Abstract
Based on a stylistic analysis of selected African novels, centrally Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar/White Teeth (1953; English translation: 1989), this article identifies a narrative technique employed by these novels, to use heterogeneous genres inserted into the prose fiction of the novel. Typically, various genres of poetry are used in this way, creating a textuality that is richly “heteroglossic” (Bakhtin, 1981). However, the range of genres that can be used in this way is not limited and includes proverbs, sayings, songs, newspaper articles, letters, or more recently digital texts such as blogs or tweets. The article uses the term “generic fracturing” to refer to this technique. Generic fracturing is used in novels for specific purposes. The article focuses on the employment of a genre of Acoli praise poetry, mwoc, in White Teeth for characterization. It is further argued here that such heterogeneous genres do not only serve to construct the narrative, but are in fact markers of thought systems that differ from the “default” ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics of the novel. These features were inherited from the genre’s European history and imposed in Africa by colonial administration through which novelistic production was initially engineered. Generic fracturing is thus a textual strategy to effectuate disruptions and subversions of an intellectual framework that was a colonial imposition, and it points towards alternative ways of thinking. These were usually derived from local African cultural traditions in early African-language novelistic production. Generic fracturing, however, continues being used up to the present day in African novels to signal the co-existence and interaction of heterogeneous knowledges and philosophical frameworks.
Introduction
Okot p’Bitek’s (1931–1982) poetry has received a great deal of critical attention. By contrast, his novelistic writing has gone largely unnoticed. 1 Yet, it was through a novel that he first made himself known as a writer. Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo (“White Teeth Make Us Laugh on Earth”) is a novel in Acoli that was published in 1953. As Okot p’Bitek’s widow, Caroline Auma Okot p’Bitek, states in her preface to the English translation: “The book was his first step in the long journey he travelled into the literary world” (p’Bitek, 1989: n.p.). 2
The English translation, White Teeth, was completed by the author in 1982, but only appeared in 1989, seven years after his death. Lubwa P’chong, the author of the foreword to the English version, which he helped to edit, suggests that Lak Tar was “perhaps one of the earliest published novels in East Africa” (p’Bitek, 1989: n.p.). The novel is overtly a criticism of the practice of paying bridewealth in Acoli culture, which in the context of colonial realities becomes a variation on the “well-established Jim goes to Jo’burg motif” (Gérard, 1990: 115). Yet, at a deeper level the novel is an incisive analysis of the social and economic changes in Uganda on the cusp of independence and of the tensions between the multiple ethnicities living in Uganda.
This article examines Lak Tar against the background of other early novels in African languages, such as the first novel in Shona, Solomon M. Mutswairo’s Feso, published in 1956. It raises the question of the textual structure of early African novels. While pioneering the genre of the novel in their languages, these texts are often characterized by intermissions of other genres: various genres of poetry, praise names, proverbs, and others. I introduce the concept of “generic fracturing” in this article to refer to this practice of heterogeneous textualities fracturing the prose of the novel. I further argue that generic fracturing has the potential to subvert ideologies embedded in the novel as a genre and opens up spaces for alternative aesthetics, epistemologies and ontologies to become manifest.
An epistemology of genre: The African novel
The novel made its entry to Africa during colonial times (Gérard, 1981). It came as an accomplished genre with its own aesthetics and an impressive history in the West, which was, to an extent, made accessible in the colonized regions through translations and divulged through school education.
The introduction of the novel becomes a powerful imposition of an entire system of thought, with its very specific epistemology and underlying ontological convictions about nature, humanity and personhood, time, and space (Philipson, 1992, Watt, 1987/1957). These are expressed in novels through established techniques of plot construction, descriptions of settings, and characterization. Novels also come with a set stock of themes and concerns, beliefs about society and the relationship between society and the individual human being, but also very fundamental convictions about language and representation, derived from an understanding of literary realism (Shaw, 1999). Language is believed to be a transparent medium capable of expressing truth and mediating reality. It is a means of knowledge and as such it is firmly anchored in epistemology — an epistemology that is itself derived from the insights of the European Enlightenment, the objectivist approaches of scientific positivism and the subjectivism of phenomenology. While this description is a simplification of the complexity of the novelistic tradition in Europe, it serves here as a backdrop to see how radical its reconfiguration has to be once the genre travels to other regions.
