Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
The contrived way poets use diction and its variations — metaphor, metonymy, imagery and symbolism — does not only complicate communication in some instances, but can also make poetry appear cumbersome to the reader.
The traditional poem, for instance, employs conventions such as rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, lexical reiteration and controlled metre. While these devices give poetry its distinctive music and texture, they can also place an interpretive burden on the reader.
When that happens, the essence of poetry as a vehicle for ferrying societal mores, values and experiences risks becoming obscured by the language meant to carry it.
Nonetheless, poetry has never remained static. A shift has occurred from the restrictions of the traditional poem as poets consolidate their role as the voice of the voiceless and the defenders of truth. Although this evolution is significant, the quintessence of poetry remains as entrancing today as it was centuries ago, principally because of its two-fold nature.
There is a distinction between the denotative and connotative meanings of a poem, or indeed any literary work. It is this distinction that brings literature and communication into dialogue.
The obvious, surface interpretation that a reader draws from a poem is its denotative meaning. Connotative meaning, on the other hand, lies beneath the surface. It is deeper, more subjective and less immediately apparent, opening the text to a plurality of interpretations whose truth often rests in conviction, experience and context.
This two-fold presentation of ideas enables poets to communicate deeper feelings of anger, distress, frustration, disillusionment, love, hatred and betrayal.
Usually, readers are not strangers to such experiences. Depending on their geo-social and cultural backgrounds, they may share the same norms, values and historical experiences as the poets.
Where conventional imagery and symbolism are employed, interpretation may be facilitated. However, where idiosyncratic elements are introduced, the task can become more complicated.
It is in this space between the apparent and the implied that poetry finds much of its communicative power.
Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, for instance, embraces both the connotative and denotative levels of poetry in “A Mysterious Marriage.”
Denotatively, the poem is about two children whose ideologies are infringed upon by “armed robbers”, culminating in their decision to seek solace in blood and iron when it dawns on them that armed confrontation is the only possible escape.
In their search for freedom, they get married, returning home after the war to wild cheers and merriment characteristic of a wedding.
Unfortunately, the grand wedding anticipated fails to take place because only the bridegroom is present, while the bride fails to turn up, much to the mortification of the waiting crowd, which feels cheated and betrayed.
The general atmosphere is, therefore, one of betrayal at the personal level, although the experience also reflects on the community and national levels.
At the connotative level, however, the illocutionary force of the poem is more expansive, expressing the ugly consequences of imperialism on the African continent.
The names “Freedom” and “Independence” epitomise values that Africans hold dear and feel have been robbed from them by the nameless gang of aliens.
Africans do not take lightly to the robbery of these values. The union of such ideals in matrimony suggests their significance to the welfare and aspirations of the people.
In the poem “Winter,” Charles Mungoshi echoes the same rationale.
Denotatively, the poem is about an old man at his wits’ end, engrossed in reminiscences of the past. So absorbed is he in his memories that he fails to notice the persona invading his privacy.
The scene reincarnating itself in his eyes is one of destruction, suggested by the phrase “pulled down”. The atmosphere is one of aridity and coldness, conveyed through the imagery of “brick-and-rubble” and “the cold July wind”.
At the connotative level, the cold voice of politics and its bane on the individual psyche overwhelm the obvious diatribes and internal woes of an old man who has lost variety and reason.
Now at sixes and sevens, he nostalgically regards his past and its glory. Change, to him, is infectious, as he struggles to grasp the cold reality of a changing tide that has swept him off his feet.
The depiction of the street as “Pioneer Street” suggests political allusion. The first settlers of Rhodesia dubbed themselves “Pioneers”; hence, the association of the street with all that is sinking and decaying connotes the idea of a sinking ship struggling against the currents of change, while the old man precariously hangs on to it.
The symbolic bastions of colonialism are reduced to rubble by the new political dispensation.
Although the race and cultural identity of the old man are not explicitly stated, the “wilted rose in his button hole”, expressive of cultural connotations, betrays him. So too does his reference to the demolishers of the buildings as “they” against “we”, exposing his sense of racial identity and separation.
Connotation and denotation have been defined in communicological terms by linguists such as Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure to demonstrate the relationship between literature and communication.
In concurrence with de Saussure (1916), Barthes defines denotation as the direct relationship between a sign and its referent in reality. It follows, therefore, that the sign “Pioneer Street” denotes a road fringed by pavements and buildings that existed in Harare, although the street has since been renamed Kaguvi Street.
Semiologically, the word “pioneer” becomes the sign whose use as a street name in Harare points to a physical reality. Connotation, on the other hand, describes the further interaction between signs and their users.
According to Barthes, signs interact with the feelings, emotions and cultural values of language users. This interaction enhances the creation of mental images that go beyond the signs’ original referents.
Thus, to a Zimbabwean, the sign “Pioneer Street” does not merely evoke the mental image of a street that existed in Harare. Connotatively, it may conjure memories of colonial domination, suffering, dispossession and betrayal each time it is mentioned.
Connotation is possible because people sharing the same cultural values and norms may also share similar intersubjective realities. Hence, by simply transmitting signs such as “Pioneer Street”, “mzungu” or “Dedan Kimathi”, Mungoshi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for instance, can evoke the idea of imperialism because artists and their societies share historical and cultural experiences.
Therefore, plays a pivotal role in connotation.
In “Up in Arms” (1982) and “Red Hills of Home” (1985), Chenjerai Hove uses the signs “migratory bird” and “bulldozers” in the poems “Lost Bird” and “Red Hills of Home”, respectively, to depict the erosion of cultural values and norms resulting from colonisation and its influence on African societies.
Bulldozers are symbolic of destruction, not only of the physical African landscape, but also of the values and norms attached to it. Places considered sacred are wantonly destroyed, and with them the mores and values of a people are threatened.
The migratory bird embodies abundance in the Zimbabwean context because it is traditionally regarded as a harbinger of the rainy season. Culturally, its arrival denotes the promise of a bumper harvest; its presence is, thus, associated with life, joy and celebration.
Yet there is cultural conflict in the way the bird is portrayed flying towards its death, as illuminated in the following lines:
“But then disaster joined him
A skirmish followed, a nasty thing
The bird dragged his breast over the city
Compressed with smog…
As he missed his airy path.”
Connotatively, disaster is conjured in the mind of the Zimbabwean reader as the bird appears destined for death. What might seem like a simple encounter between a bird and a polluted city opens into a larger meditation on the destruction of life, culture and the environment.
W.B. Yeats also compounds symbolism and connotation in his poem “Church and State.”
Although the symbols evoke mutually different elements — the religious and the political — they both connote forms of physical and psychological oppression.
In Semiological terms, the analysis of connotation, denotation and symbolism, as Barthes espouses, reveals how readers interpret aspects of literary meaning.
This process of interpretation integrates literature and communication because the extraction of meaning depends not only on understanding the denotative aspects of discourse, but also on engaging with its connotative facets, expressed through symbolism, imagery, metaphor and metonymy.
A poem, therefore, is rarely confined to what it says on the surface.
Its words may point to one reality while simultaneously opening a window into another. A street may become a history; a bird may become a season, a culture or a warning; and a marriage may become a nation’s broken promise.
It is this movement between the visible and the invisible, the spoken and the implied, the denotative and the connotative, that makes poetry not only a vehicle of communication, but one of its most intriguing and enduring forms. For poetry does not merely tell humanity something. At its best, it makes readers discover what the words have been saying all along.
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