Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe'sArrow of God

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ike nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of African text and its distance from or subversion of European literary forms consti- tutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, Africanness of African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of, on one hand, oral tradition, both in terms of form and content, and on other, and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide impetus for political judgments, prescrip- tive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes primacy of political in discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis has, from its beginning, allied itself in varied ways to process of decolonization and social critique. The relation between text and was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with extratextual through different narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that the novel serves as model by which society conceives of itself, discourse through which it articulates world (189), then African presented to us was one rent by confl icts and contradictions: scatological and sublime, demonic and utopian, and historical. Yet, at same time it was also a of profound unity. In both mythical and realist writers, early postcolonial literary production aims towards a sense of totality—an idea of interconnectedness of African world. In dealing with political imperative, Chinua Achebe employs a strategy of metonymic recuperation, of substituting his specifi c traditional framework for an elaboration of African culture in pan-Africanist agenda. He mobilizes Igbo history and culture to articulate upheav- als and dislocations of colonial and postcolonial existence. Implicit in this procedure is belief in unity and certain homogeneity, both political and metaphysical, of Africa. Similarly, Wole Soyinka offers Yoruba myths as a basis for understanding of African religious, political, and philosophi- cal thought and practice. This primal phenomenon posits a cosmological order in which man exists in a cosmic totality (3). The reciprocal porosity of natural, social, and supernatural spheres derives from an animistic religious framework. Soyinka's appropriation of term myth and its institutionalization through his theoretical writings have come to deter- mine terms in which his work and those who share similar aesthetic strategies have been analyzed. Myth, which minimally refers to a narrative about gods or mythic per- sonalities, in common usage, often indicates error, fi ction, make-believe,