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.

Writing and the storyteller

In its closing lines Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart takes a drastic shift in voice, turning away from the oral histories of Umuofia told in its pages to enter the mind of the District Commissioner, musing on the book he hopes to one day write about his “pacification” of the colonies:

As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph at any rate. (Achebe, 1959: 208–9)

With these thoughts, the District Commissioner relegates the stories of Okonkwo and Umuofia, which the reader has been perusing for some two hundred pages, to a brief aside. In the context of the novel, this dismissal serves as an ironic commentary on the colonialist epistemologies that would relegate African societies to the margins of civilization. Simultaneously, the District Commissioner’s musings highlight the long-standing anxieties surrounding literacy and orality in African literatures, writ large. For the District Commissioner, a product of a literate, and thereby “advanced”, culture, the repository of stories embedded in Umuofia’s oral tradition can be little more than a footnote or colourful anecdote. The cultural history that the reader has been perusing, by extension, loses its salience, pushed to the margins. Highlighting the importance of the book as a repository of knowledge and its origins within a Eurocentric discourse of enlightened modernity, the worldview espoused by the District Commissioner contains no place for the petty affairs of an African tribe, affairs better served by their collapse into a triumphant narrative of sequential development. The oral, the “authentic”, disappears, written over by a disinterested modernity. In this essay, I reconsider the divisions between orality and literacy that this passage develops and which have underwritten much contemporary discussion of authenticity and cultural engagement in African literatures. I draw on readings of Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2008) and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) to propose a reconfiguration of the orality/literacy split under what I am calling the storyteller function of contemporary Nigerian narrative. A form of writing emerges through this storyteller function, which, by adopting the role of the griot, unmoors itself from the fixity of the book and opens itself to a communal function, subverting any sequential narrative and calling into question the chasm between oral and literate cultures assumed by Achebe’s District Commissioner. The griot, the royal poet-historian praise singer and “highly visible cultural voice” in West Africa, as Thomas Hale describes him or her (1994: 71), functions as a keeper of the oral tradition, part of a lineage tasked with the same. Through his or her songs, the griot bridges the space between the individual and his or her community, uniting disparate social classes by “reveal[ing] both a personal and collective link between the subject [of the griot’s praise songs] and those who are inescapably bound to him or her for political and social reasons” (Hale, 1994: 80–1). Through his or her work of cultural historical transmission, the griot thereby serves the coexistent role of instigator, calling upon a form of social responsibility and connectivity across society (1994: 82). By adopting this role in their narrative forms, Abani’s and Habila’s texts enact a parallel function, one which opens the text beyond its boundaries and transforms the act of reading from a detached and individualistic mode of communication into a collective encounter with cultural history articulated in the shifting, communal, and multivocal idiom of orality.

As literary narratives, Measuring Time and Song for Night share a concern with the practice and transmission of cultural memory. Positioned within the emerging body of contemporary global African writing, what is often described as the third generation of African literature, both novels 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. Both texts, in other words, materialize a distinct chronotope for contemporary African literature through their manipulation of temporality, silence, and modes of address which, while presented in the novel form, gesture towards collective modes of engagement with meaning-making more closely aligned with the aforementioned figure of the griot. In both novels, this is enacted through the activation of an elided communal history and a collective re-creation of cultural memory that prompts a participatory form of readerly listening. In so doing, 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 Anglophone African literary writing.

In the context of African cultural production, the move from orality to literacy has stood for more than a simple reconstitution of discourse. Instead, developed under the auspices of colonial conquest and its attendant violence (Law and Mann, 1999), the shift to the written has been marked by a particular tension driven by the implicit notion that only literacy could offer “validat[ion of] one’s humanness, confirm[ation of] one’s intelligence, and […] access to the society at large” (Chambers Dalton, 1991: 545). As a result, “[t]he recording of an authentic black voice […] was the millennial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European […] the brute animal become the human being” (Mullen, 1996: 670). Indeed, as Abdul JanMohamed has argued, only words “become separate ‘things,’ abstracted from the flow of speech, shedding their close entailment with action and context” (2002: 44). Written words, therefore, express a sophistication of form in stark contrast to the “conservative and homeostatic” realm of the oral, by contrast described as a totalizing and reductive system (JanMohamed, 2002: 44). Yet, implicated in the very constitution of an African subjectivity, the opposition between orality and literacy cannot be held in such simple or single terms. By contrast, in scholarship on African literatures, the function of orality has been equally invoked as a signifier of authenticity, African cultural specificity, and the particularity of an African voice in world literary production. In this context, the supposed shift in African cultures from an oral mode of cultural transmission, thought of as authentic, to the written word as repository of literary value, positioned as part of colonialism’s legacy, has foregrounded a recurrent critical and cultural tension. The troika of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, writing in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, argue that African literature’s very autonomy comes from its adherence to folkloric and oral forms (1980: 4; 239–40), a polemic stance disparagingly described by Wole Soyinka as exhibiting a “destructive opportunism rather than […] an intelligent concern for poetry” (1975: 38). More recently, F. Abiola Irele has proposed a view of African literary writing located within a dense intertextual network of oral literary cultures, what he calls the “approximation”, in literature, of oral models of communication (2001: 31). As Irele argues,

because the traditional culture has been able to maintain itself as a contemporary reality and thus to offer itself as a living recourse, the modern literature strives to establish and strengthen its connection with a legacy that, though associated with the past, remains available as a constant reference for the African imagination. (2001: 29)