Such convictions clash drastically with local African perceptions of being, knowledge, and language. These are diverse and differ from region to region and from culture to culture. But most of them are set on a different social and philosophical footing and, as a result, are strictly incompatible with the imported ideologies. These discrepancies start with the multiple understandings of language. Language is a medium of social convention, expressed through highly formulaic, carefully crafted speech. Language is a powerful means of influencing the “life-force” (Tempels, 1945) of beings. Language is itself action. To the griot, “what is done is what is told” (Kulubali, 1995): language establishes being and truth. Language does not represent, describe, or mediate; it is action and acts of its own right, and to do this, it is moulded in accordance with complex sets of conventions related to its sounds, its rhythms, and its imagery. Such clashes in beliefs and expectations are vast and even more dramatic when they concern the understandings of personhood, community, space, time, knowledge, and human action.
Okot p’Bitek was himself deeply concerned about the eclipsing of African cultural traditions, oral literatures, history, and general ways of knowing by Western culture and scholarship. He studied African cultures in his academic work (see p’Bitek, 1963, 2011/1970) and he referenced African verbal art, in particular of the Acoli, richly in his creative writing. It is undeniable that such literary practices had deep philosophical implications (see Imbo, 2002). P’Bitek was also not isolated in having such concerns. Most early African novelists relied on local literary traditions. George Kahari (1997/1990) traces the development of early Shona “romances” from the tradition of folktales (sarungano). A range of both local and foreign resources were employed by these authors. Ayo Bamgbose (1974) observes the use of Yoruba folklore, alongside Greek mythology and Christian literature, in the work of Daniel O. Fagunwa while Daniel Kunene (1989) analyses the appropriation of Christianity in the work of Thomas Mofolo.
However, the way novel writing spread in Africa in these early phases did not encourage experimentation with philosophies and worldviews. Novel writing was often stimulated through literary competitions organized by the colonial Literature Bureaus. The assessment process that led to the publication or the discarding of the submitted texts effectively filtered out most material that did not comply with literary realism. In other words, the conditions of the “rise” of the African novel (Mukoma, 2018) contributed to the imposition of a realist aesthetics, along with its underlying positivist epistemology and ontology.
Heteroglossic textuality through generic fracturing
This means that any challenges to or subversions of the “novel genre” and its ideologies had to be done in very subtle ways. This article argues that it was through manipulating the textual genre that such subversions were undertaken. Intentionally or entirely unawares, for various political, philosophical, or aesthetic reasons, early African novelists subverted the new genre through the insertions of heterogeneous genres, most often forms of poetry, into the prose of the novel. Their “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin, 1981) was constituted through a “heterogeneric” textuality and served to subvert the ideological hegemony of the novel and to introduce alternative aesthetics, epistemologies, and ontologies. In challenging the genre of the novel, these writers challenged literary realism, with its concomitant epistemology and ontology. It is in the generic fractures and ruptures, at these limits of genres, that other, alternative aesthetics, epistemologies, and ontologies find their way into early African novels. Such generic shifts have characterized the African novel since its inception and are especially pronounced in the early novels in many African languages.
The first novel in Shona, Solomon Mutswairo’s Feso (“Proper Name”), was drafted in 1946–1947 (Vambe and Veit-Wild, 2008: 241). It was published in Shona in 1956 and in an English translation by Donald Herdeck in 1974. A new Shona edition appeared in 1982 and the English translation was reprinted in 1995. The plot concerns “two Shona groups […] the Vahota people under their generous chief Nyangombe and the Vanyai people under their cruel chief Pfumojena” (Vambe and Veit-Wild, 2008: 243). Feso, Nyangombe’s troops commander, is sent out to search for a wife for his superior, and kidnaps Chipochedenga, the daughter of Pfumojena, which leads to a war between the two groups. Being set in precolonial Zimbabwe, the novel falls in the category of “Old World novels” or “Shona romances” (Kahari, 1997), using the new genre, the novel, to interrogate precolonial history.
