Introduction

Notes

Introduction

1. In what has come to be known as ‘bolekaja’ criticism, this position is mili- tantly argued in Chinweizu’s and Madubuike’s Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature. See Gerald Moore’s Twelve African Writers for a similar but more nuanced argument. 2. In an interview with Jane Wilkinson, Okri refuses to acknowledge that Wole Soyinka or Amos Tutuola influenced him but readily cites the ancient Greeks as his literary forebears. He also claims similarities in the ‘worldviews’ of African and the ancient Greeks (see Wilkinson 87). 3. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben contests Benveniste’s interpretation. He believes that Benveniste has fallen for what he calls a ‘scientific mytholo- geme’; the theory of the ambivalence of the sacred (75). He does not, however, provide any evidence for his claims of its inaccuracy as a theory. He is more interested in proving that the Latin homo sacer – he who may be killed and yet not sacrificed – cannot be related to the religious category of the sacred, but instead ‘constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm of the West’ (8). 4. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss begin their essay Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1889) by pointing to the ‘ambiguous character of sacred things, which Robertson Smith has so admirably made clear’ (3). In 1915, Émile Durkheim, Mauss’s uncle, suggests that the ‘greatest service which Robertson Smith has rendered to the science of religions is to have pointed out the ambiguity of the notion of sacredness’ (409). Roberson Smith’s work proved crucial also to James Frazer’s argument on the evolution of society and his theory of magic, and to Freud’s Totem and Taboo. 5. Douglas claims that Frazer takes up a minor thesis of Robertson Smith, that of magic, and ‘sent comparative religion into a blind alley’ (19). 6. See Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, vol. 2, 23, 109 and Taboo and the Perils of the Soul 224. 7. The ethnography on which Durkheim based his entire theory has been faulted. Steven Lukes points out that Central Australian totemism, on which Elementary Forms is based, is highly atypical, even within Australia. He also argues that there is no evidence that Australian totemism is the earliest form of totemism, or that these Aborigines have the least developed kin- ship system or totemic organisation, or that it necessarily follows that a less technologically advanced people have a simpler religion (see Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work 477–9). 8. For a detailed discussion of Robertson Smith’s influence on Durkheim, see Douglas, Purity 19–21. 9. See Anthony Giddens, Durkheim 93. 10. The indication of a social-structuralist approach at this point is merely to point out that I have not chosen the epistemological route, which has

172 Notes 173

received a contemporary treatment in Robin Horton’s ‘return’ to E. B. Tylor and, to a limited extent, James Frazer (see ‘Neo-Tylorianism: Sound Sense or Sinister Prejudice?’ and ‘Back to Frazer?’ ). Horton’s refutation of a distinc- tive religious experience and his definition of religion as ‘an extension of the field of people’s social relationships beyond the confines of purely human society’ (‘A Definition of Religion’ 31–2), do not seem particularly useful to my approach. In fact, Horton does admit that when he tried to make ‘intel- lectualist’ analyses of various African religious theories, he always came up ‘against the fact that they were above all theories of society and the individual’s place in it. Hence it was impossible to gain understanding of them without taking detailed account of the social organisations whose working they were concerned to make sense of.’ (‘Neo-Tylorianism’ 62) 11. More details of Turner’s analysis will be explored in the chapters that follow. 12. Turner’s argument has been criticised on various fronts. Max Gluckman suggests that Turner’s opposition between communitas and structure may be a false one after all as communitas has meaning only ‘within an established structure which is asserted again afterwards, and which indeed is asserted during the liminal period itself, by inversion’ (‘On Drama and Games and Athletic Contests’ 242). Brian Morris faults Turner’s characterisation of structure and claims that Turner failed to see the egalitarian aspects in certain structured relationships (see 122). In Chapter 3, we shall see that it was precisely the comradeship in certain structures of Gikuyu traditional society that led to the development of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Kenya. Another problem I see with Turner’s argument is his use of Weber’s ideas of the ‘routinisation’ of charismatic authority (discussed in Chapter 3) to suggest the inevitability of the demise of communitas-inspired action, its ‘decline and fall into structure and law’ (The Ritual Process 132). Moreover, in his work after The Ritual Process, Turner came to see liminality in almost every facet of contemporary society and he eventually claimed a neurobio- logical basis for his social theory (see ‘Body, Brain and Culture’ 221–45). 13. Mathieu Deflem suggests that Turner’s ‘social drama approach transgresses the static framework of classical structuro-functional analyses to reveal social structure in action’ (2). For a brief overview of Turner’s methodological framework, mode of analysis, and his innovative contributions to the study of ritual and religion in anthropology, one cannot do better than Deflem’s article. 14. Mathieu Deflem points to other divergences of Turner’s symbolic analysis from French Structuralism. The structuralists emphasise mythical thought whereas Turner focuses on ritual performance. For the structuralists, oppo- sitional symbols correspond with relationships between different categories of thought, whereas Turner foregrounds the efficacy of symbols in action. As Turner put it, he wanted to bring the ‘human co-efficient’ into the study of symbol in rituals (Dramas, Fields and Metaphors 33). 15. Studies of the use of ‘myth’ have focused almost solely on the works of Wole Soyinka. See Stephan Larsen’s A Writer and His Gods, Ralf Hermann’s Creation Snake and Mobius Strip and Ketu H. Katrak’s Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy. 174 Notes

16. Brenda Cooper’s Magical Realism in West Africa will be discussed in Chapter 4. 17. Acknowledging that there is no consensus among linguists, anthropologists, folklorists and literary critics on the definition of myth, Priebe defines myth as ‘a narrative that explains, explores or attempts to resolve the primary ontological, psychological and physical contradictions that man has recur- rently faced’ (12). There are many shortcomings, as one might expect, with this definition. Armah, Awoonor and others are certainly not writers of myth unless all writers of fiction are considered as such. Also, his definition of myth would place a writer such as Milan Kundera, who deals, in his recent novels, with the recurrent problems of aging and death that humans face, as a mythical writer. Most importantly, however, is a logical problem, a petitio principio, in his definition of myth and his distinction between ethical and mythical writers. Thus, according to Priebe, a mythical writer has a mythical consciousness which ‘insists on viewing life with regard to open and perpetual contradiction’ in contradistinction to closed didacticism of the realist writer. 18. For Soyinka, Achebe is a mere ‘chronicler’, albeit a creative one (see Priebe 13 and Soyinka, ‘From a Common Backcloth’). 19. The naturist view of religion was forwarded most comprehensively by Max Müller (see ‘Comparative Mythology’ in the 1856 Oxford Essays). According to this view, religion emerges with the sensory perception of the physical world and with the imagination’s encounter with natural phenomena. The sense of being overwhelmed by nature translates, through a deforma- tion in language, through a literalisation of the metaphoric into religious discourse. 20. For example, see Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Andrew Apter’s Black Critics and Kings 97–9. 21. Although the works of Amos Tutuola provide interesting material for an exploration of the sacred, I have chosen not to address them in a comprehensive manner in the book because they do not bring to the fore this encounter and, being transformed folktales, they provide, at least for me, less interesting material for the analysis of formal and thematic deviations from Western literary models. 22. There are fleeting references to the representation of the rupture of geron- tocracy in some articles and books that deal with specific texts and writers. I shall refer to these when they arise in my discussion of the texts. However, to my knowledge, there has been no attempt not only to address this issue fully within a single text but also to provide a comparative basis by relating it to a range of texts.

