West Africa

Introduction

New media platforms are having profound effects on genres and modes of literary presentation this year. Graphic novels, young adult fiction and illustrated novels are transforming narrative forms as fiction by Nnendi Okorafor and Roy Okupe listed in the bibliography demonstrates. Chris Abani captures the general feature that defines creativity and temperament in West African Literature in his introduction to Lagos Noir, a collection of short stories by a new generation of Nigerian writers who have taken the literary stage in the last few years. Abani writes: “The thirteen stories that comprise this volume stretch the boundaries of ‘noir’ fiction, but each one of them fully captures the essence of noir, the unsettled darkness that continues to lurk in the city’s streets, alleys, and waterways”. Tomi Adeyemi, Akwaeke Emezi and Oyekan Braithwaite, all female writers who made their debuts in 2018, are stretching the boundaries of genres.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, Fragments, set in Ghana’s capital, Accra, has gained renewed critical attention. Uirak Kim comments how Armah “has taken a Western or ‘modernist’ literature [form] and adapted it to suit an African setting” in order to explore fragmentation and alienation as effects of “the reification of a corrupt neo-colonial state” (2) [see Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers].

There is a notable accent on trauma in the criticism of West African literature. This is significant to the extent that writers who do not have direct personal experiences of war or violence are depicting the aftereffects of memory in their treatment of trauma. Such writers include Cameroonian Léonora Miano and Nigerians Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani.