Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction

D. Tunca

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137264411
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on the discipline of stylistics, this book introduces a series of methodological tools and applies them to works by well-known Nigerian writers, including Abani, Adichie and Okri. In doing so, it demonstrates how attention to form fosters understanding of content in their work, as well as in African and postcolonial literatures more widely.

1

Towards an ‘African Stylistics’?

Historiographical and Methodological Considerations

Whether at public readings or academic conferences, the mention of the words ‘language’ and ‘African literature’ in the same breath usually elicits one of three responses: a sigh of boredom, an irritated mumble or, if there is an eloquent person in the room, an exasperated question akin to the one formulated by the late Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa: ‘[W]hy do we insist on having an “African literature” and debating what language it should be written in?’ (1992: 155).

Saro-Wiwa had a point. Ever since the Nigerian scholar Obiajunwa Wali famously declared, in a 1963 article published in the journal Transition, that ‘any true African literature must be written in African languages’ (p. 14), overzealous critics have insistently asked African authors writing in English, French or Portuguese to justify their decision not to use their mother tongues instead. The question, with its veiled accusations of un-Africanness and neo-colonialism, has grated on many writers’ nerves – and one would be tempted, if only on these grounds, to dismiss the matter of language altogether. Yet in the context of this study, it is impossible to do so for two reasons at least: first, the so-called ‘language debate’ sparked off by Wali has had far-reaching effects on the stylistic study of African literatures, as I argue below; and second, the Nigerian critic’s incendiary piece, despite its prescriptive rhetoric, underscored at least one disturbing, undisputable fact: that African literatures written in European languages were, and continue to be, inaccessible to ‘[t]he ordinary local audience, with little or no education in the conventional European manner’ (p. 14). The language issue is, in short, an intricate and unavoidable one, with valid arguments on both sides of the divide.

Predictably, Wali’s indictment of Europhone African writing attracted more hostility than sympathy. Shortly after its publication, it elicited a string of responses from both creative writers and literary critics in Transition itself;¹ two years later, it was notoriously countered by Wali’s compatriot Chinua Achebe, in his seminal essay, ‘English and the African Writer’.² Achebe, defending a pragmatic position adopted by many Anglophone African writers since, maintained that English should not be rejected on the sole basis of its being ‘part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice’ (1965: 28). In an often quoted passage, Achebe further expressed the conviction that, even though his mother tongue was Igbo, ‘a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings’ (p. 30) would ‘be able to carry the weight of [his] African experience’ (p. 30).

Not everyone was won over by Achebe’s arguments. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer, is the most famous case in point. Recasting some of Wali’s statements, but with a more distinctively Marxist twist, Ngũgĩ deplored ‘the petty-bourgeoisie readership automatically assumed by the [Europhone African writer’s] very choice of language’ (1986: 22). More explicitly than Wali, the Kenyan novelist and playwright also claimed that, since ‘[l]anguage carrie[d] culture’ (p. 16), the imposition of English on African children who had hitherto been raised in their mother tongues led to a sense of ‘colonial alienation’ (p. 17). Therefore, according to Ngũgĩ, English was a ‘means of … spiritual subjugation’ in Africa (p. 9), and writing in this language inevitably reinforced the ‘neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit’ (p. 26) that had succeeded independence. For all these reasons, Ngũgĩ announced that the book containing these forceful declarations, Decolonising the Mind, would be his ‘farewell to English as a vehicle for any of [his] writings. From now on it is Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili all the way’ (p. xiv).

