Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Help

for instance, the abiku figure in ben okri's novel, work, can't be understood as a genuine, authentic, traditional, etc--use any vocabulary you want--figure, but an invented one, one that really has to be referred to as "abiku," in scare quotes. this isn't to denigrate it, or ben okri or the yoruba historical beliefs, but to say that the way in which icons and ideologies work in fiction is not through a transparent reflection of an entity or object called culture, but through the reconstitution of images/ideologies under the impress of multiple pressures, including the ways in which people come to constitute the world. i don't want to annoy you with theoretical formulations, but the heart of it is that culture is always in process, that we take the notion of historical events and figures and with them constitute  our own sense of ourselves.
ngugi leads us astray by basically freezing a notion of africaness, tying it to languages, equally frozen in their essential africanness, and insulating african cultures and languages from the processes of interaction and change. this destroys the heart of african culture, and leads to cheap ideological claims like the ones about african authors cited below as not really being african. what is at stake is politics, not scholarship. if it is to come to grips with a living cultural work, he'd do well to turn to such figures as james ferguson, simon gikandi, or achille mbembe who engage historical changes in their readings of culture, including "folklore." he could read a specialist of oral literature like bob cancel, and he'd find that the authors of written literature cannot be read sensibly as translating oral literature into their novels. it would take a lot more work to understand what a novel is, and how oral culture is to be studied, before we can make any claims about their relationship. instead, people immediately say: african=oral tradition, a meaningless, ideological formulation that is grounded in the ways colonial discourses constructed their "africa."
that's the irony of it; in seeking to denigrate the european side of africa and to cleanse it, he/they actually operate out of a european discursive frame.
ken

On 2/2/14 10:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

hi ikhide
i can't really help very much; i don't agree with the proposition here about oral literature or euro lit, not in the way it is framed in the quote below. "oral lit' becomes an invented category when it is deployed more or less ideologically and not with the careful construction of those who study it. one book that might help frame this understanding is eileen julien's African Novels and the Question of Orality.
ken

On 2/2/14 9:57 PM, Ikhide wrote:

A friend is working on a research thesis, "Magical realism as a decolonizing tool in Ben Okri's narrative." He has asked me if I could refer him to books that cover or relate to this topic. His major question is, "where has oral tradition in Nigerian Literature gone?" So he is looking for nooks that cover oral tradition or use oral tradition in Nigerian narratives,
employ  myths, riddles, aphorisms in telling stories...  His argument is along these lines, I think... "Amos Tutuola's publication of The Palmwine Drinkard (1952) most Nigerian authors have abandoned African folkloric narrative style. The closest to that kind of narrative is Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991) which was based on the African Abiku myth. Contemporary Nigerian authors like Chimamanda Adichie, Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Chris Abani and Nnedi Okoroafor swung back to what Ngugi Wa Thiongo termed, in his essay, "Afro-European Literature", that is, "literature written by Africans in European Languages." They have, in their novels, refused to blend "the factual and the fantastic, the traditional and the technological landscapes" present in a postcolonial setting (Peters, 1993:23)."

Anyway, any recommendation on books, I am sure he will greatly appreciate. I hope I hear from some of you folks..

Many thanks in advance!

 

- Ikhide

 

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--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  professor of english  michigan state university  department of english  619 red cedar road  room C-614 wells hall  east lansing, mi 48824  ph. 517 803 8839  harrow@msu.edu

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--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  professor of english  michigan state university  department of english  619 red cedar road  room C-614 wells hall  east lansing, mi 48824  ph. 517 803 8839  harrow@msu.edu