1. Realising the Sacred: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

1. As a man of letters, Achebe derives axiomatic statements about the ‘Igbo world-view’ through an analysis of proverbs, cautionary tales and proper names. 2. In ‘The Writer in His Community’, written more than a decade after the chi essay, Achebe offers another element that limits the power of the individual Notes 175

in Igbo society. He uses the fate of Ezeulu in Arrow of God as illustrative of the fact that the individual is ‘subject to the sway of non-human forces in the universe’ (39). The sociological perspective in the earlier essay is replaced by a religious one. In fact, Achebe clarifies his religious position – a belief in what he calls the ‘Powers of Event’, a Platonic-Christian hybrid, which function as the ‘repositories of causes and wisdoms’ (39). Whereas Achebe prioritises the ‘total community’ as the fundamental curtailment of the excessive expression of Igbo individuality in the chi essay, in the later essay he deems supernatural forces as ‘more important’ to this process (‘The Writer’ 39). 3. David Carroll, C. L. Innes and Simon Gikandi hold, to a greater or lesser extent, to this view. 4. Although I have chosen to focus on Arrow of God, my analysis of the significance of the sacred can also be related to Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah. 5. Turner distinguishes communitas from ‘community’. The Latin word implies a ‘modality of social relationship’ rather than the more restrictive and particular ‘area of common living’ implied in community (96). 6. Although Turner’s categories are important for my reading, a more detailed consideration of the opposition (and relation) between ‘structure’ and communitas in The Ritual Process reveals that Turner, rather than opposing structure to anti-structure, as the title of his book suggests, distinguishes between two types of structure, one hierarchical and the other egalitarian, thus restricting the radical potentiality of communitas. 7. The four days correspond to one of the basic units of the Igbo calendar, the four-day ‘small week’. 8. The Ikolo as symbol reveals what Turner has identified as the bipolar nature of the symbol in ritual; that is, its normative function, fundamental to moral order and social need, and its orectic role. The symbol, thus, ‘represents both the obligatory and the desirable […] an intimate union of the material and the moral’ (Turner, The Forest of Symbols 54). 9. Numerous anthropological studies reveal the intimate relationship between forms of magical action; for example, witchcraft and the functioning of power in the African postcolony (for examples, see Geschiere, Ciekawy, and Rowlands and Warnier). 10. Lukács insists on the importance of the recreation of a harmonious totality even in his Marxist phase. He derives the idea from Hegel and it is thus thoroughly idealist in its conception. The insistence on formal integration and harmonious totality in the literary work puts him at odds with Brecht’s more materialist aesthetics.

2. Dramatising the Sacred: Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Fourth Stage’ and Kongi’s Harvest

1. In the East, Buddhism, Soyinka claims, has a similar perspective to the Platonic-Christian tradition. 2. Plato’s desire to establish the primacy of rational philosophy over social reproduction also dethrones the gods. 176 Notes

3. Soyinka may have been introduced to this view of the Ancient Greeks when he was a student, along with Christopher Okigbo, at the University of Ibadan. 4. See introduction for some examples. African critics from the Left have reproached Soyinka for what they see as the political conservatism of his plays, such as Death and the King’s Horseman (for example, see Jeyifo, The Truthful Lie 23–35) and others (for example, see Appiah) contest his assertion of African metaphysical unity. The first of these criticisms will be addressed in this chapter; the second, in the conclusion. 5. Little reference is made to modern African tragedy but it receives some clari- fication in the series of essays written after the Cambridge lectures. 6. In ‘Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?’ Soyinka repeats the distinction he makes between Yoruba religious and tragic art forms to counter Biodun Jeyifo’s and Femi Osofisan’s problematisation of his mythopoesis. Rather than, as Osofisan argues, a mythical intuition leading to a reconciliation with history, a passive resignation to historical forces, Soyinka’s prioritisation of Yoruba tragic art over its religious art emphasizes the combative, aggressive, revolutionary spirit of Ogun (see 72–3). 7. Later we shall see that it is actually the structure of the epic that provides Soyinka with a means of escaping the sacrificial logic of the ritual. 8. Early Alafin (kings) of the Yoruba Oyo Empire worshipped Erinle, the god of hunting. However, Abiodun, who reigned between 1760 and 1789, during the height of the power of the Oyo Empire, adopted his mother’s deity. As she was of the Bashorun line (the lineage group that led the warrior chiefs) whose chief deity was the god of warriors and smiths, he fused Erinle with Ogun, thereby establishing the supremacy of the Alafin over the Bashorun. It was this conflict between the king and his chiefs that was to lead to the demise of the Oyo Empire (see Barnes and Ben-Amos 58, and Lloyd, ‘Political and Social Structure’ 221–2). 9. Robert G. Armstrong contests Barnes and Ben-Amos’s association of Ogun originally with the African Iron Revolution and suggests that more a metaphysical idea may have been involved in the genesis of Ogun. He locates the beginning of Ogun’s ambivalent qualities to the purification rites of hunters (see Armstrong 29–38). 10. Due to the high mobility of Ogun devotees during the period of the great empires of West Africa, Ogun also was associated with the road (see Barnes 5). 11. The passage refers to a particular myth of Ogun that brings to the fore his uniqueness and his bond with humanity. In the myth deployed by the dramatist, Ogun hacks his way through the primordial abyss to unite the gods with humanity. 12. The difference in Achebe’s and Soyinka’s characterisation of the significance of the gods in African cosmology is similar to the difference between Ancient Greek and Roman views on the roles of the gods in their lives: the latter attributing authority, rather than power to the gods. 13. In ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’ Achebe offers the belief in chi – a god-agent responsible for the creation and fate of each individual – as indicative of the Igbo’s ‘fierce egalitarianism’ (98). 14. Although Soyinka does not refer to ase specifically, his enigmatic pronounce- ment that power stands outside history can be related to the Yoruba concept Notes 177