But neither Ngũgĩ’s resolve nor his passionate arguments have stood the test of time. Several people pointed out the gaps in the Kenyan writer’s reasoning: for example, African languages were no less prone to yielding unequal power relations than English, as the cases of ‘minority’ ethnic groups in Africa demonstrated (Saro-Wiwa, 1992); others remarked that the ‘authentic’ Africanness to which Ngũgĩ aspired simply did not exist (Adejunmobi, 1999). However, what eventually gave the ‘Achebe side’ of the language debate the upper hand was not so much ideology as feasibility: as the Nigerian writer himself had already remarked in the essay mentioned above, Africans of different ethnicities needed ‘a manageable number of languages to talk in’ (Achebe, 1965: 28). Even Ngũgĩ had to recognize the untenability of his uncompromising proposition for, while he kept his promise of writing novels in his native Gĩkũyũ, he could not but continue to publish essays and deliver lectures in English.

Clearly, since the 1960s, the language debate has caused a lot of ink to flow.³ Contemporary discussions, while still occasionally heated, seem to have lost the virulence of the early years, as most writers and critics broadly agree with Achebe’s initial suggestion that both Europhone and African-language literatures have a vital role to play in the continent’s cultural development. Importantly, however, the controversy has had a lasting impact, not so much on African literatures themselves as on their study in academic contexts. Indeed, Wali’s provocative assertion that Africans writing in the former colonial languages were ‘merely pursuing a dead end, which c[ould] only lead to sterility, uncreativity, and frustration’ (1963: 14), brought to the fore considerations about the linguistic specificities of African literatures in European languages. In the sphere of Anglophone literary criticism at least, this increased emphasis on form translated into a growing interest in linguistically-oriented studies of African works, as many commentators attempted to identify the stylistic qualities of novels, poems and plays written in the former colonial language. Most of these linguistic studies set out to examine the specifically ‘African’ elements present in such literary pieces, and thereby implicitly denied Wali’s claim that Europhone African literatures (and their critics) mindlessly enforced standards dictated by the Western academy. Despite this upsurge in scholarship, however, African studies has not witnessed the advent of a distinctive ‘school’ of stylistics. In the Anglophone domain, the area covered by the present study, hardly any sustained efforts have been made to approach the stylistic make-up of African works in any systematic way. Why, one may wonder, is this so?

In my opinion, the reasons for this relative lack of development are chiefly epistemological. Put differently, the current shortcomings in the elusive field of ‘African stylistics’ originate in scholars’ disagreement, or even indecisiveness, over the sources and methods of knowledge that should be used to carry out linguistic analyses of African literatures. These epistemological hurdles have presented themselves on at least two levels: that of the origin of the object of investigation, and that of the discipline of stylistics itself. While the difficulties faced on these two planes have been chronologically coterminous, they will be considered separately here – not only for the sake of clarity, but also because the obstacles have been encountered in two distinct lines of research into the language of African literatures: one focusing on the culturally-specific aspects of texts, and the other attempting a less context-dependent examination of literary pieces.

The former is undoubtedly the more developed of these two branches. Within this culturally-oriented body of research, a further distinction needs to be drawn between two types of analyses: on the one hand, some studies, undertaken by literary scholars, have rather successfully assessed the narrative significance of tropes such as proverbs or folktales, but without conducting in-depth linguistic examinations of the texts containing them (e.g. Griffiths, 1971; Obiechina, 1993). On the other hand, different kinds of investigations, more accomplished on the technical level, have focused on the influences of local African languages on the prose or verse of writers from the Sub-Saharan region of the continent. Because the thorough analysis of specific semantic and syntactic features requires the mastery of sophisticated linguistic tools, these enquiries have mostly been conducted by linguists (e.g. Igboanusi, 2001; Bamiro, 2006). No doubt as a consequence of their authors’ area of expertise, these works have mostly privileged the minute linguistic description of selected passages from novels over their narrative interpretation, leaving some literary critics with the feeling that the formal analysis of African literatures did not provide a decisive contribution to the aesthetic understanding of these texts. More disturbingly perhaps, some of these linguistic examinations have tended to consider literary extracts as samples of African varieties of English, thereby bestowing on fictional excerpts an aura of authenticity that ignores the crucial input of writers’ creativity. In some cases, representatives of this approach, which tends to conflate literature with reality, have only narrowly avoided succumbing to the linguistic equivalent of what Henry Louis Gates Jr has called the ‘anthropology fallacy’ (1984: 5), which consists in disregarding the aesthetic value of literary texts and considering them as sociological documentaries or anthropological treatises.

