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Research in African Literatures 31.4 (2000) 48-62



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African Literature and the Traditional Arts: Speaking Art, Molding Theory

Anthonia Kalu


In the effort--to write the African story in European languages, Africans seem to have written themselves out of a lived African history into an alien and transitional narrative world. Though enabling in its capacity to open up Africa to the international world, that narrative world continues to close itself to Africans focused on a reality invented for the service of an extant colonial imperative. This invented Africa is ridden with questions about language, identity, viable political systems, and others that continue to challenge the African intellectual engaged in the quest for true African freedom from continued Western domination. Most scholars (see Achebe, Morning Yet; Gates, Signifying Monkey; Okpewho) agree that successful engagement of the issues it raises requires both a sustained engagement of African oral traditions to discover its own theories of aesthetics, criticism, and performance as well as the formulation of relevant theories for exploring contemporary African literatures. Predictably, general agreement on the necessity of these projects in the literatures of African-descended peoples has resulted in the initiation of various methods of discovery and inquiry. Notable examples include the works of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's Nobel Prize laureate, which explore the uses of Yoruba mythology as fictional and literary tools and strategies of engagement for the new literature (Myth, Literature and the African World), and Henry Louis Gates's theory of Signifyin(g) in African American formal literary traditions (The Signifying Monkey), and Abiola Irele's focus on ideology and language (The African Experience in Literature and Ideology). As a result of its history, the assumptions of contemporary African literature continue to depend on the anthropological, insisting that Africans in general and Africanists in particular should rise to the project to (re-)member and re-deploy African thought, African traditions. Further, the political implications of the encounter demand immediate deployment of the artifacts of these archeological endeavors. This essay explores the purposeful use of the oral narrative as a contemporary African literary technique with positive implications for the development of an African literary theory.

Regarding viable methodology, Foucault reminds us that

it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within those rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say--and to itself, the object of our discourse--its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance. The archive [. . .] emerges in fragments, regions, and levels, more fully, no doubt, and with greater sharpness, the greater the time that separates us from it: at most, were it not for the rarity of documents, the greater chronological distance would be necessary to analyse it. (130) [End Page 48]

Although the postcolonial situation provides limits and possibilities, the implications of self-reflection hinder full exploration of contemporary Africa's archives. The point is not to assume that we need to arrive at a different place (Appiah 68) or to become a different people. Productive strategies should create change that must not disconnect us from our origin--nationalism's resistance of this possibility upholds sovereignty, validating tradition along with the rights of society's members. For Africans, this means that modernization's efforts will fail if one of its main purposes is to erase ancestral archives. Consequently, contemporary African literature strives, together with African peoples, to keep African earth from "heaving [only] dust" (Echewa, I Saw the Sky) by purposefully inserting fragments from traditional archives into the new.

A persistent problem is that on the level of language acquisition, it looks as though Africans have gained much that is new, useful, and superior through learning to read and write in the colonizers' languages. It is significant to note that colonized Africans would have had difficulty acquiring elements of the new cultures if no parallels existed in African societies before the encounters with the East and West. The nontrivial assumption (re-)presented here must be fully explored for...

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