Rhetoric Techniques: A Study of Ezenwa Ohaeto’s The Chants of a Minstrel

Abstract

One of the defining characteristics of poetry is its ability to generate multiple meanings and interpretations. While the orality of Ezenwa Ohaeto’s poetry and performance have received more positive criticisms by critics as well as acceptance, his deployment of rhetoric strategies as a potent amour in poetry seems to have been neglected by critics. This paper aims at investigating Ohaeto’s use of rhetoric techniques in his poetry using qualitative research methodology. Significantly, this work attempts a textual and sub-textual analysis of Ohaeto’s conventional language in poetry that leads to his literary and poetic effectiveness. Building on the ideologies of postcolonialism, Ohaeto’s select poems from The Chants of a Minstrel as primary data are studied and analysed with a view to examining his reliance on rhetoric as discursive strategy to question socio-cultural and socio-political issues in Nigerian context and by extension, Africa and the world in general. Motivated by the scanty scholarly studies on rhetoric in Ohaeto’s poetry; the paper identified some rhetoric techniques in the versifier’s poems using postcolonial theory and qualitative research method. It also demonstrated that rhetoric plays contextual role such as being interactional tool in the hands of poets. It is found out that Ohaeto deployed rhetoric techniques as poetic armouries to question and address socio- cultural, socio-political and socio-economic issues in order to bring a radical change in his society. This work revealed the effectiveness of Ohaeto’s style and dependence on rhetoric as an oratory poetic technique. Rhetoric to a very large extent is Ohaeto’s favourite device in writing.