A similar sentiment has been echoed by critics including Isidore Okpewho and Evan Mwangi, with the former arguing that “modern African writers consciously borrow techniques and ideas from their oral traditions in constructing works dealing essentially with modern life” (Okpewho, 1992: 18) and the latter that, “contemporary novelists use orature not so much to differ from the Western canon but to deconstruct local oral and literate texts and to invent a new Africa that dialogues with itself and other cultures of the world” (Mwangi, 2009: 109). Throughout these discussions and contra notions of literacy as a prerequisite to humanity, orality has been celebrated as a uniquely African mode of expression, providing a vast cultural repository which challenges the “inherent evolutionism” that denigrates the oral as hopelessly archaic (Irele, 2001: 25).

This preoccupation with the oral and the written is neither new nor specific to African letters, as a detour through critical theory demonstrates. In a context far removed from the landscape of African literature, Walter Benjamin famously described the transition from a culture of short-lived reminiscence through the art of the storyteller to one of remembrance mediated through the novel in his 1936 essay on the works of Nikolai Leskov, “The Storyteller” (1968: 83–110). Remembrance, Benjamin claims, “is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle”, essentially codifying the historical memory that will pass from generation to generation through the individualistic form of the novel (1968: 98–100). Reminiscence, the short-lived and multiply articulated domain of the storyteller, manifests by contrast in “many diffuse occurrences” (Benjamin, 1968: 98). Benjamin explains that “[t]he storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself” (1968: 87). In its very form, the novel signifies the isolating mechanisms of a modernity inaugurated by the mechanical warfare of the First World War, translating subjective positioning into the codification of memory (Benjamin, 1968: 84). The novel, then, and the written word which produces it, manifest an impoverishment of what Benjamin terms “communicable experience” (1968: 84), drawn from the alienation of large-scale social violations. In this turn, Benjamin’s notion of the entry into the written and rejection of the oral, though taken from a vastly different set of historical circumstance, bears more than a passing resemblance to the supposed entry into modernity and, by extension, civilization inaugurated on the African continent through the violence of colonialism; this imposition, too, marks a wrenching, an alienation from pre-colonial forms of sociality, and as in its European articulation, this state of cultural violation marks a transformation of history, memory, and collective experience.

Benjamin’s conceptualization of the storyteller operates broadly in the same discursive field as the more general notions of language and communication developed in Saussurean linguistics. For Saussure and his followers, writing forms a distinct and discrete system whose sole function is to reproduce the spoken word. As a mere representation of speech, itself a representation of language in the abstract sense, writing is doubly impoverished, removed from the immediacy of expression and defined by absence. Yet, as Derrida famously argues, this sequential vision of language “leads to the interpretation of all eruptions of the nonphonetic within writing as transitory crisis and accident of passage, and it is right to consider this teleology to be a Western ethnocentrism, a premathematical primitivism, and a preformalist intuitionism” (1976: 40). For Derrida, Saussure’s insistence on the primacy of the spoken over the written relies on a highly limited notion of what constitutes language. Instead, Derrida proposes a system in which writing, expanded from its narrow and particularistic definition, functions simultaneously with orality, both operating at the hinge between presence and absence. If, for Benjamin, the art of the storyteller indicates an immediacy from which the novel is severed, for Derrida, the two systems, written and spoken, remain mutually implicated, perpetually haunting one another.

As Derrida’s observations indicate, the sequential and oppositional positioning of the written and the oral finds itself at odds with each mode’s own reckoning with memory, history, and time, assuming an ontological stability where none is possible. Equally, commentary that overdetermines the break between orality and writing fails to observe that the distance between the two traditions is neither absolute nor fixed in a distinct moment in time (Chanda, 2003: 136); instead, following George, it is possible to see the two as occupying “coeval time” (2005: 356), playing, as Derrida supposes, on the hinge between absence and presence. It is precisely here where the griot, as a model of communication, becomes useful: both fixed, in his or her recitation of histories, and mutable, in his or her performance, the griot captures the duality of orality and writing mimicked through the storyteller function. Considering the continuing import of orality to cultural production on the African continent, Irele has explained that “[f]or all their undoubted diversity, the manifestations of the imagination in our traditional socialites have one common denominator — they rely primarily on an oral mode of realization. In African traditional cultures, therefore, we have a pervasiveness of the spoken word” (1990: 54). Reverberating through this amplification, orality permeates attempts at fixing an African cultural tradition in literary form as “a marriage between two disparate traditions” (Sackey, 1991: 399), in what Anindyo Roy has called an effort “to refashion the task of rethinking and remaking history” (2010: 19). In so doing, the modes of oral and written communication function less as absolutes, than, following Derrida, supplementary parts to an unfinished whole, both inside and outside of each other at the same time, engaged in an act of communication that never reaches closure.

