The storyteller function in contemporary Nigerian narrative

Abstract

This paper considers the articulation of orality in contemporary Nigerian writing, focusing on Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2008), asserting that, through the manipulation of collective engagement in meaning-making, each text functions as a contemporary griot, or repository of communal, cultural history. In contrast to earlier generations’ writing, which relied on the use of folktale, proverb, and linguistic techniques to forge a connection to the oral tradition, contemporary Anglophone African writers, this article argues, inscribe the oral tradition into their work through an epistemic shift that engages with the open signifiers of the communal, highlighting the storyteller function of their works. Both Habila’s and Abani’s novels thus occupy a discursive space which straddles registers, and both function through the art of the storyteller as a means of translating modes of collective address, foregrounding the very act of narration through their textual frames. From these foundational qualities, each work marks a contribution to, and departure from, ongoing debates surrounding the status of orality and writing as a means of cultural memorialization in global Anglophone African literature, a debate made fraught in no small part due to each discursive system’s implication with Enlightenment-driven conceptions of civilization and modernity.