in Tina's behavior. It reduces Tina's importance and, therefore, questions the wisdom in Ocol's preference for her. It makes us wonder if Tina is not mad—to prefer ink to water for hair washing. The importance of these descriptions to the husband-wife debate is that they boost Lawino's one-sided argument and win sympathy for her. She tries to project herself as the objective but offended co-wife.

Lastly, Lawino emphasizes her own beauty to Ocol (“Ocol, my friend / Look at my skin / It is smooth and black,” 63) before she concludes her case:

(8) I am proud of the hair
                    With which I was born
                    And as no white woman
                    Wishes to do her hair
                    Like mine,
                    Because she is proud
                    Of the hair with which she was born,
                    I have no wish
                    To look like a white woman.

(63)

The long and multiply coordinated structure of the complex sentence in (8) strikes us in its resemblance to the structure of legal construction where several ideas are thrown into one sentence through coordination and subordination of clauses.⁵ In (8) four main clauses are coordinated with the conjunctions “and” and “because,” and even punctuation marks. To clinch her argument in (8) (and in the rest of the section), Lawino introduces a comparison that provides an analogy that suggests an authenticity to her debate:

(8a) No leopard
                    Would change into a hyena …
                    Let no one
                    Uproot the pumpkin.

Example (8a) is significant because its first two lines make us recall the title of section 5 with which it relates cohesively: she begins with one idea and ends with it, as a kind of conclusion. The imperative nature of lines 3 and 4 also reveals Lawino's stance in the cross-cultural conflict she has described in detail. Its significance for Lawino is that Acoli culture is unique to the Acoli, and so she should not be judged by the values of others, as Ocol tries to do.

The digressions favored by Lawino therefore take the form of self-contained stories, anecdotes, or jokes, which are neatly rounded off once the point has been made and do not substantially disrupt the main flow of her discourse. This pattern recurs in the Song, as each section picks, discusses, and finishes off a theme or subtheme, all of them connected to the main Lawino-Ocol conflict of the whole Song. It is used too in descending order in Song of Ocol and Song of Prisoner.

III

Song of Ocol reveals another dimension in the use of digression to further an argument and sell the speaker's point of view. Where Lawino's digressions are based on the text and depend on premises using repeated introductory narrative clauses such as “Ocol says …” or “My husband says …,” with much dependence on anaphora and cataphora, Ocol's usage differs. With the reader's familiarity with Song of Lawino taken for granted, Ocol normally takes off with exophoric references.⁶ Thus, Song of Ocol is not as intratextually referentially complete as Song of Lawino. It relies more on the shared experience between speaker and hearer(s) than on the situation textually created by the monologuer himself.

The first movement of Song of Ocol illustrates this. If the poem is perceived as an “answer” or “reply” in defense of Ocol, then most of the allusions will be clear. If this is not taken into consideration in interpreting Ocol's utterances, he is bound to be dismissed as “abrupt” and inelegant vis-à-vis Lawino's. His urgency is akin to that of the defendant who has patiently waited for the plaintiff (Lawino) to finish making her case. This posture of defense explains the directness with which he launches into his attack:

(9) Woman,
                    Shut up!
                    Pack your things
                    Go!
                    Take all the clothes
                    I bought you
                    The beads, necklaces
                    And the remains
                    Of the utensils,
                    I need no second-hand things.

(9)

The effect of the apostrophe “woman” in line 1 of (9) derives from the fact that addressing a woman as just “woman” is a particular stigma. It makes her nameless, personless, amorphous, without identity—a situation that has made K. L. Goodwin conclude that Lawino is not really the subject of Ocol's attack (Goodwin 162). The imperatives (lines 2, 3, 4, and 5) and the short lines testify to Ocol's impatience. Lawino's lines are longer, a testimony to the fact that she is more relaxed and had more time for her attack on Ocol.⁷ Ocol's short lines set the pattern for Prisoner and Malaya, the other two harassed characters of Two Songs who start their defenses with the disadvantage of being “bad.” They are consequently more hurried and less flamboyant than Lawino.

Ocol digresses after only three stanzas, which relate to a single subject, “woman.” In the fourth, the woman's “song” is the focal point of ridicule (obviously an exophoric reference to Song of Lawino):

(10) Song of the woman
                    Is the confused noise
                    Made by the ram
                    After the butcher's knife
                    Has sunk past
                    The wind pipe
                    Red paint spraying
                    On the grass.