Measuring Time and Song for Night bear a number of similarities beyond their deployment of the storyteller function. Both texts have been written in the same time period by male authors who, though considered part of the third generation of Nigerian writers, reside and teach in the United States (Habila at George Mason University, Abani at the University of California, Riverside). More potently, both works engage with the Nigerian–Biafran War of 1967–70, a national memory which, in official, governmentally-sanctioned history, “[Nigerians] act like doesn’t exist” (Adichie, 2008: 53), centralizing the conflict and its legacies as a means of narrative organization. Officially caused by the declaration of the breakaway Republic of Biafra in the predominantly Igbo southeast of Nigeria, the war, a conflict in which an estimated 3,000 to 50,000 people died and 300,000 to one million were displaced, has been largely flattened by official histories, its origins in the emergence of the Nigerian nation-state effaced under invocations of ethnic rivalry or religious intolerance. Through this move, the war and its complex history have been both repressed and left to linger in the backdrop of present-day politics. Roy suggests that third generation authors “assume the task of evoking history through the representation of the trials and traumas of the nation emerging from the shadows of colonialism and neo-colonialism” (2010: 5), utilizing what he terms “a ‘remembering’ that fuses paratextual elements of fiction with traditional forms of West African storytelling” (2010: 9). This act of fusing, this “remembering”, is of no little consequence in this context. Described as “the second watershed in nation formation” (Nwakanma, 2008: 7), the war and its effects reverberate in the present day, leaving their trace through Nigeria’s history of coups, dictatorial regimes, and arrested entry into democracy. Returning to Benjamin’s contention that the shift from the oral to the written is marked by a parallel shift in the functioning of memory, this shared context is particularly significant given the near-obsession, in Nigerian literature, with memorializing the war (Hodges, 2009). Continually haunting the national imaginary, the Nigerian–Biafran War presents a historical context in which reckoning may only be, by default, enacted at the level of the sociality. While neither text delves into the details of battle or the politics surrounding the conflict, both use its space as the foundational moment of their plots, invoking this space for collective memorialization, in Habila’s novel through a single, critical narrative episode, and in Abani’s as his narrative backdrop. Because of the significant positioning of the war in both texts, then, it should be of little surprise that both authors seek an engagement not only with society, but also with memory and time, and it is in this sense that both texts function as reconstitutional moments of the work of orality.

Measuring Time and the historian’s task

Habila’s Measuring Time overtly grapples with the notions of orality, writing, and the constitution of a communal identity and archive through the framing of its protagonist, Mamo, a would-be historian of the people who dreams of the immortality of fame. In so doing, it explicitly reckons with the legacy of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, playing on the earlier novel’s presentation of orality and history (see McCarthy, 1985: 244–5; Okechukwu, 2001: 41; ten Kortenaar, 2011: 3; Whittaker and Msiska, 2007: 30–1), both to re-stereotype the stereotype and to Signify, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s terminology (1988), upon the tropes of writing, orality, and community. Measuring Time tells the story of Mamo, born with sickle-cell disease, and his twin brother, LaMamo. The two boys grow up in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria with their neglectful and ambitious father, their mother having died in childbirth. Hating their father for his lack of interest in them, the boys dream of ruining him and somehow finding fame in order to transcend their lonely existences, a desire captured in their slogan “CHEAT DEATH, BE FAMOUS” (Habila, 2007: 25). ¹ Early in the narrative, at a crucial juncture in their adolescent development, the twins’ uncle Haruna, a fighter on the Federal side presumed dead in the Nigerian–Biafran War, suddenly and mysteriously returns to the family home. Seeing the hero’s welcome that follows and undeterred by Haruna’s mental illness and swift descent to suicide, the twins decide to achieve a similar renown, setting off for Chad, where they hope to become mercenaries. While Mamo, struck with another of his illness’s “episodes”, as the novel calls them, is unable to journey past their village of Keti, LaMamo carries on, working as a mercenary and, later, volunteer for Médicins Sans Frontières. Mamo remains behind, his dreams of fame dashed until the day he is asked to become court historian to the Mai (a local leader), literally a modern-day griot.