During the Zimbabwean war for independence, the novel was read as “an allegory of the struggle between oppressor and oppressed”, supported by “symbolism on the level of names” (Vambe and Veit-Wild, 2008: 244) — Pfumojena means “white spear”, that is “white enemy”, while Nyangombe means “owner of cattle” (and of land). A key passage during this reading was the “Ode to Nehanda”, a poem chanted by “one old man whose relatives […] had been implicated in this disaster [and who …] had [mostly] been executed [by Pfumojena] or driven into lawless exile” (Mutswairo, 1995: 86):
“O Nehanda Nyasikana! How long shall we, the VaNyai, groan and suffer? Holy tutelary spirit! How long shall we, the VaNyai suffer oppression? We are weary of drinking our tears …” (Mutswairo, 1995: 87)
The poem evokes the spirit medium Mbuya Nehanda, who was executed by the British for leading a rebellion of the Shona in 1896–1897, during the so-called First Chimurenga. As Maurice Vambe and Flora Veit-Wild state: “the poem is an interesting example of the syncretic nature of Mutswairo’s language and imagery, his eclectic use of archaic idioms and appeals to the ancestral spirits in combination with modern terms influenced by his Christian faith” (2008: 245). The poem employs “the Shona traditional poetic genres” such as “jikinyira, nheketera, and mavingu, all of which are informed by a complaint sensibility”, while Kahari introduces the term bembera — “a vicious attack on some person whom the speaker suspects of bewitching his child or some immediate member of his family” (1997: 49, qtd. in Vambe and Veit-Wild, 2008: 246, fn. 8). Also here, the insertion of a poem serves to communicate more directly with another era, another epistemology and ontology, integrating the communication with ancestors into what is otherwise a “historical novel”.
Lak Tar/White Teeth
I will now explore the employment of poetic genres in Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo (“White Teeth Make Us Laugh on Earth”), or White Teeth, as the title was translated into English. Here, generic fracturing pursues a rather different agenda than the “Ode to Nehanda” in Feso.
White Teeth describes the tortuous trip of the protagonist, an Acoli young man named Okeca Ladwong, to Kampala in search of work. He needs to gather enough money to pay the bridewealth for his sweetheart, Cecilia Laliya. Ultimately, Okeca travels to the Kakira sugarcane plantations near the town of Jinja, where he works for several years and is promoted to a junior overseer (nyapara). After he is unjustly accused of instigating plantation labourers to leave the plantations and demoted back to a common labourer, he decides to run away from the plantation and return home. On the way, he is robbed of all his possessions and all his savings, reaching his home on foot and empty-handed.
While the topic of bridewealth is the red line running through the narrative, the novel reflects broadly on a society in transition, with interesting passages on languages and multilingualism (63), on money as the new principle governing society (77), on the status of women and especially sisters of young men as their possession (83), or on the skill and the advantages of writing (90).
Prose and mwoc
In several places (for example, 34–35, 59–60, 81–82, 100) the novel employs the genre of mwoc, a type of praise name in a poem recited by characters to introduce and assert themselves. The genre of mwoc is defined in the book’s “Notes and Glossary” section. Given the importance of this genre in the novel — giving it even its title — I reproduce the definition here in full:
Mwoc are short poems that an individual shouts at certain critical moments. During a quarrel, when a person is highly provoked, he shouts his mwoc and the fight begins at once, and during the fight he shouts his mwoc on hitting or throwing down his opponent. In a hunt, the mwoc is shouted by the person who spears an animal. When playing the hunting game called lawala, mwoc is shouted when the moving target has been speared. And at the dance an individual shouts his mwoc when he has reached the peak of his enjoyment and pleasure. There are two kinds of mwoc, one which belongs to a particular individual alone, and the other which belongs to the chiefdom.
