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African Literature and Theory: The Cart Before the Horse?

Christiane Fioupou
p. 5-16

Abstract

Through various examples drawn from the works of Western and African writers and critics, this article illustrates how the contemporary literary scene tends to be dominated by trendy ‘theories’ and their attendant jargon: shuttling from continent to continent, they often migrate from France, ‘that hotbed of critical fads’, to the United States and Africa in ‘self-reproducing mazes’. Is it not time to go back to literature?

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Author's notes

This is an updated and adapted version of the paper delivered at the Mellon Symposium on ‘The Postcolonial: Literature and Theory in Africa and the African Diaspora’, Tulane University, New Orleans, December 2001.

Full text

1A few years ago, I was asked to give my opinion about the potential publication of an article dealing with the work of a well-known Nigerian writer. The paper contained a few interesting analyses which, unfortunately, were lost in a surfeit of trendy jargon derived from, to name but a few, postmodernist and postcolonial theories. And it soon dawned upon me that the author of that very long article was simply playing the academic game, showing off, as it were, by using all the ingredients needed in what he thought was a Nouvelle Cuisine recipe. In the process, the texts had become a mere pretext for using quotations or references from the high priests of criticism that would be the open sesame to any publication door. Indeed, the main ingredients – the literary texts under scrutiny – had lost their wholesome flavour through an overdose of tasty seasoning and of what is known in America as ‘French dressing’ (‘French’ only in name): a handful of Foucault here, a cup of Kristeva there, a cube of Lacan plus an extra dose of Derrida to add flavour to the gravy. Besides, the article was so badly printed that it made its reading all the more difficult. Being French myself, having been steeped in the French quasi-obsessional interest in various schools of criticism, but also having lived in England, then in West Africa, and having worked on African Literature for many years, I could not help thinking: in this age of new dogmas, can African Literature not exist without the credo – ‘In the beginning was Derrida’? Could we not decide to rephrase part of the question in pidgin English – ‘In the beginning was de reada?’ – and ask who, indeed, comes first: Derrida or the reader?

  • 1 To use the title of Flann O’Brien’s satirical column in the Irish Times. See Myles na Gopaleen (Fla (...)
  • 2 Stephen Arnold, ‘A Peopled Persona: Autobiography, Post-Modernism and the Poetry of Niyi Osundare’, (...)

2I have started with this personal anecdote to ponder on the role of literary criticism in African Literature and particularly its avatar as seen in postcolonial and postmodernist studies. This article is not a critique of theory as such – we do need theory – but a tentative illustration of its misuse when so-called literary criticism becomes a mere ‘Catechism of Clichés’.1 And this is not new, of course. Stephen Arnold, a literary man who was previously trained as a scientist, has often complained about the new fads in literary criticism spawned by what he parodically calls ‘science envy’2: he argues that, because theory is all too often used as an end in itself, it tends to push into the background what interests us in the first place: literature:

  • 3 ‘Carpe Millennium: Niyi Osundare’s Seize the Day and African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Stru (...)

If Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault led us a short generation ago to significant insights and intellectual vistas, their North American disciples have brought us to die gasping as we view the vast plains of literature through the foggy pollutants of ‘critical theory’ born of misbegotten science envy. What good is it for our graduate students to learn ‘the use of specialised language’, a critically ill discourse that leads away from the insights of literary study, once upon a time understood as the study of literary texts.3

3In the same vein, Wole Soyinka has time and again objected to critics and academics who, under the cover of theory, were in fact trying to shoehorn creative work into oppressive structures. Concurrently, he was ready to pay homage to Abiola Irele in his article ‘Abiola Irele: The Critic as Olohun-Iyo’, Olohun-Iyo significantly meaning ‘The Singer with a Voice of Honey’ in Yoruba:

  • 4 Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiola Irele: The Critic as Olohun-Iyo’, in Yemi Ogunbiyi, ed., Perspectives on Nige (...)

