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Research - Criticisms on African Writing - 3 |
African Literature Online
African spaces in European
places: Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones and Donato Ndongo’s
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Portrait of a Contemporary Griot: Orality in the Films and Novels of
Ousmane Sembène THE majority of Ousmane Sembène's literary and cinematic work is a critique of the conflictual relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the people, the rich and the poor, and the elders and the youth. Thus, his novels and films address issues involving tensions that are commonly created by uneven power relations. Well-known novels by Sembène include Les bouts de bois de dieu (1960), L'Harmattan (1964), and Xala (1974). In 1963, he created his first short film "Borom Saret" (1963), followed one year later by "Niaye" (1964). In 1966, Sembène completed "La Noire de ...'', his first full-length film that won first prize at the Film Festival of Carthage and gained him the title of Best African Filmmaker at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. Films to follow included "Le Mandat'' (1968), "Emitai'' (1971), "Xala'' (1974), "Ceddo'' (1977), ''Camp de Thiaroye'' (1988), ''Guelewar'' (1992), ''Faat Kiné'' (2000) and ''Molaadé'' (2004). Though one could write numerous articles on the themes covered by Sembène's large, multimedia corpus (poverty, African feminisms, circumcision, religion, politics, etc.), one aspect of profound interest is the role of the griot, or West African storyteller, in Sembène's work. Full
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Ayi Kwei Armah: Provincialising Old Centres and Remaking the African Myth by Divine Neba Che
FOREMOST revisionist African mythologists like Cheikh Anta Diop and Chinweizu have successfully debunked the Western collusion in Black inferiorisation. They are joined by Ayi Kwei Armah, a dogged revisionist mythologist who in the novel Osiris Rising attempts to demythologize the racist maxim that the black world is "forward never, backward ever" by resuscitating the African past as a means of restoring her lost values. This process of resuscitation, recycling and integration may not totally erase assimilated or hybrid values, for Africa owes a debt to the modern nation states and vice versa, but is simply a process of bringing into limelight what has been rejected or ignored for
centuries: the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris and
Isis and the building of the image of a vibrant Africa via literature.
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The
Miriam Makeba Story
by
Benjamin Odhoji
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Crisis of Identity in Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People by Smita JhaWHEN we talk of identity crisis in African writing it is a kind that is both individual and territorial in character and does have strong social, political, religious or cultural implications within the continent. Through a century of colonial governance Africa lost much of its traditional and cultural identity to artificial nation state and ideological formations. The violence inscribed upon the continent imposed by the colonizing power has witnessed traumatic physical and psychological conditions that affect generations of African peoples and cultures. For the first generation of modern African writers led by Senghor, Achebe, etc., it was a daunting task to seek to restore belief in the lost and maligned traditions of Africa through their writings.
Achebe’s search for innate human qualities takes an ironic manifestation in A
Man of The People wherein he portrays two well-rounded characters immersed
in their own rationale of success and achievement and proves that western
cultural invasion together with the infiltration of material luxuries poses a
serious threat to tribal African values and amidst such confusion the society
lost its way.
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KENYA elected a new leader, Mwai
Kibaki, in December, 2002, after 24 years under the presidency of Daniel
Arap Moi. This was not only a major change in Kenyan politics; it opened the
door for a major shift in the lives of all Kenyans and especially the
nation's artists. It was not long, however, before the new administration
faced accusations of corruption and business as usual, but the spark had
already been lit under a burgeoning artist community; change was on the
horizon.
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History, Memory and Tradition in African Poetry by Sarah Anyang Agbor
POETRY has become a means of remembering
history and documenting the oral lore of a people. It is a medium of
transposing the culture of the people as well as exposing the abnormalities
within it through memory. This study points to the function of African
poetry, to educate, entertain, and moralize. It examines attempts to deploy
elements of orality, history and memory in through poetry.