(10)

A similarity exists in the note of certainty exhibited in (10) and that of Lawino in (6) above, especially in the use of the verb be with its quality of being factual in the present simple. The verb “is” (line 2) equates the subject in line 1 with the extended metaphor in lines 2-8 (as subject complement). The woman's “song” is still topically related to the woman (i.e., as we move from example 9 to 10) and is, therefore, part and parcel of the mainstream of narration. It is similar to Lawino's strategy in the use of the utterance-based digression that we have classified here as shifts in discourse direction. The word “song” reminds Ocol of Lawino's attack on his personality. He thus assumes a conspiratorial camaraderie between himself as defendant and the reader-listener/audience. Ocol assumes that Lawino's song is still fresh in our minds, and in providing “the other side of the coin” (his defense), he expects and believes he will be understood. The implied addressees are the readers. If not, Ocol will not use definite reference in line 1 or (10). This is a sympathy-buying ploy, similar to the strategy a speaker adopts during a conversation in which he exploits the interlocutor's foreknowledge and so economizes on his words to avoid repetition. The only difference here is that the audience is incapable of ever interrupting Ocol and bringing him back to his topic if he strays from it. In a sense, therefore, Ocol provides his own cues. We will not ask him “what woman?” or “which song?” We already know, and are thus expected to excuse his abruptness.

From the fourth to the sixth stanzas, Ocol partly explains, informs, and describes the nature of the song, using different images and associations to tie up his intention. The images of death persistent in the slaughter of the ram (“butcher's knife … past the wind pipe,” “yesterday's funeral,” “old tomb,” “dry bones,” “skulls,” “earth,” “extinguished,” “without life,” etc.) are used to reveal Ocol's attitude. To him, the song is futile, worthless, and ineffective.

His digression in the seventh stanza differs from that adopted earlier in the section. There is a topical disconnection between it and the foregoing—either in reference to “woman,” her “song,” or the song's futility. The question addressed both to the woman and the reader-listener, but more to the latter, is unexpected. It is not directly related to the subject “woman”:

(11) Have you heard
                    The sigh of a monarch
                    In exile?

(11)

For its abruptness, passage (11) looks more like a distraction at its point of introduction. But we recognize it as a rhetorical question whose answer is obviously “No.”⁸ It serves as a storyteller's indication of a wish to digress—a digression-introducing device. Because the reader still expects an answer, it is not stylistically, and, therefore thematically, insignificant. We are aware that the narrator wants to create a situation, an anecdotal one, in which he seeks to make us see the parallel between the lost glory of an impotent, disinherited “monarch” and the jealous housewife who has lost her pride of place in her husband's affection and is whipping up sentiment against him, to win sympathy for herself. The reader sees the relationship between the question (and its explanation in other stanzas) and Ocol's initial command to Lawino in (9) to “pack your things / Go!” The relationship is therefore, thematic: housewife and monarch have lost their homes.

In the use of this strategy, Ocol as first-person narrator further exploits his role as omniscient narrator. He not only describes but comments on the plight of the deposed king. He seems to have privileged access to the thoughts and feelings of this king, which he provides in the form of free direct speech. He is in a position (he suggests) to tell what happens to whom as long as it is relevant to throwing more light on his immediate topic—that is, Lawino's reaction to her rejection and his attitude toward it. The monarch's story, his thoughts, regrets, and so on, are presented in stanzas 9, 10, and 11. Ocol temporarily puts off attention from himself as the narrator and adopts the fictional position of the monarch so that we can hear “the sigh of the monarch” ourselves:

(12) Yesternight!
                    Yesternight ah!

(11)

Typographically, the monarch's direct speech is not put in quotation marks but is indented to mark it off from the mainstream of Ocol's commentary and narration:

(12a) Under the arm-pit
                    It is sticky,
                    The remains of a shirt
                    Sticks to his back
                    Yesternight ah!
                    The hot bath
                    The thick purple carpet
                    The red slippers.

(12)

This technique makes it possible for us to hear both Ocol and the monarch.⁹ As Ocol is the storyteller, we expect him (and in using the same technique, the other singers) to adopt a different “tone of voice” to distinguish his own personal thoughts, feelings, and utterances from the monarch's. This is a manifestation of one of the requirements of monologue, which needs the single speaker to have an advanced skill of impersonation.

In the eleventh stanza, the technique is taken a step further. Ocol comments on the state of the monarch's thirst, lets us hear the monarch soliloquize (or monologue internally), and within the monarch's speech/thought process, provides us with direct-speech-within-direct-speech, as we hear a third character. The monarch's regret heightens as he laments the loss of his wife and re-creates (internally?) his wife's speech. This time, the third voice within this Ocol—monarch—monarch's wife's monologue pattern is put in quotation marks.¹⁰ The eleventh stanza is quoted in full for visual effect:

(13) His dry lips taste salty
                    A ball of thirst
                    Is climbing up his throat
                    He is forcing down
                    Some saliva, 5
                              Yesternight
                              The waiter on his knee
                              The woman whispering
                              “My Lord, My husband,”
                              The red wine 10
                              The soft lights
                              Woman's smile
                              Inviting man to bed,
                              The hot lips
                              Of her younger sister 15
                              Firm breasts
                              The embrace …
                    He looks at his hands
                    At the black finger nails
                    Cold sweat. … 20
                    He is choking,
                    He keeps asking himself,
                    “But why? Why? Why?”

