African Literature and the Traditional Arts: Speaking Art, Molding Theory

Abstract

In the effort--to write the African story in European languages, Africans seem to have written themselves out of a lived African history into an alien and transitional narrative world. Though enabling in its capacity to open up Africa to the international world, that narrative world continues to close itself to Africans focused on a reality invented for the service of an extant colonial imperative. This invented Africa is ridden with questions about language, identity, viable political systems, and others that continue to challenge the African intellectual engaged in the quest for true African freedom from continued Western domination. Most scholars (see Achebe, Morning Yet; Gates, Signifying Monkey; Okpewho) agree that successful engagement of the issues it raises requires both a sustained engagement of African oral traditions to discover its own theories of aesthetics, criticism, and performance as well as the formulation of relevant theories for exploring contemporary African literatures. Predictably, general agreement on the necessity of these projects in the literatures of African-descended peoples has resulted in the initiation of various methods of discovery and inquiry. Notable examples include the works of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's Nobel Prize laureate, which explore the uses of Yoruba mythology as fictional and literary tools and strategies of engagement for the new literature (Myth, Literature and the African World), and Henry Louis Gates's theory of Signifyin(g) in African American formal literary traditions (The Signifying Monkey), and Abiola Irele's focus on ideology and language (The African Experience in Literature and Ideology). As a result of its history, the assumptions of contemporary African literature continue to depend on the anthropological, insisting that Africans in general and Africanists in particular should rise to the project to (re-)member and re-deploy African thought, African traditions. Further, the political implications of the encounter demand immediate deployment of the artifacts of these archeological endeavors. This essay explores the purposeful use of the oral narrative as a contemporary African literary technique with positive implications for the development of an African literary theory.