Language, Creative Writing and Literature: Analysing Phebe Veronica Jatau’s The Hound from the Poet-Scholar Perspective

Abstract

The interrelationship among language, creative writing and literature is such that at any one moment one discovers that the end product which is literature in this order forms the ultimate amalgam of the other two. The scholar-poet or poet-scholar, and these two are not interchangeable, is at once the producer and the consumer in and of the creative writing process, the vehicle of both activities (production and consumption) being language. No one uses language as carefreely as the creative writer and no one takes time to pin the nuances of language to their very essence as the scholar or the critic. And when these converge in one person the output from such writer should engage the utmost attention of the reader. The poet-scholar is the producer of literature when she resorts to creative writing and she is the consumer when she attempts to access and assess the import of other writers’ creative efforts. Until the publication of The Hound in 2014, Phebe Jatau had been content to remain a scholar, a postcolonial critic as it were, who is at home with social issues as they are portrayed in other texts especially as they affect women. This paper analyses social issues as they are portrayed in her text especially as they affect women and comes to the expressivist conclusion that Jatau’s language and creative concerns are primarily a scholar-poet apprehension and not a poet-scholar representation. The implication for criticism being that the more she delves into creative writing the more honed she gets and the more her works would display this interconnectedness of language, creative writing and literature.

Keywords: poet-scholar, language, creative writing, literature