of ase. Ase was initially translated as ‘authority’ or ‘command’ (Abraham 71). Margaret Thompson Drewal, drawing on the work of Pierre Verger, gives a more precise definition. She suggests that it is a neutral force and that ‘in and of itself ase has no moral connotations; neither good nor evil, neither positive nor negative’ (‘Dancing’ 203). It is rather the ‘principle of all that lives or acts or moves , […] everything which exhibits power’ (Verger cited in Drewal, ‘Dancing’ 203). 15. Friedrich Schiller writes: ‘All other beings obey necessity; man is the being who wills.’ (cited in Gellrich 253) 16. The abyss and the quest echo the principal themes that Lévi-Strauss identi- fies in mythical narratives: the negation of non-existence and the need for self-assertion (Structural Anthropology 175). 17. Oyin Ogunba suggests a variety of other reasons for the particular lack of critical interest in the play: the absence of metaphorical and metaphysical density when compared to Soyinka’s other major plays of the 1960s, The Road and Madmen and Specialists; Soyinka’s desire to write a ‘people’s play’ meant that he uses simple plot, staging, melodrama and broad humour; and most significantly M.M. Mahood suggested to Ogunba that the era which Kongi’s Harvest so faithfully portrays seems to have passed in postcolonial Africa (see 193–200). 18. All references to Kongi’s Harvest come from Oxford University Press’s Collected Plays 2. 19. See Duerden, The Invisible Present 30 and Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa 29–32. 20. Pierre Clastres argues that segmental traditional societies are not societies without a state in the sense that they have not yet reached the stage of state development but they must be seen rather as counter-stational societies – societies which institute social and political structures that actively prevent the centralisation and unification of power in the form of the State. 21. I rely on John Pemberton’s analysis of the Iwa Ogun ritual, which he witnessed in 1977 in the northern Yoruba town of Ila-Orangun (see ‘The Dreadful God and the Divine King’ 105–46). 22. For a similar viewpoint of Igbo ‘kings’, see Richard Henderson’s The King in Everyman. 23. Note a Luba ritual chant:

The chieftain is neither this nor that. The chieftain is neither good nor bad. He is at once guest, foreigner and host villager. He is the wise man and the fool. (cited in Girard, Violence 253).

24. The emphasis on genetic narratives betrays a desire to specify an origin and to locate the beginnings of an aesthetic tradition, to ‘authenticate’ contemporary cultural practices. This foundational drive can also be related to significance of epic form, and its ideologies, to Soyinka’s theory of tragedy. 25. I shall discuss this particular ‘geometry’ of time in Chapter 4. 178 Notes

26. In ‘The Writer in a Modern African State’, written soon after Kongi’s Harvest, Soyinka criticised the writers and intellectuals who became ‘props of the state machinery’. They embraced ‘any –ism […] with a clear conscience’ and were turned into ‘demagogic opportunists of the new aggressive national consciousness’ (17). The angry tone of the article gives some indication of the impetus behind the ridicule the playwright invests in the characterisation of Kongi’s ISA. 27. See Hubert’s and Mauss’s essay on sacrifice.

3. Politicising the Sacred: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between

1. ‘I am a prophet. A Prophet by birth and inclination,’ proclaims Jero at the beginning of the play. 2. Many prophets in East Africa predicted the coming of the white man and the destruction he would bring. Charles Ambler notes that the arrival of the colonial force had been predicted for three generations before the colonial and missionary penetration of the interior and that many prominent seers saw invasion and subjugation as inevitable, resistance as futile (see 222–9). Other prophets like Kinjitikile and Koitalel advocated resistance and led armed rebellions (see Adas 25–34 and Anderson 167). The historical basis for the prophecies of colonial conquest problematises Amoko Apollo’s claim that Ngugi’s deployment of this prophecy in The River Between represents an authorial bid to ‘transcend coloniality’ (37). 3. Kenyatta, in his Uhuru Day speech, likened the decolonisation process to the Biblical narrative of slavery and redemption, the Release of the ‘Children of Israel’ from bondage in Egypt (Suffering 19). Implicit in the use of this symbol is his unacknowledged role as saviour, as messianic hero delivering his people from the shackles of colonialism. 4. Legesse uses the term ‘demo-charisma’ in connection with the Rastafarian movement in which each individual adopts a charismatic stance. 5. See Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg; and Robert Fatton 44–5. 6. See Anderson’s and Johnson’s introduction to Revealing Prophets. 7. Charisma, Weber’s master concept for explaining social change, must, he claims, eventually become ‘routinised’ into either one or a combination of the other forms of legitimate domination; that is, rational-bureaucratic or traditional (see On Charisma 54). 8. John Lamphear argues in The Scattering Time that the prophet Lokerio transformed his previous role of diviner into a more centralising political authority among the Turkana (see 29–38). Kinjitikile, the leader of the Maji Maji Rebellion in Tanganyika, Michael Adas suggests, represented his authority as transcending clan and ethnic boundaries, thus superseding the authority of the elders (144). For a discussion of the eclipsing of the elders’ authority by the laibons among the Maasai see Waller 45–6 and the orkoiik of the Kalenjin see Anderson 165–7. 9. This claim will be interrogated by a reading of the religious symbols of The River Between. 10. John A. Stotesbury makes a more incisive argument on the Biblical and Christian references in the novel. Notes 179