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Every Acoli male of tradition has his own mwoc, and some women do also have theirs. Mwoc usually arises from some funny incident. Friends refer to each other by their mwoc, usually only a word, or a line. One form of greeting among friends is the exchange of mwoc: one shouting the mwoc of the other, one line at a time. The chiefdom mwoc is shared by all members of the chiefdom; and it is also shouted by wives of that group, except when the situation is such that her loyalty to her people is at stake. These poems often embody names of chiefs of old, names of mountains, rivers sites once occupied by the chiefdom, fierce beasts or harmful plants, etc, which are supposed to exhibit or represent the characteristics or quality of the people of the chiefdom; or they may contain slogans, telling what the chiefdom has been: its strength, its glory, etc. (1989: 107–108)
It is also with the mwoc of the protagonist and his relatives that the novel starts. Okeca Ladwong introduces himself with his name and his nickname Atuk, which is the beginning of his mwoc. He then goes on to recite his entire mwoc, combined with the mwoc of Patiko:
Atuk, Otuk ruk!
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You disturbed ten
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In your mother-in-law’s hut. Your eye-lids are heavy On account of food Your eye-lids are dark Because you do not want to share The carcass of the cow That had died of dysentery. It is I, Atuk, speaking. I come from Patiko: We are lions We are an okra dish A little dish of okra Finishes a big lump of kwon
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We are softeners We cool you off However fierce you may be We are lions We of Patiko are hot Hot like red pepper We are itchy! (1)
Following this self-introduction, the protagonist introduces his father, Ojok Lapok, and states that his mwoc was White Teeth:
It is white teeth That make us laugh in this world! (1)
Finally, the father’s elder brother, Odora Obal-lim, who inherits Okeca’s mother after his father’s death, is introduced through his mwoc:
Your tobacco bag is empty Your provoke a mamba In the hole of mwok ant-eater A black billy-goat has broken the water pot! (2)
The mwoc of the father, “white teeth”, becomes a life philosophy of the protagonist that helps him endure all his suffering:
But the whiteness of my teeth, not happiness, not pleasures, not the softness of my inside; my white teeth force me to laugh; my white teeth force me to laugh, for fear that girls might think my teeth are rotten and rusty like those of the bull edible rat. It is my white teeth that make me laugh still. But when people see and hear me laugh, they say: “Ah, the son of Ojok is a very cheerful and happy man!” Others say: “The son of Ojok is a funny man indeed!” My age-mates laugh at me when I laugh and say I must be very odd because I laugh when I am suffering so much! And the girls say: “But Atuk is not an ordinary boy; he is so special!” I am not cheerful, not odd, not funny, nor am I special. It is the white of my teeth that makes me laugh. (2)
It is also this mwoc of his father, as we see here, that determines how the protagonist is perceived by society. The main character embraces this characteristic like a valuable heritage from his late father.
While some parts of mwoc are fixed, some are prone to variation. For example, Okeca re-introduces himself at the start of his journey:
Atuk, Otuk ruk! You disturbed ten In your mother-in-law’s hut. Your eyes are dark Because you do not want to share The carcass of the cow A thief dies in silence However hard he is hit! It is I, Atuk, still talking. It is my white teeth that still make me laugh in this world. If it was not for the white of my teeth, suffering would have stopped me from laughing. I come from Patiko: We are lions We are a dish of okra A little dish of okra Finishes a whole kwon. We are softeners We cool you off However fierce you may be We are lions We of Patiko are hot Hot like red pepper We are itchy! (34–35)
While the first and last passage are repeated almost verbatim, in the middle sequence of his mwoc Okeca elaborates his praises by integrating a passage about his “white teeth”. Abbreviations of his mwoc are used throughout the narrative:
That I was collected at the bus station to carry some woman’s box, like a porter, a box of some woman whose husband I did not even know! Atuk, Otuk ruk! You-disturbed-the-cooking-pot-in-your-mother-in-law’s-hut. (46)
The same abbreviation is used for others:
He is the son of the late, It-is-white-teeth-that-make-us-laugh-in-this-world, Ojok Lapok, the brother of Balibali Odora, Your-tobacco-bag-is-empty! (51)
Mwoc is used repeatedly in the book for characters to introduce themselves or to start communication. Thus when Okeca asks his stepfather about the possibility to gain some wealth to marry his chosen girl, Obal-lim reacts in an “outburst” (28) of his mwoc. This is his way both to assert his seniority and to evade the discussion.
