%@ Language=VBScript %>
|
*
|
Research - Criticisms on African Writing |
African Literature Online
Three (Neo)colonial Male Characters of Ama Ata Aidoo by Miriam C. GyimahIN THE ART OF Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neo-colonialism, Vincent Odamtten argues that Aidoo's works consistently address the issue of neo-colonialism and its impact on the educated Ghanaian elite. Citing critics like Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie who maintains that the African woman writer has a particular commitment to discuss issues of gender, womanhood and a Third World reality, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o who asserts that African writers must write against neo-colonialism, Odamtten stresses that readers and critics of African literature should also invest in reading and writing against neo-colonialism. He says, "[i]f there are writers who are writing against neo-colonialism, there should be reader-critics who complement their work" (6). He warns against reading and writing about African women characters and situations from a narrow feminist perspective. Such criticism which sometimes focuses on the ills of patriarchy through colonial impositions and those effected through "indigenous pre-colonial values and relations" promote a dichotomous analysis of African literature (4). Odamtten, then, argues for a polylectic approach to reading and critiquing these works. He says that in order to read in this manner, one must "begin to develop a polylectic understanding of Africa's economic, political, and cultural actualities" (6).
Full Text
Available in Bulk Order: Contact Publisher |
|
Cultural
Translation in Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and Osonye Tess Onwueme's
The Missing Face
Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and Osonye Tess Onwueme's The Missing Face demonstrate the process of finding a cultural identity that does not privilege an originary moment, yet provides space for a negotiated Pan-African identity for West Africans and African Americans. Both of these plays deal with the issue of constructing a Pan-African identity through connecting African Americans with West Africans and both highlight the simultaneous necessity for and failure of cultural translation to facilitate that connection. In each play, we find a female protagonist returning to Africa only to find that the connection she initially sought was not naturally there just waiting for her. Both women (Eulalie in Dilemma and Ida Bee in Face) find the need for a cultural translation and each looks to her African "been-to" husband/lover to provide it. In each case, the expected translator fails in his duties. It is left, instead, for the West African communities themselves, led by women, to provide a translation of culture to the two African-American women that will allow them to connect with and embrace their African identity while respecting the cultures that they find in Africa (rather than the culture that they project onto Africa). These plays, then, challenge romanticized notions of Pan-African identification through an emphasis on cultural translation and reveal the failure of the male-centered model of translation that would posit the husband as the sole translator for the wife and the "been-to" man as the sole translator for the community. Instead, a feminist agency is exerted by the West African communities in which these plays are set that undoes 1 the western notion of translation as the domain of the male, and moves it into a female-led, democratic process by which the community as a whole makes decisions about how to translate itself to the diasporic culture, thus asserting a kind of indigenous African agency while privileging the role of the female within this agency. At the same time, it allows for the intervention of West African communities into shaping their own identities in new ways. This reshaping of identity is shown in The Dilemma of a Ghost, the story of Eulalie, an African-American woman who has married Ato, a Ghanaian man who had been studying in the United States. The couple moves to Ghana, where Eulalie realizes that Africa is not all that she had anticipated in a homeland. Ato's family, especially his mother Esi, seem rooted in their ways and intolerant of what they see as white people's ways adopted by Eulalie and Ato in their new life in Ghana. The central conflict revolves around the family's expectation that Eulalie will become pregnant and Ato's unwillingness to entertain the idea, while he allows his wife to take the brunt of his family's criticism. When, in the end, the family, led by Esi, finds out about Ato's treachery, they take Eulalie in as their own, reprimanding Ato for his failure to uphold his values and to translate those values to Eulalie. This embrace is not automatic, however. Eulalie initially romanticizes the idea of Africa. While still in the U.S. she and Ato have a conversation about moving to Africa where she demonstrates her lack of awareness about her soon-to-be home:EU: I'm optimistic, Native Boy. To belong somewhere again…. Sure, this
must be bliss.
