Examining Canonization in Modern African Literature March 21, 2009
Posted by Tanure Ojaide in : African Literature , add a commentWith four literary Nobel laureates the past two decades or so (Wole Soyinka, Idris Mahfouz, Nadine Godimer, and J.M. Coetzee), modern African literature has reached such a world standard of respectability that deserves internal re-examination. Once a writer wins the Nobel Prize, his/her literature and the culture assume a significance that would normally not be accorded it. For this reason, it is pertinent to re-examine the modern tradition of African literature.
This essay examines the idea of an African literary canon through the creative talents of African writers and their critics. The term “canon” will be used here in its simple meaning of being “privileged,” or given special status, by a culture (Murfin and Ray 38). Broadly speaking, works that attain the status of classics and are repeatedly discussed, anthologized, or reprinted are usually said to have entered the canon. Of course, different schools of critics, especially Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and minority ones argue that many artistic works may not enter the canon if they do not conform to the mainstream ideology. The discussion of the African literary canon will have more to do with what makes African literature generally than isolating specific texts into a superior class of its own. This essay will thus discuss the criteria for inclusion and what constitutes cultural acceptability in African literary works. Once there is a canon, it follows that there will be works outside its domain or what could be described as non-canonical works.
By inference, if literature is a cultural production, as there is a Western literary canon, so also will there be an African literary canon. Inevitably, since writers of Europe, North America (Canada and the United States), and European world peoples in Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere have their literary canon as defined by critics such as Harold Bloom and others, one needs to define what is the African literary canon. This definition will be based on the African-ness or Africanity and what it constitutes in literary terms.
Africa is a geographical, political, and socio-cultural entity. For this reason the African in this essay is not limited to the racial but also covers the totality of a diverse continent. African writers are those writers that express the African sensibility in their works. This is significant as critics have been shy to address the position in African literature of non-black writers of
Every literary canon exists in the context of the people’s overall experience and aesthetic values. Thus, the African literary canon is related to the African experience, which has strong cultural and historical underpinnings. The question, rather the idea, of an African literary canon is one that has often been raised in controversies but not addressed head-on in its totality. Chinweizu’s “debate” with Wole Soyinka in the 1980s, the issue of the language of African literature from Benedict Vilakazi through Obi Wali in “The Dead End of African Literature” in 1963 and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s cultural crusade since the early 1980s to now, and the ongoing debate as to whether contemporary African writers, especially those living in North America and Europe, are writing more to please their Western audiences and publishers rather than their own African people they write about, are examples of discussions that touch the issue of canon in modern African literature. In addition, what constitutes the African experience forms a significant part of the canonical definition. The issues of cultural identity are also involved in this exploration. All such controversial debates contest what should be or not be part of the African literary canon, what Abiola Irele describes as “the African imagination.”
To Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, modern African literature has to be “decolonized” to be taken seriously and seen as authentically African. Many critics would quarrel with that position as essentialist, but others still wonder why modern African literature should be written mainly in the foreign languages of former European colonizers of the continent and also exhibit core features of European modernist writing. To Soyinka, the reality of Africans has to be acknowledged and the modernist impulse of
Benedict W. Vilakazi, as far back as 1939, lamented the fact that South African writers were writing in English and not in African indigenous languages. Very much in the manner of Chinweizu, some five decades earlier he saw African literature as literary works in African languages. He wrote:
By Bantu drama, I mean a drama written by a Bantu, for the Bantu, in a Bantu language. I do not class English or Afrikaans dramas on Bantu themes, whether these are written by Black people, I do not call them contributions to Bantu Literature. It is the same with poetry. . . I have an unshaken belief in the possibilities of Bantu languages and their literature, provided the Bantu writers themselves can learn to love their languages and use them as vehicles for thought, feeling and will. After all, the belief, resulting in literature, is a demonstration of people’s “self” where they cry: “Ego sum quod sum” [I am what I am]. That is our pride in being black, and we cannot change creation (qtd. Masilela 76).
Vilakazi also sees Bantu sensibility as different from what he describes as the Romantic sensibility of South Africans of European stock (qtd. in Masilela 75). This same idea of an African language defining African literature is to be pursued by Chinweizu et alia and Ngugi wa Thiongo later on.