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“Genealogies of the Spirit”: Ancestral Reclamation in the dramas of August Wilson by Shirley J. Carrie
CONTEMPORARY Black intellectuals and artists like August Wilson often signify
the historical dispersal of peoples of African descent in a redemptive narrative
that suggests that diasporic body can be re-born through the restoration of the
dead. More importantly, the commemoration of the ancestor figure anchors the
diasporic subject to their own uncertain present by enabling them to redeem the
past. This cultural reclamation of an African origin and/or roots is often tied
to the solemn remembrance of the Ancestor. Thus, the demand for the humane
treatment of the ancestral dead is viewed as having both social and psychic
consequences for the generations that follow.
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African Mythic Context and Postmodern Philosophy in Aminata Sow Fall's Le Jujubier du patriarche by Médoune Guèye
IN THE wake of the announcement of the death of grand narratives by
postmodernism, postcolonial critics announced the death of such
“essentialisms” as race, nation or even gender in their works.1Aminata Sow
Fall's Le Jujubier du patriarche2 illustrates that deconstructive vein of
postcolonial literature with a discursive strategy, underwritten by the
interaction of genres. Le Jujubier du patriarche opens in the mode of
novelistic fiction and closes through that of epic poetry. Constructed in a
dialogic relationship between the novel and the epic, the work transposes
one genre, which is tied to the African oral tradition, into another, which
emerges from the Western literary tradition.3 The novel's structure is
characterized by the weaving of traditional mythological elements into a
contemporary fictional text. This literary strategy allows the author to
produce a narration written in the fiction of orality4 by creating a
framework of oral enunciation via the technique of alternating voices. By
achieving a collage of traditional speech within her novelistic discourse, Aminata Sow Fall makes Le Jujubier du patriarche emerge as the prolongation
of the myth, which she installs at the core of the real.5 Here we examine
the novelistic and epic styles of the work and the discursive implications
that convey an ethno-nationalist counter-discourse on Senegalese society.
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The Revolutionary Lyrics of Fela Anikulapo Kuti by Albert Oikelome
BY the nineteen seventies, a
unique popular musical typology emerged from the continent of Africa
pioneered by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Afrobeat, Fela's musical synthesis from
rhythm, jazz and highlife was defined by this fusion of foreign elements in
a socio-stylistic musical framework whose roots are African traditional.
Felá Anikulapo Kuti remained an enigma to his generation. Some said he was
one of Africa's best musicians. To others he was a prophet. And to the
governments that ruled in his time, he was an odious rebel. In all, Felá
stood as an outspoken musician that employed his music as a weapon to
propagate both political and social ideologies. His irresistible rhythms and
instrumental composition were laid with originality that grew increasingly
political and revolutionary in nature. Coker describes Fela as a brilliant
artist:
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“Global flows”: Ethnographic studies of the Hindi Movie in Africa by Anjali Gera RoyTHE celebration of Bollywood as a culture of globalization to illustrate the reverse flows from the non-west to the west is juxtaposed against the long history of transnationalization through which Hindi cinematic texts were incorporated into African cultural practices to assume African ethnic or national identities. Attention to the difference between the subaltern audience of Hindi cinema in the past and the cosmopolitan consumers of Bollywood in the present also point to an alternative narrative of subaltern cosmopolitanisms through which cultural exchanges took place between ordinary folks in the process of trade and travel. The global flows of Indian images to Africa must be framed against oceanic flows of images between Africa and India in contact zones of the past forged through travel and trade. Positing “the coastline of Benin Republic and Togo as a vortex, incorporating items and ideas from across the sea into its littoral”, Dana Rush focuses on one such “vortextual phenomenon”, that is, the incorporation of India − via chromolithographic images (mostly Hindu) − into the eternally organic religious system of Vodun (2008: 150). While the Vodun imagemaker Joseph Kossivi Ahiator, who incorporates Indian items into his own images, claims to have been inspired by his spiritual journeys to India, Rush provides a rational explanation of the travels of Indian images to Africa through the arrival of chromolithographs to Africa as early as 1891 when the first colour reproductions were executed in Mumbai (Rush 2008: 59-60).
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