.... Like Aidoo's work, Osonye Tess Onwueme's The Missing Face very early on alerts the reader to the cultural conflict to come. Based on an earlier play called Legacies, Face introduces readers to Ida Bee and her son Amaechi, who have come to Africa in search of Amaechi's father Momah. Ida Bee wants her son to know his father, who stayed with her while studying in the U.S., and to embrace his African ancestry, and so they wander into the camp led by Odozi, the elder, and his wife Nebe. The first moment of misrecognition between Ida Bee and her son Amaechi and the Idu community comes when Odozi questions the strangers about who they are and where they are from. When Ida Bee is pressed for information about her lineage, she responds: From … from Idu…from all of Africa. We are the children of Africa…born in the new world. Africa is our land. We do not have to claim any particualar land or country because Africa was our nation…before the white man came to divide…disperse us. So why must we limit ourselves to one country…one state. No! The whole of Africa is our nationality. This is our land. We are the children of Africa. We come from here….(Onwueme 10) ... Onwueme also provides a flashback scene that reveals the Momah's true character and demonstrates his rejection of the mantle of cultural translator that his village has bestowed upon him. Instead, he has fully embraced the culture that those in the West tout as superior, while defensively asserting that Africa will one day adopt it: Yes, we strive to turn Africa into modern Europe. [. . .] African ways are so long and burdensome. American ways, so 'cool' and fast! A world of individualism and prosperity [. . .] We must acquire a new form of civilization. Transform the basis of our lives. Step into the 21 century walking tall. Modernize our culture. Americanize our ways. [. . .] Black-out the past. Our ancestors are nothing but archeological specimens for advanced studies on impoverished human species…Black-out the black past, backward in time and space. (29) Full
Text Available in |
|
Feminine Archetypes in Ossie Enekwe's Poetry
By
Catherine Schneider GAYLE Rubin and Barbara Melosh in their book Modern Literary Theory: A Reader posit that “gender” is socially constructed. Their classic example comes from Nineteenth-century Victorian culture which Melosh notes, described sexual difference in terms of the duties and obligations that followed from men's and women's inherent characteristics. Women's moral superiority made them ideal wives and mothers, charged with the solemn responsibility of guiding errant children and men. (“Introduction” 7) Many socially constructed notions have been perpetuated through the literary works and philosophies of many societies. Elaine Showalter in her paper “Towards a Feminist Poetics” of the opinion that when “we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but what men have thought women should be” (34-36). Hence recent Feminist interest in literary criticism is directed at exposing how ideas of gender, gender relationship are constructed and transmitted through literary works. This becomes the objective of this paper, from a Feminist theory, to assess how Onuora Enekwe's portrayal of women pander to archetypal inscriptions of women as either mother (the Madonna) or destroyer (la femme fatale) – masculinist portraitures which aid in entrenching contestable notions and myths of male superiority and female inferiority. In contesting phallocentric systems of thought and dismantling logocentricism, Feminist criticism challenges Masculinist female (mis)perceptions and (mis)presentations while simultaneously deconstructing patriarchal “systems of thought which legitimize themselves by reference to some presence or point of authority prior to and outside of themselves “ (Hawthorn 130).
Full
Text Available in
|
|
Shades of Utter(ing) Silences in The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, Maru, and Under the Tongue by B. Weiss “Shades of Utter(ing) Silences” delves on the idea of
women's potential to unveil constricting gender and racial laws by uttering
silence, or as the title of the essay also suggests, by being enveloped in
utter silence. This voicelessness, however, a cloister into the emotional
space, is chosen deliberately and therefore distances itself from the mere
notion of the Beti proverb of Cameroon: “Women have no mouth”. |
|
Poetics of Diaspora: “La ca't,” Surrealism, and Métissage in Bessora's 53 cm by JT Westmoreland
A NEW poetic and literary trend among
Francophone African diasporic authors, specifically those writing from
Paris, is the use of surrealist techniques in a “postcolonial” context. This
practice dates back to Negritude's affiliations with such European
surrealist writers as André Breton. Whereas traditionally in African
diasporic context, Surrealism has been used to articulate a sense of
solidarity or belonging (as in the formation of the Negritude and Black
Power movements), Bessora employs surrealist imagery in the immigrant
context to articulate a sense of unbelonging or anxiety-filled, hybrid state
of the female immigrant in Paris.
Full
Text Available in
|
|
Colonisation and African Modernity in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's
Ambiguous
Adventure by B. M'Baye IN THE BLACK Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy argues that, from the late eighteenth
century to the present, the cultures of Blacks in the West have been hybrid and
antithetical to “ethnic absolutism” (4-5). According to Gilroy, the modern
history of the Black Atlantic is a discontinuous trajectory in which countries,
borders, languages, and political ideologies are crossed in order to oppose
“narrow nationalism” (12). Gilroy's term “Black Atlantic” describes the
“rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation”
of modern Black cultures that oppose the nationalist focus “common to English
and African American versions of cultural studies” (4). Gilroy defines
“modernity” as the period from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries when the ideas of “nationality, ethnicity, authenticity,
and cultural integrity” that sustain contemporary cultural studies in the West
were first developed (2). Gilroy writes:
Full Text Available in
|
|
|
|
Orature and Oratorical Teaching
Strategies in African Literature: The Examples of Laye Camara and Chin Ce
by EM Sone and DM Toko
Traditional literature in
Africa (orature) serves as an instrument for examination of individual
experience in relation to the normative order of society. It was used, and
is still being used in several parts of rural Africa to chart social
progress or to comment on how society adheres to or deviates from general
community aesthetic. Seen in this light, traditional literature as a
creation of the imagination ultimately derives its material from the
realities of society. As mirror of the society it enables the community to
teach, entertain, and explore the ambiguities of human existence. The
substance of human experience out of which orature is created is that which
has made sufficient impact in the community to excite the imagination of the
people to literary creativity. One of these experiences is civic
responsibility and leadership training which is sadly lost in modernised or
postcolonial environment.