By contrast, female characters in the novel are presented through realistically styled descriptions in prose. The mother, for instance, is introduced by several characteristics and nicknames, but not through a mwoc:
My mother comes from Atyak, fondly referred to as Lwani. Tall, big-chested. She was taller than her husband, and they call her, Abalo Muca. She never cooks much. Her nickname is Tyena-teda, my feet are my cooks, for she eats where her feet carry her to. (2)
Okeca Ladwong’s sweetheart, Cecilia, is portrayed in the following words:
That girl in front of the others was spotless. Tall but not too tall. Brown, yet not brown. Her skin was tender like the young grass shoot. It was so soft and tender as if she used Lux bathing soap. This must have been the case, for her brother had just come home on leave from the army. She was leading the other girls to the market like a bull antelope leading others to the drinking place. She had draped her tender frame with a soft silky dress and on her crested crane neck was a single giraffe-tail hair necklace. Her hair was carefully combed and pressed, and on her head was balanced an abino, earthen jar, whose neck was like that of its carrier. Faultlessly beautiful. Spotlessly clean. The leader of girls bore abino. Cecilia Laliya, chief of girls! (14)
Yet, as the young man approaches the girl together with the other young men, his description merges with the exclamation by these young men, in which descriptive phrases are transformed into a type of vocative praises: “Carrier of a new basket, look at me, my love! If you are shy, you will miss a good man for a husband!” (14)
Cecilia’s later appearances are rendered, again, through descriptive passages like the following:
Cecilia Laliya, sister of Otto, Laliya the chief of girls, was there in front of all the Paibona girls, leading the dancing beauties. She was wearing a nylon dance skirt, her breasts barely covered. The breasts were ripe like a pair of ripened tugu fruits and the tatooes on her back were like olok fruits. Her heels sparkled as she danced; her hair shone, black and thick but not bushy. Cecilia stunningly beautiful! (22)
Unknown city girls are also introduced through descriptive prose passages:
One schoolgirl was sitting beside me. She was reading a large newspaper, the type read by the white and educated people in Gulu. Her eyes were piercing like those of a white woman. When she looked at you, it was straight in the eyes, no shyness at all! She talked to you as if she was talking to a fellow girl and not a man! (38)
This contrast between the characterization of female characters and the characterization of male characters through mwoc shows the plurality of techniques employed by Okot p’Bitek to project personhood, with possible implications for gender relations. I will not pursue this line of enquiry here; I will limit myself to examining the effects of characterization through mwoc in the constitution of the human person as a social being.
Characterization through mwoc
On top of its poetic qualities, adding a “local flair” to the narrative, mwoc becomes a key technique of characterization in White Teeth. This is a highly significant fact: a genre (mwoc) is employed to fulfil a specific function in another genre (novel). The genre of the novel, of course, has set techniques of characterization. But characterization through mwoc does not follow these standard novelistic techniques.
