Abstract
In this paper, I read selected poems in Ime Ikiddeh's The Vulture's Funeral and Reincarnation as social signifiers based on the theoretical constructs drawn from Cultural Semiotics. As social signifiers, the poems studied are signs whose referents reflect the socio-political and cultural ethos of its milieu, and form a good part of the Akwa Ibom and Nigerian signification system. Ikiddeh's poetics has profited from the rich oral tradition of Akwa Ibom cultural space which are deployed to make important statements on the realities of the society from which the poems emanate. Ikiddeh's poems are unique in the sense that they are folktales rendered in verse forms, thus giving the poems their allegorical texture and signifying orders. This way, Ikiddeh's arts are read beyond their surface meaning of birds and their aerial cultural values to take into accounts the recent human experiences in the poet's political and socio-cultural spaces. His poems reflect a rich array of cultural mnemonics which represent the lived experiences of modern Akwa Ibom peoples in the Nigerian political space, and can be read as at once a personal and collective response to all the moments that sum up the existential dynamics of contemporary society.
Keywords
Introduction
Has it ever occurred to you that meaning is what makes life and arts enjoyable? Without the ability of human beings to decipher meaning in any event or situation, it would be difficult for them to appreciate the import or significance of the event. Meaning lurks in all of life's circumstances, including arts and literature. There are many ways, methods and theories deployed by critics of arts and literature in accounting for meaning in art objects. In recent times, I have been fascinated by some of the linguistic theories of literature, especially given the increasing propensity of critics in our time to advocate the combination of literature and language-based theories in the interpretation of texts in order to make up for the perceived deficiencies in content-only and form-only approaches to literary criticism. For instance, in my 2023 paper entitled, 'The Poetics of Rivers and the Intertextual Practices in Joe Ushie's 'Bekwang River' and Gabriel Okara's 'The Call of the River Nun', I coined the term 'postcolonial formalism' to account for how content (postcolonialism) and form (formalism) can at once be appreciated in the selected poems of Ushie and Osundare (E. Etim, 2023, pp. 83-95). However, among the linguistic theories that allow for a more robust interpretation of content and form in literature is cultural semiotics, which is deployed as the theoretical framework for this study
Content
Semiotics is among the most recent linguistic theories that can be deployed in the interpretation of literature and other cultural objects. The word semiotics has a Greek root, semeiotikos, which means 'an interpreter of signs' (Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz, 1999, p.4). This means that semiotics, often described as the science of signs, is a theory that is interested in the study of signs and how they function in the art of meaning realisation. A sign, within the context of language and semiotics, can be defined as a word, an object or an element that realises its semantic significance in another word, object or element. According to Bengu Batu, 'a sign can be a word. . . a work of art, a text or a collection of different rules that govern societal life' (Batu, 2012, p. 465). Going by this definition, I propose to analyse the poems selected from Ikiddeh's The Vulture's Funeral as signs that point to the sociocultural denotations and connotations of the Akwa Ibom milieu.
Cultural semiotics has its parental sheltering in semiotics; hence it is important to, first of all, expound on semiotics before we discuss the tenets of cultural semiotics. Semiotics is usually construed as a modernist/postmodernist theoretical tool which began with proponents such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Julien Greimas and Umberto Eco, among others. However, it should be noted that semiotics has its roots traced back to ancient times with Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans, St Augustine and John Locke, among others. These proto-semioticians laid the foundation for the field by philosophising on the ontology of signs. For instance, the classical sign scholars argued over the existence of natural and conventional signs, giving rise to the perennial debate between the naturalists and the conventionalist, with the naturalists believing that the referents for signs were natural while the conventionalists believed that the relationship between signs and their referents was arbitrary, based on the agreement of the members of a speech community (David Eka, 2008, p.13). Another aspect of pre-Saussurean semiotics was practised by Hippocrates and his contemporaries in the f ield of medicine. For them, the symptoms in their patients were seen as signs because they stood for certain ailments (Marcel Danes and Paul Peron, 1999, p.5).