Full
Text Available in
|
|
|
Memory, Transition and Dialogue: The Cyclic Order of Chin Ce’s Oeuvres By A GrantsBeginning with An African Eclipse (2000) Chin Ce’s oeuvres foreshadow a general communal retardation most poignant in the Koloko and Gamji fictions. Seen together as one movement, Chin Ce’s writings trace a movement in the major characters from one of social preoccupation to that of psychological transition in awareness and growth. 'A Farewell' (AE) highlights this movement in a prefatory manner. The three ways: left, right and middle signify three choices involving two extremes and a middle course, an important element in Chin Ce's oeuvres. Before the choice is made, we must face ourselves, our fears, and actions represented in 'only our own graffiti.' The choice of a middle alternative is imperative from the flagellation of the other extremities but it is a lonely route that marks a separation from friends, old values, and life ways. In Children of Koloko, Yoyo represents this third factor and his separation from his two friends, Dickie and Buff, finally marks his attainment of growth as we shall see later. With the choice enacted in full awareness of the sense of alienation engendered, progress is sure even if the social outcome of this progress in political and social discourse may be uncertain. 'May 29 1999', a historical poem on the inauguration of Nigeria's last democracy confronts us with the grotesque physical paunch and slovenliness of Nigeria's new civilian leadership which combine with poetic epithets to forecast political disaster. 'The curse of the triangle' is another slavery which the new government portends for the generality of the Nigerian people. Ce's cynicism has been justified in the society-evident lack of direction that rated that country one of the most corrupt nations on earth under the government of Olusegun Obasanjo. It is the fraud of nation building which Africa’s postcolonial founding fathers had mistaken for patriotism. Its impact on the younger generations to come is being witnessed in contemporary politics of attrition and dislocation of previously honoured traditional values, a situation that Chin Ce forewarns in his second fiction Gamji College... Chin Ce's delineated 'eclipse' is therefore of a postcolonial transition that can only be determined by the quality of both leadership and citizenship in contemporary African republics. The evidence of internal social contradictions and ungainly stirring in the form of political upheavals within the continent naturally justifies the cynicism with which a poet and writer like Chin Ce would draw us to the centre of the African pedagogy.
Full Text
Available in Bulk Order: Contact Publisher
|
|
‘Let’s combat
tyranny’: The Social Dialogue of
An African Eclipse
by SE Egya AN African Eclipse projects Ce's striking portrayal of military (and civilian) dictatorships in Africa. In these poems are Ce's contribution to the African political discourse often concerned with the failures of those who acquire leadership positions, either by force or elections, to perform their duties thus reducing the land to the collapse of conscience, morals and ethics. Chin Ce cries for the land, confronts and curses the dictator in a combatant, almost revolutionary stance, and offers a hope for the masses of his land with whom he identifies. He is among Nigerian contemporary poets who are burdened with the years of plunder and dispossession under civilian and military despots and thus find political poetry an outlet of emotions. One recalls Louis James’s words (in Obafemi 36) that "[in] a situation as explosive as that of Africa today, there can be no creative literature that is not in some way political, in some way protest." The poet understands and pursues a duty, which is the entrenchment of social awareness among his people usually the downtrodden and those silenced through systematic oppression. In his versification, he calls the attention of his kin to the "characteristic evils [of politics] and the consequences of its defects" (Egudu 84).A remarkable strength seen in Ce's political poems is that they contain sharp and apt images of the oppression of the masses encapsulated in a tone that is at once combatant and direful. In her Comparative Studies in African Dirge Poetry, GMT Emezue sees the craft of some modern poets as their means for mourning the irretrievable economic and political reversals in their land. She opines that "…the overall threnody of the African eclipse qualifies as a modern African dirge poetry in all its aesthetics" . According to her, the poets of Nigeria, over the years, have come to evolve a poetics of lamentation, an elegy for a land rich in both human and natural resources but condemned by destructive leadership inadequacies (132).