Mwoc is a genre of praise poetry and praise names. In terms of grammar and narratology, with the intrusion of mwoc, the narrative voice suddenly shifts: the protagonist no longer speaks of himself in the first person, but in the third or the second person. In this way, mwoc becomes “an interweaving of explicitly and implicitly attributed utterances to, or about”, the character (Barber, 2007: 124). Praise names are rich in polysemy; their signification is fluid and relational. Through such characterization, it is not the objective, external characteristics of a person that are in focus, depicting the character’s visual appearance, chronicling what the character has done, and so forth. The character is not presented through a detached observation and description, nor does this characterization effectuate an entry into the subjective sphere, detailing the territories of inner mental life. Instead, the character is presented in a poetic abbreviation expressive of the essence of the person, of the gist of what a person is, how they act within a community, who they are for others, and so on. This is a holistic characterization based on an epistemology that abstains from a realist description and analysis of the character, but rather encourages the readers to “dance him/her” (Senghor, 1995) — to join in the integration of the character in and through a community. Characterization through mwoc thus goes directly against the aesthetics and the narrative techniques of literary realism — the default narrative texture of the genre of the novel.
Philosophically, in integrating mwoc in its characterization, White Teeth introduces another epistemology and ontology, another understanding of personhood and community, than those that are by default found in the genre of the novel. The characterization through praise names constructs the human being at the centre of social relations. The human being is the bearer of attributes derived from their position within these social relations and from their actions within this defined social field. Okot p’Bitek has explicitly challenged the “atomistic” or “monadic” (Barber, 2007: 104) views of the person of Western philosophy (see p’Bitek, 1994/1986: 19).
This challenge is implicit in the projection of personhood through the genre of praise names. A relational view of person is at the heart of characterization through praise names: the person as defined through their actions in the world, their place within a community, their appearing to others: through “being for others”. This can be expressed in line with the tenets of ubuntu philosophy. What a person is, is derived from the others; and to be a human being is to be through others (Ramose, 1999). Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu in Zulu or motho ke motho ka batho in Sesotho both mean “a human being is human through humans”, while in Swahili this is expressed in the saying, mtu ni watu, “a human being is [through] humans” (Rettová, 2007). Here one has to be aware of the fact that umuntu (and its language-specific variations) can mean both “a human being” and “person”, and abantu can mean “humans, human beings”, “persons” or “people”.
Through mwoc, characters assert themselves in interaction with one another. By contrast, characterization through prose presents them in an “objective”, detached description. Such descriptions employ the vocative only when calling out for action (such as in wooing women). When Okeca is forced to be passive in his contemplation of women on account of his lack of means to interact with these women (especially his lack of money to offer in exchange for a bride), he reverts back to descriptive observations. Vocative genres, such as the praises, are a clear marker of action and interaction with others — of a person’s expressing and negotiating their position in society.
Other genres in White Teeth
Marginally, other genres are used in White Teeth. Funeral songs (12) communicate ideas about death. Wooing songs are used to attract girls’ attention and show ideas about feminine beauty and marital life:
Rip kipi!
You girl in front of the other girls, look this way! I will take you to live with me under the cool shadows of Ladwong Hill; To eat shea butter; To the land of ghee and milk and honey; To live with me in peace and confort [sic], And to adorn your beautiful neck With giraffe tail-hair necklaces […]! (14)
Songs accompanying the orak dance and drumming are used to celebrate marriage (21–22). A song about travel expresses Okeca’s nostalgia as he is leaving his homeland (37). Later on, all his hopes are expressed in another travel song (41).
