On the Sacred in African Literature: Old Gods and New Worlds (review)

Mark Mathuray's book seeks, in its author's own tersest summary, "to introduce to the field of African literary criticism the idea of the sacred" (11) and thereby to challenge the "primacy of the political" (1) in that field. In the alternative criticism that is here proposed, nationalist politics and the history of colonization no longer provide the master-code of all analysis but must share hermeneutic space with an older (and still influential) order of power that is not only represented in African texts but also enters into the very forms of writing themselves. Thus it is that closure in sacrificial ritual models narrative closure, and an aesthetic that privileges realism over mythopoesis and assigns to each of these its own automatic political valency—"progress" and "reaction" respectively—is shown to be quite simply a falsification of African writing. These generic stereotypes are rescued from their mutual exclusion and exhibited as cohabiting happily together in the same text.

Mathuray pursues this worthy and timely project methodologically through a close focus on five Anglophone African works, with supportive reference to others and a significant reliance on authorities from a variety of disciplines across the breadth of the humanities. He loses no time in situating himself among these secondary sources: that great neo-Kantian theorist of the numinous Rudolf Otto finds himself (perhaps for the first time) rubbing shoulders with the anthropologists Mary Douglas and Victor Turner and being directed with them against Emile Durkheim and those late nineteenth-century British enquirers into the "primitive" whose notions of the sacred obscured either its essential internal ambivalence or its intimate articulation on the "profane" (or both). While this is then primarily an intervention within postcolonial studies, it will have intrinsic interest for anyone open to the argument that mythos and logos are not opposites locked in a unilinear teleology of successive supersession but perennially in each other's company even under conditions of modernity; and that—as Hans Blumenberg argues in his monumental Work on Myth (1979)—myth can never, as uncritical moderns have long supposed, decisively be "brought to an end." Indeed, this book might in its widest intellectual reach be said to have applied the Blumenbergian argument about the metropolis to its reflex out at the colonial "margins"; and it is then a pity that a thinker so sympathetic to its project should not have been marshaled to strengthen its whole innovative case.

After his introduction, Mathuray turns first to West Africa, using Chinua Achebe's novel Arrow of God and Wole Soyinka's play Kongi's Harvest to bring into a commonality of serious investment in the sacred two writers who are regularly dichotomized in conventional commentaries. Arrow of God, a tale of the hero-victim and priest-king Ezeulu and the work of a writer ordinarily dubbed "realist," is itself "a ritual writ large" (39). The African sacred and the traditional epic are encompassing enough at once to survive in the atmosphere of a modern literary genre and to absorb even Christian conversion into their own premodern terms. It is with this order of reading that Mathuray challenges what he calls the "culture-clash" model of liberationist criticism, suggesting at least to this reader that the hospitality of traditional modes to the irruption of change from outside, which is so often stressed in relation to the scribal cultures of India—of colonial rule as a brief interruption of a long temporality—might be predicated across the cultures of (nonscribal) Africa. India indeed comes to mind in this chapter when the god Ulu appears and the novel's realism "shifts . . . into the mythic mode" (40), inasmuch as this is precisely what happens in the last part of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, where in the context of just such a theophany motifs from the first two parts reappear in striking new combinations and in detachment from their earlier realistic circumstantiation. To observe this is not so much to identify...