As Roy suggests, Habila’s narrative foregrounds a “form of narrative anticipation, hesitation and incompleteness that constitutes this state of ‘waiting’” (2010: 6), in order to create “a new aesthetics of realism” (2010: 9). It is this new aesthetics which creates a novel form of historical memorialization within the narrative, explicitly challenging the so-called transparency of cultural memory through Mamo’s own search for a “true history”, a corrective to colonialist and patriotic histories — what the novel depicts as “a process without closure”, which hearkens back to the oral tradition (Roy, 2010: 14; 23). Significantly, in establishing this aesthetic, the novel draws heavily on the modes of oral approximation and cultural intertextuality described by Irele, Mwangi, and Okpewho as characteristic of the modern African novel. Split into four parts, the novel proceeds under chapter headings which explicitly gesture to folklore, including: “the king of women” (15), “the silent listener” (66), “the decline of lamang” (135), “the young pretender” (296), and “after the gunshots” (355). Throughout, the text is interspersed with frequent episodic interruptions, delving into character origins and recounting moments from the twins’ childhood through a loosely-structured form of free association that recalls the improvisational art of oral performance. The narrative opens with a prologue in the form of a song praising Mamo and LaMamo’s father, Lamang, as the King of Women, announcing that “though the twins had not been born then, some women in the village still hum the song, popular many years ago, about Lamang’s philandering before and after he had married their mother” (15), growing in complexity until many competing versions of the same story would circulate (16). Through this opening frame, the novel both develops what Eileen Julien, in a different context, has termed “orality on display” (1992: 21), and extends beyond these more literal transpositions of the tropes of orality, shifting its focus from an oral engagement at the level of the word to one which imbues the text as a material artefact through a range of narrative strategies that exceed the limitations of the text as a narrowly defined repository of static information. Beyond simply reconstituting memory through intertextuality, the novel exceeds the parameters of historical remembrance in favour of the ever emerging play of short-lived and communal constitutions, leveraging its ambiguous temporality, performativity, and the extra-lingual in this work.

Mamo’s sickle-cell disease is introduced early in the narrative:

When he was four, Mamo was discovered to have inherited his mother’s blood disease, and it was, for the first time, given a name: sickle-cell anemia. He would make a lengthy reference to this in his biography of his mother, explaining in detail the chemistry and the biology of the disease. He also painted a picture, mostly in indigo and blue, of his earliest memory of his illness, and he described the occasion as “similar to being born again”. (20)

In this passage, Mamo links his work of writing with his coming-into-being, using the hypothetical moment of his mother’s biography as a way of describing his earliest memories, what he refers to as “emerging from some cave” (20). For Mamo, faced with his illness, writing’s allure comes from its permanency, its fixing qualities. Yet, connecting his mother, the fulcrum around which his sense of belonging develops, with his illness, that which isolates him, writing is simultaneously destabilized, opened beyond the individualistic and complicated through the invocation of alternative, visual discourses (Vincent, 2010: 46). Introduced at the interstices of these modes of communication, Mamo’s writing transfigures into a moment of uncertainty, an entry not into the private world of the novel, but rather into the amorphous, communal realm of the sociality. This transfiguration is amplified both here and throughout the novel in its ambiguous temporality, one with few overt markers and which expands and contracts beyond the “homogenous, empty time” of the novel (Anderson, 1991: 24). Reflected in the assertion that Mamo “would make a lengthy reference” to his mother’s illness, the text is placed under the ambiguity of a conditional tense which, though manifested through the written text, gestures more towards the interpretative flexibility and transience of the spoken word. Writing, supposed to grant Mamo what is later referred to as a “gratuitous immortality” (236), is suspended under the weight of its own conditionality, in thrall to an unspoken future and the promises therein. Focalized through a protagonist who later ruminates that “[h]e wanted to ask questions, not really to teach” (105), the conditionality of this passage signals the opening of the text to its interlocutors, its gesture to a listener. To transmit history, for Mamo, to encompass it, escapes the fixing potential of the present tense, opening itself to the anticipatory mode of questioning, a mode of communication inherently collective in its force.