11. Kenyatta’s account of Gikuyu culture in Facing Mount Kenya is inspired by Malinowski’s anthropology. Not only does this lead to a view that privileges a functionalist understanding of Gikuyu rituals and social organisation but also one that emphasises harmonious social interaction. While this serves well its interests as polemic, it leads to a partial account of Gikuyu culture. Therefore, the ethnographic details, which I derive from this book, are qualified by other commentaries. 12. While Simon Gikandi sees the holy tree as ‘the most obvious symbol of Gikuyu collective interests’ (43), Lee Haring argues that a single holy tree represents Biblical influence (84). 13. A ‘world without end’ suggests a prophetic discourse that relies on a cyclical view of history. 14. Amoko O. Apollo makes a much broader claim for the relation of prophetic knowledge to the textual evocation of the history and destiny of the Agikuyu in the novel: ‘The text suggests that the entire history and destiny of the tribe – from the tribe’s originary wholeness in immemorial time, to its complacent immediate past, to its calamitous colonial present, to its future organic restoration – is contained in the body of prophetic and historical knowledge handed down through generations of seer families.’ (37) 15. For a discussion of the significance of the myth of the Demi and Mathathi to the Gikuyu legal argument during the Kenya Land Commission see Lonsdale 258–65. 16. One of the rules of traditional governance was that one generation should hold the office of government for a period of thirty to forty years, ‘at the end of which the ceremony of ituika should take place to declare the old generation had completed its term of governing, and that the young generation was ready to take over the administration of the country’ (Kenyatta, Facing 189; and Leakey 29). 17. In the aftermath of the clitoridectomy episode, Johanna Karanja, the presi- dent of the Kareng’a movement, said; ‘We were anti-mission, not anti-God.’ (cited in Rosberg and Nottingham 126) 18. Waiyaki’s emphasis on education as the means to eventually eradicate the custom echoes the colonial state’s official policy on the matter (see Rosberg and Nottingham 123). 19. ‘Romantic love,’ Gikandi argues, ‘is an imaginative mechanism for overcom- ing the divisions embedded in the polis. In an ideal world, Waiyaki’s mar- riage to Joshua’s daughter would overcome the division between Kameno and Makuyu.’ (66) 20. In terms of Weber’s articulation of charismatic authority, the textual anagnorisis mirrors the process of the routinisation of charisma, what Turner calls the ‘decline and fall into structure and law’ (132). Therefore, Falco argues that tragedy is ‘the pre-eminent discourse of the failure of charisma’ (71).

4. Sacred Realism: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

1. Brenda Cooper, who reads Ben Okri, Kojo Laing and Syl Cheney-Coker as magic realist writers, makes these distinctions on the basis of a putative difference in political outlook between the older and younger generation of writers. 180 Notes

2. The collection of essays in Zamora and Faris’s Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community is exemplary of this trend. Zamora and Faris argue that magic realism is an ‘international commodity’ – postmodern in its orientation it is ‘especially live and well in postcolonial contexts’ (2). 3. Zamora and Faris argue that magic realism draws on ‘non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation’ (3). 4. Connell notes that the ‘formal descriptions of magic realism that fundamen- tally depend on the dissimilarity of the two modes of thinking … begin to appear considerably less informative’ (103). 5. Faris, Martin, Stephen Slemon, Wilson, Connell and Brenda Cooper, all subscribe, in the most part, to Jameson’s materialist thesis, in attempts to locate magic realism contextually. The above theorists often make a case for an international postcolonial/ postmodern movement. 6. Kole Omotoso provided an historical basis for magic realism sometime before Jameson’s analysis. In 1979, drawing from Carpentier’s work, he related the term ‘marvellous realism’ to African novels that depicted the ‘juxtaposition of the belief system of one archaic economic and social system side by side with the belief system of another economic and social system, this time capitalism’ (26). 7. Jameson’s approach is subtended by the assumption that the magico- mythical is effaced with the rise of capitalism and increasing social rationalisation. 8. For a discussion of the relationship between the modern African state and magical practices and beliefs, see Diane Ciekawy 119–41, Peter Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft, and Rowlands and Warnier 118–32. 9. A suggestive, if controversial, reading of Things Fall Apart could regard the District Commissioner’s Pacification tract at the end of the novel as being generated by the same form of rationalism that governs the rest of Achebe’s text. 10. Priebe, for example, distinguishes the realist, pedagogical and ‘ethical’ fiction of Achebe from the ‘mythical consciousness’ of the writings of Soyinka, Kwei Armah and Tutuola. 11. The protagonist of his first novel, the realist Flowers and Shadows, wiles his time away reading Achebe’s Arrow of God before his world falls apart. 12. Despite the harshness of her tone in her critique of MacCabe’s argument, Esther de Bruijn quite correctly points out that MacCabe overstates his case when he claims that ‘New Age spirituality – not postmodernism or postcolonialism – is the most important cultural vector shaping The Famished Road’ (2). 13. On the restriction of agency and the sequential rather than the consequen- tial nature of Tutuola’s episodicism see Robert Plant Armstrong, The Affecting Presence 155–7. For a discussion of bodily transgressions in West African folktales see Robert Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa 30. 14. For a brief discussion of the fabular elements in Songs of Enchantment see Quayson, ‘Esoteric Webwork’ 154. 15. Both topoi have a long tradition in West African cultural production (see Quayson, Strategic Transformations 121–4). Notes 181

16. ‘The ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre.’ (Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’ 6) 17. Boehmer discusses the significance attached to historical retrieval in early postcolonial writing, which represented an attempt to negate this negation and constitute Africans as makers and subjects of their own history (see 194–9). 18. Leach opposed the commonly held view of the perception of cyclicality in the repetition of natural phenomena. For him, primitive peoples, including the ancient Greeks, regard time as alternating between polar opposites: night and day, life and death etc. 19. Alfred Gell shows that Bloch’s confinement of cyclical time to ritual contexts and hierarchical traditional societies cannot be sustained (see 84–5). Periodicity and recurrence, Gell argues, are the most salient features of time in agrarian societies and therefore there is nothing mystical about cyclical time (84). 20. With regards to Yoruba ritual, Andrew Apter argues that they are not ruled by ‘timeless traditions’, but rather negotiate history from multiple and often opposing perspectives (1).

5. The Stalled Sublime: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

1. Otto’s characterisation of the amoral character of the numen (and its overpowering might over the individual subject) also shares similarities with Achebe’s theorising on the significance of chi to the Igbo worldview (see Chapter 1). 2. Bataille’s ideas on the sacred, discussed in Chapter 2, and Turner’s theorisa- tion of the social category of communitas, can also be seen as versions of the numinous. 3. In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Jean-Francois Lyotard explicates the Kantian version of the sublime: ‘The admixture of fear and exaltation that constitutes sublime feeling is insoluble, irreducible to moral feeling.’ (127) 4. His religious approach to his subject is clarified when he insists that those who have not had a ‘moment of deeply-felt religious experience’ should not bother reading his book (8). 5. For examples of these positions, see Splendore 59, Bishop 54, Marais 73, Macaskill and Colleran 446. 6. Coetzee characterises the defining feature of ‘white writing’ – that is, the literature of a people that are not quite European and not quite African – as a ‘literature of empty landscape […] [which] is thus a literature of failure, of the failure of historical imagination’ (White Writing 9). 7. Kwaku Larbi Korang agrees, regarding Coetzee’s disfiguring and disabling of Friday as a locking into place of blackness, a hedging in that underwrites a ‘quasi-essentialist interpretation of race and culture’ (193). 8. ‘Like Coetzee’s earlier fiction,’ Pechey argues, The Master of Petersburg ‘concentrates – only then to displace away from itself – a force of sublime dissonance.’ (71) 182 Notes

