Nature and the supernatural in African literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the relationship between literary naturalism and supernaturalism, with an emphasis on the latter. The supernatural genre, a common avenue of representation in African cultural production, combines fantasy and horror as it deals with the social and psychological anxieties surrounding the unknowns of its time. While the natural world can appear to some extent knowable, the supernatural world according to Moradewun Adejunmobi, refers to ‘the unknown and potentially unknowable or that which cannot be apprehended.’ This essay argues that to discern the ‘super’ in the ‘supernatural,’ it is first necessary to understand how the genre represents the ‘natural.’ Social transitions or crises are often framed in the 19th century naturalist novel with reference to ideas about nature and what is natural, with nature and society presented on both sides of a metaphoric equation. A close look at references to nature can demonstrate how naturalist narratives sees social change as primarily socially or naturally generated. Naturalism has been criticized for reducing social problems to laws of nature. Theorist Biodun Jeyifo has noted that in African versions of naturalism, social crises can similarly appear to follow a supernatural trajectory, making social movements appear static or determined by supernatural forces. The novels that I examine – Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s House of Jasmine – are set in anxious times of economic transition. I analyse these works to show how supernatural forces can appear to be primarily aligned with the social or natural world, before considering what this says about the depiction of social possibility. When the supernatural appears to be socially generated, the genre can expose the increasingly apprehensible logic of capital or what Marx calls ‘the value form,’ in its haunting social contradictions. In these works, capital itself is the supernatural.