Full Text Available in
|
|
|
|
Beyond
Subjectificatory Structures:
Chin Ce 'In the season of another life'
by GAR Hamilton LIKE the works of many other politically-conscious Nigerian poets –such as Ada Ugah, Odia Ofeimun, and Niyi Osundare – Chin Ce's collection of poetry, An African Eclipse, is clearly concerned with the ethical and moral transgressions of Nigeria's political leaders in its post-independence years. Yet, one would like to demonstrate here how Ce's poetry offers something more profound than a simple sketch of the various past injustices inflicted on a largely poor Nigerian population by both civilian and military leaders following the official end of British colonial governance. Indeed, this paper argues that Ce's An African Eclipse conceptualises a non-personal force of Life that not only conditions a revolutionary way of being for its readers but also functions as an ethical principle that has the potential to become the antidote to the diseased morality of Nigeria's political leaders. In a little-known article on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze laments 'the sadness of generations without teachers' (77). It is a sentiment that finds its conceptual correlate in the frustration that characterises Chinua Achebe's criticism of post-independence Nigerian leadership. 'The Nigerian problem', Achebe writes, 'is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership' (1). Given the context of a succession of corrupt civilian and military administrations, Achebe's frustration with the inability of Nigeria's leading political figures to assume the role of teacher to the nation seems entirely merited. But the concept of a teacher to the nation goes further than simply setting a good example for others to follow. 'Our teachers', Deleuze continues, are those who find 'ways of thinking that correspond to our modernity'. That is to say, our teachers are those people who can find ways of thinking that are not antiquated or antithetical to our present situation – those that are mindful of our 'difficulties as well as our vague enthusiasms' that we experience in life (77).For Ce, this simply cannot be said of the post-independence Nigerian political leaderships. Indeed, the political emphasis of Ce's An African Eclipse ensures that the collection is not without (many) examples of the impoverished condition of what one might call 'State thinking'. So, Ce writes of the profligacy of political administrations and the manner in which such recklessness and wastefulness is learned and repeated by the Nigerian everyman in the damning social commentary of 'Prodigal Drums'; he writes of the rampant egoism of Nigeria's political leaders in 'African Eclipse', which results in the social blight of self-interest and self-importance and claims of billions of dollars in oil revenues siphoned from the Nigerian economy by some Nigerian leaders and their families; and he writes of the willingness of the politicians to hide rather than disclose and resolve social problems and injustices, in the poems of 'The Second Reptile' and 'The Champ'. Taken in concert, Ce's cutting overview of State thinking presents a scathing indictment of a leadership that demonstrates a complete inability to empathise with, and react to, the experience of being a modern Nigerian. However, in Ce's essay 'Bards and Tyrants' one can trace the inability of the political leadership to form an appreciation of other Nigerians to a failure of thinking itself. Linked to his discussion of the degeneration of the integrity of the Nigerian university system, Ce reasons that the inadequacy of State thinking is due to the failure of Nigeria's political class to engage in deep personal thought at the hands of a 'liberating' literature:
Full Text Available in
|
|
|
|
The Rhetoric of
Despair in Chin Ce’s
Children of Koloko
by O Okuyade Introduction THIS DISCOURSE is centred against the background of public attitudes and orientation towards military or democratic governance in Africa. It evinces the relationship between political and legal sovereignty in Chin Ce's Children of Koloko, a book that artistically anatomizes the Nigerian society in its grossest sense in order to give the reader a proper understanding of that society. African literature is hardly discussed outside contemporary history from where it derives its pre-occupation. From the late 1970s till date, African literature continues to be inward looking, x-raying the entire continent with the people trapped in serious socio-economic crisis. According to Chidi Amuta:it is indisputable that national history and national social experience furnish a thematic quarry and an ideology imperative in the context of which African writers have been working, especially in the post-colonial period. Individual African writers have consistently testified to this fact in both their polemical utterances and literary creativity. (62 63) To assess African literature more effectively, critics must take into cognizance that this artistic vocation is a recreation of social realities and a critique of the African condition. African writers are alert and alive to their responsibility not only as teachers but, as Oyeniyi Okunoye puts it, "critics and chroniclers of shared experiences" (19). They continue to appraise the ruling class thereby signposting the failures of post- colonial nation states. The post colonial African terrain has been a turbulent geography since the 1960s when independence began to sweep through the continent. As the ruled continue to falter even within the marginal space where they are being held supine, so do their rulers progressively plunge them into poverty with the apparatus of power permanently confiscated for public subjugation. The disenchantment with Africa's independences has made most African writers identify with the people's efforts to resist the rulers. In Josaphat Kubayada's words: Postcolonial dictatorship in Africa concerns itself with repression, which in effect means the arrest, exile, execution, or consistent harassment of dissident voices. The general result of dictatorship is an atmosphere of fear, hate and humiliation. (5) Rhetoric and Narrative in Children of KolokoChin Ce's biggest asset in Children of Koloko is his ability to describe characters and scenes so vividly, and, by these descriptions, appeal greatly to readers' senses thereby creating a sense of presence and immediacy in the story. This outstanding element of style comes across in the lucid flow of language and the linearity of his plot narrative. Though the stories are told from the first person narrative perspective, Ce is able to enter imaginatively into the emotional streams of other characters and, by the use of simple evocative words, record his observations with poetic lyricism and dramatic immediacy. The narrative of Children of Koloko covers almost every aspect of life and governance, but the leadership factor underlies the literary substance of the novel. The problem of