9. As identification with the historical other is often thwarted in Coetzee’s novels, their discursive strategy operates outside a structuralist model, which relies on relation for meaning. Also, poststructuralist approaches that cel- ebrate the playfulness of the text, the joy in the infinite deferral of meaning, seem far removed from the anguish the lack of meaning or connection produces in Coetzee’s characters. 10. Weiskel’s adherence to a structuralist approach and its methodology of deriving synchrony from diachrony, system from change, means that he relies on an arbitrary principle for its synchronic dimension – one derived from biology, that of homeostasis. Weiskel sees the sublime moment as ‘an economic event, a series of changes and the distribution of energy within a constant field’ (28). Therefore, Weiskel is forced to acknowledge that his model ‘requires and can in no way provide a dynamic element’ (37). 11. ‘The irresistibility of the might of nature forces upon us the recogni- tion of our physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same time reveals a faculty of estimating ourselves as independent of nature and discovers a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation of quite another kind.’ (Critique 125) With this remark Kant clearly distinguishes his argument from Edmund Burke’s. Burke was original in insisting on the centrality of terror to the experience of the sublime: ‘Terror is, in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. No passion so effectually robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.’ (101–02) For Burke (contra Kant) objects themselves are sublime and must contain power or extreme pain to be considered so. Hence the Burkean sublime is intimately related to self- preservation. Kant’s self-preservation ‘of quite another kind’ suggests instead that the sublime experience occasions the calling-up of our moral vocation and thus founds our transcendent freedom. 12. Richard Begam interprets Friday’s writing of ‘O’s as an attempt to address himself as a ‘textual gap or a lacuna’ in the narrative – as nothingness – or as meaning the exact opposite by referring to Friday’s god of Defoe’s novel – as everything (123). 13. From the Greek for ‘no passage through’ or ‘impassable’, aporia refers, as it did in the Platonic dialogues, to a difficulty, an insoluble contradiction or a puzzle in logic. 14. Barton’s hermeneutics are further complicated by another important factor, which she admits must be taken into consideration before any meaning is derived from the picture. She asks: ‘Who was to say there do not exist entire tribes in Africa among whom the men are mute and speech is reserved to women? Why should it not be so?’ (69) The reading of images (texts), she implies, is culturally specific, and ideologically generated. The scene concludes with her emphasising the irreducible gap between reality and representation by tearing up the pictures (see Foe 70). Coetzee also draws attention to the codification of images by racial stereotypes (palm trees standing for Africa, a sickle-shaped knife to represent a Moor). 15. See Marais 66–81. 16. The pattern rehearses Todorov’s theory of the fantastic including the moment of hesitation, and Weiskel’s three phases of the sublime moment. Notes 183

17. S. L. Varnado also deploys Otto’s theological concept of the numinous to explore the Gothic imagination. 18. The Lacanian reading is most comprehensive in Teresa Dovey’s book (see especially her chapter on Foe). 19. Despite the numerous designations for the Other in Lacan’s work Jacques- Alain Miller suggests that they have two common factors: ‘their dimension of exteriority and … their determinant function in relation to the subject’ (623). 20. See Attridge’s ‘Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of Canonisation’, in which he argues that Coetzee’s novelistic strategies subvert the canon and critique the processes of literary legitimation. Parry suggests that as Coetzee does not refer to any ‘non-canonical knowledges’ and represents them as ineffable, he actually upholds the canon (158). 21. There are multiple registers in which Kristeva scores abjection. At times the abject refers to the subject experiencing the breakdown (of meaning, identity, order). At others, abjection refers to the defiled object/other, which for Kristeva is a non-object, a non-other as abjection operates outside the logic of desire or representation (65). Yet at still other times she relates abjection to the occasion, the impersonal moment that disturbs identity, order etc. 22. Turner refers to the acquisition of sacred knowledge as the ‘communication of sacra’ (see The Forest of Symbols 99–108). 23. The structure of rites of passage replicates that of the epic narrative (see Chapter 2). 24. In Waiting, however, the discourse of defilement and purification operates at the limits/boundaries of state power – at the frontier of the colony and in the torture chamber. Coetzee suggests that the torture chamber ‘provide[s] a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims’ (Doubling 363). For the Magistrate, the violence perpetrated in the torture cell sacralises the space and when he enters it, he wonders if he is ‘trespassing […] on what has become holy or unholy ground’ (6). Coetzee’s view of the sacred resonates with the double value, the coincidentia opposito- rum, of the holy and unholy, I have been exploring in the dissertation. By perpetrating the most violent of rituals, torture, Colonel Joll, in the eyes of the Magistrate, becomes unclean, and, thus, the Magistrate’s central problem in his relation to the torturer is Joll’s apparent lack of need for a rite of purification – his ability to move ‘without disquiet between the unclean and the clean’ after he has trespassed into the forbidden (Waiting 12). The Magistrate asks the Colonel: ‘Do you find it easy to take food afterwards? I have imagined that one would want to wash one’s hands. But no ordi- nary washing would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial cleansing […] Otherwise it would be impossible to return to everyday life.’ (126) 25. Kant, in his ‘analytic’ of the sublime, writes of the pleasure, the one half of the ambivalent sentiment generated in the sublime encounter, as ‘disinter- ested’ (113). There is no desire on the part of the subject to possess the object that facilitates the sublime experience. 184 Notes

26. Kant’s dynamical sublime repeats at the level of the individual the importance of contesting the power of Nature. The power of the individual’s imagination replaces the enactment of ritual challenge.