(12-13)

Lines 1-5 of (13) are Ocol's narrative description of the physical position of the deposed monarch. So he uses the third-person (“his dry lips,” “his throat,” “he is …”) to signal his reference to the monarch and the monarch's speech (or thoughts). The monarch's wife's speech is reproduced within the monarch's own reminiscence (lines 6-17). But “his” (line 7) shows that Ocol reports the monarch's thoughts/thought processes. If it were directly uttered by the monarch, line 7 would have been “The waiter on my knee.” Line 9 is again a direct reproduction of the woman's speech, heralded by the narrative introductory clause “the woman whispering” (line 8). The narrator does not report her “whispering.” He gives it immediacy by having her use first-person pronominal reference to address the monarch: “My Lord, My husband.” This makes it obvious that “Lord” and “husband” do not in any way refer to the narrator but to the monarch. The monarch would himself adopt another tone of voice. Though the narrator reports the monarch's thoughts, there are clues that they constitute a kind of “stream of consciousness” (internal monologue) pattern, for they are thrown in as they occur: “the red wine,” “the soft lights,” and so forth. They are scattered recollections of the monarch's past as they race through his mind. In lines 18-23 the narrator goes back to his own commentary and description of the monarch's plight, with one instance of the use of direct speech in the last line (the monarch's self-interrogation).

This strategy is complicated and can be managed only by an adept storyteller who shifts stances as the occasions call for them and who uses the strategy to enhance performance. He has to change the tone of his voice as he changes persona. These changes in tone of voice may have a comic effect, but they also are aimed at narrative distance and objectivity: the narrator is trying to say, “What you hear is not mine but another's thoughts and feelings.” They are also aimed at arousing interest in the narration as the anecdote unfolds so that the digression is not boring.

Other punctuation marks, in addition to quotation marks, are used to mark the introduction and stopping points of digressions. In (13) the end to the monarch's speech is indicated by three dots (line 17). Four dots are used to show where the initial narrator (Ocol) breaks off in his digression to reintroduce the topic, as it were (line 20). Since Ocol monologues, the reader-listener cannot call his attention back to the issue at stake. Ocol does so himself; he applies all the controls. His decision is marked graphologically. Punctuation, therefore, is a significant and stylistically important part of the text, not mere embellishment.

So within this single movement, two patterns of digressions are discernible: the first, directly related to the topic, is a full digression (it involves a topic dislocation). The digression opening device used in the second is deliberately different from the first to show the interrupted trend of thought revealed by the content of the question. It is not, however, totally disruptive in the sense of being insensible, unconnected, or incoherent with the mainstream. Thematically, we are made to see the relationship between the helplessness (and regret) of the monarch's situation, that of the woman and her song, and Lawino's complaints. It is used to buttress Ocol's attitude toward Lawino. The king has lost his kingdom, his glory, and is nostalgic. Lawino has lost Ocol's attention and is also regretful. Their situations are analogous. Ocol's argument is that Lawino has no case or has lost one and that her frustration is thus understandable. The air of camaraderie that he adopted in asking the question is aimed at bringing the reader-listener emotionally closer to his argument. Ocol, therefore, gives Lawino's plight more immediacy in portraying the monarch the way he does.

In the twelfth stanza, there is a reintroduction of the mainstream topic: “song of the woman.” More explanations are given to the nature of the song. Ocol employs the equative pattern “Song of the woman is …” to digress further in stanzas 12-16. This pattern makes all the described images direct metaphors (viz., “Song of the woman / Is the mad bragging / Of a defeated General”; it is “the pointless defiance / Of the condemned”; the song is “rotting buffalo”; it is “sour sweet,” “pork gone rancid,” 13-16). These epithets have an elaborative function. Ocol's intention is to abuse “woman”; these descriptions, as illustrations of her “debased nature,” merely reveal the intensity of his feelings.

In the seventeenth stanza, Ocol's abuse of Lawino undergoes a significant change of tone because it reveals the extent of Ocol's subjectivity (example 14 below). The epithets described in the preceding paragraph were intended to carry a tone of authority in their use of the factual “is.” It is as if they are undebatable, true, matter of fact, and impersonal (for being objective assessments). But in this stanza, Ocol becomes openly personal. He opts for the first-person pronoun “I.” This pattern is used in the remaining three stanzas of this typical section. He invokes the “Old Homestead” and the “Pumpkin,” both symbolic motifs used by Lawino. But his attitude toward them is different from Lawino's (14a is the seventeenth stanza; 14b, the eighteenth):

(14a) I see an Old Homestead
                    In the valley below
                    Huts, granaries …
                    All in ruins;
(14b) I see a large pumpkin
                    Rotting
                    A thousand beetles
                    In it.

(16)

After evading the subject of his cultural estrangement raised by Lawino, and refusing to broach it by being initially oblique in referring to her as “woman,” he becomes more specific. He seems to have come to terms, temporarily, with the fact that the woman is his wife, Lawino. This message filters through when he “comes home,” as it were, and invokes his houseboy in the last stanza of the section:

(15) Houseboy,
                    Listen
                    Call the ayah
                    Help the woman
                    Pack her things,
                    Then sweep the house clean
                    And wash the floor,
                    I am off to Town
                    To fetch the painter.