leadership hovers over everything in the narrative and hence becomes the source of societal tragedy. Among the people of Koloko we encounter an experience: an experience of a living world that is slowly dying. Ce lucidly cartographs the familiar anguish that surrounds the exclusion of African masses from the common wealth –the prodigal desire of their daily lives. The book becomes a parable on the Nigerian situation where power is consolidated in a few hands and they run away with politics which is achieved by demagoguery and deceit. Said Khamis sees this as "characteristic of the third world but not completely absent in the developed world" (57). ... Children of Koloko begins with what an ideal society should look like. This is amply demonstrated in Yoyo's observation of how the ant community organize themselves. Yoyo imagines a system that is inclusive, no high ups and no low downs, they are all involved in the business of building the community from where they all eat:These creatures were great workaholics. Their home sands were neatly piled around the holes, mounting steadily. It's always a busy day after rains … Soon I could find the workers busy doing the job, steadily, doggedly to salvage the remaining stock. They deposited, doggedly to salvage the remaining stock. … others were scouting for alternative accommodation. I saw some of them wandering as if aimless, but purposeful. (3)
Full
Text Available in |
|
|
|
'Closer to
Wordsworth': Nature and Pain in Chin Ce's
Full Moon
poems
by Kola Eke FEW AFRICAN POETS have been concerned with nature and the natural world in contrast to English poets who have written much more on nature. In Chin Ce's poetic universe, mind and nature act and react upon each other to generate a network of pleasure and pain.In his theme poem, "Full Moon", there is the attempt to elevate moonlighting above the ordinary pleasure of communal life. It is a poem of the mind and its relations to the external world, signified in the "moon". The description of the moonlight compels one's participation with the speaker: Full moon shines upon the dream The passions gather with violent The influence of nature upon him is such that the "moon" is perceived as living. With Chin Ce, the moonlight should no longer be taken for granted, it is now gifted with passionate and energetic feelings. These very few lines show that one moment of communion with the great moods and beams of moonlight can generate enough "wisdom": We had met The speaker and the moonlight as travellers run into each other. Here, "crossroads" may suggest a sense of universality. It might be tempting to think of the poem as a dramatic monologue or lyric. There is some form of dialogue between the speaker and the moon, but this is revealed from the discourse of the single speaker: Your voice cut like symphony in the Although "Full Moon" is spoken by one person as he walks in the "woods" by moonlight, it does not have all the features of a dramatic monologue. For one thing, the foundation of the poem is not the revelation of the speaker's temperament but the development of his observation and feelings.
Full Text Available in
Online Order:Add to Cart Bulk Order: Contact Publisher |
|
|
|
Creating Identity out of the
Postcolonial Void
by
L Nesbitt IN THE LAST half of the twentieth century many postcolonial cultures have found themselves out of balance. During colonization the people lived a kind of non-existence, a living void; their identities had been stolen. To establish dominion, the colonial power eradicated previous religions, educational structures, and languages. Although the indigenous person adopted a Western identity through the colonizer, it was an illusion, empty of meaning, because the native culture, in all its complexity, was not recognized by the colonizer. Essentially the people became impostors of themselves. Their personal and cultural history had been destroyed as one of the implications of colonial rule. Since the complex identity of the native was not acknowledged, the native essentially never existed as a unique individual in the colonizer's eyes. The identity inflicted on the indigenous person was a meaningless stereotype masking the true identity that had become void. This vacancy will be explored from the context of abuse of power. This void is the denial of identity and a life with no meaning; the mask of colonial identity covering the void is an illusion. Taking off the mask in the postcolonial world does not necessarily reveal a full individual; the colonial erasure of cultural and personal identity appears to be permanent. The enduring exploitation of formerly colonised nations has been defined using the term Neo-colonialism. The term implies a nation with a continued reliance upon the former imperial power and the West in general, but more specifically neo-colonialism also implies a persistent state of confusion of selfhood for the individual and for the whole nation. We spend our lives constructing unique personal traits and individually recognizable selves created from different sources. In the globalisation of today's society, the notion of identity is becoming increasingly complex, especially with an added complication of post-colonization. Many individuals do not communicate in their indigenous language, were not schooled using textbooks reflecting their particular social and cultural situations, or had Western instructors; even their religions did not reflect their own indigenous religious history. The definition of one's self has become multi-layered and essentially fractured. Vassanji:
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country's treasury in recent years. I head my country's List of Shame. (Vassanji 3) ...... Turning and turning in the widening gyre Yeats's notion that humans have created a dark and foreboding future with no connection between their own humanity and spirituality is implicit and explicit in Achebe's novel. There is a loss of common purpose, instability, and great unrest in a world spinning out of control. The novel is replete with symbolism emphasizing these notions. For example several of Achebe's characters function as symbols. While Okonkwo, the protagonist, is a complex character, he also symbolizes traditional Igbo society; he is defined by his culture, clan, and his rigid role in that clan. He is also a flawed character with some of his destruction being self-inflicted. For example even though he is warned not to participate in the killing of his surrogate son, he fears "being thought weak" and so strikes the fatal blow (Achebe 43). This blow destroys his family since it drives his son to the colonizer's religion where he is given a new self-identity, "Isaac" (Achebe 129). On the one hand Okonkwo's resolute behaviour kills him and contributes to the fracturing of his tribe; however, his daughter, Ezinma, symbolizes the future of the clan when she crawls into the cave and womb-like safety of Africa, transported on the back of the oracle, Chielo.