Doubtless, literary works by Africans in indigenous African languages such as Ewe, Sotho, Yoruba, and Zulu are African works that have a place in the canon. So also are works of Afro-Arab literature in Ki-Swahili and Hausa. However, a people’s experience is so diverse that it is not limited to “authentic” or pristine features. The African reality is diverse and ever-changing and it is expansive enough to accommodate what Africans do in their own different ways. Hybridization inevitably occurs in the course of a people’s history, as that of Africans, and that is an integral aspect of the people’s experience. The African identity, therefore, is an ongoing process, like the African culture, and is not fixed on marble but is dynamic—it absorbs new features, even as it discards some of its own old ways. Thus literary works in non-African languages by Africans that express the African experience belong to the multifarious tradition of African literature(s).
Much as literatures in pre-colonial times are defined by the languages they are expressed or written in, European colonial adventures across the globe have made that definition of a people’s literature limited and outmoded in a postcolonial context. Chinua Achebe accepts the use of English, but attempts to indigenize it to suit the society he writes about. In fact, in his particular case, as in Things Fall Apart, the language of the colonizer becomes a potent medium of the colonized to interrogate the colonial enterprise in its political, moral, and ethical dimensions. Abiola Irele defends African writers’ use of English, which he describes as an “extra-territorial” language, since there are now many Englishes worldwide. On the other hand, the language debate, as to whether a work in English, French, or Portuguese can be “African,” appears to be playing itself out in suggestions of translations of works done by Africans in foreign languages into indigenous African languages. Furthermore, by using indigenous oral techniques to write, African writers are practicing what Abiola Irele describes as “written oral literature.”
Literature in
Modern African literature has imbibed many qualities of the oral tradition. Much of the writing is functional in the sense that the literary creations—poetry, fiction, and drama—aim at transforming society into a more humane one. It is for this reason of having an impact on society that Mazisi Kunene finds African literature “heavy,” compared to European literature. He told Dike Okoro in an interview in
In fact, it is those works that aim at changing the world as it is (often imperfect) and installing new values that will advance the betterment of society and individuals that can be said to be natural inheritors of the oral tradition. In the oral tradition, as in udje and halo, literature matters as individuals pay attention to the way they live and so follow cherished values so as not to be laughed at in songs. Literary works that have this attribute should contend for inclusion in the African literary canon.
Many African literary works deal with subjects that in the Western canon will be described as “extra-literary,” suggesting that they should not be legitimate concerns of writers. However, what is “extra-literary” to the Western critic is intrinsic to the African writer, who, because of the historical predicament and tradition, draws materials from the socio-political happenings around him or her. For this reason, many literary works in all the genres criticize political corruption, tyranny of leaders, excessive materialism of the elite, and others meant to ridicule and, by so doing, eliminate the negative habits of society are also natural heirs of the African oral traditions of literature.
Many African literary works fall into the satiric corpus of laughing at follies and foibles of individuals and society to change them for the better. Examples are plentiful, but it suffices to mention a few. Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, for instance, attacks the vulgar materialism of Nigerian politicians of that time, as Achebe’s Man of the People. Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino ridicules Africans who were copying Western lifestyles without discrimination as shown in the lampooning of both Ocol and his girlfriend Clementina, while portraying the culturally nationalistic Lawino in a positive manner. Much of modern African poetry is critical of political corruption as in Niyi Osundare’s Songs of the Marketplace and Tanure Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures.
African writers condemn the exploitation of the common people (as in Syl Cheney-Coker’s “Peasants”) and other negative practices. There is the effort on the parts of writers to promote humanity and sensitivity to others. Works that condemn apartheid in South Africa in the form of poetry such as Dennis Brutus’s Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, fiction such as Peter Abraham’s Tell Freedom and Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night, memoir such as Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History, and drama as Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead are functional works meant to eliminate the inhuman socio-political system of apartheid. It is thus very understandable that there is a lot of protest in modern African literature—against colonialism, racism, apartheid, political corruption, class distinction, and injustice, among others. Modern African literature is a literature that responds to the people’s plight, feelings, and aspirations.