The Medieval study of signs was based on hermeneutics as practised by Clement of Alexandria, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockam, among others. Among the proto-semiotic views that existed in the medieval period included scholasticism and nominalism. In scholasticism, the signs deployed in the representation of religious beliefs were seen to be independent, while nominalists inferred that signs were not the direct referents of the beliefs they were used to represent. For Thomas Aquinas, signs functioned to aid reasoning concerning scientific and philosophical truths. As far as William of Ockam was concerned, signs were used to infer other signs based on the Platonic model of ideal forms.
Among the Renaissance and post-Renaissance scholars and philosophers interested in the study of signs were Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galilei Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and David Hume, John Locke, Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. During the Renaissance, signs functioned in the analysis of iconography and in the interpretation of symbols in literature and the arts. Renaissance philosophers laid the foundation for the mental and abstract conceptualisation of signs in the semiotic studies of the modern period.
The modern sign scholars are Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Morris, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Louis Hjelmslev, Tahsin Yucel, Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, Thomas Sebeok and Umberto Eco, among others. Saussure construed semiotics as semiology based on the theoretical outcomes of his synchronic study of language. Thus, the first modern theorisation of signs came with Saussure's structuralism which perceives language as a code that embodies a system structured in the form of signifiers and signifieds (Charles Bressler, 1994). For Saussure, the sign is a dyad of signifier-signified relations, where the signifier stands for the verbal image and the signified refers to the mental concept linked to the verbal image. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is at once arbitrary and based on difference, which are the bases upon which meaning is realised. It should be noted that modern semiotics rests on the structuralist foundation laid by Saussure and that semiotics remains basically a structuralist science.
Cultural semiotics has its parental sheltering in semiotics; hence it is important to, first of all, expound on semiotics before we discuss the tenets of cultural semiotics. Semiotics is usually construed as a modernist/postmodernist theoretical tool which began with proponents such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Julien Greimas and Umberto Eco, among others. However, it should be noted that semiotics has its roots traced back to ancient times with Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans, St Augustine and John Locke, among others. These proto-semioticians laid the foundation for the field by philosophising on the ontology of signs. For instance, the classical sign scholars argued over the existence of natural and conventional signs, giving rise to the perennial debate between the naturalists and the conventionalist, with the naturalists believing that the referents for signs were natural while the conventionalists believed that the relationship between signs and their referents was arbitrary, based on the agreement of the members of a speech community (David Eka, 2008, p.13). Another aspect of pre-Saussurean semiotics was practised by Hippocrates and his contemporaries in the f ield of medicine. For them, the symptoms in their patients were seen as signs because they stood for certain ailments (Marcel Danes and Paul Peron, 1999, p.5).
The Medieval study of signs was based on hermeneutics as practised by Clement of Alexandria, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockam, among others. Among the proto-semiotic views that existed in the medieval period included scholasticism and nominalism. In scholasticism, the signs deployed in the representation of religious beliefs were seen to be independent, while nominalists inferred that signs were not the direct referents of the beliefs they were used to represent. For Thomas Aquinas, signs functioned to aid reasoning concerning scientific and philosophical truths. As far as William of Ockam was concerned, signs were used to infer other signs based on the Platonic model of ideal forms.
Among the Renaissance and post-Renaissance scholars and philosophers interested in the study of signs were Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galilei Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and David Hume, John Locke, Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. During the Renaissance, signs functioned in the analysis of iconography and in the interpretation of symbols in literature and the arts. Renaissance philosophers laid the foundation for the mental and abstract conceptualisation of signs in the semiotic studies of the modern period.
