Shaken Wisdom: Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction

Introduction

1 i n troduct ion Irony can be a response to an oppressor convinced of his superior wisdom . It can suggest that its user’s wisdom is superior. Irony can also hold the line on traditional wisdom shaken by disruptive events. Wisdom itself can be ironic, therefore shaken from the inside. Wisdom displayed as absolute truth, by an older generation, for example, for some homogeneous community, can in turn be displayed ironically by a younger generation anxious to affirm its own claim to knowledge, understanding , and freedom. Irony can be a tradition, but it can also subvert traditions or perhaps hide traditions in itself in order to remind us of them while seeming to speak and live free of traditional influences. But if irony is an integral part of the way that meaning is produced and communicated in all kinds of situations of human verbal interaction , and often appears in literary texts as a representation of that role, what are the implications for a study that undertakes to foreground a specific discursive practice as African? In her study of Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, Virginia Ola uses the notion of irony to defend the heroine’s Africanity from “Eurocentric” feminist accusations of sexism: “Even the irony which informs the title, The Concubine, on which much of the suspense and complexity of the heroine’s own position are predicated is denied its own crucial contribution to Amadi’s stylistic achievement. [ . . . ] The situation of ethereal or other worldly concubinage is the dominant irony of the text, as well as the first act of rebellion and self-assertion on the heroine’s part” (132). Why African Ironies? Shaken Wisdom 2 would irony form so basic an argument for an African heroine’s self-assertion and so important a means of leading the reader to a more balanced understanding of African traditions and experience? Such is the seminal questioning that underlies the conception of the present study. the goal The goal of this study is to consider the relationship, within the context of African literary discourse, between irony and meaning. What is the purpose of irony, and how does it work in its various forms as part of the process of communication? I am not assuming that all African literature is ironic. Nor am I undertaking a historical survey of irony in the vast and diverse corpus of African writing or of African literary criticism. Through an approach based to a large extent on pragmatics , the branch of linguistics that attempts to account for what utterances mean when they are used in actual situations, this study will show that from its presence in traditional communities, through the struggle to respond to a long history of disparagement of all things African , through the disillusionment with postindependence leadership, to the postcolonial questioning of cultural identity, the tendency to say things without saying them directly, the subterfuge of implicit meaning in speech, is an abundant, effective, and yet little understood feature of the codes and practices of African self-expression. Irony remains a subtle but powerful means for African women and men to undercut assumptions of their economic and social powerlessness by adding ironic subtexts to their words, just as marginalized individuals and communities ironically undercut the verbal dominance of their oppressors and detractors. This practice of irony will be shown to illuminate many insinuating and stealthy utterances that form a vital part of the texture of meaning conveyed through the literary works of Ahmadou Kourouma, Chinua Achebe, and Calixthe Beyala. theoretical considerations: ironic discourse and african culture Is African literature simply one possible example among others of ironic discourse? Or is African literature in some way more ironic than other literatures, thereby meriting special attention? Or could it be that irony in African literature has not been adequately explored in studies of literary irony or in the criticism of African literature itself? Studies of irony Introduction 3 in literature have tended to privilege examples taken from specific literary traditions, for example, the many references to nineteenth-century French literature in Philippe Hamon’s L’ironie littéraire (Literary irony), Muecke’s preference for English literature, and Knox’s emphasis on fifteenth - to eighteenth-century English writers. Even Linda Hutcheon’s Irony’s Edge, though politically conscious and focused on postmodern theories, privileges European examples. Laura Rice’s Of Irony and Empire (2007) is an exploration of the potential that irony offers as a means...