Considering the fact that his doctoral training took place in France, that hotbed of critical fads, and, no matter how intellectually seductive, anti-literature gamesmanship, it is amazing that he has remained faithful to literature as opposed to its parasitic offshoot which now approaches its ultimate apotheosis in what amounts to a brazen autogenesis. And so Abiola remains constantly readable, enlightening and stimulating, not locked in a ghetto of self-reproducing mazes.4

  • 5 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, Pelican (London, 1970), translated from the French Pou (...)
  • 6 See Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained, St Jerome (Mancheste (...)

4‘Brazen autogenesis’, ‘self-reproducing mazes’, ‘parasitic offshoot’: this is the way quite a number of French academics themselves see those ‘critical fads’ of which their country is a ‘hotbed’. But the point is that nowadays those ‘self-reproducing mazes’ sometimes travel out of France, undergo changes once they have crossed the Atlantic, and ‘write back’ to the critical ‘hotbed’, as it were, trying to impose their own unpronounceable anglicised French jargon dressed up as postcolonial or postmodernist theory. As a student, I was of course steeped in the critics that were to become trendy: I read Michel Foucault, his Les mots et les choses, Histoire de la folie when they came out, along with Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Tzvetan Todorov, who all became part, at one stage or another, of our academic references and intellectual ‘encyclopedia’. Ironically, I discovered Frantz Fanon in… English – Toward the African Revolution5 when I was doing research in Dublin. I had previously worked on Flann O’Brien and Irish Literature for my Maîtrise (M.A.) and at the time, I must say, I was not aware that I had undertaken ‘Postcolonial Studies’. James Joyce, I read now, is a postcolonial writer. So is Flann O’Brien (postcolonial and postmodernist), Samuel Beckett and, I am also told, William Butler Yeats. ‘Things fall apart’, indeed. Why should we level all these writers down – in all their diversity, difference, complexity, and literary value – to a reductive and here unnecessary ‘postcolonial’ category, a category in which one could easily be tempted to place Wole Soyinka and Buchi Emecheta in one all-inclusive ‘postcolonial’ literary basket? To take another example, when with my Burkinabè colleague Samuel Millogo I translated Soyinka’s play The Road into French, little had I realized the importance of our task until it could be enshrined in the postcolonial lingo: ‘A third-world black male and a first-world white female translated a hybrid postcolonial text from one hegemonic language into another’.6

  • 7 Arnold, ‘Carpe Millennium’, note 5, p. 25.

5This is intended to be a caricature, of course. But all the same, even if we are hardly aware of it, we cannot avoid being shaped by and steeped in the ‘atmosphere of the time’, l’air du temps, with its attendant language, whether we like it or not. And with some legitimacy, we can seriously start questioning theory, as Stephen Arnold does, when we discover that ‘literature is now a footnote to its theory’.7

  • 8 Niyi Osundare, African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorising, Options Book and (...)

6Niyi Osundare – in his monograph African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorising8 to which Stephen Arnold referred in the title of his own article has humorously illustrated his view on postcolonial and postmodernist fads with a rhymed satirical poem aptly entitled ‘Text Worship (or the deconstructed passport of Travelling Theory)’. I shall extensively quote from it, taken from the horse’s mouth, as it were, i.e. from the poet who resents his being pigeon-holed as a postcolonial (or post-colonial!) writer and who asks candidly: ‘When you meet me in the corridors tomorrow would you congratulate me on my ‘post-colonial’ poetry? Is there anything worth talking about outside ‘coloniality’? In brief, is there a life besides ‘coloniality’?’ (p. 9):

... Did you see the Text on the conference table
Talkative giant of a faddish fable

Pounding the podium, a moustached tyrant
How holy his sin-tax, stupendously brillant!
[...]
It opens the door to the fattest jobs
The prettiest journals up for grabs
Arrange your jargon on a glittering rack
Your feet are firm on the tenure track

     Post-day post-night
     Post-history post-reason
     Post-humanist post-human
     Show me the post of your post-coloniality

     Aporia comporia catachresis
     Totalizing razmatazzing
     Meto nym nym nym logocentr tri tri tri
     Show me the structure of your post-structurality

     Oh for a gram of Grammatology
     A sample sperm of Disseminations
     The Discourse tree with fruits of Discord
     And the New His-story-cism, New Her-story-cism

The madder the smatter, the harder the better
Make it new, make it arcane
The clumsier the code the sweeter the pain
It’s the brave new era of the gaudy patter