The act of writing becomes an organizing principle of the narrative, appearing in an overt form through Mamo’s experience in writing his play, The Coming. Based on an annually improvised performance held by the women of his church, the play, written in Mamo’s thirteenth year, depicts the history of Keti and its “discovery” by the American missionary, Reverend Drinkwater. Staged to decidedly mixed results, Mamo’s version of the play fails through the women’s inability to transpose their oral art form onto the codified realm of the written word. Previously described as “jok[ing] and exchang[ing] banter as they mimed and sang and danced” (39), the women embody a form of collective vitality through which they are able to enliven as new their performance of the village origin story year upon year: “each new year, they approached the performance with the enthusiasm of a new discovery, and each year the audience applauded and cheered with undiminished enthusiasm” (40). Yet, consigned to a narrowly-determined form of writing, the women’s ability to communicate loses its force. As he watches their stilted performance, Mamo discovers that writing cannot sustain a single, stable meaning, much less (re)produce the dynamism of his village’s history:

Mamo instantly saw how poor his version of the play was. These women, in their forties and fifties, not by any means the most mentally agile age, now faced with having to be word-perfect, had suddenly lost their confidence and went about in a wooden, self-conscious way, and although the audience still cheering and laughed good-naturedly when the white man tried local food for the first time, and shed tears when his wife rescued abandoned twins, Mamo could see that the raw, unpremeditated vitality had gone out of the performance. (41)

With this loss of vitality, Mamo witnesses the violence of the letter, simultaneously able to see historical record and written fact as necessary for the transmission of culture, society, and history, and yet false, impossible in its multifarious ways. Stripped of its illocutionary force, one both said and heard (Austin, 1962: 100), and flattened to mere meaning, the play loses its performative thrust, no longer able to engender to collective force of reminiscence. As Mamo realizes at the end of the novel, the potency of the play emerges not through its perfect transposition and recitation, but through its force in action, its production of a communal spirit through which the people of Keti celebrate that

they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met Komda, and many times before that in their travels and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest among them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. (381)

Memory, as the multiply articulated and diffuse reminiscence of orality, cannot, it seems, be hardened into a unitary remembrance in writing, and writing, in turn, cannot be consigned to a single, discrete form. The very fixing of language under such a partial view of writing robs the play of its communicative force, stripping it of its social function. Writing, it seems, can never capture the essence of the act and therefore allows only the illusion of a fixity which is, in reality, a mediated occlusion of history and performance. Words, stories, and narratives, like Mamo’s aborted version of The Coming, remain partially realized, inadequate, and slanted without the supplemental force of orality.

Writing appears in several other forms within Habila’s novel, most notably in Mamo’s engagement as the Mai’s historian, hired to write his biography, but instead inspired to write Lives and Times, a history of Keti through the biographies of ordinary people. Even when working as a historian, the role of writing is left ambiguous for Mamo, who realizes through his work that no history, nor historian, could adequately capture the totality of any sociality. In the face of the dictate to produce a “royal history” (194), Mamo recognizes that a true history would be “the story of ordinary people, farmers, workers, housewives” (195), innumerable stories, which together sound the dissonant tones of a collective memory. It is perhaps for this reason that, despite the occasional extracts from Lives and Times, little evidence is given in the text that the larger work exists or will exist, left instead to the reader’s determination; within the frame of the text, Mamo never succeeds in his endeavour, reverting to a state in which the multi-vocality of experience is lost within the written word. Far from developing as an attempt to narrate a totalized version of history, Mamo’s biographies demonstrate the very impossibility for any history based on remembrance, however well-intentioned, to be all-encompassing, highlighting its need for an interlocutor to complete its work. Indeed, Mamo’s biographies disappear from view as his engagement with his community complicates, and it is ironically the disappointing play which, in the end, functions as Mamo’s literary legacy, returning in a new performance unrecognizable to Mamo that foregrounds the malleability of the text in its storytelling guise.

A third form of writing functions through the regular paratextual reproductions of LaMamo’s letters to Mamo, written during his absence. Despite the twins’ innate oneness as children, these letters, depicted as infrequent, irregular, and often out of date by the time of their arrival, remain their sole link to one another for the majority of the narrative. Within these letters, then, is LaMamo’s attempt to show his twin his life, describing seemingly arbitrary episodes from his adventures. Because of the nature of LaMamo’s work, however, Mamo is unable to respond to any of his letters, turning their written communication into a one-way transferral of information that lacks communicative exchange, seemingly embodying the isolation of the written form. Yet, LaMamo, previously described as a talented artist, encloses with each letter a drawing of his surroundings, explaining in a postscript to his first letter “I have included a sketch of the camp and the desert here, and the hills in the distance. The view of the hills sometimes reminded me of the hills at home” (81). Each subsequent letter finishes with a similar postscript, always explaining which portion of his landscape he depicts and why it reminds him of Keti. Like the photographic image of Mamo’s birth, these postscripts and the images they signify function as supplements to the actual written letters that LaMamo produces, engaging in another form of writing more closely aligned with the immediacy of the spoken. As such, they both extend the boundaries of each letter, giving a sense of communion which the simple recounting of stories may not do, but also exceed each letter, through their linkage with LaMamo’s memories of home, by turning the one-sided communication of the written into a two way communion over memory, space, and time. Through the regular inclusion of these missives, Measuring Time becomes a sort of mise en abyme, where the narrative, like the words and writing it holds in such suspicion, is itself opened, enabling its position as storyteller and site of communal exchange through the open-ended signifiers of reminiscence. Meaning is to be found not in the text itself, because all texts, like those within the narrative diegesis, remain open and ever-circulating, subject to the conditionality of reception in some as yet unrealized future. Instead, by embracing the instability of writing, Measuring Time, through its storyteller function, becomes itself the repository of cultural traditions and the locus of communal engagement, speaking to a communicable audience beyond the boundaries of the word. Throughout Measuring Time, these narrative devices come together to create an effect in which to read the novel is, by default, to engage in a form of listening, a participation in the narrative’s storytelling effect that opens its temporal, spatial, and imaginative effects beyond the domain of the written word.