(17)

In (15) Ocol is back to his matrimonial home, even if it is only to ask Lawino to leave. This section reveals a degree of emotional involvement absent in earlier stanzas. In spite of his earlier detachment, and despite his determined insistence on referring to Lawino as “woman” rather than by name, he asks his servant to pack her things. The use of the definite article in line 4 (“the woman”) makes her identity fairly specific: at least the houseboy too knows the woman. The rotting homestead of (14), we come to accept, is after all his home. It is his duty to clear the dirt and make it habitable. Despite his revulsion for “woman,” we cannot help seeing him as pathetic as he accepts his cultural reality, although he continues to voice his rejection of it. His rejection to the end makes his character fairly consistent. He shows himself consistent with Lawino's description of his type. He is no less real for this fact.

IV

In Two Songs digressions are adopted in different forms for different effects. Prisoner, for instance, adopts a different strategy from the other singers. He uses the situations in proverblike and epigrammatic constructions as analogues to justify his case. This pattern recurs in his Song except in sections 1, 5, 10, 12, and 15. He uses them as premises to create a situation that he then lets us see has an application to his own life.

For example, section 2 of Song of Prisoner begins with this declarative statement:

(16) The foul smell
                    Of the world
                    Rises like cumulus clouds
                    And clings on the bare walls
                    Like a baby monkey
                    On its mother's back.

(21)

This establishes a setting from which Prisoner initiates his digression. He moves from his personal suffering in the cell to the “Chief's dog” (22), to the “mosquito legs” of his children, to his wife, then pleads “hunger,” goes back to his children, to wife, pleads insanity, uses another stanza that sounds very much like the first, and ends the section with his personal plight in the prison cell.

Our initial response to these digressions is to conclude that they are the product of a confused and unsteady mind, the product of Prisoner's suffering. But they are not without significance, particularly the simile of the “baby monkey / On its mother's back” in (16) above. The tenacity and unloosening grip of the “baby monkey” is compared to the strength and pervasiveness of the squalor he describes. They all are united by the theme of hunger. Prisoner is hungry; his children suffer malnutrition from the dreaded disease kwashiokor (what he calls “their infant pregnancies”), his wife has no food to cook because she waits in vain for him to return with “beans,” “maize flour,” and “salt.” Yet, the chief's dog consumes pounds of meat and jugs of milk.

These digressions help in establishing a contrast between his family's suffering and the luxury in the life of their oppressors. They tend to make us take the prisoner's side and identify with him before we realize that he has committed an offense that is immoral (from the point of view of the society and its laws). As is usual with p'Bitek's poetry, the authorial intention here could be to create irony.

However, such a discernible pattern of incoherence exists in the discourse of this Song that different interpretations have been offered about the persona(e) in it. Some critics believe that there is only one prisoner who on some occasions involves himself in the confusion and self-deception that create the impression that there are two prisoners (especially in the seventh movement, “voice of a dove,” which seems out of tune with the rest of the poem).¹¹ Other critics feel that there are really two prisoners (a poor one whose voice reechoes throughout most of the poem, the misused political assassin and unsung hero of Uhuru who is angry and pleads to all kinds of repression, the defenseless and badly beaten prisoner of all the movements, except the seventh; and the rich, satisfied, unperturbed prisoner of the seventh, whose detention is only momentary) (Heron; Roscoe). Edward Blishen seems alone in suggesting that there are three voices and personalities in the poem, though he fails to establish the existence of three separate masks; he does not illustrate why, how, or where in the text the possibility of multiple characters suggests itself.¹² Monica Nalyaka Wanambisi, however, presents a marginal case. She states fairly categorically that “the Song is sung by a prisoner” who is “a composite of two prisoners, each with his own history, crime and concerns” (70). She explains:

In Song of Prisoner, there were two histories and, therefore, two biographies of two different prisoners. However they are blended in together because of the concentration on the single prison situation. This single dramatic moment and setting, that is, this single moment in a plot conveys the full despair, anger, fury, and fiercely expressed frustration of anyone anywhere who is in political imprisonment.

(101)

Her equivocal position on the existence of a two-in-one prisoner does not resolve the controversy. But she is emphatic in her analysis of the points of dialogic break in the text by suggesting that “the first ten sections are devoted to one prisoner who is called ‘a vagrant, a loiterer’” (70), while the second, “another prisoner with a totally different biography emerges in sections 11 and 12” (71).

There is, therefore, no doubt that a controversy exists. But there is no unanimity about the exact positions of dialogic breaks in the text, irrespective of whether the existence of one, two, or multiple prisoners is suggested. Where, for instance, Wanambisi suggests a diversion in section 11, and Goodwin agrees, a majority, including Heron and Roscoe, think the break is between section 7, on the one hand, and the other sections, on the other hand. If the suggested breaks in dialogic tone exist, are there clues to suggest the presence of one, two, or more prisoners? There is no doubt then the need to look at the song more closely as a text, particularly from the point of view of its digressions.