Conclusion: The Political as Tragic Effect

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A amaXhosa 171 abiku 125–7 ambivalence of the sacred see seacred abjection 154–61 anagnorisis 104, 107 Aborigines 7 ancient Greece 4, 10, 39, 72, 123, Achebe, Chinua 1, 2, 3, 11–12, 14, 17, 167, 169, 172, 176, 181 21–44, 45, 86, 98, 116, ancient Rome 72–3, 176 119–20, 130, 158, 163, 164, 165, animism 11–17, 46, 57, 59, 127, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174–5 138, 168 acts of desecration 62 Anthills of Savannah 120 Adam, Barbara 132 anthropology Adas, Michael 90, 110 and Durkheim 8 Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi 171 and theology 6 aesthetic of the sublime 138, 142, antithesis in rhetoric 25 148, 168 antithesis structure 61 Africa apartheid 160 conception of time 132 Appiah, Anthony Kwame 47, 49, contemporary society 50 123, 162, 164 contradictions 1 archival realism 26 as cultural entity 47 Arendt, Hannah 62, 64, 72, 167 dictatorships in 85 Aristotle 64, 167, 168 interconnectedness 1 Arrow of God 3, 14, 17, 21–44, 45–6, 56, and modern occult 163 98, 120, 164, 165, 166, 170, 175 newly independent 85 Artaud, Antonin 167 post-colonial 86, 89, 135, 177 Arthur, Dr. J.W. 102 pre-colonial past 39, 60, 108 artist in African society 45 as seen by colonial powers 130–1 Ashforth, Adam 41, 108 sexual inequality in 16 auctoritas 31 status of heads of state 89 Austin, J.L. 38 and time-lessness 130 authenticity 1 unity 1 authority and the West 46–8 and agency 77–85 as without history/time 130 in ancient Greece 72–3 worldview of religion 46, 84 in ancient Rome 72–3 see also colonialism charismatic 63, 69, 74, 76, 86, 99, African Literature, Animism and 100, 103, 107–8, 111, 173, 179 Politics 12 crisis 75, 78 Afrikaans poetry 142 and divinity 64–9 agglomerative space 81 political 81 Agikuyu 90 and power 59–71 alazon in drama 78 religious 81 alienation 104–5, 168, 170 types 63–5 allegoresis 127 versus power 71–7 allegory in literature 115 Awoonor, Kofi 2, 12, 174

197197 198 Index

B communitas 8–11, 28, 29–30, 31, 34, Bakhtin, Mikhail 78, 124, 129 36, 40, 41, 43, 68, 104, 105, Bandele, Biyi 171 106, 107, 110, 157, 166, 173, Barnes, Sandra T. 52 175, 181 Barthes, Roland 24, 25, 26, 40, 42, comparative linguistics 4–5 61, 93 Connell, Liam 117 Bataille, Georges 15–16, 55, 181 continentalist vision 2 Ben-Amos, Paula Girshick 52 Cooper, Brenda 115, 133, 136, 179 Benjamin, Walter 169 cosmic totality 2, 47 Benveniste, Émile 4–5, 121, 172 Cosmos and History 130 Bernsten, J. 89–90 Critique of Judgement 144, 145, 146 Bible see Christianity Custom and Conflict 76–7 The Birth of Tragedy 51, 58 cycle of greed 133 The Black Hermit 94 cyclical dreams 128 Blanchot, Maurice 5, 15 cyclical time 131, 132, 134, 181 Bloch, Maurice 131 Boehmer, Elleke 130 D Book of Isaiah 108 Daloz, Jean-Pascal 163 Buddhism 175 A Dance of the Forests 56 Burke, Edmund 182 das ganz Andere 57 Davis, Ann B. 49, 50 C Death and the King’s Horseman 49, Cameroon 33 61, 164 Campbell, Roy 142 death sentence as scientific Carpentier, Alejo 119 exorcism 75 Carroll, David 25 defilement 159 Chabal, Patrick 163 Deflem, Mathieu 173 Chanady, Amaryll 119, 129 demagoguery 86 charisma 63, 86, 178 demo-charisma 88, 178, see also demo-charisma 88, 178 charisma charismatic authority/leadership 63, Derrida, Jacques 26, 32 69, 74, 76, 86, 99, 100, 103, desecration 62 107–8, 111, 173, 179 deus absconditus of modernity 160 Cheney-Coker, Syl 115–16, 121, 122, Devil on the Cross 120 179 divine energy 5 chi 21–2, 168, 176 Douglas, Mary 5, 6, 8, 57, 159 Christianity 87, 88–9, 91–4, 97–8, dramatic technique 51 101, 102–3, 108–9, 111, 112, Drewal, Margaret Thompson 13 128, 132, 141, 144, 166, 167, The Drums of Affliction 8, 10, 11, 37 171, 175, 178 dual worldhood 117 Church and oppression 91–2 Duerden, Dennis 64 Church of Scotland 87, 102 Durkheim, Émile 6–8, 9, 13, 16, 24, Clastres, Pierre 23, 177 33, 37, 50, 131, 172 Coetzee, J.M. 15, 137–60, 168, 169, dynamic temporality 132 181, 182, 183 dynamical sublime 145, 146, 184 cognitive universals 131 colonialism 23, 25, 27, 34, 35, 39, E 41, 90, 100, 111, 125, 129, East Africa 89, 111 130–1, 144–5, 156, 164, 165, 166 Echevarría, Roberto González 116 Index 199 eighteenth century sublime 148 Gluckman, Max 64, 76, 173 eiron in drama 78 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Goodman, Paul 9, 146 Life 6, 24 Gothic imagination 183 Eliade, Mircea 5, 81–2, 130 Gothic sublime 148 Eliot, T.S. 4 A Grain of Wheat 86–7, 88, 92, 94, epiphany of absolute limitation 144 105, 108, 109 epistemic anxiety 41, 59, 108 greed, cycle of 133 epistemological anxiety 58 Greenhouse, Carol 132 epistemological continuities 164 epistemological determinancy 41 H epistemological indeterminancy The Heart of Redness 171 108, 167 Heidegger, Martin 5, 15, 42 epistemological transformations 86 Heilbringer 87 epistemological uncertainty 41, 167 Henderson, Richard N. 32 epistemology, African 46, 54 hermeneutic sublime 146, 147, 182 Erickson, John 117 hermeneutics of prophecy 87–8, 103 essential gesture 82, 83 hierophany 82 historical junctures 86 F Holy, idea of 137, see also sacred Facing Mount Kenya 94, 97 homo absconditus of apartheid Falco, Raphael 104, 107 state 160 The Famished Road 15, 115–36 Horton, Robert 12 fantastic 123, 125, 183 House of Hunger 171 Faris, Wendy B. 115, 117 Hubert, Henri 57, 172 female body as sacred 16 female writers 16 I Foe 15, 137–60 The Idea of the Holy 5, 15 Fool in drama 70–1, 77 idea of the Holy 137 The Forest of Symbols 8, 10, 16 Igbo culture 2, 21–2, 23, 24–5, 26 foundational social narrative 73 illocutionary speech acts 38 The Fourth Stage (Soyinka) 46, 48–52, Implicit Meanings 8 54, 55, 56, 60, 73, 137, 138 In the Heart of the Country 142 Fragments 120 Indo-European Language and Frazer, James 6, 172 Society 4–5 Freud, Sigmund 6 The Interpreters 120 Frye, Northrop 78 Irele, Abiola 12 Fuentes, Carlos 119 ituika ceremony 100–1