Song for Night and the voiceless word

While Measuring Time grapples overtly with the roles of the historian, the storyteller, and the writer, Song for Night turns equally resolutely to what, at first, seems diametrically opposed, choosing silence as its narrative register. My Luck, the protagonist–narrator, is a fifteen-year-old conscript in the Biafran forces, three years into the Nigerian–Biafran War. Like Measuring Time, historical context is withheld, though, for the reader conversant in Nigerian postcolonial history, the setting in war is apparent. Hamish Dalley suggests that

despite allusions to geographical features like the Cross River that make its setting identifiable as Biafra in 1967–70, neither nation state is named in the text, which additionally lacks explicit chronological markers that would allow its events to be dated. Having provoked our desire to read his novel as representing the civil war, Abani undercuts this frame by fracturing his temporal setting through repetition and anachronism. At one point, for example, My Luck compares a comrade to “a Star Wars Ewok”, drawing on cultural knowledge inaccessible until more than ten years after Biafra’s demise. (Dalley, 2013: 2)

This observation is of no little significance to the novel’s work of storytelling, highlighting the extent to which its narrative rests upon both the work of collective reminiscence, in enlivening its historical context, and the mutability which marks orality. As the novel opens, My Luck has become separated from the rest of his squadron, a group of child soldiers tasked with searching out landmines and enemy traps. Like the other children chosen for this task because of their light step, My Luck has had his vocal chords severed so that, were he to step on a landmine, his screams would not startle the other scouts. As My Luck wanders through the war front, he reminisces on his experiences, both before and during the war, a stream of thought which, as Dalley observes, pivots around the unspeakable fulcrum of his mother’s murder during the pogroms which preceded it (2013: 9). Like Measuring Time, Song for Night hearkens in myriad forms to the oral tradition, most notably in its deployment of the ogbanje motif, the figure of the child who repeatedly dies and returns, commonplace in Igbo cosmology (see Dalley, 2013: 7; Krishnan, 2011: 100). Beyond this more overt reference and again reminiscent of Measuring Time, Song for Night divides its narrative with chapter headings which hearken to its storytelling function, each titled with a brief description of one of the signs My Luck and his colleagues improvise as their means of voiceless communication. These descriptions include entries “Memory is a Pattern Cut into an Arm”, “Danger is a Deeper Silence”, and “Home is a Palm Fisted to the Heart”, each sign relating to an episode from his past, leading to My Luck’s final reunion with his mother in death.

As a narrative, Song for Night functions through absences. In his training, My Luck is taught from a training manual absent except for its presence in his commander’s head, his “invisible manual” (Abani, 2008: 38). ² My Luck characterizes his storytelling by its absence of voice, on the one hand, and the absence of time, on the other, a by-product of his shifting memories:

It seems I am retracing my steps through places we passed. Something is off about it though, and yet as much as it is nagging at me, I cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with the chronology of my memories. The time between them is shrinking, I think. (47)

His trauma, throughout the novella, is characterized by the absent memory of his mother’s murder, witnessed by him yet irretrievable. Even the war, in its narrative presentation, is characterized by the absence of cause, the absence of rationale. Yet, rather than undergird the notion that the written word is itself an absence, these narrative absences paradoxically provoke a sort of presence through their very embodiment. The novella’s opening pages, entitled “Silence is a Steady Hand, Palm Flat”, begin with the assertion that “What you hear is not my voice” (9). This has been described, in one review, as “both acknowledg[ing] the reader and assum[ing] that the reader ‘hears’ a voice as s/he reads the written narrative, while also foreshadowing the revelation that the main character has no voice” (Zott, 2008: 1). While perhaps an overly literal response, this reaction captures the paradox at the heart of the narrative as a tale told without telling at all. Instead, the narrative is spoken in a form of speech that functions by writing on and through the body, symbolized in the graveyard of crosses My Luck carves on his skin, a “map” of his “genealogy” in war and “his own personal cemetery” (15–16; 28). Through this immediacy and despite its stated absence, the narrative progresses in My Luck’s voice, drawing attention to the artifice of its own form, with declarations that

if you are hearing any of this at all it’s because you have gained access to my head. You would also know then that my inner-speech is not in English, because there is something atavistic about war that rejects all but the primal language of the genes to comprehend it. (11)

