Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor and History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera

174 Pages·2009·2.695 MB·English

by  Arlene A. Elder

Narrative Shape-shifting
Narrative Shape-shifting
Myth, Humor, & History in the fiction
of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera
arLeNe a. eLder
Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Cincinnati
James Currey
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First published 2009
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
elder, arlene a.
Narrative shape-shifting : myth, humor & history in
the fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera
1. Okri, Ben – Criticism and interpretation 2. Laing,
B. Kojo – Criticism and interpretation 3. Vera, Yvonne
– Criticism and interpretation 4. african fiction
(english) – History and criticism
I. Title
823.9'140996-dc22
ISBN: 978-1-84701-012-4 (James Currey cloth)
Typeset in 10.5/12.5pt Melior by forzalibro designs, Cape Town
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI antony rowe,
Chippenham and eastbourne

acknowledgements
as ‘they’ say, ‘The shrub with one root is not hard to pull up’; my
own sense of rootedness relies on the many institutions and people
that have and continue to nourish me. First, I am grateful to the Ful-
bright Scholar Program that provided me with the opportunity to
live in Nairobi, Kenya, for a year and take my first classes in african
literature and orature at the University of Nairobi under the tutelage
of Okot p’Bitek, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Kimani Gichau. This eye-
opening experience led to my change of research fields. I will remain
grateful always to my friends and colleagues in the african Literature
association who have inspired me with their accomplishments and
instructed me in ways of reading and thinking I could never have
achieved on my own. Next, I would like to acknowledge the generos-
ity over the years of the William Howard Taft Memorial Fund at the
University of Cincinnati, without which not only would this work
never have been completed, but I also would not have been able to
try out its ideas at the annual conferences of the aLa. additionally,
I owe a debt of gratitude to a large number of graduate students in the
department of english and Comparative Literature, and to my col-
leagues in the african and african american Studies department
and the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at
the University of Cincinnati: the first, for their incisive comments
and questions in our seminars together that made me rethink weak
assumptions, and the second two for their intellectual stimulation
and supportive collegiality. Of course, finishing this study would be
worth very little to me without the continuing love and encourage-
ment of my glorious daughter, Nadja, and my incomparable partner,
Larry. a heartfelt asante sana to all.
vi
Introduction
Writing as ase
In Yoruba Ritual, Margaret Thompson drewal defines the term ase
as ‘the power of performers to generate ritual spectacles, or rather
spectacular rituals, that operate as style wars, for style is meaning
and competing styles generate uniqueness, virtuosity, and inven-
tiveness’ (27). The three novelists I study here, Ben Okri of Nigeria,
B. Kojo Laing of Ghana and Yvonne Vera of Zimbabwe, while hardly
at ‘war’ with each other, clearly demonstrate the ability of their
variety of styles to communicate complementary meanings while
revealing their artistic individuality. all three write about their
own regions and of particular periods in the experiences of their
countries and peoples, yet, while they criticise similar social and
political problems in their colonised, and then, newly independent
nations, they envision solutions not for Nigeria, Ghana or Zimbabwe
alone, but for the entire continent, even the world. Okri’s interpreta-
tion is spiritual, Laing’s a symbiosis of the most progressive ideas
from tradition with the most humane from modernity, Vera’s a trust
in the validity of ‘re-memory’ as truth-telling and in the potential
of eco-communialism to create a better world. While all three rec-
ognise the agency of politicians, none places the burden of progress
on political ideology or leaders alone, but rather on the enlighten-
ment of individuals, ordinary people, who themselves will create
just societies.