Signs are here, the Word is dead:
The funeral of meaning a tropical debt
Paid in the surface of an idle game
In the dim-lit abyss of pedantic fame

War may rage, Hunger may spread
The river may die in its lowly bed
Chains may descend from every sky
The price of Freedom raised so high

Count your tropes, praise the Text
The meaningless meaning is a grand pretext
‘Oppression’ is merely undecidable reference
‘Poverty’ is slave to metaphysics of presence

The Author is dead, in unmarked grave dumped
The Reader to power with crown has rumped
The Text writes itself with a magic hand
In the curious way its priests can stand

It shouts in French, in English it whispers
It murmurs in German in gasps and whimpers
[...] (pp. 20-21)

  • 9 See, in particular, Soyinka’s exploration of the ‘championing of new deities’, through ‘The King is (...)
  • 10 Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists in Collected Plays II, Oxford UP (London, 1973), p. 272.
  • 11 And this could extend, of course, to ‘In the beginning was the Reader’, with a capital R – as in Ni (...)

7The penultimate stanza above, referring to the death of the Author and the approach to the Text by priests-cum-critics, is to me resonant of what Soyinka has called elsewhere ‘priesthood manipulations’.9 Indeed, ‘The Writer is dead, long live the Critic’ could become the new motto when literary criticism and theory have been warped into a new kind of religion with its own rigid dogma. And in the irreverent wake of Aafa in Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists – ‘In the beginning was the Priesthood’10 –, we could even venture ‘in the beginning was the Critic’.11 It was in a similar train of thought that Soyinka, in his strictures against those whom he calls Neo-Tarzanists – the Nigerian writers or critics who have absorbed the Hollywood clichés of Africa to the point of wanting their use compulsory in any ‘authentic’ African writing – remarked:

  • 12 Wole Soyinka, ‘Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition’, Art, Dialogue and Outrage (Essays o (...)

Criticism, we see, aspires to the authority of the jealous priesthood: we may look to see a new poetry emasculated by conformist subterfuge, hounded by a new school of hypocritics.12

  • 13 Wole Soyinka, ‘The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies’ in Art, Dialogue (...)

8These words perfectly capture the mood of Soyinka’s Art, Dialogue and Outrage, a collection of Essays on Literature and Culture published between 1962 and 1986, which remains an enlightening compendium of some heated controversies between writers and critics, particularly when the latter want to dictate to the former what they should or should not write. In his both witty and scathing ‘Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies’,13 Soyinka recalls his student days in Leeds when a visiting French academic (not Barthes) ‘had come to spread the gospel of the New Fiction from across the Channel to conservative England’ and had left them ‘part bemused, part fascinated’ (p. 147). Soyinka then sets out to explore the paradox of Roland Barthes, ‘the Leftist scholar, a would-be academic popularizer who, however, does not employ popular langue’ (p. 153) and ‘the social tension of his discourse, which makes him an obvious example for the radical, socially committed critic of today’s African intelligentsia’ (p. 153).

9Throughout his essays, Soyinka can easily draw the line between honest Marxist critics and the ‘Leftocrats’, those who use their ‘committed theories’ as a stepladder towards personal promotion. In this article on ‘Leftocracy’, Soyinka interprets the latter’s attitude as a ‘guilty reflex, a defense mechanism’ (p. 169), which explains why they have become those who ‘dye their cloth a deeper indigo than that of the bereaved’ (p. 166) – a Yoruba way of referring to those who out-Herod Herod. He thus exposes ‘the negative, sterilizing effect which is a misuse of critical notions’ (p. 165) and its noxious impact on students, critics, and writers alike: ‘In Nigeria the millipedes of future literature are no sooner hatched than they are made to begin to count their feet. Naturally, they never walk’ (p. 165). Again, if Soyinka attacks those who are trying to impose a pseudo-ideological grid on literature – along with its related jargon –, he is ready to grant Barthes, for all his contradictions, that:

he is a teacher who has honestly critiqued his own situation…. Above all, however, as a demolition agent of bourgeois mythologies, he has paused to examine whether he, Roland Barthes, is not part of a new ideo-mythical langue which merely occludes the real possibility of an understanding and transmission of a proletarian culture. (p. 176)

10Thus, Soyinka’s butt is not so much Barthes himself as the academics or critics who are simply aping him, those African ‘Leftocrats’ who ‘have failed to discriminate even within their ranks the self-seekers, opportunists, the radical chic and the starkly ideological illiterate’ (p. 176).

