Mythopoetics and Cultural Re-Creation

Abstract

This chapter moves from questions of subjectivity and the individual to a broader consideration of address and narrative strategy in contemporary Anglophone African writing. Throughout this chapter, I refer predominantly to two primary texts, Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, to interrogate the means through which contemporary African writers negotiate the multiple audiences for whom they write through the re-inscription of mythopoetic motifs. The latter text, in particular, as a work produced in Gĩkũyũ, translated into English and more widely read in this second form, makes for a particularly potent example of textual innovation, narrative form and rhetorical address. Indeed, it is the particular fact of the novel’s creation, as a work produced within a local tradition with a view towards its global audience, that most explicitly highlights the issues of re-inscription and multiplicity which this chapter explores. This polyvocality, in turn, forms a central facet of the work of contemporary African writing in negotiating the supposed binaries of modernity and tradition, West and rest, which have marked the emergence of African writing on the global stage.