Performing Climate Change through Spoken Word Poetry: A Multimodal Eco-lingiistic Study of Victory Ashaka's Selected Poems

Abstract

Analysing printed poems has allowed researchers to examine ecological issues in Nigeria from the viewpoints of environmental degradation, natural disasters, and greenhouse disasters. Apparently, spoken word poems were not the basis for earlier linguistic research on environmental poetry. Thus, this research investigates how language, performance, and ecological advocacy intersect in Victory Ashaka's spoken word poetry from Nigeria. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL), conceptual metaphor, and multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) are the three theoretical frameworks that will be used to i) identify the linguistic and semiotic resources that the poet uses to express eco-sustainability, ii) investigate how the transitivity system represents human-environment relations, and iii) interpret how the performance features reinforce environmental advocacy. In order to uncover the poet's ecological worldview and activist advocacy, the study focuses on Halliday's ideational meaning of the transitivity system, gaze, posture, prosody, visual images, metaphorical constructions, and gestures. YouTube recordings of spoken word poetry by Victory Ashaka serve as the study's source of data. The poems that will be chosen are Heal the World, Healthy Diets; Healthy Plants, and Friends of Eko, are you Eco-friendly? Along with the audio recordings and images, the lyrics of the poem will be extracted from the YouTube captions and by manually recording the lines. The study concludes that Ashaka's spoken word poetry exhibits eco-discursive patterns, which promote sustainability and ecological care through language and multimodal resources.