Several clues point to the presence of a single prisoner. The title of the poem is very important. It has appeared as Song of a Prisoner (U. S. edition) and Song of Prisoner (African edition), both capable of different but related interpretations. The indefinite article in the former suggests one unidentified prisoner, who has an almost allegorical (generalized, representative) quality, referring to any one prisoner who finds himself immersed in the kinds of experiences narrated in the poem. Phonological cohesion can also help here to suggest only one prisoner known to the poem (“Song of a Prisoner,” i.e., if the article is emphasized).¹³ The omission of the article in the latter edition can also be explained grammatically: in “Song of Prisoner,” the word “Prisoner” is used with concrete reference achieved through a play with the semantic features of nouns. “Prisoner” is a common noun but the omission of the article and its capitalization give it the status of a proper noun—makes it a name, thus giving it specificity. Prisoner is now a person, not a class. In both editions, then, a single individual is suggested, with or without identity.¹⁴

This suggestion is bolstered by the cohesive use of the first-person singular pronoun, “I,” throughout the poem. In the first section (“Dung of chicken”), all the woes of the prisoner are personalized. The stone floor “lifts her powerful arms / … To welcome me / As I sit on her navel” (11); as he boasts about his prowess as a thug and athlete, he pleads with us to “see the muscles / Of my arms / I can break your neck / Do you realize?” (13); in anger, he asks us why he should not sleep in the green grass “while I nurse / My hunger” (15); on complaining about the neglect of his children, he affirms that “my children howl / Like mad dogs” (17); and he exhorts us to listen to the footsteps of the wizard, desecrating, “dancing on my father's / Grave” (17). The same trend pervades the Song, even in sections 7 and 11, where dialogic breaks have been identified. Though the message differs from section to section, there is a textual uniformity in the use of the first-person singular pronoun throughout the poem.¹⁵

Bearing in mind the textual unity suggested above, we could examine the prisoner's pattern of digression to see what clues it too holds. Sections 1-6 are unanimously agreed to have been spoken by the same prisoner. At the end of section 6, we are left with this question:

(17) Can you hear them saying
                    That my Clan
                    Will never rise to Power,
                    And I will die in deep poverty
                    And my children
                    Will become thieves?

(53)

In this dramatic monologue situation, this (rhetorical) question remains unanswered. If it is viewed as a digression-introducing ploy, a strategy to let him provide the answer himself, then the logical takeoff point is section 7. Does a cohesive link exist between the end of section 6 and the beginning of 7? None seems to exist, on the surface, when Prisoner starts with the anecdote:

(18) The tiny lagut bird
                    Carries a leaf of grass
                    To the olango thorn bush
                    To erect a hut
                    For her children
                    Who knock loudly
                    At the gate
                    And scream
                    To be let out.

(57)

The preceding section had ended on a personal (human) note which seems discordant with the reference to the “lagut bird” and its family in (18). As stated earlier, Prisoner shows a predilection for the use of analogy as a digressional strategy. A metaphorical link exists between Prisoner's family (17) and the bird's family of section 7: a thematic link lies in the parental provision of sustenance for children. The cohesive link between the two is lexicalized: “children.” At the end of 7 (17), Prisoner laments his poverty and his inability to fend for his children. In the earlier section 2 (21-25), he had decried their “infant pregnancies” (22). The beginning of section 7 shows the lagut bird providing for its family in clear contrast to Prisoner's. It, therefore, offers an optimistic takeoff for his psychological ramble throughout the section; he has been so preoccupied with providing for his wife and children that he goes on a mentally soothing delusive journey. He paints a beautiful picture of familial bliss, one consonant with the bliss in the anecdote of the lagut bird. Again, the section is in simple present tense to show he conceives of the situation as not only having an immediate significance, but a for-all-time effect.

Prisoner imagines a situation of peace and freedom for his wife and children, and exhorts his wife to

(19) Sleep peacefully
                    My love,
                    Dream sweet dreams,
                    Dream about our first meeting
                    In the forest …

(58)

Typographically, Prisoner wanders off at this point: the discontinuity dots in (19) signal a break in narrative/thought process mainstream. Their “first meeting” contrasts with the present state of affairs. We are then not surprised at his nostalgic retrospection. The reality is that he is in jail! But to keep the posture of bliss, he charges his wife not to allow the present to dampen memories of the past which now act as a palliative. Hence, he exhorts her to “jump with joy,” when she hears the news of his arrest. The section reverberates with Prisoner's optimism—he remains in his make-believe dream state. Telling his wife to “rejoice”; asking his children not to cry; wishing that he be defended by the best lawyers; his delusion of freedom (“Our black nationalistic judges / And those who hired me / Will set me / Free,” 59); asking his wife to “sleep for the last time / In that old hut / With leaking thatch,” his dream of a farm “in the fertile valley / A thousand acres / Of heaven / For you and me / And our children” (60), the perfect pastoral picture of his children playing and swimming with crested cranes in a stream in the estate while hooking fish for lunch—all are part of his grandiose self-deception, fantasy, and wishful thinking. We are not surprised that his mental journey of life in an unattainable “heaven” climaxes on a libidinal note:

(20) Your house stands
                    On the crest
                    Of a small hill …
                    Darling,
                    Your bed is soft
                    Like the voice of a dove,
                    And warm
                    Like the womb!