The cultural identity of modern African literature is a major consideration in establishing a canon for its texts. Culture involves a shared experience of belief systems, worldview, traditions, and aesthetic standards. One can observe certain aspects of cultural identity in modern African literature, especially the novel, even though written in English, French, or Portuguese, foreign European languages. As expressed in Poetic Imagination in Black Africa, these cultural qualities include the utilitarian function of the literature, social cohesion, the ethical/moral nature of African civilization, defense of African culture, African mystical life, ideas of law and order, peculiar attitude to time and space, and special use of folklore and language, especially of proverbs. Let me highlight some aspects of the cultural identity exhibited in modern African literature.
African literary works tend to be functional and not just art for art’s sake. A few examples will illustrate the didactic tendency of African creative works. The “adequate revolution” that Chinua Achebe espouses is “to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement” (44). And he teaches fellow Africans “that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” (45). To Mariama Ba, her mission as a female writer is to attack “the archaic practices, traditions and customs that are not a real part of our precious cultural heritage.” Ngugi and Ken Saro-Wiwa are also clearly didactic in both Devil on the Cross and Lemona’s Tale respectively. In Ngugi’s novel, the Gicaandi Player tells Waringa’s story so that other young women will learn from her story and avoid her mistakes. Saro-Wiwa’s Lemona’s Tale is meant for young beautiful but uneducated women to learn from her plight. While many literary works are openly didactic, others are more subtle in their methods.
The sense of community holds strongly in the African society. A cardinal point in understanding the African view of humankind is the belief that “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am” (Mbiti 108-109). Mazisi Kunene is of the view that “the earliest act of civilization was . . . the establishment of a cooperative, interactive, human community.” He adds:
The idea of integrating the artist’s vision within a broad social experience becomes a normal and natural process that does not require rules of application. Both the philosophic and artistic worlds fuse to produce a discipline that aims at affirming the social purpose of all expressions of human life. In short, the ideal of social solidarity is projected (xvi).
Modern African literature, while dealing with individuals as characters, tends to focus on the entire society. In many works, the hero or protagonist is diffused in many characters. Examples of such works include Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters with five major characters, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Petals of Blood with three major characters, Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the
John Mbiti also says that “the whole psychic atmosphere of African village life is filled with belief in . . . mystical power” (197). This continues today through the embrace of traditional religion and practices and Pentecostal Christianity, which emphasizes defeating demons and principalities than preparing to go to heaven as the regular Western Christianity does. The belief in gods and mystical phenomena is strong in African literature. There are gods invoked in many African literary works. Also there is a sense of mystery expressed as in Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods and in Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine in which a beautiful lady is dedicated to the gods and woe betide the man who marries her. Many African writers portray characters and actions that defy scientific reality and operate in extraterrestrial planes. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Starbook derive from this tradition. Of course, the much touted magical realism of Latin America most likely originated in
The African idea of law and order can best be seen at play in a literary work like Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, where Elesin has to will himself to die before the burial of the dead Oba so that he will not have to interfere with the rule of succession. On the African concept of land, it is sacred and dedicated to the ancestors. In Weep Not, Child, “Any man who had land was considered rich,” and is poor if he has no land but has cars and jet planes (22). African literary works that express these mainstream beliefs can be considered belonging to the literary canon.
Modern African literature is highly infused with folklore. The oral traditions of
The use of language in African literature appears unique because of the peculiar circumstances of African history and the nature of its indigenous languages. That Africans write in English, French, and Portuguese does not make their language European. Most African writers, especially of the first, second, and third generations, spoke their own mother tongues before learning the European official languages at school. In fact, there are many Africans who spoke two or more languages before acquiring any of the European languages of their countries. Once these African writers begin to use the adopted language, they tend to inform it with their native tongues. For instance, the writings of Wole Soyinka are informed by Yoruba, while those of Chinua Achebe are informed by Igbo, Kofi Awoonor’s by Ewe, and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s by Gikuyu. These tonal African languages have their own syntax and folklore, which become subtexts in, for instance, the English that the writers use. A reading of Death and the King’s Horseman, Things Fall Apart, “Song of Sorrow,” and Petals of Blood, without taking into consideration the African language settings of the respective texts, would lead to missing much of the meaning of the works. As Abiola Irele puts it in The African Imagination, “The effort to achieve a formal correspondence between the writer’s African references and the European language he or she employs has, as one of its objectives, the achievement of a distinctiveness of idiom within the borrowed tongue by an infusion of the European language with the tonality of African speech patterns” (57). Irele sees “orality as a matrix of the African imagination” (58), incorporated into modern African literature through “transliteration, transfer, reinterpretation, and transposition” (58). Language, after all, carries the thought and experience of a people.