G J Gárcia Márquez, Gabriel 115, 118, Jameson, Frederic 18, 51, 138, 167, 119, 123 180 Gauchet, Marcel 57 Jeyifo, Biodun 2, 49, 50, 52, 58, 60, Geertz, Clifford 131 120, 164 Gellrich, Michele 168 Geschiere, Peter 33 K Gibbs, James 60–1 Kalenjin 97 Gikandi, Simon 3, 23, 28, 49 Kant, Immanuel 15, 138, 142, 143, Girard, René 53, 56, 68 144, 145–6, 160, 168, 182, 183 200 Index

Katrak, Ketu H. 49, 50 realism 15, 40, 115–19, 120–1, Kenya 89, 96, 166, 179 122, 123, 179–80 Kenyatta, Jomo 89, 94–5, 97, 103, and religion 6 178, 179 and technology 162 Killam, G.D. 24 theory of 172 Kirk-Greene, A.H.M. 89 use of term 16–17 Kongi’s Harvest 14, 59–85, 98, 165, Magical Realism in West African 170, 177 Fiction 115 Korang, Kwaku Larbi 141 magico-mythical in African Kristeva, Julia 150, 151, 155, 157, literature 115, 136 159, 183 Maji Maji rebellion 90 Kwei Armah, Ayi 1, 2, 12, 120, 121, Major Gentl and the Achimota 171 Wars 122 Maka culture 33 L Man of the People 120 Laing, Kojo 120, 121, 122, 171, 179 mana 5 Last Supper allusion 89 Marechera, Dambudzo 171 Leach, Edmund 131 Marxism 3, 118, 140, 142, 164 leader cult 89 The Master of Petersburg 141, 181 leadership, post-colonial 111 Matagari 10, 108 Lectures on the Religion of the mathematical sublime 145, 146 Semites 5 Mau Mau rebellion 87, 103 l’effet du réel 93 Mauss, Marcel 57, 172 legal/rational authority 63 Mda, Zakes 115–16, 122, 171 leprosy 33–4, 35, 68 meaning, as a force 42 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 25, 27, 131, mental movement in the 177 sublime 143 liberation struggle 2 mercantile time 132 Life & Times of Michael K 143 messianic narratives 86 The Life of the Mind 167 messianic role and mythology 105 liminality 9, 12, 28–9, 35, 104, 139, messianic visions 74 157 metaphoric sublime 144 linear time 131–4 metaphysical concepts 52 literary thematisation of metonymic recuperation strategy 2 epochality 86 metonymic sublime 144 literature see writing Miller, David 148 Lloyd, Peter C. 66–7 modernism 4 logocentricism 26 A Moment’s Notice 132 Lonsdale, John 87, 166 monster-child image 71, 80 Lukács, Georg 24, 39, 40, 46, 54, 83 monstrous doubles 56, 59 Lukes, Steven 7, 31 Moore, Gerald 2 Morris, David B. 148 M mountains and plains in Maasai 89–90, 97 literature 109–12 MacCabe, Douglas 123 Müller, Max 15, 174 magic mutilation 149–54 and culture 11 mysterium fascinosum 137 medieval 162 mysterium tremendum 137–8, 148, in post-colonial Africa 115–19 149, 168 Index 201 myth Nuer 90 in African literature 1, 2, 12, 16, numinous see mysterium tremendum 22–5, 40 and animism 11–17 O definition of 174 Obiechina, Emmanuel 23 and epic quest 60 occult in modern Africa 163 as ideology 25 Odun festivals 65–6, 177 importance of mythical Ogun 52–4, 55 narratives 73 Ojinmah, Umelo 23 and land restitution 100 Okri, Ben 4, 12, 15, 115–36, 158, magico-mythical in African 169, 172, 179 literature 115 On Charisma 63 and messianic role 105 ontological continuities 164 and metaphysical concepts 52 opacity 167 mythical model 82 oral tradition 1 mytho-ritual 60, 166 Osofisan, Femi 49 and religion 119 Otto, Rudolf 5, 15, 57, 137, 138, and sacred time 130 148, 149, 168 as timeless 133 outcast-defiler 56 Myth, Literature and the African World 2, 35, 46, 51, 60 P Myth, Realism and the West African pan-African agenda 2 Writer 11–12 Parry, Benita 140–1 Myth and Society 3, 4, 48, 55 patriarchal image 62–3 mythico-religious ideas 119 Patterns in Comparative Religion 5 Mythologies 24 Pechey, Graham 141–2 Pemberton, John 68 N perlocutionary speech acts 38 narrative plains and mountains in Ngugi’s closure 38 work 109–12 modes 121 Plato 3, 47, 64, 175 strategies 1, 38, 86, 165, 169 Poetics 168 narrative of primal becoming 73 polarisation 10–11, 14 narrative of primordial genesis 73 political continuities 164 naturism 15 The Political Development of Yoruba Nazareth, Peter 92 Kingdoms in the Eighteenth and Ndembu culture 8 Nineteenth Centuries 67 New Age spirituality 123, 180 political imperative 2 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1, 12, 14, political reality, postcolonial 120 86–112, 116, 119, 130, political satire 61 163, 165, 166, 169, The Political Unconscious 51 170, 178 Polynesia 5 Ngwale, Kinjitikile 90 postcolonial politics 135, 177 Nietzsche 51–2, 58, 61, 85 Postcolonialism 86 Nigeria 60–1, 115, 123, 125, 128, power 23, 25–31, 33, 56, 57 129, 136, 171 absolute 78 Nigerian writing 12 and authority 59–77 Nkrumah, Kwame 85 gerontocratic division 80–1 novel and genre 124 versus authority 71–7 202 Index

Powers of Horror 154 religious activity and reality 55 Priebe, Richard K. 11–12, 13 religious art 51 primal phenomenon 2 religious authority 81 primal reality 127–8 religious conversion 36 Primitive Culture 13 religious experience 15 problem of proximity 56, 57, 80 religious framework 2 profane and the sacred see sacred religious treachery 42 prophecy 89, 90, 91, 97, 99, 102, rhetoric and politics 163 103, 105, 111, 165, 178, 179 ritual 10, 50, 166 Purity and Danger 5 Semitic 5, 6, 8 Purple Hibiscus 171 taboos 5, 6, 22, 62, 68, 71, 72, 74 traditional African 123, 162 Q and war 102 Quayson, Ato 12, 13, 48, 86, 121, 127 Yoruba 59 see also Christian/Biblical R Republic 3, 47 rationality 163 Ricoeur, Paul 93, 134 The Raw and the Cooked 26, 131 ritual 1 Reading the African Novel 3, 24 abuse of 62 Reading Chinua Achebe 23, in African literature 12 25, 28 and alienation 59 realism and auctoritas 31 alienated 40, 42, 44, 170 bipolarity 10–11 animist 127 and the clan 165 archival 26 condensation 10 beyond 119–22 and culture 11 European 26 in festivals 66 in Famished Road 122 functionalist approach 50 magic 15, 40, 115–19, 120–1, 122, ituika ceremony 100–1 123, 179, 180 liminal period/phase 9, 104 sacred 122–30 meaning in 38 in writing 119–20, 122 metaphysical concepts 52 religion multiple meanings 10 according to Müller 174 mytho-ritual 60, 165 advanced 6 polarisation 10–11, 14 African worldview 46, 84 post-liminal phase 9 in Arrow of God 46 pre-liminal phase 9 characteristics of 7 primacy of language in 38–9 and charisma 63 processual 8 forms in society 8 purification 159 and hierarchal relations 62 religious 10, 50, 166 and magic 6 of renewal 32 metaphysical concepts 52 rite of passage 9 mysterium tremendum 15 separation stage 9 and myth 119 significata 10 naturist view 174 state 89 pagan 6 structure 9, 10 and politics 163 symbolic 10 primitive 5–6 time 131 Index 203