(61)

In (20) Prisoner is only modest in making oblique reference to “your house” when he really means “our house.” We are, therefore, not surprised that the oppressed lower-class victim wishes for the luxuries that he has revealed are characteristic of the life-style of his elitist oppressors: he wants to partake of the luxuries of the Ocols and is not sorry about this desire. His boastfulness tallies with this new-found source of imagined power.

Prisoner's optimism is expressed in other ways in this section. Apart from his dream of utopian luxuries, his language is also expressive of his mental posture. Lexically, he talks of “great news,” “joy,” “rejoice,” “heaven”; he addresses his wife in the first person as “wife” and uses the endearment “my love” twice. Earlier on, he had addressed her as merely “woman” (44) when he describes her assumed infidelity with “the big chief.” Now, he even calls her “Darling,” an expression of his present state of emotive well-being. The fact that the tone of section 7 contrasts with the tone of continued complaint and lament in the earlier sections does not imply the presence of a second prisoner who is richer, more powerful. The sudden relief found here seems to be Prisoner's solution to his mental struggle over the problem of his family, particularly his children, expressed before in sections 2 and 6. The vocatives used in section 7 indirectly heighten the feeling of loss or neglect that he will feel on realizing that he has been dreaming. We know at the end of this section that the answer to the question in (17) at the end of section 6 is still not given, particularly when “womb” in (20) above, which suggests fetal protection and love at the end of section 7, heralds another analogy in section 8. This time, Prisoner conjures a situation where mothers, in perversion, devour their children:

(21) The sharks of Uhuru
                    Devour their own children,
                    The heads
                    Of their blood brothers
                    Bash with the battle axes
                    Of their tails.

(65-66)

The only explanation we can give to the contrast between the tones of sections 7 and 8 is that the word “womb” in (20) brought the prisoner's thoughts back from his escapist trance to the reality of his cell and present predicament. His maltreatment, neglect, and consequent resentment and disillusionment make him thump his chest and boast that he committed his crime. There is no more reverie and daydreaming; the reality is that he does not get the august treatment he “expected” from the warders (“You uninformed Brothers / Beating me now, / Why do you not / Salute me?” 68). He tries to rationalize his assassination of the politician (67-68). He is irritated that he is not saluted by the warders and orders them to “form a guard of honour / So that I may inspect you” (68)—in obvious relapse to his delusion. He complains that the jails are congested and ends this section wishing for a coup d'etat (“Two bulls wrestle / With their horns, / The horn of the ruling bull / Breaks / And he tumbles down,” 70). So, even in section 8, his delusions have not ended. The same note of optimism and illusion remains.

In section 9, he addresses the widow of his victim. He seems bent on ridding himself of his guilt through its rationalization:

(22) Do not blame me
                    Sister,
                    Do not be angry with me,
                    Do not hate me
                    You true Daughter
                    Of the Land.
                    Your husband was
                    An obstacle blocking
                    The path of Our Progress,
                    He had to be urgently removed.

(72)

As is obvious in (22), he hopes to palliate the widow through flattery and by arousing her nationalistic sentiments. Hence, he draws a contrast between her (the patriot) and her husband (the traitor). He blames her, later, for her role in encouraging her late husband's arrogance and high-handedness. The section degenerates to a sadistic taunt when he claims his actions made the widow “famous” (74). His catalog of the politician's crimes do not, however, seem to succeed in justifying Prisoner's own crime.

In section 10 Prisoner's optimism is unabated. He is still very much aware of his incarceration but wishes to “command” or will his freedom:

(23) Open this steel gate,
                    You uninformed Brothers,
                    Open the door
                    And let me out.

(73)

The moving spirit behind this urge is that he wants to be with his family. There is pathos in his realization that he could be hanged:

(24) Open the door,
                    I want to go home,
                    I want to be with my children,
                    I want to talk with my wife.
                    I do not want to hang
                    By the neck
                    Until I am cold
                    And dead

(76)

He wants to be free to do the things free men do in his society: “plough the land,” “go to the church,” “go to the village / To perform / The cleansing ceremony” at the clan shrine in atonement of his murder, and so on. He is sure “the women will wail / Their welcome”; he wants “to join / The jubilant throng / Gathered at the City Park” waiting for him; he wants to receive “their thunderous applause” (77). He still pictures himself as a political hero: “I want to raise my hands / And acknowledge / Their cheers. / I want to shake hands / With the Saturday morning shoppers / And wave to motorists / And cyclists” (77-78). He is the hero of Uhuru and wishes to be honored by the populace: parliamentarians, chiefs, women, schoolchildren. He has done a lofty deed and has become “immortal” (79). The tone of this section is not remarkably different from that of section 7, nor does it sharply contrast with section 11.