It is significant that many modern African writers, especially the poets, are highly learned in the folklores of their peoples. Kofi Anyidoho studied his Ghanaian Ewe folklore, as Tanure Ojaide has researched on
Many African writers have gone to the extent of writing poetry, plays, and stories by anglicizing their local languages or indigenizing English. Kofi Anyindoho’s “Tsitsa” does this in Ewe-izing “teacher,” “college,” “trousers,” and “English,” among so many words of the poem. Kojo Laing has also tried to use Akan words as if English. Gabriel Okara’s novel, The Voice, is written in a language which is a transliteration of Izon (also spelt Ijo) into English.
The frequent use of proverbs by African writers, especially in fiction and drama, gives a unique flavor to African literature. The proverb, a traditional speech trope, validates what the writer aims at conveying. Chinua Achebe seems to have used proverbs the most of modern African writers. These proverbs give a distinctive cultural identity to modern African literature.
Though it could be seen as a postcolonial phenomenon, the use of Pidgin English has become an African language experience that some of the writers employ in their works. It started from coastal areas of Africa as a means of communication between the foreign sailors and the local communities as in
Pidgin English has been used to write fiction as Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Soja Boy, which is described as “rotten English.” Many pidgin poems have been written in
I wan bi President
if food no dey market I no worry
if dem say price don rise I no go worry
if salary no come on time I no go worry
if petrol dey cost too much I no go worry
if sanitation exercise dey I no go worry
if na religion trouble dey I no go worry (Ojaide and Sallah 183).
Pidgin English, for the most cases, serves as a comic medium to undermine and ridicule accepted but unethical values of the society.
The use of Pidgin, Creole, and the indigenizing of European language words are forms of linguistic experimentation in the creative process of the postcolonial societies of
At the crux of traditional African literature is its orality. Abiola Irele observes in the African imagination “a conscious reference to a matrix of expression whose ultimate foundation is the oral mode” (21). Africans, in their writings, have to switch from the traditional mode of the spoken word to the modern one of writing. It is interesting that there is a good amount of written works in some African languages, especially in Yoruba, Hausa, Ki-Swahili, and Somali. However, in terms of historical time, African languages have only recently started to be written, a postcolonial experience. The point is that while written, African literature still carries much of its traditional orality in many forms such as the use of repetition, songs, narrative modes, and chant-like rhythms, among other features. Often there is tension between the oral (often popular culture) and the modern written (often elitist) resulting in the synthesis of the two into a unique artistic mode. One can observe that modern African poetry tends to be more performative in mode than reflective, a distinction that comes out when one listens to an African poet and a Western (American or British) poet read at the same forum. This mediation of writing by orality has become a significant mark of modern African literature. No good African literature, therefore, can afford to ignore the reality of the known tradition of orality employed in a creative manner in writing. This has led Abiola Irele to assert that “the problem of the African writer employing a European language is how to write an oral culture” (16). He adds that “what gives interest to the literary situation today in
Since literature is a cultural production, it only follows that a people’s narratives, poetry, and drama should be an expression of their culture’s artistic disposition at its highest level. Failing to reflect this cultural identity will fall short of the aesthetic, which is culturally conditioned. In fact, the canon of a people’s literature grows from its cultural ideals. It is not surprising therefore that Obotunde Ijemere, a British, writes with that penname to be seen as a Nigerian Yoruba in order to validate his cultural immersion in the African people’s artistic production. The notion of a literary canon admits of some essentialism, since working out of a different, albeit foreign, cultural background will not fit into some specific cultural view of the literature. John Haynes, also a British writer in
The African environment provides the setting, source of images, and symbolism for the African experience expressed in the literary works. The evocation of the landscape provides the literary work a concrete setting that defines it as African. African rivers, forests, and mountains, among others, appear in literary works. The river, for instance, is the home of Mami Wata, the water-maid or Olokun by a Yoruba name that pervades the poetry of many African writers such as J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo, and Onookome Okome, among many poets. The weather is also evoked as in David Rubadiri’s “An African Thunderstorm.”
