Parallel Universes and Detonating Words: The Brixton Wonderland of Biyi Bandele's <i>The Street</i>

Abstract

Materialist Animism, Rhetoric of Metonymy, and Resistance of EverydayAfrican writers communicating English - and particularly migrants living and Western world - have found of challenging European imperialist power through playing with language. What they struggle with, specifically, fact English saturated with metaphors and meanings linked imperialism. The exemplary metaphor is, of course, Africa as dark heart of Conrad's classic. Writers struggle against tentacles of this of their colonisers, through which they themselves have been constituted as reluctant, ambivalent subjects; they therefore seize this language, with which they have love-hatred, and attempt manipulate its tropes and symbols variety of ways. These include anchoring their fictions visceral material realities of their previous lives and their new experiences diaspora; it involves infusing sounds and words and worldviews of other languages into which they were born and socialised, such as Arabic, Igbo or Yoruba. To depict these literal realities and incorporate rhythms of other languages into their fictions, some African writers find rhetoric of metonymy holds potential interrogate hierarchical law of dominant metaphors. What I will be demonstrating this article crucial link between material culture, solid objects, and subjectivity, as applied Biyi Bandele's novel, The Street.The connections are include contiguity - chance ordering of elements find themselves next each other, which contrasts with deep, symbolic, figurai bonds of metaphor. Rhymes and jingles, songs, concrete and happenstance are all stuff of metonymy. Bill Ashcroft has focussed on one particular use of this trope, what he has called the gap (2001: 75). He continues emphasise how cultural differences of experience are actually installed text various ways (ibid: 75, his emphasis). The gap, by means of which this installation of difference accomplished, occurs when postcolonial writers insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from first language, or concepts, allusions or references which may be unknown reader (ibid: 75). What then happens that:Such words become synecdochic of writer's culture - part stands for whole ... Thus inserted 'stands for' colonized culture way, and its very resistance interpretation constructs 'gap' between writer's culture and colonial culture, (ibid: 75)Ashcroft also observes this harnessing of metonymy flies face of law of powerful, Western centre: in European tradition contiguous and accidental, those characteristics which seem accrue metonymic, will never have power of truth and truth, of course, is province of metropolitan (ibid: 75). Ashcroft, fact, describes this metonymic gap as a crucial feature of transformative function of post-colonial writing (ibid: 75) and goes so far as suggest it the distinguishing feature of post-colonial literature (ibid: 76). Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of subcultural, combative literature. They explain does not refer minor but that which minority constructs within major language (1986: 16). Specifically, with regard Kafka, there the situation of German Czechoslovakia, as fluid intermixed with Czech and Yiddish (ibid: 20). Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka's as melange, a Harlequin costume which very different functions of and distinct centers of power are played out (ibid: 26). The challenge how to become nomad and an immigrant and gypsy relation one's own language? (ibid: 19). …