Throughout, My Luck describes his signing, and yet is equally able to “speak” with those who are not conversant in this method of communication, a fact that he finds surprising, even as he describes how to read these very signs (152). Reading and writing remain motions to be performed, acted out by My Luck for an audience, meaningless without a comprehending listener (18). Words, in this context, are neither fixed nor to be trusted; even in the sole episode depicting literal writing My Luck chooses to draw a sign over writing words (104). It seems, then, that words and the code of the written word are inherently unsuited for My Luck’s task, as he traverses what becomes the underworld of the child soldier. Communion comes not from understanding, but from feeling and through an embrace of the arbitrary, underscoring how language “cannot, under these material circumstances, be satisfied in this world” (Schultheis, 2008: 39).

It is perhaps no coincidence that, in both novels, the shift to a storyteller function is motivated at least in part by the insertion of female characters, aunt Marina, her acting troupe, Zara, and the twins’ mother, in Measuring Time, and Ijeoma, My Luck’s mother, and the mysterious mothers of the forest in Song for Night. The potency of gender in both texts’ work of reminiscence becomes particularly relevant when set against the larger, vexed context in which gender has been written in African literatures. Florence Stratton writes that early Anglophone African writing was marked by its exclusion of women through the objectification of the feminine under masculine agency (2004: 40–2). In a similar vein, Susan Z. Andrade argues that, through a narrow allegiance to the political in readings of early African writing, women’s writing, unfairly dismissed as solely domestic in scope, was neglected as part of the larger project of nation-building (2011: 1–6). For Stratton, and of relevance to my readings of Abani’s and Habila’s novels, this negligence of women’s literary production has been particularly damaging insofar as it has reified a false separation between the public and the private. In Song for Night and Measuring Time, it is precisely this gap between the private, the libidinal, and the public, the political, which the storyteller function closes; in this regard, it is of no little significance that the communicative play which each novel enacts is driven largely by its female characters, through each protagonist’s erstwhile mother figures. Both Andrade and Stratton observe how the figure of the mother, particularly through the Mother Africa trope, serves as a means of objectifying women, naturalizing them as inscribed in the land (Andrade, 2011: 14; Stratton, 2004: 40). Yet, in these two novels, the mother figure emerges as she who resists objectification, instead impelling the unspoken and perpetually unfinished trajectories of cultural history that each protagonist attempts to enliven, made more potent through women’s simultaneous importance in the development of oral traditions on the African continent and erasure from its history (Ogundipe-Leslie and Boyce Davies, 1994: 1–2). Through the women’s performance of The Coming in Measuring Time, and the blind spectre of his mother’s murder for My Luck, the maternal underwrites the ceaseless communion of the storyteller in need of a listener. In place of a binary division between the private and the public, the masculine and the feminine, the written and the spoken, comes a holistic and collective experience of movement, deferral, and reconciliation.

This representation of silence under the amorphous code of signs and signals read by way of, or through and in, the body becomes, itself, as much a signifier of the griot and oral function as the articulated storytelling of Measuring Time. By elevating the lack inherent to silence and foregrounding the arbitrary artifice of signs, Song for Night, as one commentator notes, “demands instead the reader and author’s joint contract to imagine the unimaginable as an (unattainable) goal in and of itself” (Schultheis, 2008: 38). The storyteller function in Song for Night emerges through the very silence of the text, its narrative, and its demand for a present co-creation, what My Luck thinks of as living both inside and outside of his dreams (49). Through a refusal of words, codes, and, in a paradoxical fashion, narration itself, the novella inhabits the multiply articulated, amorphous and palimpsestically inscribed space of the oral tradition, becoming in its own way another materialization of the oral as a material signifier of the storyteller. Like their predecessor in Achebe, both Habila’s and Abani’s texts display an understanding of the power of narrative as a means of coding hidden messages and intertwining layers of power and dominance in its reflection of its sociality. At the same time, both simultaneously and explicitly acknowledge the very impossibility of separating the written from the unstable performativity of the oral text through their engagement with the violence of the letter and the destabilization of the word. The violence of language and its constant circulation and deferral of meaning is foregrounded in each character’s individual relationship to storytelling, memory, and history, highlighting the slippery mutuality of what are erroneously perceived as distinct and discrete modes of discursive engagement. The tropes of the writing and storytelling are thus refigured in Measuring Time and Song for Night into sites of instability and ambivalence, simultaneously enabling and confining in their characteristics.