despite the similarity of their critiques, like drewal’s Yoruba per-
formers, Okri, Laing, and Vera express their ideas in styles particular
to each. drawing most heavily of the three from orature, Okri, in his
abiku trilogy – to which I am limiting my discussion of his work –
creates a neo-myth with transcendent characters experiencing past,
present, and future lives simultaneously. For all the action in his
novels, his incorporation of the repetition of storytelling results in
a stasis emblematic of Nigeria itself, struggling into independence
painfully, through a slow, difficult, and uncertain birth. Laing, on the
other hand, sets his comic novels in the period shortly after Ghana’s
freedom and draws from both his oral traditions and postmodern
narrative structures to comment on what he sees as the pitfalls for
africa of either abandoning or completely embracing either tradition
or modernism. Of the three, his language is the most experimen-
tal and challenging, his characters the most humorous. even more
1
2 Introduction
so than Okri, Vera is a poet writing in prose. For this reason, her
beautifully lyrical fiction turns out to be the most startling of that of
the three writers, as it conveys in incongruously gorgeous imagery
the most violent and appalling actions and scenes. While her pri-
mary concern is the oppression of Zimbabwean women before and
after the second war of liberation, her final response to their age-
old problems is the formation of a new cultural identity created not
by warfare, but by personal enlightenment and bravery, which she
suggests will lead to male/female mutuality and, ultimately, to the
transformation of the entire society.
Ben Okri’s trilogy re-creates traditional West african oral forms by
his brave attempt to write ‘oraliture’,1 that is, through literary strate-
gies, to recreate orature, the performance of the oral tradition, on
the printed page. Moreover, his moral grounding in these works, all
three of which reveal Nigeria on the cusp of self-government, derives
from traditional cultural mores and ethics. The pervasive spiritual-
ity in Okri’s novels sets his work apart from Laing and Vera’s. Not
only his abiku protagonist, but all his characters exist in layered
‘zones’ of natural, spiritual, and technological realities reflective of
his country’s traditional, colonial, and post-independence identities
co-existing; his characters’ confusion about their future and their
vulnerability to political oppression depicts Okri’s commentary on
the necessity but difficulty of ‘seeing’ clearly, a quality essential for
both personal and social health. While Laing’s political concerns are
similar to Okri’s, his primary mode is comic. His novels can be read
as linguistic romps through recent Ghanaian ‘history’ that employ
oral traditions as well as postmodern self-reflexivity to satirise polit-
ical venality but also to insist on the importance of finding a place of
moral purchase in a quickly evolving global world. Maintaining the
best of the old and combining it with the best of the new is crucial to
his view of progress. Vera’s novels, ranging in time from her people’s
first attempt to overthrow the colonisers to their post-independence
experience of ‘freedom,’ are the most historically grounded of the
three, although she denies attempting to write ‘history’; therefore
her fiction calls for an examination of her use of ‘official’ accounts
of Zimbabwe’s turbulent liberation period and her creation of re-
memories based on ‘oral history’. Vera’s focus on women, of course,
requires a feminist approach, particularly the tenets of ecofeminism,
which she reflects in her last published novel. Significantly, all three
writers depict extraordinary women either leading or impeding their
countries’ progress.
each novelist’s strengths lead to particular problems with their
texts, of course, for as the Kongo say, ‘[T]he key that opens is also
Writing as ase 3
the key that locks’. Okri’s re-creation of myth, monsters, and sym-
bolic action has caused the disputed label, ‘magical realism’, to be
stamped onto his trilogy. Moreover, his risky attempts to structure
his lengthy narratives according to the patterns of episodic oral tales
has led to charges of unnecessary repetition and lack of development.
Laing’s linguistic play has resulted in complaints about obscurity
and verbal trickery for trickery’s sake. Likewise, Vera’s poetic imag-
ing of the violence in which women find themselves caught, and
of the destruction associated with Zimbabwean independence, has
called into question the historical accuracy and political purpose of
her works. These critical judgments will be addressed in my study.
While I was struggling to try to understand each writer and to
communicate both his/her stylistic uniqueness yet common interpre-
tation of their modern and contemporary african nations, I began to
think, understandably, I suppose, of the similarities and differences
between their creative task and that of critics of literature. although
the solitary act of writing criticism, that is, the academically author-
ised, yet individualistic application of theories to creative writing,
has always struck me as the furthest remove possible from the excit-
ing, communal performance of orature. The traditionally competitive
performances drewal describes made me envision our academic
engagement as one that actually could be viewed as a ‘style war’.