Examining Canonization in Modern African Literature - Continued March 21, 2009
Posted by Tanure Ojaide in : African Literature , 3commentsThe fauna and flora of the continent become embodiments of the thoughts of the characters expressed in literature. Wole Soyinka’s Brother Jero plays are based on the motif of the trickster tortoise, the Yoruba ajakpa. Kofi Awoonor uses the weaverbird to represent the coming of colonialists to
Following the shared experience of culture and environment is the historical experience of the people, especially of the people’s contact with Europeans and the consequence of that encounter. First, there was slave trade in which the coastal and interior parts of the continent were ravaged by despoliation and the youths captured and shipped away. Then there was colonization in which Europe, through military might, shared
The Negritude writers countered the European notion of Africans as inferior by extolling pride in blackness. Works of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Birago Diop, David Diop, and others praise African values and humanity, what later generations will call ubuntu. Senghor does not only exhibit the state of innocence of pre-colonial Africa as in “Night of Sine” and “I Will Pronounce Your Name,” but also expresses in both “
For who else would teach rhythm to the world that has died of machines and cannons?
For who else should ejaculate the cry of joy, that arouses the dead and the wise in a new dawn?
Say, who else could return the memory of life to men with a torn hope?
They call us cotton heads, and coffee men, and oily men,
They call us men of death.
But we are the men of the dance whose feet only gain power when they beat the hard soil.
(Moore and Beier 233)
Senghor is using this poem and similar ones to confront the challenges of colonial history, proffering to Europeans what they lack and Africans have in abundance. He thus uses his art not only to respond to the European colonization of Africa but also to defend
While there are several strands of Negritude, including Senghor’s romantic presentation of pre-colonial Africa as an idyllic place, there is agreement that the literary movement of the 1940s and 50s raised black consciousness in Africa and the African Diaspora, especially in the
While Francophone African intellectuals and writers used Negritude to react to European denigration of African culture, the Anglophone African writers affirmed their Africanity in their own way by showing the African personality as a human who has strengths and weaknesses. With works of Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) and Joyce Cary (Mister Johnson) in particular portraying African characters in stereotypical ways, African writers felt it was their duty to correct the European distortion of the African.
Chinua Achebe’s literary objective in his early works, especially in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, was to fight back the negative ideas of
Africa’s political history has a significant impact on the people’s experience and their literature. The experience of colonization placed the European metropolitan countries at the center and the African colonies at the periphery in a relationship that African writers fought against. In fact, Janheinz Jahn sees African history as paralleling modern African literature. The years of colonization, nationalist struggle, independence, post-independence, and neocolonialism have their imprint on modern African literature. The colonization afforded African writers the opportunity to question European values in their exploitation of “others.” Thus, African literature is critical of the colonial enterprise of Europeans. After World War II, many Africans, including those who fought for the liberation and freedom of
The nation became very important in identity formations of Africans. In place of traditional ethnic groups or kingdoms, new states arose, bringing together multiethnic groups that the European powers put together for their political and economic benefit. African peoples were divided into countries irrespective of ethnicities, and countries such as
In both Francophone and Anglophone Africa, writers attacked European exploitation of Africans. Works of Sembene Ousmane such as Le Mandat (The Money Order) and Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman are illustrative of the calamities brought by the West to
In addition to reacting to European exploitation, after independence, African writers started to react to their separate African rule. As will follow, the political corruption of the emergent states and the instability resulting in coups and civil wars gave the writers materials for their art. One can say that almost all over
Literary works immediately preceding and following political independence in
This period coincided with the Cold War between the Eastern Bloc and the West. Most of the writers were left of center. There was Marxism expressed in works, principal among them was Ngugi wa ‘Thiongo in his Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and Matigari. The workers and proletariat came to the center of fictional works. In poetry, many writers, including Jared Angira and Niyi Osundare, declared themselves Marxists. However, whether declared Marxists or not, the poets of the generation that include Syl Cheney-Coker, Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, and Femi Osofisan ranged on the side of the underprivileged and tended to concern themselves more with socio-economic issues rather than culture which formed the major preoccupation of the earlier generation of Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Kofi Awoonor, and Lenrie Peters. These “new” poets also expressed more of class conflict as they relied more on African oral traditional techniques rather than the modernists in their expression of the current African reality. Thus,
