To W/rite in a New Language: Werewere Liking's Adaptation of Ritual to the Novel

Abstract

lunatic language be born allow lunatics express themselves in the face of an age of lunacy.' This maxim is Werewere Liking's assessment of the state of discourse in African arts and letters. Citing contemporaries, dramatist-novelist-poetpainter Liking draws attention conscious effort forge another aesthetic language: Writing my book demanded that I invent lexicon capable of rendering the tropical situation through its sonorities (Sony Labou Tansi). These writers are impelled, as Jean-Marie Adiaffi says, to depart from the specificity of African literature innovate, find find such forms as fables, which see tomorrow with today's eyes (Sony Labou Tansi); recitals of litany of dreams and nightmares (Henri Lopes); and chant-novels, chants romans (Werewere Liking). Although Liking refers only Francophone writers, we could complement her list with the names of any number of Anglophone novelists such as Ayi Kwei Armah, in his later works; Ngugi wa Thiong'o; Nuruddin Farah; Bessie Head, and others. For what is Head's A Question of Power, if not a litany of dreams and nightmares taken its limit? Calling for recognition of new aesthetic paradigms, nouvelles esthitiques, innovative forms, Liking is addressing what Sewanou Diabla refers in his Nouvelles ecritures africaines2 as the malaises des consciences africaines, the organic malignancy afflicting the collective African social and spiritual body, for which they seek, in literary terms, healing, purgation, therapy. For Liking, source of the needed purgative is traditional ritual adapted contemporary conditions. Having experienced the Bassa rituals of initiation, healing the sick, death and mourning while growing up, Liking recognized manifestations of kind of dynamic language that she was seeking.3 She discusses her notion of the nouvelles esthitiques in the ILENA paper cited here in the opening statement. Advocating the legitimate subverting of rigid genre boundaries, she points an African aesthetics characterized by a) greater liberty that strikes down all genres, and b) deployment of symbolic elements not just for their meaning and content (the signified), but also and especially for the texture and sensuality of the signs themselves, for their unaccustomed encounter and for their very vibration, as it were. Descriptive language and the imaginative, she continues, must be liberated from all logical formation and from the restraints of verisimilitude. They should serve create series of images intended provoke an emotional explosion which can liberate the reader, turning him/her into creator also4 (thus re/uniting the audience and the artist/writer). Noting that such mixing was in the oldest of African traditions, where there were no binary oppositions of sacred/profane, mystical/mundane, tragic/comedic, Liking