African Literary Aesthetics: Continuity and Change

Abstract

In literary discourse, one reads about poetic aesthetics very often but not much about literary aesthetics, especially when it concerns African literature. The aesthetics of different genres tend to be isolated and discussed separately; hence poetic aesthetics, narrative aesthetics, and dramatic aesthetics tend to be treated in isolation of each other. While such a study of individual genres is simpler to undertake because of uniformity of generic features, a study of aesthetics of literature also makes sense in a disciplinary manner as one would also look at art, music, and dance, among other artistic productions. This chapter therefore deals with aesthetics of African literature in general, including traditional, modern, and contemporary literatures, as well as in all literary genres as known today with emphasis on drama, fiction, and poetry.Only a few literary scholars have attempted discussing aesthetics of African literature directly. Among functions of critic that Chinweizu and others enumerate in Toward Decolonization of African Literature is educating taste of public (286-287). The strident condemnation of euro-modernist tendencies of poets such as Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and J.P. Clark for their indebtedness to Western poetic traditions is meant to make point of how difficult it will be for African readers to understand and relate to poetry written by African poets with borrowed techniques and poetic forms. Toward Decolonization of African Literature may not have addressed question of literary aesthetics directly but covers it in general concern of a people's literature without regard to their environment and culture, especially their orature. To a large extent, study of modern African poetry since early 1980s, especially of its content and form, is incomplete without addressing alarm that Chinweizu and his group raised in their controversial book.Another literary scholar that has contributed to issue of literary aesthetics is Emmanuel Ngara whose three significant books, Stylistic Criticism & African Novel (1982), Art & Ideology in African Novel (1985), and Ideology & Form in African Poetry (1990), deal with African literary modes and form, aspects of aesthetics of African literature. Despite rigid ideological stand of inflicting Marxism on what has always obtained in Africa from time immemorial, utilitarian function of art, as Marxist, his studies of African poetry and novel are relevant works that attempt to deal with major aspects of African literary aesthetics. In Ideology & Form in African Poetry, he defines as referring to the literary convention and stylistic stances adopted by writer (12). He admits that there are several of aesthetic ideology and identifies repetition and parallelism as well as para-linguistic affective devices of myth, allusion, and irony as enabling poetic aesthetics. He makes strongest case for African literary aesthetics as follows:In process of reading, reader and text also enter into a dialectical relationship. There is no one-sided cause and effect relationship. The text bares itself to reader, exposes its multiple layers of meaning and aesthetic effects and reader responds by not only receiving what text offers but also by injecting into it something of his or her perceptiveness, ideological insights and sensitivity. The reader and text enter into a relationship similar to that of a man and woman making love (16-17).It is in subsequent chapters of book that he deals with poetic devices used to generate aesthetic effects by authors he selected to discuss. Ngara is an unapologetic Marxist in his approach and ignores fact that literature is a cultural production. Still, his works on African poetry and fiction are few of a kind in criticism of African literature. …