  • 14 Michel-Antoine Burnier & Patrick Rambaud, Le Roland-Barthes sans peine, Balland (Paris, 1978).

11On the French front, in the late 1970s, the contrived and superficial borrowings to which Soyinka alludes throughout his essays had also become a favourite target in some (limited) circles. They triggered off the parodic Le Roland-Barthes sans peine (Roland-Barthes Made Easy), a kind of ‘Teach Yourself the Language of Roland Barthes in Eighteen Lessons’ published in 1978.14 As the blurb on the back cover puts it,

  • 15 Burnier & Rambaud, Le Roland Barthes. All translations in this article are mine.
    ‘Le R.B. (en Roland (...)

The R.B. language (in Roland-Barthes, Roland Barthes is called R.B.) appeared in its archaic form twenty-five years ago in the work entitled Writing Degree Zero. Since then, it has progressively departed from the French language – from which it is partially derived – and has become an autonomous language with a grammar and a vocabulary of its own.
In the present book, students will find an attractive Teach Yourself Roland-Barthes Method. From the outset, we propose to make them at ease and practise some idiomatic conversation on very simple topics. For example:

Question in R.B.: How do
you enounce yourself?
English translation from the French: What is your name?

Answer in R.B.: I enounce myself as L.
English translation from the French: My name is William.

Question in R.B.: What stipulation bolts, fences, organises, constructs the eco-nomy of your pragma against the occultation/exploitation of your ek-sistence?
English translation from the French: What do you do in life?

Answer in R.B.: I expel little bits of code.
English translation from the French: I am a typist.15

12Certainly, this R.B. lesson is meant to be a caricature, but in the preface entitled ‘Roland-Barthes, a Universal Language’, a variety of very similar (and sometimes even more extreme) examples are actually drawn by the authors from the French press – ranging, for instance, from the writings of a theatre man, a communist, a psychoanalyst, a Roman Catholic priest, and a poet. In the postscript, the authors warn the readers:

  • 16 Burnier, p. 13: ‘Nous ne traiterons pas des idiomes proches du R.B., le Jacques-Derrida, le Philipp (...)

We will not deal with any of the Jacques-Derrida, Philippe-Sollers and Lacan idioms, all closely related to R.B., but sterner and less rich. We shall also ignore, among others, the Guattaro-Deleuzism, Ricardou and Cixous dialects. Finally, we will not embark on the polemic concerning the mutual influences of these different idioms.16

  • 17 The Guardian Weekly, ‘Obituary: Malcolm Bradbury’ (Dec. 7-13 2000), p. 16.

13Still in Europe, English novelist, academic and humorist Malcolm Bradbury – who, to adapt his words, ‘like most comic novelists, [took] the novel extremely seriously’17 – in his turn wrote a comic fiction of deconstruction and invented a hoax with ‘the elusive author’ called Mensonge (the French word for ‘Lie’).

  • 18 Malcom Bradbury, Mensonge, (My Strange Quest for Mensonge, Structuralism’s Hidden Hero), Arena (Lon (...)

Mensonge may be considered our truest, our most necessary, philosopher, the ultimate case of Deconstructionist integrity – the man who has out-Barthesed Barthes, out-Foucaulted Foucault, out-Derridaed Derrida, out-Deleuzed-and-Guattaried Deleuze and Guattari.... But for the time being, he remains the purest instance we have of la mort de l’auteur, living, we think, proof of Roland Barthes’s famous comment that ‘Linguistically, the Author is never more than the instance writing’. Yet even Barthes, who did so much to lead us into the impasse in which we find ourselves, did not alas explain just how to deal with the problems that arise when we can find no author to deconstruct.18