However, among the studies that have concentrated on the culturally-specific features of literary texts, at least one work has managed to perform precise linguistic analyses without ever losing sight of how a text’s formal traits could bear relevance to its poetic strategies. The book in question, Chantal Zabus’ The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (1991), was groundbreaking at the time of its first publication, and has remained highly relevant since, as suggested by the 2007 release of a second expanded edition. The study’s long-lasting pertinence can be ascribed to its impressive scope – it tackles a range of linguistic characteristics of West African literatures in both French and English – but also to its methodological incisiveness. To give but one example, Zabus did not take at face value that the passages in Pidgin found in Anglophone Nigerian novels perfectly mirrored the language as it was spoken in reality, and she proceeded to analyse such extracts in detail. She convincingly claimed that most of the literary occurrences of the linguistic code only qualified as ‘pseudo-pidgin’, since many of these renderings displayed numerous influences of English not typically associated with ‘real-life’ Pidgin. Importantly, Zabus went beyond these strictly formal conclusions and, rather than dismiss the fabricated language for essentialist reasons, she attempted to account for its presence and examine its functions within Nigerian fiction.

Zabus covered so much methodological ground that few of those doing language-oriented research in African literatures in her wake have succeeded in improving on her findings. Admittedly, some scholars writing during the 1990s managed to gain insight into specific literary texts (see, for instance, some of the essays contained in Epstein and Kole’s collection, The Language of African Literature, 1998). However, even as the literary value of cross-cultural Europhone African literatures had been convincingly established – and thereby the ‘dead end’ scenario predicted by Wali once and for all disproved – critics were, ironically enough, heading towards another cul-de-sac. Indeed, research into the culturally-specific features of African writing focused, almost by definition, on language as a cultural (or, in some cases, social) signifier in given contexts, completely disregarding in the process the linguistic traits that the literatures might have in common with traditions from other continents. As African literary texts began to be consistently considered in terms of their linguistic ‘otherness’, language-oriented enquiries ran the risk of losing their critical potency.

The scant attention given to the literatures’ possibly universal qualities can partly be explained by the pervasive influence of the language debate. Nevertheless, one might suggest – perhaps a little provocatively – that it also finds its origin in another series of incidents that defined the critical climate in the last three or four decades of the twentieth century. While Wali had indicted both Europhone African writers ‘and their western midwives’ (1963: 14), others had denounced some Western critics’ inclination to make sweeping statements about African literatures in the name of universality. There was undoubtedly some validity to this accusation, since certain European and American commentators claimed to uncover ‘“universal truths”’ which, in Kadiatu Kanneh’s felicitous words, ‘act[ed] merely as euphemisms for European [or, more broadly, Western] truths’ (1997: 81, italics in original). This tendency was forcefully condemned in the 1970s by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, who even gave it a name, ‘larsony’ (1976), after the literary critic Charles Larson who, in his eyes, was guilty of peremptorily perpetuating cliché-ridden representations of Africa. The term coined by Armah was later used by Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike in their controversial Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1983), in which they rebuked Larson’s and others’ wholesale universalism, and explicitly pleaded in favour of a system of aesthetic evaluation based on what they perceived as ‘authentic’ African paradigms.

Chinweizu et al.’s Afrocentrist views did not meet with unanimous approval. The 1975 article in which they first articulated their position was vehemently countered by Wole Soyinka (1975), who exposed the critics’ limited knowledge of traditional and contemporary Africa, and debunked the misguided, or even inaccurate, readings that resulted from their simplistic, one-dimensional approach to African cultural practices. Chinweizu et al.’s stance also co-existed, more peacefully this time, with other positions in the area of Black and African studies, such as that of Henry Louis Gates Jr, who emphasized the ‘complexity’ of Europhone Black and African texts, a result of their ‘double heritage’ (1984: 4). In the field of traditional literary criticism, many scholars discreetly sided with Gates, in that they continued to analyse African literatures using a mixture of theories originally arising out of Western contexts (the works of poststructuralist thinkers come to mind) and more distinctly postcolonial approaches that had been developed to address the specificities of formerly colonized territories.