Involved in the historical experience of Africa and concomitant with colonialism was the introduction of Christianity to
African writers, especially the poets, the Congolese Tchicaya U’Tamsi, the Nigerian Christopher Okigbo, and the Sierra Leonean Syl Cheney-Coker, copiously use Christian motifs of a suffering Christ and other rituals and symbolisms of Christianity, particularly of the Catholic Church. Christ becomes the sacrificial hero, who endures the “sins” of society and is immolated to give better life to his people. While Cheney-Coker may not be a church-going person, still he uses the image of Christ to express his Creole origin and his individual circumstances in his society in Concerto for an Exile. It is interesting to note that in Cheney-Coker’s poetry “his persona combines the contradictory attitude of condemning Christ and Christianity while at the same time seeing himself as Christ” (Ojaide and Obi 149). He feels betrayed, as Christ was, in love, his Creole ancestry, and the mistreatment of people in his country and throughout the world; hence he exhorts his betrayers:
Oh! Nail me to my cross, the two thieves also, I am they
my three deaths, one for myself, one for my people,
and one for
In Cheney-Coker’s poetic work, “The mask of Christ is used by the poet for secular motives—to save the lives of his people as in Christopher Okigbo, not to save their souls” (Ojaide and Obi 150).
Thus, Christianity may be alien in origin, but it has become a religion embraced by millions of Africans who fashion their lifestyles on its tenets. Many African writers, especially the poets, tend to be critical of Christianity because of its association with slave trade and colonialism.
Integral to
Modernism (or modernity) goes with many assumptions—literacy, democracy, etc. that fit well with the state of the European world at the time of its origin between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that coincided with the onset of colonialism in Africa. On the literary level, the works of T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pounds, W.B. Yeats, and Gerald Manley Hopkins, among others, illustrate the modernist spirit that resulted in difficult, obscure, allusive, and fragmented ideas manifested in poetry. Modernism demands some intellectual basis for creativity, as seen from the literary works of
African writers have also been responding to the impact of migration and globalization on their people and continent. Ecological and environmental matters, sometimes arising from the actions of multinational companies, are at the core of Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness on the ecology of the coastal part of
In recent times, there has been discussion about the direction of contemporary African literature, especially the direction the literature is taking in light of the fact that many of Africa’s leading writers now live in the West and the problem arising from the foreign publishers bringing out texts that conform to their notion of “African” literature, which is usually a distorted Western view of Africa. The relevant question is, Is any writing with an African setting African literature? Are African writers living in North America and
Many African writers in North America and
Writing specifically of South African literature, but reflective of this phenomenon in the continent’s literature, Gugu Hlongwane writes: “The point being advanced here is that the Western gaze influences not only how some South Africans write, but also who is elevated as the modern interpreter who will be palatable for Westerners” (5). Also many of the African writers getting published in North America and Europe are barely read in their home countries where these books are very expensive because of
The position of contemporary African writers living (and writing) in the Continent in the literary canon debate has become less significant as the writers in the West tend to steal the spotlight with the advantage of big publishers, promotion in the media, and money involved. Most African writers winning international literary prizes tend to be living in the West, and one can count so many of them—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Calixthe Beyala, Zakes Mda, Sefi Atta, Helen Oyeyemi, and others. These writers abroad have their works reviewed by the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and other prestigious papers, magazines, and journals in the West. At the same time, despite globalization, the poor communication network within
Those living and writing outside Africa seem therefore to be defining the canon rather than those writing in
The establishment of a tradition and the inter-textuality that goes with it are related to the establishment of a canon. While there is the inter-textuality of indigenous folklore and writing in the form of folktales used in poetry, drama, and fiction that easily conjure in one’s mind certain modes of behavior as of the tortoise, spider, and hyena, among others, it is the connectedness of the writing tradition that gives the readers/audience a sense of continuity. Younger writers seem to be referring to their elders’ works to validate their own standing in their individual country’s or continent’s legacy.
