PROTEST POETICS IN SO RO SÓKÈ: AN #ENDSARS ANTHOLOGY

Abstract

Language use in literary works have consistently engaged with societal realities, including pressing concerns on security in contemporary Nigeria, resulting in civic debate and demonstrations such as the #EndSARS protests. Existing studies on literary pragmatics have focused largely on elements that emphasise meaning, such as linguistic choice, characterisation techniques, and meaning constructions in socio-cultural contexts. There has, however, been limited attention to how poetic language reflects resistance to extrajudicial violence, conflict, profiling, and delayed access to justice. This paper, therefore, examines selected poems in Soro s ókè: An #EndSARS Anthology (Soro s ókè), with a view to analysing how imagery, symbolism, irony, and allusion are foregrounded through pragmatic expressions represented in tense, punctuation, and pronouns, in determining how poetic language shapes public perception of security matters. This study adopts pragmatic concepts foregrounded by Mey (2001) which provides the framework for a reader-based interpretation of linguistic-literary signifiers. Findings reveal the use of alternating tense constructions to portray imagery, symbolism and ironical stance in highlighting past and current social realities related to the #EndSARS protests. Pragmatic expressions such as ellipsis and personal pronouns indicate representational references to poetic imagery and allusion, as contextualised in personalised and solidarity perspectives of extrajudicial brutality. With a deployment of literary pragmatics, especially as it relates to the sensory/imaginative and the semiotic/symbolic, this study explores linguistic strategy through literary lens in selected poems from Soro s ókè, to make a case for how understanding language use in literary contexts can foster national and, by extension, global security.