Full Text
Available in Bulk Order: Contact Publisher
|
|
|
|
Antigone
as Revolutionary Muse. Fémi Òsófisan's
Tègònni: an African Antigone
by A Van Weyenberg THE POPULARITY of Antigone within Western literature, art and thought has been discussed at length, most famously by George Steiner who classifies it as "one of the most enduring and canonic acts in the history of our philosophic, literary, political consciousness" (1984 preface). At the heart of the tragedy is the conflict between Antigone, who sets out to bury her brother, and her uncle King Creon, who has issued a decree forbidding this burial. Antigone's appeal largely derives from this central conflict, a conflict that appears straightforward, but on closer inspection reveals the intricate nature of the various oppositions it explores, such as that between woman and man, individual and state, private and public and the gods and mankind. Not only does this complexity make the conflict between both protagonists tragic to begin with, but it also ensures Antigone's continuing attraction as a source for philosophical and artistic inspiration.A great number of playwrights have revisited Sophocles' original, but its contemporary popularity is particularly striking on the African stage, where Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Athol Fugard, Fémi Òsófisan and Sylvain Bemba have given Antigone post-colonial relevance in a variety of 2 settings. It may seem strange that African playwrights would turn to texts that represent the classical Western canon. After all, Greek tragedy originally came to colonial areas through imported, and forcefully imposed, Western educational systems, and in that sense could be seen to epitomise imperial Europe. In their seminal study on post-colonial drama, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins clarify that it is precisely this enduring legacy of colonialist education that explains the "prominent endeavour among colonised writers/artists" to "rework the European ‘classics’ in order to invest them with more local relevance and to divest them of their assumed authority/authenticity" (16). Still, whether or not African reworkings of Antigone should be considered counter-narratives to the Western canon is a question in need of closer investigation, and one that will be discussed later. This paper will focus on Fémi Òsófisan's reworking of Antigone, entitled Tègònni: an African Antigone (1994). It will first examine Òsófisan's decision to draw on Antigone within the context of Nigeria. Then, it will discuss Antigone's representative value within her "new" surroundings, the (meta)theatrical aesthetics that characterise her cultural translocation and, finally, the political implications of this translocation for Antigone's status as a Western canonical figure.The Choice of Antigone
Full
Text Available in |
|
|
|
The Child hero: A Comparative Study of
Ngugi's Weep not, child and Oyono's
Houseboy
by
L. Nwokora IN HIS WORK on Chinua Achebe's novels, entitled ‘Chinua Achebe and the Tragedy of History ,' Thomas Melone says that the content of literature ought to be judged as "a portion of his destiny" (T. Melone, 1973, 12). Explaining his reasons, the Cameroonian critic says that every authentic literature should be a "carrier of humanity" ("porteuse d'humanite"), since it should, whether it be African or European, "witness for man and his destiny"; because, continues the critic, "men are first of all men ..., their identity is fundamental, and their destiny human" (T. Melone, 1973.12 ). More than any other form of literary criticism or appreciation, comparative literature highlights this universality of even' creative literary art. Universality, however, does not mean that one must necessarily compare authors from different countries or different cultural backgrounds. It is possible to compare and contrast two or more writers from the same country, from the same village, even from the same family, and finally, an author can be compared to himself. One comes up with interesting findings, in comparing, for example, the Chinua Achebe of No Longer at Ease with the Achebe of Arrow of God. The young graduate returning from England, unable to find his feet in his former home, and the village of Umuaro no longer thesame under sweeping religious attacks on the gods that had hitherto guaranteed its security and unity, both are witnesses each in its own way to the same cracking society under the invasion of foreign culture. Does it mean that the celebrated Nigerian novelist has said everything when he published his famous Things Fall Apart, and that thereafter is he only repeating himself Far from it? The novelist is comparable to a surveyor, whose field is the human society; in each novel he observes society from a particular point of view. The product of his artistic (here literary) creation is a "portion" of man's struggle with life, i.e., with his destiny, and this "odyssey" reproduces, mutatis mutandis, similar characteristics, whether it talks of Achilles, of Antigone, of Hamlet, of Obi Okonkwo or Ezeulu.The above considerations help us to better appreciate Ime Ikiddeh's definition of a novel as "fiction based on an historical event recreated in human terms" (Ngugi, 1962, xii). The particular point of focus of the two authors we are studying is the child in his relation to given certain "historical events recreated in human terms" in two different countries and at nearly ten years' interval in time. Before comparing these historical events viewed as recreated fiction, we should first of all ascertain why the two authors chose each a child to be his hero. Why the Child as hero? Comparative Study of the
Experiences of' Toundi, and Njoroge
Full Text Available in
|
|
This reading will demonstrate in Ce's second published prose fiction true images of this postcolonial violence that has modern African states such as Nigeria in a vice grip – a post-war violence, as brutal to the psyche of individuals as it is to the state, perennially threatening to consume the national cultural and political ethos of the entire African region. Thus while Gamji College in a larger artistic perspective may deal with the character of the nation states of Africa under the various civilian and military regimes that govern them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Brown par 1), its oral metaphors of violence are rendered in a manner that few recent fiction narratives in the African region have attempted. The objective of this study is to look at the story-teller's conceptualisation of violence, and how it envelopes his narrative, characterization and language in a way that brings out the message in its glaring entirety. Chin Ce's story of a metaphorical African-Nigerian nation (Gamji College)
