Author's Name:	Ephraim Chukwu
Subject Area:	Social Science and Humanities
Subject	Other
Section	Research Paper

empathetic, experience, foreground, rendition, war.

The Nigeria-Biafran Civil War became a knife sharpener for the functional expression of language for literary creation. Multifarious songs showcasing creativity in responding to the crises were demonstrated. This literary creation channeled via speech fore grounded human psycho-social experience of hopes and fears, attitudes towards an existing event and reactions against man’s repression of man. Song rendition depicts these experiential thoughts of man captured in language – literal and literary – stringed to reveal problems of psychological nature bubbling away in the hearts of the participants in the war. This paper strives to present how the war motivated the Biafrans to improvise songs in heart-rending language to tell, whoever was willing to listen, the hopelessness of the corrupt and muddled war. In so doing, it depicts the pivotal roles of language in foregrounding the experience: the syntactic structures encoding the experience, the associative or literary use of language describing the experience and social identity signaling collectivity pictured in language.