In the contention-prone domain of language-related studies of African literatures, on the other hand, many Europeans and Americans seemed intent on not becoming the next Charles Larson. Thus, while the warnings by Armah and Chinweizu et al. had the positive effect of urging Western academics to carry out contextualized stylistic research into African literatures, they might also have been among the factors that discouraged many postcolonial scholars from undertaking linguistic examinations based on Western theoretical models, whose application may have risked aligning African works with canonical European texts. As a result, the linguistic criticism of African literatures remained largely – though not entirely – impervious to methods of systemic-functional and cognitive inspiration privileged by ‘mainstream’ Western stylisticians over the same decades. A few scholars did nevertheless make brave attempts to apply Western stylistic models to African objects of inquiry.⁴ It is interesting to note, though this may only be incidental, that most of these studies were conducted by African scholars – who, one may assume, ran a lower risk of being labelled paternalistic for applying ‘white’ models to works written by black authors.⁵ Ultimately, most of these experimental ventures had a limited impact on the field of African studies, not only because of their modest circulation, but also because of some of their weaknesses – starting with a leaning towards descriptiveness, inherited from some brands of Western stylistics.

Today, descriptiveness is considered a major shortcoming in any type of stylistic analysis, but it was not always perceived as such in the Western world. As contemporary stylisticians point out, it was acceptable practice for early linguistic studies of literary texts to be primarily concerned with establishing the ‘literariness’ of a specific piece, without attempting to show the impact of the text’s formal traits on its possible meaning. Despite the sea change witnessed in the 1970s, when formalism and structuralism were largely superseded by functionalism and cognitivism as dominant theoretical paradigms, the discipline has never quite lost its reputation as a pointless ‘clause counting’ exercise (Mills, 1995: 7). This negative image seems to have persisted even more strongly in African and postcolonial studies, where the interpretation of writers’ social and political positions has traditionally taken precedence over formal considerations of any kind – unless linguistic specificities could actually be shown to reflect the social and political stances under scrutiny.

Understandably, then, when Emmanuel Ngara published his Marxist-oriented Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel in 1982, he attempted to distance himself from those who endlessly listed the linguistic features of literary works but did little else. To this effect, he introduced a distinction between the ‘stylistician’ and the ‘stylistic critic’:

[T]he stylistician … uses the principles of general linguistics to single out the distinctive features of a variety of [sic] the idiosyncracies of an author. He uses the principles of general linguistics to identity the features of language which are restricted to particular social contexts, and to account for the reasons why such features are used and when and where they are used … The stylistic critic … certainly must use the analytic tools of the linguist and stylistician … But more than that he must relate his analysis of linguistic features to considerations of content value and aesthetic quality in art.

(1982: 11–12)

The contrast proposed by Ngara is helpful (if somewhat prescriptive, as indicated by the author’s repeated use of the modal ‘must’), but it did not gain wide currency. Even so, this distinction embodied the scholar’s desire to develop a rigorous critical framework for the linguistic study of African writing, a challenge to which he attempted to respond in the stimulating introduction to his study. Aware of the complex historical heritage of African literatures, Ngara advised that ‘the African critic should search for African solutions in criticism, or should search for those solutions which, though not specifically African, will do justice to African works of art’ (p. 6).⁶ As is made clear in the book, Ngara was above all claiming his allegiance to Marxism when writing these lines, but he also argued in favour of using terminology developed in Western systemic-functional models, for example.

Unfortunately, once put into practice, Ngara’s ideas fell short of fulfilling their promise. Although the author skilfully avoided the pitfall of descriptiveness, his study di...