as timeless 133 and supernatural 13, 33, 115 unification 10 terror of 167 victims 58 and theorising of tragic 46 Yoruba 13 time 130–6 see also sacrifice and tribal societies 9–10 The Ritual Process: Structure and and uncleanness 5, 6 Anti-Structure 8, 9, 10, 28, 29, and the universe 5, 57–8 159, 175 and Yoruba art 59 The River Between 14, 86–112, 165, and younger writers 171 166, 167, 170 The Sacred and The Profane 82 the river in literature 104–9 sacrifice 36–8, 43–4, 49, 50, Robertson Smith, William 5–6, 7, 8, 56–7, 111, 126, 132, 160, 33, 172 165, 172 Romantic sublime 138, 148 satire 61 Rooney, Caroline 12, 127 The Savage Mind 131 royalty 70 Schiller, Friedrich 177 Rushdie, Salman 115, 118 Schism and Continuity in an African Society 10 S Schopenhauer, Arthur 15, 51–2, 58 sacred scientific rationality 163 ambiguity of 33, 172 Search Sweet Country 120, 121 ambivalence 5, 8, 10, 14, Sekyi-Otu, Ato 96 15, 53, 79–80, 127, 137, self-ingestion 135 164, 172 shapeless time 132 and chi 22 Sharma, Govind Narain 92 and class interest 24 Slemon, Stephen 116 and concepts of religion 16, 22 social and natural disorder 90 and conflict 62 social rationality 163 definition 5, 14 social totality 39 and destruction of subject 39 societal rationalisation 118 dialectic 35–44 Socrates 71 and divine imperative 109 Soyinka, Wole 1, 2, 3, 4, 11–12, 13, duality 83 14–15, 16, 35, 42, 45–85, 86, and the female body 16 98, 116, 120, 121, 125, 128, and festivals 31–2 130, 134, 137, 138, 158, 163, forces 7 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, idea of the Holy 137 172, 173, 176 liminality 139 see also Wole Soyinka in literature 12, 14, 21–44 sparagmos 106, 107 and monarchial power 67 speech acts 38 persistence of 171 spirit-children 126 and power 57, 67, 171 spiritual edge of the imperialist and profane 7–8, 9, 82, 132 sword 91 propitious 7 spiritual universe 123 realism 122–30 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 139 sacer 5, 35, 172 the stalled sublime 142, 161, 168 and social order 8 Steiner, George 56, 167 social structure 11, 29 Stotesbury, John A. 88 and sublime 137–42 Strategic Formations 121 204 Index

Strategic Transformations in Nigerian tragic art 46, 49, 50–1, 54, 61, 84 Writing 12, 48 tragic structure 70, 104 strategies in writing 129 tragic tyranny 58–9 The Strong Breed 49 tragic victim 58 structural ties 9 the tree in literature 93–104, 106, structure 8–11, 26, 28, 29, 31, 36, 109, 179 68, 70, 182 trickster figure in literature 129 subjectlessness 158 Turkana 97 sublime 137–61, 168, 181, 182, 183, Turner, Victor 8–11, 16, 28, 29, 30, 184 37, 43, 57, 68, 104, 157, 159, supernatural, and Famished 166, 173, 175 Road 115, 122 Tutuola, Amos 12, 121, 125, 130, symbolic articulation 167 172, 174 symbolic complex 52 Tylor, E.B. 13 symbolic framework of Christianity 102 U symbolic logic 107 universal rationality 163 symbolic oppositions 26 symbolic relations 61 V symbolic value of landscape 146 Van Gennep, Arnold 8–9, 28 symbolism Vera, Yvonne 171 and authority 75 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 3, 4, 48, 55, 56, and discrimination 157 70, 81 dominant 10 Violence and The Sacred 53 instrumental 10 polysemy of symbol 93 W in ritual 10 Waiting for the Barbarians 143, 150, and the river 105 152 using nature 93 Watson, Stephen 141 The Symbolism of Evil 93 Watt, E.D. 73 The Sympathetic Undertaker... 171 A Way of Being Free 130 Weber, Max 3, 4, 7, 23, 28, 29, 62, T 63, 69, 73, 76, 85, 89, 118, 162, taboos 5, 6, 22, 62, 68, 71, 72, 74 178, 179 Talbott, Rick Franklin 56, 57 Weep Not, Child 87, 88, 92, 103, 109, theology, and anthropology 6 166 Things Fall Apart 26, 30, 166 Weiskel, Thomas 138, 143, 146, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of 147–8, 154, 182 the World 71 West, compared to Africa 47 Thomas, Keith 162 Western metaphysics 48 time, sacred 130–6 White Writing 142, 143, 145, 146, time-lessness 130 149, 181 totality 46 Wholly Other 148, 150, 153 totemism 172 Will concept 53–4, 58, 81, 165 traditional authority 63, 76, 83 Williams, Raymond 169–70 traditional sublimity 158, 161 witchcraft 33, 127, 180, 184 tragedy 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, Wole Soyinka 60 56, 60, 61, 73, 81, 168, 170 Woman of the Aeroplanes 122 tragic action 61 writer as post-mortem surgeon 45 Index 205 writing strategies 129 Anglophone African literature 169 in the West 120 foundational aims 129 myth 1, 2–4 Y novel and genre 124 Yoruba culture/myth 2, 5, 12, 13, postcolonial 1, 41, 86, 139 46–7, 48, 49, 50–1, 52, 54, 59, reaction 2 64, 91, 124, 134, 137, 165, 166, realist 1, 2, 3, 39 169, 176, 181