14At the end of the book, there is, as the blurb confesses, a ‘useless bibliography’ significantly containing Le Roland-Barthes sans peine as well as other ‘real’ critical studies that ‘were translated out of their French-resembling originals into something that has often been compared with or described as English’ (p. 15). I became acutely aware of the language issue which is humorously raised here not on April the first – the date when ‘Bradbury’s first note on the elusive Mensonge was spotted in The Observer some years ago’ [blurb] – but in January 2002 when a friend, who knew my allergy to jargon, sent me the following literary call for papers:

Cripping Postcoloniality/Cripping Globalization

Construction (de / reconstruction) of disabled / postcolonial / gendered / sexed / raced / ethnic identities; body and nation as inflected by ability / disability; globalization / anti-globalization and disability; cross-cultural constructions / representations; the WHO and other international bodies; the ‘worlding’ of disability, etc. Written, visual, and / or embodied texts.
250-word abstracts and brief cvs by March 1…

  • 19 Copied in January 2002 from the Literary Call for Papers Mailing list, CFP@english.upenn.edu
  • 20 This is my adaptation from Soyinka’s reaction to the Neo-Tarzanists and Leftocrats who wanted him t (...)

15For a while, I thought this call for paper was just another hoax, but apparently it was not:19 it was ‘authentic’, and had simply out-Mensonged Mensonge. Then I wondered whether ‘cripping’ was a new gripping concept of which I was not aware. Was it some portmanteau word, or simply a misspelling of ‘crippling’? Obviously, I was in need of a Le P.C/D.C. sans peine [PC/DC Made Easy], a Teach Yourself the Post-Colonial / De-Construction Language in ten lessons. More seriously, I wondered what was at the root of that call for papers: was the ghost of ‘publish or perish’ lurking behind? Or was it meant to induce a Politically Correct sense of guilt: ‘How dare the writer / critic / academic define one moment which is not a postcolonial / disabled / gendered / sexed / ethnic reflection?’20 Or was it yet another Postcolonial / Cultural Studies basket from which to choose one’s favourite ingredients for another incipient Post-Nouvelle Cuisine theory? In which case, the purpose was defeated, if we are to agree with Antoine Compagnon’s approach to theory:

  • 21 Antoine Compagnon, Le Démon de la théorie: littérature et sens commun, Seuil (Paris, 1998), p. 23: (...)

Theory is not a method, a technique, a way of cooking. On the contrary, it aims at being suspicious of all recipes, doing away with them through reflection. My intention is not at all to make things easy but to make people watchful, wary, sceptical, in one word or in one thousand: critical, or ironic. Theory is a school of irony.21

  • 22 See Wole Soyinka, ‘Climates of Art’, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, p. 257, on ‘Abiku’: ‘When a child d (...)
  • 23 Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiku’, Idanre and Other Poems, Eyre Methuen (London, 1967), pp. 28-30.
  • 24 Ben Okri, The Famished Road, Jonathan Cape (London, 1991).

16And irony implies detachment. The problem is that so many postgraduate students around the world are required to be ‘theoretical’ without even being ‘critical’. And after years of compulsory investment in theory that leaves them very little time to read the literary texts, they are tempted to repeat the pattern when they themselves become tenured teachers, asking their own students and colleagues to play the same sterile academic game. In that case, the victims of jargon and abstract overtheorising become themselves the victimizers, too often imposing ready-made grids and forgetting, as I explained in my introduction, the specificity of the literary texts under study. I shall briefly illustrate what Soyinka called in the Gallic context ‘a ghetto of self-reproducing mazes’ – now international – by way of two articles dealing with the abiku in Nigerian literature – the myth of the ‘born to die’ child,22 principally in Wole Soyinka’s poem ‘Abiku’23 and Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road.24

  • 25 John Hawley, ‘Ben Okri's Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity’, Research in African Lite (...)