Critics, too, desire to appear to our peers to ‘generate uniqueness,
virtuosity, and inventiveness’, as she notes of the Yoruba performers,
while sometimes shielding ourselves behind opaque and esoteric
terminology, striking down one interpretive claim while elevating
another, by this struggle hoping to serve our authors fairly. drewal
goes on in her essay to emphasise the importance of ‘play’ to the
Yoruba performers she studied, the intention they ‘exercise in trans-
forming ritual itself’ (28). The theories and critiques of the critics I
employ in this study, as well as my own efforts, should be received,
paradoxically, as both a very serious scholarly business and a play-
ful ‘stylin’ out’. Theorising and analysing literature are significant
activities, for the purpose of such strenuous efforts is to illuminate
the literature of writers we hold as significant because they delight
us with their linguistic virtuosity and also help to clarify the mean-
ings of our lives and times. However, writing criticism is also ‘play’,
not only because it sometimes, unfortunately, represents rather
esoteric battles of ‘gotcha’ among different schools of theorists, or
because it thrives on trying one interpretation then abandoning it for
another, but because criticism, too, is a ritual performance of honor-
ing art, an intellectual ‘dance’ intent on shaping perceptions of our
literary texts, even our cultural moments. By imaginatively reshap-
4 Introduction
ing our literature’s meaning and significance, critics transform our
understanding of it according to particular literary, psychological,
historical, and philosophical ‘truths’. additionally, of course, writ-
ing criticism can often be fun.
One of the most enjoyable experiences I had while working on
this study was the realisation that one has to know many ‘dances’ to
perform criticism. Here is what I mean. drewal and others correctly
insist that the content of orature changes with each performance; she
observes the resulting paradox that, ‘[U]nfixed and unstable, Yoruba
ritual is more modern than modernism itself’ (20). accordingly, the
cyclic return of postmodern narrative theories to the traditions of
orature has struck me, and for some time, as an amusing develop-
ment. We should recall, that, speaking of intertextuality, T.S. eliot,
the ‘High Priest’ of Modernism himself, remarked in his 1919 ‘Tra-
dition and the Individual Talent’ on the transformation worked on
our apprehension of the corpus of written art, which reads differ-
ently with the addition of the genuinely new poem, the actually new
novel; ‘the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered’
(eliot’s emphasis). While eliot is observing continuous changes
in what he terms the ‘monument’ of literature, like the Yoruba, he
knows that ‘[N]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone’ (Heath 1994: 1442). In her study, drewal is not reflecting back-
wards on the entire oral tradition, but is rather commenting on the
organic nature of individual oral performances, or orature, and the
immediate effect of each differing performance in the experience
and understanding of its participants. It is especially with reader
response or reception theory and its concept of the ‘virtual book’
that we gain an idea about writing truly akin to our understanding of
the organic nature of oral narratives in performance and their chang-
ing psychological effects.2 eliot and drewal, as removed in time and
interest as they are, emphasise the fluidity of both oral and literary
performances, and therefore the mutability of art’s influence on both
readers and audience-participants. Such ‘shape-shifting’ is especial-
ly clear in the works of dual-tradition writers like Okri, Laing, and
Vera, who strive to employ aspects of their ancient oral traditions in
very contemporary texts, thus creating a complex and indeterminate
hybridity. What I have learned is that ‘shape-shifting’ of a similar
sort is necessary for their critics as well.
Because the writers I have chosen draw on different african and
western narrative traditions, I too needed to employ an eclectic
approach. While I recognise the history of western cultural distor-
tions of african writers and writing that leads to anthonia Kalu’s
well-considered caution to other critics that ‘evaluation and analyses