A reconfigured orality

Writing on Frantz Fanon’s elusive third stage of national culture, Homi K. Bhabha has claimed that “Fanon’s vision of revolutionary cultural and political change as a ‘fluctuating movement’ of occult instability could not be articulated as cultural practice without an acknowledgement of this indeterminate space of the subject(s) of enunciation” (1994: 37; emphasis in original). Following from this remark, we might see Measuring Time and Song for Night as fabricating a cultural practice in which suppressed and silenced voices and dialogues are unearthed in this very indeterminate space of language. In Measuring Time, this space opens by way of Mamo’s speculative writings, propelling the novel into a conditional tense in which the mooring points of a static history erode in favour of a dissonant, discrepant history of “secret desires and aspirations” (358). In Song for Night, similarly, this space emerges by way of a performing body, enshrouded in silence and lucid dreaming (49). In contemporary Nigerian writing, it is precisely this notion of orality and literacy as a binary engagement that is overturned by the very treachery of the written word and proliferation of alternative means of coding communicative experience, which highlight the artifice of this dichotomy while encouraging intersubjective constructions of memory. The written word, while certainly abstract, cannot be seen as a fixed site of contemplation and meaning making, much less a site on which to create “a dense representation of the past”, which then results in “the development of historical consciousness and secular teleology” (JanMohamed, 2002: 44). Instead, it is the written word that becomes in thrall to mythic time and totalization through its very incomprehensibility masquerading as fixity, allowing space for the recognition that “orality is flexible and adaptable to change; that the oral mode can accommodate modernism through specific indigenous perspectives” (Ezenwa-Ohaeto, 1998: 18). Together with its storyteller function, the text reconfigures itself within a discursive category in which neither may be subsumed to the other, but persist in a constant play.

It is thus precisely through this unstable relationship with the written word that Measuring Time and Song for Night reveal themselves as the griot, embodying, through what I have called their storyteller function, the very ambiguous movements and meanings that demand an articulation which, while attentive to the localized context in which it occurs, simultaneously engages with a multiplicity of discourses that refuse the fixity of a single form of modernity, humanity, or civilization. In these texts what appears, then, is a manifestation of the text-as-griot, encapsulating what Irele has called the text’s “character as ‘meta-code’ for the formulation of those representations by which the collective consciousness is structured” (1993: 169). In so doing, the text-as-griot embodies an enunciatory frame which, like the trickster, has “the capacity […] to embody multivocality”, and which may “prevent the otherness or difference of texts from being reduced or assimilated” (Monsma, 1996: 95). This storyteller function thereby translates the written, physical text into an oral text which is “less a representation of the past than a contemporary reading of that past” (Hale, 1998: 23), one which demands its co-creation. Ruth Finnegan remarks that oral literature arises through the specificity of each instantiation, where “the nature of the performance itself can make an important contribution to the impact of the particular literary form being exhibited” (2012: 5). Here, through the storyteller function, the text engages in a specified illocutionary act which requires an interpreter to attain its force, functioning at the interstices of writing and speaking. Extending beyond hybridity, the two modes of discourse are transfigured and translated through the storyteller function into a site of continuous becoming. Cynthia Ward in an analysis of Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), has written that “acknowledging a fidelity to the oral, these texts can instead be ‘heard’ to declare the precedence of ‘real’ human — therefore essentially untextualizable — voices and meanings over the putative political and historical hegemony of the word” (1990: 89). Habila’s and Abani’s texts, too, demand an engagement through which to expand their often conflictual notions of communal identity and history, evoking a form of being heard that transforms the written from a site of “power and recognition” (Kaschula, 1999: 71). In the process of this transformation, static remembrance is re-constituted as polyglossic reminiscence, left unfinished and foregrounding the mutual existence and multiplicity of the oral and the written.

Through this contravention of the orality/writing binary, then, Measuring Time and Song for Night return to a form of engagement and meaning that rearticulates the pre-literate notion of the text and the word through an overt embrace of the multiplicity of the word and the use of the text as a site of communal engagement. Contra the conservative reading, however, these notions of communal engagement and dynamic perspectives on the word and the text are not, themselves, incompatible with a point of view which is both distinctively situated within the milieu of postcoloniality and the modernity it necessitates, nor does it mean a necessary foreclosure of the individual within the amorphous communal space. Instead, these texts demonstrate the very criticality and self-reflexivity of the oral tradition and the notion of a literacy that exceeds the imposed ideals of an “enlightened” Europe. Through their destabilization of the word, then, these literary works invite the sort of participation in which history becomes a construction that is continually enacted and re-enacted outside of a monolithically enforced sense of normativity. The text itself, as the material manifestation of a malleable and heterogeneous notion of culture and community, becomes the repository of a history which is dynamic, and that nonetheless allows for a multiply articulated engagement with memory, self, and community through its very embedding in a fleeting social and historical context. This, in turn, demonstrates the development of new forms of literacy in the contemporary Nigerian novel which, at the same time, may serve for readers as a cipher, an invitation to novel textual engagements.