17In ‘Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity’,25 John C. Hawley discusses ‘the possible points of intersection between postmodernism and postcolonialism’ (p. 33) in connection with Okri’s abiku novels:

In Hutcheon’s view, it seems, postmodernism is a victim of colonisation by history, an anxiety of influence writ large.
But if postmodernism ‘
necessarily admits a provisionality of its truth claims’ (Slemon 5), Slemon and others argue that ‘an interested post-colonial critical practice would want to allow for the positive production of oppositional truth-claims’ (9). There is in much post-colonial fiction, in Slemon’s view, a great deal that is postmodern: it may be ‘fundamentally fragmented and hybridized, it engages overtly in a decentring and decanonizing labour; it is enormously self-reflexive and ironic; it draws obviously and excessively on the devices of ‘fiction’ to demystify imperialist versions of ‘history’; it ‘uses and abuses’ the received codes of popular culture in order to effect a serious intervention in the Production and circulation of majority opinion’ (Slemon 10) – and much of this can be seen in Okri’s works. But post-colonial fiction also ‘retains a recuperative impulse towards the structure of ‘history’ and manifests a Utopian desire grounded in reference’ (Slemon 10). As Linda Hutcheon elsewhere argues, ‘the postcolonial, like the feminist, is a dismantling but also constructive political enterprise insofar as it implies a theory of agency and social change that the postmodern deconstructive impulse lacks’ (‘Circling’ 171). In Benita Parry’s words, this involves a recuperation, a remembering and relearning of ‘the role of the native as historical subject and combatant, possessor of an-other (sic) knowledge and producer of alternative traditions’ (34). And Barry’s words are true of Okri. (p. 33)

18Reading this paragraph and many others, I cannot help wondering where Ben Okri’s Abiku has migrated to. Could he still be shuttling between the metas of meta-metacriticism?

  • 26 Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, ‘Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road(...)

19The second article to which I want to refer was published in the same issue of Research in African Literatures. In his ‘Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road’, Olatubosun Ogunsanwo argues that what makes the novel ‘postcolonial and multicultural both in form and content is precisely what makes it postmodernist, that is, a response to ‘the need to clear oneself a space’’:26

In conclusion, the parodic intertexts create a discursive multiculturality or cross-culturality that effectively contests and re-formulates the dominant, colonial or Eurocentric perception, and approach to, different cultural phenomena. In other words, the narrative technique seeks to explode the myth of a centralized sameness that privileges the Eurocentric ideology while ‘silencing by inclusion’ the uniqueness of African culture.…
In
The Famished Road, Okri de-emphasizes the centrality and dominance of ‘the conventional well-made realist novel’ while enhancing the traditionally off-center, ancillary African folkloric and mythic narration, ‘encentering’ its functionality and so giving to both narrative modes the same attention. Indeed, in line with Okri’s radio statement in St. Louis, The Famished Road has truly sought to achieve a decolonization of colonial education, which, Appiah says, ‘produced a generation immersed in the literature of the colonizers, a literature that often reflected and transmitted the imperial vision’ (55) and imperialist technique. More precisely, then, The Famished Road shows Ben Okri to be a neo-traditionalist, decolonized novelist who is, by the same token, a veritable postmodernist. (p. 50)

  • 27 From Osundare’s poem quoted above.
  • 28 Douglas McCabe, ‘Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka’s ‘Abiku’’, Research in (...)

20Unfortunately, in this instance, it would seem that, through ‘the use of specialised language’ drawn from a postmodernist-postcolonial ‘Catechism’, the discourse of decolonisation has been, as it were, recolonised. But enough. My point is not to ridicule the writers who abide by ‘Make it new, make it arcane’,27 but to expose the ‘theoretical’ nooses in which they are trapped. And some do manage to avoid the snare. In a very stimulating article, published in the latest issue of, again, Research in African Literatures, Douglas McCabe discusses ‘Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka’s ‘Abiku’’28 based on the thorough fieldwork he has done on abiku in Nigeria, both in oral traditions and in written literature. McCabe proposes ‘to retrieve some sense of abiku’s rich and varied history’ (p. 45), and he does so, convincingly, supporting his arguments with sensitive textual analyses. The other two abiku articles quoted above are included in his bibliography and some of McCabe’s conclusions could be read as an implicit and amiable reply to their metacritical ‘errancy’:

critical attention to the historicity of abiku would help dispel the powerful temptation to interpret abiku in a way that reflects critics’ own theoretical or political commitments rather than the commitments embodied by the literature. (p. 66)

  • 29 I am aware that I could be accused here of shuttling between the metas of meta-metacriticism myself (...)

