Boleswa Writing And Weathercock Aesthetics Of African Literature

Abstract

SummaryPostmodernist “thinking about thinking” allows for speculative reflection which avers that “Boleswa literature” like “African literature” is non-existent. Basic to this kind of proposition is the suggestion by Saussurean linguistics of systemic differential and oppositional relation in language between sound image and concept and the Barthesian postulation of a semiological associative distinction between signifier, signified and sign in the study of myth where myth is defined as speech but a peculiar type of discourse. Literature is speech comprising different types of discourse – poetry, prose – based on a primary mode of discourse that is language but which also manifests variously as forms of metalanguage. Boleswa literature does not exist, not because “Boleswa” is only an acronym from three southern African countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and is no geographical entity in a strict legal sense, but because arguably it names a part of African literature which itself does not exist. This supposition is premised in part on an ideational extension of the problematic and identification and identity crises in the African cultural experience. Literary history reveals how a search for a suitable poetics, an ideal aesthetics of the African literary terrain often has lapsed into an exercise in the circuitous, enigmatic and contradictory. Still, the discursive pursuit, despite its potential for futility, can, in its dynamics, also be exciting: this essay attempts a speculative review of the study based on African literature using the weathercock as a trope to probe the bizarre, the paradoxical, and the engaging, in the African literary landscape, with reference to Boleswa as signifier, signified and sign.