is divided into three sections entitled the "The Cross", "The Bottle" and
“The Gun". Each of these sections is as separate from the other as the
characters in the stories are different. The only link is that all the
action happens in the college although at different times. With this
arrangement, quite similar to the author’s first published work, Children of
Koloko, this collection of stories, told through the viewpoint of three
major characters, gives us added insight to the author's vision regarding
the youths (college students) of his country represented by Gamji in the
three stories. |
|
|
|
‘Moderated Bliss’:
Coetzee's Disgrace as Existential Maturation
By Erik Grayson
ALTHOUGH J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace has garnered a great deal of critical attention in the six years since its publication, most critical literature written about Coetzee's novel attempts to identify and delineate a process by which the protagonist David Lurie lifts himself out of a state of disgrace, often claiming that a condition of grace is the former professor's ultimate destination. Yet, as Ron Charles observes, the moment one begins to consider the nature of Lurie's (dis)grace, "the novel's title begins to refract meaning in a dozen directions" (20). Furthermore, commentators continue to struggle with what Gareth Cornwell calls "the fertile indirections of its narrative style" ("Disgraceland" 43.) Indeed, combined with Coetzee's deceptively simple prose, Disgrace has encouraged a range of equally convincing, yet widely divergent, interpretations.In their discussions of (dis)grace, critics have viewed Lurie as a burgeoning Stoic, a man threatened by emasculation, and an individual suffering from a lack or intimacy while positing that the novel depicts the attainment of grace through "secular humility" (Kissack and Titlestad 135) and the struggle to remain human in an inhumane world. However, despite the novel's concern with states of (dis)grace, the trajectory David Lurie's life takes during the course of the novel might be better understood as a process of existential maturation. Rather than chart the fall and subsequent redemption of a "mighty" academic, as Melanie Isaacs's father sardonically remarks, Disgrace documents the end of David Lurie's reluctant acceptance of aging and mortality (Coetzee 167). In fact, Lurie's strikingly powerful fixation on mortality not only girds the aforementioned readings, but may also explain the "odd kink in [the novel's] narrative structure," namely what "the first quarter of the story [has] to do with what follows" (Hynes 1). It is only after David Lurie acknowledges and internalises his own eventual mortality that he discovers anything akin to grace. Indeed, Lurie's period of existential maturation, his gradual acceptance of life's eventualities, also marks a period of creative self-discovery during which Lurie finds his voice as he composes a comic opera "that will never be performed" (215). Disgrace, then, may be read as David Lurie's journey from estrangement to sexual, creative and existential self-actualization.The first quarter of the novel, rather than depict Lurie's tumble into disgrace as many commentators have suggested, presents us with a man who has been isolated from, and disengaged with, the world for some time already. Tellingly, Disgrace opens with Lurie thinking that "[f]or a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well" (1). Since Lurie regards physical intimacy as a problem which must be solved as one would fill in a crossword puzzle or balance a budget, we may infer that, for him, sex is little more than a chore he must perform periodically. In other words, Lurie's sex life lacks the sort of emotional intimacy one would assume he enjoyed as a married man. Furthermore, the line reveals Lurie's acute awareness that ageing will only make solving the problem increasingly difficult. Thus, as Michael Gorra observes, Coetzee's opening line only "tells us that David Lurie hasn't solved the problem at all" (7). Thus, Lurie's relationship with a prostitute named Soraya only reveals the inadequacy of physical intimacy to satiate his hunger for emotional intimacy. Although Lurie claims "that ninety minutes a week of a woman's company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage" and that "[h]is needs turn out to be quite light after all, light and fleeting," he nevertheless longs for a different arrangement with Soraya (5). Indeed, Lurie admits to having developed "an affection" for Soraya that "[t]o some degree, he believes…is reciprocated" (2). Yet, despite his apparent rejection of emotional attachment, Lurie indulges his need to share his life with Soraya:During their sessions he speaks to her with a certain freedom, even on occasion unburdens himself. She knows the facts of his life. She has heard the stories of his two marriages, knows about his daughter and his daughter's ups and downs. She knows many of his opinions. (3)
Full Text
Available in Bulk Order: Contact Publisher
|
|
|
|
Post-Colonial Literatures as
Counter-Discourse: J.M. Coetzee's
Foe
and the Reworking of the Canon
A Kehinde
