The Phenomenon of Exile as a Mutant Strain in Nigerian Narratives

Ilha do Desterro: Journal of English Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies

Five decades of resorting to humanistic critical procedures have bequeathed to the Nigerian critical practice the legacy of examining and discovering in Nigerian and African narratives the historical and social concepts of the time and times they are presumed to posit. These concepts include colonialism, corruption, war, political instability, and culture conflict. These procedures are undertaken without due regard to seeing the whole of the literary tradition as a stream out of which narratives emerge. This article, therefore, by way of introduction, seeks to retrieve Nigerian narratives from "every author" and humanistic critical approach by placing them in a realm where a holistic method such as Frye's could be applied. Here, the traverses of the structure of mythical imagery such as the mythos of crime and punishment as embodied in these narratives and how this structure was displaced/shrouded from Frye's first mimetic mode to the last, via the concept of mythic displacement, will be analysed.

Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture, 2014

Nigerian narratives always reveal corruption, disillusionment, mythological entities, political instability, cultural backgrounds and traditions of the tribes and nations used as context. Textual resources advertise literary works as realistic. In general, the recurring presence of the characters in these narratives is almost ignored. Unlike earlier interpretations of the Nigerian narratives, this essay is based on the theory of Frye's five mimetic modes or categories. Based on the analysis of The Interpreters and The Famished Road , this article examines the defiant hero as a recurring presence in Nigerian narratives. In fact, the hero is a character of resistance, which, in many ways, is in conflict with the laws made unbearable for others. The article also shows how the character, revealed by the constant manifestations of the structure of the primary activities of the hero of narratives such as myths, gradually and systematically hides in later narratives of mimetic modes through the emergence and influence of realist art. Similar processes in which the hero is involved are abundant in many Nigerian narratives. The insights revealed by these discussions serve to rethink previous critical views on these texts.

Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture, 2014

ABSTRACT. Nigerian narratives always reveal corruption, disillusionment, mythological entities, political instability, cultural backgrounds and traditions of the tribes and nations used as context. Textual resources advertise literary works as realistic. In general, the recurring presence of the characters in these narratives is almost ignored. Unlike earlier interpretations of the Nigerian narratives, this essay is based on the theory of Frye’s five mimetic modes or categories. Based on the analysis of The Interpreters (SOYINKA, 1972) and The Famished Road (OKRI, 1992), this article examines the defiant hero as a recurring presence in Nigerian narratives. In fact, the hero is a character of resistance, which, in many ways, is in conflict with the laws made unbearable for others. The article also shows how the character, revealed by the constant manifestations of the structure of the primary activities of the hero of narratives such as myths, gradually and systematically hides in later narratives of mimetic modes through the emergence and influence of realist art. Similar processes in which the hero is involved are abundant in many Nigerian narratives. The insights revealed by these discussions serve to rethink previous critical views on these texts.

Before exile emerged as a major theme in African literatures, two landmark novels that paved the way for Nigerian literature from Igboland, Nwana's Omenuko (1933) and Achebe's Things fall apart (1958), provided a parallel reflection on the subject of exile within the confines of the same cultural and linguistic area, highlighting its different facets. The first novel, written in Igbo, presents the immigrant face of exile, a movement forward, while the second, written in English and published twenty-five years later, focuses on its emigrant face and the painful longing for home. The study reveals striking similarities between the two main protagonists, Omenuko and Okonkwo, from their background to their character and story, while highlighting how their character and circumstances shape their destiny.

2022

Migration and mobility stories have received scholarly attention in contemporary African literary criticism lately. Scholarship on African migration to the developed world has mainly focused on migrants' experience in the West with regards to race and identity and a continual propensity towards criticizing Western border closing policies. This paper, in a close reading and critical discourse analysis maneuver, explores two new generation Nigerian writers namely Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa within postcolonial theoretical framework. It purports to examine new immigration narratives in which migrants return 'home' to write about their place of origin as they have become transnationals calling attention on mayhem that this place experiences as opposed to nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideologies, of bygone era, expressed primarily in Negritude writings. Both considered narratives show that Cole and Saro-Wiwa use magical realism and travelogue form to depict the starkly mundane life condition in Nigeria with failed transportation system, socio-political corruption, and overwhelming fatalism due to not only the ruled but the ruler's failure to change their living conditions. Rather, they tend to surrender and participate in 'mutual zombification.' These writers' thematic inclination displays their pessimism and skepticism regarding Nigeria's improvement to become a place with acceptable living standards as they leave their readers to hopelessly contemplate the mess that the narratives aesthetically depict.

2016

Five decades of resorting to humanistic critical procedures

Exile writings have been concerned with the pain and survival of people who for one reason or the other have left their country of origin. But recent development in literary creativity has gone beyond this façade to explore what could be described as internal exile. Femi Ojo-Ade is a Nigerian poet who has used the resources of actual events as framework in Exile at Home. Written within the context of the harsh socio-political and economic climate in Nigeria, the collection reconstructs historical truths about the nightmarish conditions of Nigerians in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Nebula

The question of exile in contemporary African literature remains central to the understanding of its people. Of particular interest is the place of poets of the second generation in the depiction of this phenomenon. Although the paradigm of generational configuration is admittedly flexible, this paper seeks, nonetheless, to explore the perception of a few selected poets of the second generation from Anglophone Africa in order to illustrate the multidimensional approach to the engagement of the theme. By so doing, the paper is also concerned with the construction of home through its images, on the one hand, and on the other, the dissection that lies between home and exile in countries of destination in the West. The paper also hopes to explore the frustration that goes with the experience and the dilemmatic situation in which its victims are caught. It will show at the same time how from an initial standpoint of essentially internal sociopolitical and economic factors in regions and countries, things have gradually moved in the past three decades or thereabouts into an exponentially actuated and leveling stage in which globalization-as seen in its present fashion-has accelerated the spate of African citizens' vulnerability to exile, especially to the West.

2013

In his article Frye\u27s Thought and Its Implications for the Interpretation of Nigerian Narratives Ignatius Chukwumah applies Northrop Frye\u27s theoretical work on archetypes, mythos, and modes for the analysis of Nigerian literature. Chukwumah\u27s application in the interpretation of Nigerian literature results in the understanding that the hero as conceived by Frye is not exactly the same with Africa\u27s or Nigeria\u27s and requires that scholars and critics of African texts fill up the ellipses generated by Frye with an autochthonous, resistant, rewarding, African-related symbolic templates in order to make the sense of the hero in both traditional and postcolonial African/Nigerian literatures in a manner that is somewhat substitutive, but mainly complementary. It is hoped that helpful inferences could be drawn from here to the advantage of the Nigerian literary tradition in particular and African literature in general

Matatu, 2017

Sociopolitical phenomena such as corruption, political instability, (domestic) violence, cultural fragmentation, and the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) have been central themes of Nigerian narratives. Important as these are, they tend to touch on the periphery of the major issue at stake, which is the vector of persecution underlying the Nigerian tradition in general and in modern Igbo Nigerian narratives in particular, novels and short stories written in English which capture, wholly or in part, the Igbo cosmology and experience in their discursive formations. The present study of such modern Igbo Nigerian narratives as Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976), Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), and other novels and short stories applies René Girard’s theory of the pharmakos (Greek for scapegoat) to this background of persecution, particularly as it subtends the condition of the Igbo in postcolonial Nigeria in the early years of independence.