"The Festival Spirit and the Comic Horizon in African Literature"

African literary criticism usually focuses on tragic or 'serious' literature. The tradition of comic literature is often understated or neglected. Many of the well-known and often-discussed modern African novels—such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre [So Long a Letter], Mia Couto's Terra Sonâmbula [Sleepwalking Land], Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Assia Djebar's L'Amour la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade], Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat—are tragic or semi-tragic novelizations of the traditional or the contemporary African experience. The seven novels referenced are among the 12 books announced by a panel of judges in Accra, Ghana on February 19, 2002 as the very best of "Africa's Best 100 Books of the Twentieth Century." This tendency toward gravitas in literary production and commentary is not peculiar to African literature. Noting Aristotle's association of the comic with the trivial, Robert Torrance, in The Comic Hero, points out: "Not only does comedy represent men as worse than they are, while tragedy represents them as better, the writers of the invectives in which comedy had its origin were themselves of the cheaper or more vulgar sort" (2). In a similar vein, Marcel Gutwirth states in Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic, "In the hierarchy of literary genres, comedy is seldom set on a par with tragedy as an expression of what is most profound in human nature. Among the practitioners of the genre, in fact, few rise above the trivializing possibilities inherent in it, thereby reinforcing the prejudices of the theoreticians" (24). The association of tragedy with nobility and grandeur and comedy with titillation and triviality still informs literary production and criticism, including African literature and criticism.

In the case of African literature, the gravitation toward the tragic seems accentuated by its sociopolitical or postcolonial thrust. This disposition toward the production of the tragic or 'serious' (instead of the comic) novel is not simply consequent on aesthetic consideration alone. Modern African literature, of which the novel is a radiant example, emerged as a historically grounded and consciously postcolonial counter-discourse. Published in 1958, Achebe's Things Fall Apart acquired the status of a defining signpost in the narrative of that emergence. As an incarnation of the prototypical African novel, Things Fall Apart more or less functioned as the foundation of modern African literature. Colonial/postcolonial subalternization (the marginalization or devaluation of the colonized subject) played a significant role in conditioning the imagination of the modern African writer. In its immediate postcolonial mode in the middle or the last half of the twentieth century, the African novel often provided a literary platform for the seriously didactic critique of the history and effects of colonialism as well as the scrutiny of post-independence anomie. Many novels of that era—Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy (1956–1957), Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966), Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Ahmadou Kourouma's The Suns of Independence (1968), Djebar's L'Amour (1985), and several others—can be described as "dual-focus narratives" that explore the tension and dis/continuities between at least two opposed systems of thought or modes of being (such as the native or traditional versus the foreign or modern). In Season of Migration to the North, for instance, a parallel between Mustafa Sa'eed's exploits in England as a student in the twentieth century and Tarik ibn Ziyad's conquest of Hispania in the eighth century is a comparative as well as contrastive aspect of the narrative structure. When Sa'eed reportedly says "I have come to you as a conqueror" (Salih 60), we hear in that declaration not just his brazen admission of his romantic-criminal exploits but also discernible echoes of Ziyad's declaration after landing in Gibraltar: "Either we shall conquer this country and establish ourselves here or [End...