Creaturely Mimesis: Life After Necropolitics in Chris Abani's Song for Night

The common goal of both historical and animist materialism is the re-enchantment of the world. To realize this goal, contemporary African literature must do more than simply represent the world. Its most vital role is to perform itself as a surrogate rite of re-ancestralization, one that engenders a radically expanded, trans-species spirit of relatedness. Chris Abani's 2007 novel Song for Night is an exemplary allegorization of this expansive process of re-ancestralization in that its narrator, blown apart by a landmine, must reinvent his Igbo grandfather's forgotten song of connectedness in order to rejoin the world of the ancestors. Insofar as his lyrical song for night transposes the improvised sign language of his platoon of muted minesweepers, the narrative mimes their creative resistance to the instrumentalization of human life. However, this creativity does not constitute a recovery of the human so much as a spirited affirmation of corporeal similarity, or what I term creaturely mimesis.