CULTURE, SOUND, SENSE AND FURY IN SELECTED YORUBA CURATIVE INCANTATORY POETRY

Abstract

This study explores the sound mechanisms in one of the Yoruba genres of oral literature, the incantation, for the purpose of revealing the significance and functionality of sound manifestations in their meaning realisation. The Yoruba curative incantation is especially popular for its potential to cause things to happen or not to happen, and it depends on several imaginative strategies and the use of figurative manipulations to realise this through the creative exploitation of some specific Yoruba words to reinforce onomatopoeic, repetitive and other metaphorical constructs which help to stimulate effects. The objective of this study is to reveal the connections between selected words, sounds, the contexts of usage and effects they are expected to unleash, adopting Durkheim structural functionalism theory which opines that every aspect of the people’s folklore works to reinforce its overall functionality towards achieving stability. This theory offers a good premise for the content analysis of sounds in the verses of incantation. The selected Yoruba curative incantations, purposively gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, made use of the sounds based on mythical assumptions that they have magical potential through which things could be manipulated. The sounds which are coded are creatively patterned to reinforce healing. It is evinced through this study that sounds are capable of self-replication and dissolution for effects. This study concludes that, although sounds used in incantations are drawn from their quotidian usage, they become evocative and function to reinforce effects when rearranged and manipulated as components of incantations.