Section 11 does not seem so drastically different from the delusions of the other sections as to warrant our suggestion of the possibility of another prisoner. The explanation given to section 7 equally applies. Whether the speaker overhears another prisoner, the trend of the discourse remains the same. The pronominal structure of first-person singular still predominates. When Prisoner says he is a minister, the dominant pattern of delusive grandeur persists. His unchanging concern for family welfare also remains; he even wants to deceive his wife about his incarceration because he is sure of his release in “two or three days” (84). His primary concern seems to be to save her from embarrassment. He still wants members of his clan to “look / After my wife and children / And to make plans” (85). He dreams of a “gold pen.” He does not want his children to know he is in prison; he wants to fill the vacant cabinet post; he wants to send “fat” checks to his parents, though he contradicts himself here. In sections 4 and 6, he had implied that his father had died. When he says he wants to send a fat check to “my old father” (87), and does not want him “to die / Of a heart attack” (88), this could be confusing.

But Prisoner's digressions this far, and even to the end of the Song, show that the same person is talking, lamenting, thinking, and daydreaming. The breaks in tone suggested by critics are only thematic and not linguistic, which could be attributed to the confused state of the prisoner's mind all through the song. The whole song, therefore, dramatizes his mental disorientation. We are surprised, for instance, when he pleads insanity (“I plead insanity, / I am / Mad, / Can't you see?” 24) and later contradicts himself (“I am not insane,” 67). In section 4 he blames his father for marrying his mother, “a stupid bitch” from a wrong clan (36) and threatens to desecrate his father's tomb for it (“I will exhume your bones / And hang you / By the neck,” 38). In the same way, he gloats over his cold-blooded murder of the slain politician (“Yes / I did it / And, / My God, / What a beautiful / Shot!” 66) and later complains that he was not a “thug” and should have been congratulated (67-68). These contradictions and shifts in point of view are confusing. They seem the rantings of a disjointed personality. As Ogunyemi rightly suggests, Prisoner is a “schizophrenic,” and she thinks that that explains his mental shifts:

Once we have grasped the true nature of the prisoner's situation and the attendant effect on his health, the poem becomes intelligible as the soliloquy or song of a schizophrenic prisoner. … From the text we have no cause to believe, as Heron proposes, that other prisoners are involved.

(75; author's emphasis)

The breaks in tone in sections 7 and 11 (or elsewhere in the Song) are instances of Prisoner's delusions of grandeur and serve as exercises in “wish-fulfilment fantasies” (75). The rest of the Song can be given this explanation. We should also consider seriously the issue of impersonation discussed in the third section of this paper concerning Ocol and the “monarch's sigh.” If, for instance, Prisoner sees himself as affluent and wishes to become a minister of state, or even claims to be one already, this could be because he had been a bodyguard and thus familiar with a minister's sophisticated life. His subconscious wishes merely surface in these sections. More realistically, then, we may not take all his speech literally as uttered and directly addressed to us; some or most of the texts may be reproductions of his thought processes. As Ogunyemi sums it,

What we see in this prisoner then is a human wreck, the living consequence of the brutality of incarceration. Although he complains about his physical discomforts, he has already undergone a metamorphosis mentally without knowing it.

(76)

This could account for why he digresses freely, changes subjects at will, without paying attention to details, and for his general incoherence and discourse instability.¹⁶

V

Malaya, the second societal reject of Two Songs, is less confused than the prisoner but exhibits the same digressional trend in her song. Her digressions are hardly developed, like the rest of her case. She is preoccupied with so many cares that she digresses as often as she is distracted. Most of her movements, especially in sections 1-3, have no definite narrative patterns. They do not have a specific story line. What we have are series of addresses and statements directed at several addresses. Because these are not as elaborate as those adopted by Lawino, for instance, Malaya depends a great deal on allusions for her case. This is exemplified in sections 4 and 5 of Song of Malaya, particularly in pages 166-67 of section 4 and 172-73 of 5.

In section 4 she exhorts her copractitioners to greater heights, implying that their “sins” have biblical and classical equivalents in the roles of the daughters of Sodom and Gomorrah, Rahab, Delilah, Magdalena, Theodora, and “the unknown Prostitute Sister / Who fired St. Augustine / To the clouds” (166).

Her digressions are more pronounced in 5, but all revolve around her weeping son. For instance, she tries to find a parallel between her bastard son and Christ. Her digression-opening bracketing device is in the form of a question:

(25) The Saviour
                    Redeemer
                    The Light
                    King of Kings
                    The Prince of Peace …
                    My Big Boy
                    Tell Mommy
                    What was his Father's name?
                    Was the Carpenter
                    Really His Father?

(172)

The first five lines of (25) are all apostrophes in the form of the several titles with which Jesus Christ is described in Christian lore. The questions in lines 8-10 constitute a jibe at the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth. They reveal Malaya's stance. We normally expect third-person narrators to relate events and descriptions by the use of statements. Questions imply both an asker and an addressee who, theoretically at least, has the power to react and reply. By consistently using these questions, Malaya seems to address them both to the boy and to the readers, inviting judgments on the events leading to her son's crying and our condemnation of the schoolteacher.