21It seems to me that McCabe, a doctoral student, comes close here to what David Punter has to say about ‘Postcolonial Imaginings’:29

  • 30 David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, Edinburgh UP (Edinburgh, 2000 (...)

If we are to engage with postcolonial writing, then we have to do so through an encounter between the postcolonial and the literary, in all its peculiarities, its exemplary unyieldingness, its intransigence, its resistance not only to political appropriation but also to theoretical oversight. We have to find a kind of criticism which is less panoptical, which ebbs and flows with the complex rhythms of the text.30

22This, to me, is precisely what Douglas McCabe has achieved, taking literature into account and using a kind of criticism ‘which ebbs and flows with the complex rhythms of the text,’ constantly questioning without being subservient to any predictable predigested post-theory.

  • 31 I am thankful to Lorna Goodison for reminding me of Derek Walcott’s witty phrase.

23For literature is also, as ‘even’ Barthes claimed, ‘the pleasure of the text’. To forget literature for the sake of trendy categories is definitely – to give the last word to Derek Walcott – ‘to put Descartes before the horse’.31

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Notes

1 To use the title of Flann O’Brien’s satirical column in the Irish Times. See Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien), The Best of Myles, MacGibbon & Kee (London, 1968), pp. 201-227.

2 Stephen Arnold, ‘A Peopled Persona: Autobiography, Post-Modernism and the Poetry of Niyi Osundare’, in Janos Riesz and Ulla Schild, eds., Genres autobiographiques en Afrique/Autobiographical Genres in Africa, Dieter Reimer Verlag (Berlin, 1996), pp. 143-165.

3 ‘Carpe Millennium: Niyi Osundare’s Seize the Day and African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorizing’, in Christiane Fioupou, ed., Anglophonia / Caliban 7: Seuils / Thresholds, Presses Universitaires du Mirail (Toulouse, 2000), pp. 23-32 (p. 26).

4 Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiola Irele: The Critic as Olohun-Iyo’, in Yemi Ogunbiyi, ed., Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, Guardian Books (Lagos, 1988), pp. 136-138 (p. 137).

5 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, Pelican (London, 1970), translated from the French Pour la révolution africaine by Aakon Chevalier, Maspero (Paris, 1964).

6 See Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained, St Jerome (Manchester, 1997), for the kind of specialised language used when ‘Translating across power differentials’ (pp. 31-45).

7 Arnold, ‘Carpe Millennium’, note 5, p. 25.

8 Niyi Osundare, African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorising, Options Book and Information Services (Ibadan, 1993).

9 See, in particular, Soyinka’s exploration of the ‘championing of new deities’, through ‘The King is dead; long live the god!’ (when King Shango’s priests transformed their King’s suicide into instant apotheosis and acclaimed him as God of Thunder and Lightning), in Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 1976), p. 12.

10 Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists in Collected Plays II, Oxford UP (London, 1973), p. 272.

11 And this could extend, of course, to ‘In the beginning was the Reader’, with a capital R – as in Niyi Osundare’s above-quoted stanza: ‘The Reader to power with crown has rumped’, i.e the ‘deconstructed’ Reader who is taking over the role of the ‘dead’ Writer and of the Critic – and not to the plain reader suggested in this introduction, he who reads literature for ‘the pleasure of the text’.

12 Wole Soyinka, ‘Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition’, Art, Dialogue and Outrage (Essays on Literature and Culture), New Horn Press (Ibadan, 1988), p. 325. This article was first published in 1975.

13 Wole Soyinka, ‘The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies’ in Art, Dialogue and Outrage, p. 145. This article was first published in 1981.

14 Michel-Antoine Burnier & Patrick Rambaud, Le Roland-Barthes sans peine, Balland (Paris, 1978).

15 Burnier & Rambaud, Le Roland Barthes. All translations in this article are mine.
‘Le R.B. (en Roland-Barthes, Roland Barthes se dit R.B.) apparut sous sa forme archaïque voilà vingt-cinq ans, dans l’ouvrage intitulé Le Degré zéro de l’écriture. Depuis, il s’est peu à peu détaché du français dont il est partiellement issu, se constituant comme langage autonome avec sa grammaire et son vocabulaire propres.
L’étudiant trouvera dans le présent livre une méthode attrayante qui l’initiera au Roland-Barthes. D’emblée nous proposons de le mettre à l’aise en pratiquant un peu de conversation courante sur des sujets très simples. Par exemple:
Question: Comment t’énonces-tu, toi?
Français: Comment t’appelles-tu?
Réponse: Je m’énonce
L. Français: Je m’appelle William.
Quelle stipulation verrouille, clôture, organise, agence l’éco-nomie de ta pragma comme l’occultation/exploitation de ton ek-sistence?
Français: Que faites-vous dans la vie?
J’expulse des petits bouts de code.
Français: Je suis dactylo’.

