Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction

277 Pages·1990·21.106 MB·English

by  N Lazarus

RESISTANCE IN
POSTCOLONIAL
AFRICAN FICTION

Neil Lazarus
RESISTANCE IN
POSTCOLONIAL
AFRICAN
FICTION
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
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Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication
Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College.
Parts of chapters 1 and 6 appeared in an earlier version as "Great Expecta
tions and After: The Politics of Postcolonialism in African Fiction," in So
cial Text 13/14 (Winter-Spring 1986): 49-66. Chapter 3 appeared in an
earlier version as "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A
Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born," in
Research in African Literatures 18, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 137-75.
Copyright © 1990 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by April Leidig-Higgins. Set in Meridien type by Keystone
Typesetting Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States
of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lazarus, Neil, 1953-
Resistance in postcolonial African fiction I Neil Lazarus.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-300-04 5 5 3-0 (a lk. paper)
I. Armah, Ayi Kwei, 1939- -Criticism and interpretation. 2. African
fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 3. Africa-Intellectual
life-20th century. 4. Decolonization in literature. 5. Radicalism in litera
ture. 6. Africa in literature. I. Title.
PR9379.9.A7Z75 1990
823-dc20 89-38349
CIP
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and dura
bility of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of
the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For my parents,
Laurel and Norman,
with love

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Great Expectations and the Mourning After
Decolonization and African Intellectuals 1
l From Frantz Fanon to Ayi Kwei Armah
Messianism and the Representation of Postcolonialism 27
J The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will 46
4 Fragments
Enduring the Conditional, Thinking the Unconditional 80
s
Why Are We So Blest?
Intellectualism, Masculinism, and Racial Essentialism 117
6 After the Break
Trends in Radical African Literature since 1970 185
Notes 235
Index 259

PREFACE
This is a book about the work of Ayi Kwei Armah, one of the
most important and controversial of contemporary African writers. At the
same time, it is a book about radical African intellectualism and the forms of
African fiction in the postcolonial era. Armah is the author of five novels
published between 1968 and 1978. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction
focuses centrally upon the first three of these: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet
Born ( 1968), Fragments ( 1970), and Why Are We So Blest? ( 1972). In writing
about these novels, realist fictions set for the most part if not exclusively in
independent African states, I have attempted to examine them not in any
formalistic way, but in the light of their own ideological projects and hori
zons. I have wanted both to reconstruct these projects and horizons, and
with the benefit of twenty years' hindsight-to assess them theoretically
and politically.
My argument is initially a periodizing one. I begin, in chapter 1, by
investigating the ways in which African writers active in the years imme
diately following decolonization-the 1960s and early l 970s-tended to
view the postcolonial situation. The most significant African writers of this
period saw themselves as progressive political activists, committed to the
more or less comprehensive transformation of their societies in the post
colonial era. Reading these writers in the light of the work of Frantz Fanon,
however, I suggest that in their thinking and writing they were, as a group,
predisposed to a messianic and middle-class specific conception of decolo
nization as a revolutionary process, such that, for them, the transfer of
power at independence seemed to constitute an event like the storming of
the Winter Palace. In common with other progressive intellectuals in the
immediate postcolonial era, radical African writers tended drastically to
overvalue the emancipatory significance of independence. One conse
quence was that, as their hopes were punctured in the years following
decolonization (as they invariably were), a rhetoric of disillusion began to
replace the earlier utopian rhetoric in their work: it emerged as fatalism or
despair or anger or in the accusation that postcolonial leaders had betrayed
the "African revolution." Common to these representations, however, was a
failure to question the presupposition upon which they all rested, namely
that decolonization had indeed marked a moment of revolutionary uplift in
African societies.
In chapter 2, I attempt to bring this discussion of the ideological horizons
of postcolonial African intellectualism to bear upon Ayi Kwei Armah,
ix
Preface
whose work is exemplary of the passage from messianism to disillusion
outlined above. I discuss the influence of Fanon upon Armah and also the
terms of Armah's interrogation of Fanon's thought as, ten years after the
posthumous publication of The Wretched of the Earth, he suggests that the
conditions that had sustained Fanon's revolutionary optimism in the era of
anticolonialism have been all but obliterated by postcolonial developments.
This discussion paves the way for an examination, in chapters 3, 4, and 5, of
Armah's three novels of postcolonialism. In writing about the first two of
these novels, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments, I trace the
social origins of their concerns, and I argue for the cogency and resourceful
ness of their resolutions, which manage to affirm an ethic of resistance in
the face of the most adversarial social circumstances. With respect to Ar
mah's third novel, Why Are We So Blest?, however, I argue that the work
founders because its conceptual infrastructure is incapable of sustaining the
allegorical burden that Armah imposes upon it. What interests me par
ticularly here is not that but why this should be so. In my reading of Why Are
We So Blest?, accordingly, I try to suggest that the failures of the novel need to
be grasped in the context of the determinate collapse of the ideological
formation within which it assumes meaning. The failures of the novel are in
fact indicative of this larger-and essentially sociohistorical-collapse. Why
Are We So Blest? remains a work of major importance because it exposes the
limitations of a way of thinking about decolonization and independence
that is not Armah's alone, but characteristic of a generation of radical
African intellectuals. In chapter 6, I discuss the reasons for the collapse of
this generational field of vision in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the
significance ofthe crisis of intellectualism that ensued. I conclude by outlin
ing the trajectory of developments both in Armah's two subsequent novels,
Two Thousand Seasons ( 1973) and The Healers ( 1978), and in African fiction
at large. I attempt to show that the directions taken in recent African fiction
reflect divergent answers to the unforgoable questions that forced them
selves to the surface in the early 1970s, obliging established writers com
prehensively to rethink their positions and the fundamentals of their cul
tural practice, and providing points of departure for new writers with rather
different interests and concerns.
I would like to thank Ellen Graham and Judith Calvert at Yale
University Press and the following people, without whose help and encour
agement this book would never have been completed: Fran Bartkowski,
Paul Bellaby, Lalage Bown, Paul Buhle, Hazel Carby, Jim Catano, Frank
Mkalawile Chipasula, Rey Chow, Stephen Clingman, Jeffrey Decker, Anani
x