Later Malaya's attention shifts from her crying son, diverts to tracing a relationship between him and Christ via allusion, links up with the teacher who throws “the first stone / While Christ writes / In the sand” (173), and finally moves to an exhortation of her “Sister Prostitutes.” She thus, does not, like Lawino, trace back her narrative line and end with her son. Instead, her allusions wander off as she seems to forget all about him. The complete break in direction of the discourse contributes to the incoherence of her Song.

The pattern of undeveloped digression adopted by the two singers in Two Songs seems responsible for the lack of depth often associated with them.¹⁷ However, we see a correlation between their mental disposition (and distractions) and their digression patterns. Their unsettled and psychologically incoherent natures are made manifest in their verbal incoherence.

CONCLUSION

In this paper I have examined several digressional strategies adopted by the different singers in p'Bitek's dramatic monologue Songs. Lawino's shifts and utterance-based patterns are very closely related to the issues she addresses. This is responsible for the coherent nature of her discourse and her ability to carry the audience with her. Ocol, in his own Song, is as successful as Lawino, though the responses evoked from the reader are different. We have seen his deft use of the complex narrative pattern of the speech-within-the-speech to carry the ironic force of his arguments. We also saw how exophoric references provide a conspiratorial link with the reader. Ocol has to adopt several strategies to counter Lawino's very emotive submission in her Song. Prisoner, on the other hand, is more coherent than Malaya, who “beats about the bush” in her digressions. Thus, in examining these digressional patterns in these monologues, I have indicated that the sense of coherence which accompanies the narration of these singers varies with the type of digression.

Basically, I have hoped to demonstrate that a proper and broad account of our intuitions concerning these discourse phenomena has to take into consideration this entire range of factors, particularly purely interactional and implicit factors, rather than merely the sequential relations of utterances and the implications which can be conventionally derived from them. The discussion is, however, not as exhaustive as it could be, but its primary aim has been to reveal how monologuers in such dramatic monologue texts adopt them for several purposes: to aid narration, to win our sympathy, to save face, to heighten suspense, for comic relief, and so on. More important is the way this contributes to our knowledge of digressions in monologue texts, in a situation where conversations have received all the attention in previous discussions. It reveals the need for more empirical studies of this phenomenon in literary texts, in relation to the authorial intention of making the fictional characters digress, especially the effect of creating the impression of detachment of the poet from his work and from the creative intentions underlying it.

Notes

1. In addition to Dascal and Katriel, others include Beattie, Schegloff, and also Dascal's “Conversational Relevance.”

2. See, e.g., Okpewho.

3. These features of monologue discourse are discussed in Gregory and Carroll.

4. Typical bracketing devices are such expressions as “by the way” and “it reminds me of,” interjections such as “oh!” and “yeah!” for introducing digressions, and “to go back,” “so,” or the very common laughter that follows the point of a joke, in order to mark the end of a digression.

5. Crystal and Davy provide detailed analyses of the grammatical structure of legal constructions.

6. The terms anaphoric, cataphoric, and exophoric references are used here in the sense in which they are used by Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English.

7. It is possible too that this has to do with the lineation pattern of the original Acoli text (Wer pa Lawino) which has remained despite its translation from Acoli to English.

8. Abrams describes a “rhetorical question” as “asked, not to evoke an actual reply, but to achieve an emphasis stronger than a direct statement” (149).

9. This technique is used profusely by Lawino and in decreasing proportions by Ocol, Prisoner, and Malaya. In Song of Lawino there are thirty-nine instances; Song of Ocol has eleven; there are seven instances in Song of Prisoner, and only one in Song of Malaya.

10. In the phrase “Ocol l monarch l monarch's wife,” the arrow points backward to indicate that the narrative scheme is not chronological or sequential but inward-going and traceable to Ocol as producer.

11. Works by the following critics are fairly representative: Atieno-Odhiambo, Folarin, Goodwin, Marshment, Moore, lo Liyong, Ogunyemi, and Ofuani.

12. More recently, Heywood suggests multiple personalities. But unlike Blishen, she is not specific: “Song of Prisoner lacks the mask of a single persona. It is a choral song of those who are trapped by freedom. … None are criminals in the ordinary sense: all are victims of either social or political change which has overwhelmed them” (77).

13. This reading seems to have made Blishen suggest that the Prisoner was Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, though biographical information provided by Okot p'Bitek indicates that the poem was inspired by the assassination of Tom Mboya. See Lindfors 142.

14. Several ways in which the grammatical features of aspects of the Songs aid their interpretation have been developed in two articles by Ofuani, “Poetics and Syntax in Okot p'Bitek's Songs,” and “The Form and Function of Repetition in Okot p'Bitek's Poetry.”

15. See the discussion in Ofuani's “Lexical Cohesion in Okot p'Bitek's Song of Prisoner.”

16. Goodwin attributes this incoherence to Prisoner's delirium, a consequence of the severe beating he received from the warders.

17. See, e.g., Goodwin, Heywood, Moore, and Roscoe.

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