16 Burnier, p. 13: ‘Nous ne traiterons pas des idiomes proches du R.B., le Jacques-Derrida, le Philippe-Sollers, le Lacan, plus sévères et moins riches. Nous négligerons également les patois comme le Guattaro-Deleuzisme, le Ricardou et le Cixous. Enfin nous n’entrerons pas dans la polémique sur les influences réciproques de ces divers idiomes’.

17 The Guardian Weekly, ‘Obituary: Malcolm Bradbury’ (Dec. 7-13 2000), p. 16.

18 Malcom Bradbury, Mensonge, (My Strange Quest for Mensonge, Structuralism’s Hidden Hero), Arena (London, 1989), p. 25 (first publ. André Deutsch, 1987).

19 Copied in January 2002 from the Literary Call for Papers Mailing list, CFP@english.upenn.edu

20 This is my adaptation from Soyinka’s reaction to the Neo-Tarzanists and Leftocrats who wanted him to be a ‘committed writer’ twenty-four hours a day: ‘It does not matter that the bulk of [the writer’s] total work, his life is devoted to urgent social issues; every posturing critic is privileged to haul out one ‘uncommitted’ work, wave it aloft, mount the rostrum and bleat: ‘What is this doing here? How dare this artist define one moment of private reflection?’ (‘Neo-Tarzanism’, p. 328).

21 Antoine Compagnon, Le Démon de la théorie: littérature et sens commun, Seuil (Paris, 1998), p. 23: ‘La théorie n’est pas la méthode, la technique, la cuisine. Au contraire, le but est de se rendre méfiant à l’égard de toutes les recettes, de s’en défaire par la réflexion. Mon intention n’est donc pas du tout de faciliter les choses mais de rendre vigilant, soupçonneux, sceptique, en en mot comme en mille: critique, ou ironique. La théorie est une école d’ironie’.

22 See Wole Soyinka, ‘Climates of Art’, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, p. 257, on ‘Abiku’: ‘When a child dies to a mother twice or thrice, it becomes the same child returnee, whose ‘earthing’ can only be guaranteed by sacrifices and rituals in propitiation of the obstinate child or in confrontation with his or her siblings on ‘the other side’’.

23 Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiku’, Idanre and Other Poems, Eyre Methuen (London, 1967), pp. 28-30.

24 Ben Okri, The Famished Road, Jonathan Cape (London, 1991).

25 John Hawley, ‘Ben Okri's Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity’, Research in African Literatures 26-1 (Spring 1995), pp. 30-39.

26 Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, ‘Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road’, Research in African Literatures 26-1 (Spring 1995), pp. 40-52.

27 From Osundare’s poem quoted above.

28 Douglas McCabe, ‘Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka’s ‘Abiku’’, Research in African Literatures 33-1 (Spring 2002), pp. 45-74.

29 I am aware that I could be accused here of shuttling between the metas of meta-metacriticism myself! Have I been contaminated?

30 David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, Edinburgh UP (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 10.

31 I am thankful to Lorna Goodison for reminding me of Derek Walcott’s witty phrase.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Christiane Fioupou, “African Literature and Theory: The Cart Before the Horse?”Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 24.2 | 2002, 5-16.

Electronic reference

Christiane Fioupou, “African Literature and Theory: The Cart Before the Horse?”Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 24.2 | 2002, Online since 09 April 2022, connection on 13 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/11948; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12488

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About the author

Christiane Fioupou

Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail

Christiane Fioupou is Professor of English in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, France. She specialises in African studies, particularly in Nigerian and Ghanaian literatures.

By this author

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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