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Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001) 45-56



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Special Issue: Nationalism

The Nation as a Contested Construct

Emmanuel Yewah


In his landmark study in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson opens what has become a continuous debate on the idea of the nation and nationalism by defining the nation as "an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (15). He explains: "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them. Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (15). In fact, he adds, "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" (15). To imagine the nation that way is to focus on its physical structure, that is, as a landscape with fixed boundaries, rather than as an inscape, amorphous and fluid. For as Anderson contends, the nation is "imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lies other nations" (16). To think of the nation as sovereign, that is, an independent, self-governing entity modeled on monarchies at a time of great historical and intellectual changes in Europe, a period of increasing religious pluralism, adds yet to that false notion of the nation. Yet the question remains: how can such a recent, false notion as nation cause so many to be willing to die? Or, as in the case with some African writers, be willing to create works that " [offer] blueprints of national formation?" The answer lies perhaps in the political leaderships' or, indeed, pseudo-sovereigns' abilities to dictate this false notion to his people as truth.

In recent years, however, writers like Sony Labou Tansi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nuruddin Farah, disillusioned by the broken promises of "les soleils des indépendances," betrayed by postcolonial rulers who have appropriated national discourses, conscious of dictators' human rights abuses within their imagined sovereign space, have turned their creative endeavors into weapons to challenge, indeed to deconstruct what Jean Franco has called in another context "any signified that could correspond to the nation" (204). Such subversive activities of de-centering the nation, of questioning established national boundaries, have taken various forms. Some of the writers have created grotesque, ubuesque, composite political figures and endowed them with larger-than-life qualities that transcend national boundaries while undermining their flattering attributes by also endowing them with self-destructive tendencies as well, tendencies that together nullify their existence. Farah's Maps transgresses all kinds of boundaries--social, gender, generational, identity, and geographical--to show the idea of nation as having "a shifting and unstable significance." On his part, Ngugi's decision to write in the Gikuyu language has implications beyond the established boundaries of his imagined community Kenya. As will be shown later in the discussion, such a decision aims at developing his local language so that it can effectively express the complexities [End Page 45] of local realities and through that empower the Gikuyu-speaking masses to actively participate in shaping their own destiny. For Labou Tansi, contesting takes the form of highlighting the arbitrariness of national boundaries by making them fluid so they can be mapped and remapped at will by dictators, and by intertwining the existence or destiny of the nation with that of unstable political figures. In doing so, Labou Tansi as well as the other writers in question here seem to pave the way for the nullification of the nation itself.

For many women writers, who, to borrow from Homi Bhabha, "have always been placed on the limits of [their] nations' narratives"(302), contesting various boundaries has often come through their way of framing what might be considered personal, individual, local issues, everyday life stories in ways that transcend the boundaries of their imagined communities. Indeed, for all those writers and critics, the nation can no longer be interpreted as Walker Connor puts it simply as "a...

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