An interesting example is army songs. Three such songs are introduced when the narrator describes the visits of his maternal grandfather, Sergeant Otto Bwangomoi, who had served in Keya, King’s African Rifles. Two are in Acoli:
Obong kara lwor Obong kara lwor Muno otara tyeko dano do Mh, mh Obong kara lwor …
The other Acoli army song goes like this:
Ito Got Alur muloyo lacek Ngat ma ito pe Kiri-ni-kijing …
One army song is in Swahili:
Funga safari Funga safari Funga safari Funga safari Funga safari, captain Funga safari …
While the lyrics convey a simple message — stating “go on a journey, captain” — the presence of Swahili is a marker of otherness, attached to the character of the grandfather. The grandfather represents another culture and other cultural values to which he has been exposed. This shows in the fact that he creates a written record of Okeca’s birth:
He had come home on a short leave from Keya, King’s African Rifles, when I was born, and he had written down the name of the day, the moon and the year, and had kept the book in a small wooden box. (4)
Okeca is illiterate and eventually destroys this memory:
Unfortunately, when I began to smoke, I used leaves from the book to wrap my abugwe, tobacco, and now I cannot tell the exact date on which I was born. But I suppose it does not really matter, does it? (4)
Okeca’s carelessness about the exact date of his birth shows the clash of two cultures and two worldviews: one that meticulously records events according to a set calendar and one that is based on lived time, regardless of “day, moon, and year”. Each is tied to a different concept of time, as John S. Mbiti (1970) elaborates in his work. Okeca’s time orientation is one dependent on a “phenomenon calendar” (Mbiti, 1970), where time is constituted through action and not through an abstract system of time reckoning. Such “phenomenon calendars” are often identified with “traditional” African thought systems (cf. Ndlovu et al., 1995).
Conclusion: Generic fracturing in recent novels
Richly present in early African novels, where it marks the interpenetration of two cultures in contact, the technique of generic fracturing continues being employed to the present day. Contemporary novels deploy other genres consciously and strategically. In William Mkufya’s Swahili novel Ziraili na Zirani (Azrael and Zirani, 1999), genres are markers of dissonant philosophies. Poems inserted into the prose narrative are the “speech of the devils” (Rettová, 2016); they destabilize the positivist epistemology of the key protagonists of the novel, the souls of materialist thinkers, and outline an epistemology of relativism and agnosticism (Rettová, forthcoming).
Espérance-François Ngayibata Bulayumi’s Lingala novel Mosuni (“Village Name”, 2007) presents an even broader array of genres: “prose fiction, poems, traditional tales and stories, depictions of history, letters, lyrics of traditional, popular modern, and church songs, prayers, lectures on religious topics, maps, explanations of historical names and theoretical concepts” (Rettová, 2012). These constitute the fictional biography of Mosende Nzube Mabe, a man born in the village of Mosuni in the Congo and the first-person narrator in the book, who undertakes a trip to India to bring back a magical potion to defeat the village sorcerer Lempowa. This variety of genres serves to communicate a diversified postmodern knowledge base.
Generic fracturing is also effective in Europhone African literatures, where the linguistic referencing of such heterogeneous worldviews is disturbed through the transposition from one language into another language: an African world is expressed in a “foreign” language. At the same time, each language has its own specific “horizon of the unsaid”, as Tanzanian novelist Euphrase Kezilahabi puts it (1985). Indeed, in Europhone African literature, as well as in translations of African-language novels, such “heterogeneric” intermissions are even more striking on account of the estrangement effect of “foreign” literary genres in the “familiar” genre of the novel. In this article, we could follow the effects of generic fracturing in the English translation of Lak Tar. 7 The Europhone African novel is itself a versatile genre readily capable of integrating other genres within itself: from poems to news items, emails or tweets, such generic fractures have a special meaning in the African novel. To mention just two recent examples, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) or A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015) are two Anglophone novels that not only incorporate excerpts from blogs, but the authors have created actual blogs existing parallel to the printed books. As Miriam Pahl argues, this presence of digital media in the novels and the merging of the real and the virtual point out to new, “posthumanist” understandings of subjectivity, agency and authorship (2017).
The African novel is then not only a multigeneric textual form, but these multiple genres point to diverse and polyvalent philosophical backdrops. As I have argued in this article, it is then at these interstices of genres that alternative philosophies erupt and make themselves heard within the novels. In this way, the African novel gives voice to philosophical views that have been marginalized by dominant discourses, be it African worldviews suppressed by colonialism or cutting-edge theoretical ideas that challenge habitual conceptualizations of reality.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The article was produced during the lifetime of an ERC Consolidator Grant, “Philosophy and Genre: Creating a Textual Basis for African Philosophy”. The author acknowledges the financial support of this funding to work on this article.