The modern sign scholars are Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Morris, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Louis Hjelmslev, Tahsin Yucel, Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, Thomas Sebeok and Umberto Eco, among others. Saussure construed semiotics as semiology based on the theoretical outcomes of his synchronic study of language. Thus, the first modern theorisation of signs came with Saussure's structuralism which perceives language as a code that embodies a system structured in the form of signifiers and signifieds (Charles Bressler, 1994). For Saussure, the sign is a dyad of signifier-signified relations, where the signifier stands for the verbal image and the signified refers to the mental concept linked to the verbal image. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is at once arbitrary and based on difference, which are the bases upon which meaning is realised. It should be noted that modern semiotics rests on the structuralist foundation laid by Saussure and that semiotics remains basically a structuralist science.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have attempted the cultural semiotic analysis of Ime Ikiddeh's The Vulture's Funeral and Reincarnation by deploying tools and concepts from theoretical semiotics to present a discursive reading of the issues raised in the primary text. The analysis reveals that Ikiddeh's work is a rich poetic statement on the postcolonial and postmodern Nigerian and African life seen primarily from the perspectives of birds and drawn from the rich oral tradition and folkloric materials of the Ibibio. It is realised that the entire text is an allegory whose meaning is layered and varied, which explains why the semiotic approach was preferrable for this particular reading enterprise. The text is also rich in anthropomorphism as well as prosopopoeia, through the ascription of human qualities to non-human ones. The levels of signification in the work are discoursed based on the extant theoretical models outlined in the work. The discussion proceeds from the primary levels of signification involving animals and their attributes and graduates into the world of human beings, harvesting and yielding second-order mode meanings that enrich our understanding of the text.
References
References
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Umoren, T. (2003). 'African Oral Tradition and the African Literary Renaissance: Ime
Ikiddeh's The Vulture's Funeral'. A Journal of Research in English and
Literature. 4, 119-128.
Abrams, H. & Harpham, G. (2005). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage Learning.
Batu, B. (20120. 'An Overview of the Field of Semiotics.' Procedia Social and
Behavioural Sciences. 51, 464-469.
Bressler, C. (1994). Literary Criticism: An Introduction. Third Edition. New Jersey:
Pearson Education Inc.
Coby, P. & Jansz, L. (1999). Introducing Semiotics. Cambridge: Icon Books.
Danes, M. & Paul, P. (1999). Analysing Cultures: An Introduction. Third Edition.
Project Muse. Indiana University Press. Accessed: 8th May, 2025, at
muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/monograph/chapter/3722224.
Eka, D. (2008). Elements of Grammar and Mechanics of the English Language. Uyo:
Samuf Nigeria Limited.
Etim, E. (2023). 'The Poetics of Rivers and the Intertextual Practices in Joe Ushie's
“Bekwang River” and Gabrel Okara's “The Call of the River Nun”'. Integrity
Journal of Arts and Humanities. 4(5), 83-95. DOI: 10.31248/IJH2023.084.
Felluga, D. (2003). 'Modules on Greimas: On the Semiotic Square'. Introductory Guide
to Critical Theory. Narratology. Accessed: 8th May, 2025, at
cla.purdue.edu.academic/English/Theory/narratology/modules/greimassquare.ht
ml/
He, J. & Long, J. (2021). 'Cultural Semiotics and the Related Interpretation.' Advances
in Social Sciences and the Related Interpretation. 5 & 6, 1268-1272.
Ikiddeh, I. (2005). The Vulture's Funeral and Reincarnation. Uyo: Minder International.
Oha, O. (2000). 'Signs, Cities, and Designs of Capacities: The Semiotic of Road
Monuments in
Some Nigerian Cities'. The African Anthropologist. 7 (1), 33-47.
Tarasti, E. (2017). 'The Semiotics of A. J. Greimas: A European Intellectual Heritage
Seen from the Inside and the Outside.' Sign System Studies. 45 (1/2), 33-53.
Umoren, T. (2003). 'African Oral Tradition and the African Literary Renaissance: Ime
Ikiddeh's The Vulture's Funeral'. A Journal of Research in English and
Literature. 4, 119-128.