Africa in Western Canons All our traditions and experiences are connected with a foreign race –we have no poetry but that of our taskmasters. The songs which live in our ears and are often on our lips are the songs we heard sung by those who shouted while we groaned and lamented. They sang of their history, which was the history of our degradation. They recited their triumphs, which contained the records of our humiliation. To our great misfortune, we learned their prejudices and their passions, and thought we had their aspirations and their power. (91) Africa and Africans are given negative images in Western books of geography, travels, novels, history and in Hollywood films about the continent. In these texts and records, Africans are misrepresented; they are portrayed as caricatures. Unfortunately, Africans themselves are obliged to study such pernicious teachings. Reacting to this mistake, Chinua Achebe declares that if he were God, he would "regard as the very worst our acceptance, for whatever reason, of racial inferiority" (32). He further comments that his role as a writer is that of an educator who seeks to help his society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of vilification and self-denigration. Homi Bhabha also declares that Western newspapers and quasi-scientific works are replete with a wide range of stereotypes (17). In similar fashion, Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt dwell on the inscriptions of stereotypes of Africa/Africans in Western religious canonical texts (the Bible in particular). To them, canonical texts are: those Christian religious texts considered divinely inspired by the Church. In secular aesthetics, literary and other texts accorded a privileged status, within some version or another of a 'great tradition', as embodying the core values of a culture. (225) Thus, in expansion of Milner and Browitt, Dennis Walder asserts that the Western-associated canons of texts are dotted with a whole complex of conservative, authoritarian attitudes, which supposedly buttress the liberal-democratic (bourgeois) states of Europe and North Africa (74).Actually, the colonization of Africa is explicit in the physical domination and control of its vast geographical territory by the colonial world and its cronies. However, this physical presence, domination and control of Africa by the colonizer is sustained by a series or range of concepts implicitly constructed in the minds of the colonized. Therefore, more than the power of the cannon, it is canonical knowledge that establishes the power of the colonizer "I" over the colonized "Other" (Foucault 174). It should also be stressed that the available records of Africa's history handed down by the Europeans, far from being a disinterested account of Africa, are interested constructs of European representational narratives. This view is supported by Ania Loomba : "the vast new world (Africa inclusive) encountered by European travelers were interpreted by them through ideological filters, or ways of seeing, provided by their own culture" (71). ... Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. (168) By distorting the history and culture of Africa, the colonizer has created a new set of values for the African. Consequently, just the subject fashioned by Orientalism, the African has equally become a creation by the West. On his 'island', Crusoe attempts to subjugate all of nature, including Friday, his manservant. The founding principle of subjugation is force, as he uses his gun to save Friday from his captors (and to silently threaten Friday into obedience).He then begins a programme of imposing cultural imperialism. The first method in this programme is a linguistic one. Crusoe gives Friday his new name without bothering to enquire about his real name. He instructs Friday to call him "Master." He thus initiates Friday into the rites of English with a view to making him just an incipient bilingual subject.
Full
Text Available in |
|
|
|
Memory and Trauma in John Nkemngong
Nkengasong's Across the Mongolo
by SA Agbor THE STUDY focuses on the relationship between literature and memory and thus, addresses a theme that over the last two decades has become one of the central issues in literary and cultural studies. Memory and literature intersect in many different ways. Literature is one of the media that plays a crucial role in the process of representing and constructing both individual and collective memories. Throughout literary history, literary texts have engaged in a discussion of the implications, the problems, and the purposes of remembering (www.uni-giessen.de). Literature, moreover, participates in the processes of shaping collective memories and of subversively undermining culturally dominant memories by establishing counter-memories, which seek to consider, for example, gender-conscious or ethnic perspectives on past events. One of the recurring themes as far as literary representations of memories are concerned is the complex interaction between memories and identities. The intimate relationship between literature and memory is particularly obvious in genres such as autobiography, biography, or fictional biography.The Anglophone problem is a historical reality in Cameroon and has had a profound influence on the literary imagination of many Anglophone writers from Bole Butake to Epie Ngome to Bate Besong, to Charles Alobwed'Epie and John Nkemngong Nkengasong amongst others. Modern Cameroon is made up of Anglophones and Francophones because the nation was colonized by the British and French. The Anglophones in Cameroon are a minority, constituting about one-fifth of the population and occupying less than one-tenth of the national territory. Alobwed'Epie states that "in Cameroon usage, the term is used to designate the opposite of Francophone on the one hand and, on the other, to designate people native to the S.W (Southwest) and N.W (Northwest) provinces" (49). Although fact is mixed with fiction, Nkengasong's text educates and allows the reader to participate in the (re)creation and (re)interpretation of events and processes that form identity crisis and alienation in a nation. Moreover, the manner in which Nkengasong manipulates characterization, storytelling, and imagination to enact memory is enriching. Across the Mongolo is relevant in the information it coveys and functions as historical data and as an avenue through which nationhood and bilingualism in Cameroon are conceived. This study aims to explore various facets of the intimate and complex relationship between literature and memory from different vantage points in Nkengasong's Across the Mongolo.This essay hopes to show that the subject of the Anglophone problem has indeed inspired a range of reflections on the notion of memory, trauma, and history. It intersects with Nkengasong's creative springboard. His creative imagination is influenced by a multiplicity of social, cultural, political, and economic trends of the Cameroon nation. The argument here begins with this recognition. Alienation, we contend, is as central to Across the Mongolo as neocolonization. Secondly, through his creative imagination Nkengasong reveals the tension and predicament of a minority in the nation. It is in this wise that we refer to the Anglop |