Envisioning Difference in Le Clézio's Onitsha

Le Clézio's Onitsha was published in 1991 and is to date the most important fictional piece the author has devoted to his childhood experience of colonial black Africa (British-ruled Nigeria of the late 1940s). I approach the work as an instance of postcolonial discursive practice and focus specifically on the nature and function of the cross-cultural perspective it offers. I grant that any attempt to describe a culture other than one's own inevitably involves using one's cultural reference to describe that culture. I further grant that the unavoidable use of one's cultural lens to relate to another culture rules out the possibility of there being a one-to-one relationship between what one writes about the other culture and what that culture is in its complexity. I claim none the less that the attempt at crossing boundaries — even from a culture that has stood in a position of antagonism and domination in relation to another — is not always to be seen as a cultural self-serving and self-aggrandizing venture. The attempt may well be for all its imperfections a necessary exercise in cultural self-questioning and a welcome threshold of engaging with or indeed opening up to difference. This is perhaps particularly so when one considers that Onitsha was written and published some three decades or so after the achievement of independence in black Africa.