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Dear Editor:

Having read Neil Lazarus's review of my book on Ayi Kwei Armah, "An African Focus" (1998) [rev. RAL 32.1: 134-36], I felt compelled to respond with a few clarifications. Of course I am unhappy when someone as respectable as Lazarus denounces my efforts in such harsh terms, but it is his apparent unwillingness to read my study sincerely--based on, it seems, an irritation with the book--that is more distressing. I can understand part of Lazarus's irritation, as the book was rushed through language-check and printers, due to unfortunate circumstances. But this alone cannot account for his malicious review. I will, however, not comment on his strong words but look at his more serious allegations.

Lazarus claims that I "construe modernism as emblematic of 'the West.'" I do not! Even the passage he quotes from my page 173 merely describes Armah's modernism in the earlier novels as Western, not Modernism. It is Western Modernism I am talking about, yes, since that is the Modernism Armah shunned, not Russian, Latin American, African, poetic, or Swedish. It is Armah who defines his modernism in his first novel as Western, not I; he is the reductionist!

Nor do I, as Lazarus claims, even mistakenly, say that African cultural instances are "binaristically opposed to those of 'the West.'" It appears, however, that Armah's texts express such a view, something most other Armah-exegetes also have observed. It is the fictionalization of this reductive binarism that I study narratologically in my book.

Narratology does not appear to be Lazarus's favorite critical theory/ method. Instead he wishes I had been more engaged with "philosophical terms" (an ideological category masquerading as philosophy here). I absolutely get the feeling that it is politics he is after. The subtext of the review indicates that part of Lazarus's irritation originates from the fact that I do not discuss the politics of Armah's novels. Why should I, when others, including Lazarus, have already done this? Even if I never subject Armah's novels to a political reading in my book, I certainly do not claim that his novels "ought not to be subjected to political critique," as Lazarus claims. Anything can and indeed must be subjected to political analysis. And I do say so in my book, on page 203, if not in those words; I do end on an ethical note. There is, however, a time and place for everything. I decided that my study would not be the place for political critique of Armah's novels. I felt when I began (late '80s) that there was a place for analyses of narrative strategy, to complement, to add to what critics like Lazarus, Derek Wright, Richard Priebe, Robert Fraser, and others had written.

Nor does this position, or "philosophy," as Lazarus prefers to call it, lead me to claim that "Frantz Fanon's work does not function as intertext for The Beautyful Ones." Lazarus's use of the preposition for indicates our different views of the term intertext. Because it is my work definition of that term, derived from Genette and Riffaterre on my page 21, which quite rightly leads me to the judgment that Fanon's work is not intertext in Armah's novels. With his use of the preposition for I can, however, agree with Lazarus, since Fanon's work certainly is, as I believe Derek Wright wrote, "Armah's conceptual horizon"; it is Fanon's thoughts that Armah fictionalizes in almost all his writings. If we want to understand that horizon, we must turn to Fanon. In my view we are not then discussing intertext, but influence.

Intertext, as I use the concept in my book, is a text of secondary nature that it is necessary to perceive and understand in the primary text, here Armah's first novel. In The Beautyful Ones, Armah certainly fictionalizes Fanon's work, but it is not necessary to know this in order to appreciate...