Zakes Mda of
There appears an observable lack of connection between the older and younger writers in the case of South African literature. This is understandable in the sense that the children of free
One cannot conclude the discussion of a literary or artistic canon without a thorough examination of the aesthetics involved. Traditional and modern Africans and their artists have their established concept of the purpose of literature. They also have their notions of beauty and artistic merit when judging a specific literary text. Whether among oral or written texts, Africans have standards and principles for judging cultural productions, what Emory Elliott describes as “the systems of values” (5). African literary aesthetic also has to do with critical evaluation and making “selections and judgments from among an abundant array of texts” (Elliott 5). It is from the expectations of readers that a people’s literature can establish its canon. Audiences challenge the writers to certain standards. Works that advance their cherished values and are consonant with the highest aspirations of African peoples and done artistically are those that can enter the canon under discussion.
It goes without saying that since literature is a cultural production and is dynamic like the culture that carries it, the notion of an African literary canon is fluid and not cast in stone. The canon is not calcified, but evolving within the shared experiences of Africans, rooted in their known reality, and forever tapping into their changing consciousness. However, despite the diversity and the expanding content and style of modern African literature arising from the dynamic experience of the people and continent, African literature will remain that literature that responds to the concerns and expresses the sensibility and aspirations and ideals of African people in a form and manner that they see as part of their living reality.
Examining Canonization in Modern African Literature - Works Cited and References March 21, 2009
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La Guma, Alex. A Walk in the Night.
Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness.
Mezlekia, Nega. The God Who Begat a Jackal.
Modisane, Bloke. Blame Me on History.
Moore, Gerald and Ulli Beier. Modern African Poetry.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel. The African Image.
Masilela, Ntongela. The Cultural Modernity of H.I.E. Dhlomo.
Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy.
Murfin, Ross and Supryia M. Ray. The
Ngugi, wa ‘Thiongo. Devil on the Cross.
—. Decolonizing the Mind.
—. Petals of Blood.
—. Matigari.
Okigbo, Christopher. Labyrinths with Poems Prophesying War.
Okoro, Dike. “Interview with Mazisi Kunene.”
Ojaide, Tanure. The Tale of the Harmattan.
—. The Activist.
—. Poetic Imagination in Black
—. With Joseph Obi. Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature: Texts and Contexts.
—. With Tijan M. Sallah. The New African Poetry: An Anthology.
—. The Fate of Vultures & Other Poems.
Osundare, Niyi. Songs of the Marketplace.
Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl.
P’Bitek, Okot. Song of Lawino.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Lemona’s Tale.
Soyinka, Wole. Idanre & Other Poems.
—. The Interpreters.
–. The Man Died.
–. A Shuttle in the Crypt.
—. Season of Anomie.
—. Myth, Literature and the African World.
Vilakazi, B.W. “To the Editor,” South African Outlook, vol. 69, July 1, 1939.98.
2nd Ojaide International Conference October 26, 2007
Posted by Tanure Ojaide in : Politics and Society , add a commentCall for Papers
2nd Ojaide International Conference (July 9-13, 2008)
-the local and the global in Ojaide’s literature; discourses of ecology in Ojaide’s literature; oil and the politics of literary representations in Nigerian literature; the history of oil exploration in the Niger Delta; literature of ecology and the environment about the Niger delta; literary representations of multi-national oil companies in the Niger Delta; JP Clark (Bekederemo), Ken Saro-Wiwa, Tanure Ojaide; socio-cultural transformations in the Niger Delta; Oil, politics, and the literatures of the Niger Delta. Abstracts (due December 15, 2007) and full papers (due March 31, 2007) should be sent by email to both:
English and Film Studies Department of English and Literary Studies
Email<ookome@ualberta.ca> email<sawefeada@yahoo.com
Welcome to Tanure Ojaide’s Blog! May 22, 2007
Posted by Tanure Ojaide in : Politics and Society , 3commentsThanks for visiting Tanure Ojaide’s Blog and learning about socio-economic and political issues facing Africa. Dr. tanure Ojaide, is one of Africa’s most prolific poet and writer in his generation. Please feel free to post your comments on our blog, and we truly appreciate it!