Waiting for an Angel: Refashioning the African Writing Self

WAITING FOR AN ANGEL: REFASHIONING THE AFRICAN WRITING SELF By Copyright 2008 Ainehi Edoro M.A., University of Kansas 2008 Submitted to the Department of English and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts ___________________ Chairperson Committee Members ___________________ ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ Date defended____________________ 2 The Thesis Committee for Ainehi Edoro certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: WAITING FOR AN ANGEL: REFASHIONING THE AFRICAN WRITING SELF By Ainehi Edoro Committee: ________________________ Chairperson ________________________ _________________________ _________________________ Date approved _________________ 3 WAITING FOR AN ANGEL: REFASHIONING THE AFRICAN WRITING SELF Chapter One Introduction Achebe begins two of his essays—“The Novelist as Teacher” (1965) and “The Writer and His Community” (1984)—with a critique of an individualistic conception of the creative mind, a conception he attributes to the European literary tradition. How, Achebe wonders, half tickled and half puzzled, would a writer desire to rebel against society and banish himself to the fringes of society? In “The Writer and His Community,” Achebe situates this literary attitude within the broader social and economic context of individualism and a will-to-ownership that owes its roots to the advent of the book and its copyright culture. In contrast, as an African writer coming from a culture of collective ownership of art-objects, he thinks of his literary creativity and positions himself in relation to society differently. In “The Novelist as Teacher,” Achebe addresses what society expects of its writers, an aspect of the writer-society relationship he sees as largely unexplored. In the second essay, he explores, more specifically, the intersections of writer, writing, and society. His conclusion is that African societies do expect something of their writers and that the writer should always strive for an organic relationship between his artistic self, his artistic creation, and the collective. Other African writers, in the Nigerian setting, have articulated this conception of the African writer and his or her role in society differently. Wole Soyinka, writing in 4 the 60s and the 70s, constructs the image of the writer as social visionary. Femi Osofisan, writing in the 80s and 90s, thinks of the writer as the creative foundation of a viable national ethos. Despite the differences in the formulation of their arguments, these writers all agree that African literature functions as social and cultural resource, not as a means to individual authorial self-realization, and that African writers ought also to function as public intellectuals. Third generation Nigerian writers are no different. Despite accusations that their writings lack social and political force because of what some critics see as disabling pessimism and uncritical adoption of post-modernist and post- structuralist stylistic modes, third generation writers are strongly driven by the assumption that writers have a social role with serious consequences for collective resistance against power. I would even go as far as arguing that third generation Nigerian writers articulate a more refined representation of the artist as a social entity and of writing as a collective process precisely because they do not take the social function of African writers and writings for granted. They do this by showing how the writer’s social role is always being constructed and performed within powerful historical, material, and ideological forces and, most importantly, how these forces can be both restraining and productive. They are asking the same question that Achebe, Soyinka, and Osofisan asked: what is the role of the African writer? It is just that the new writers are proffering answers that are quite different from those of their forebears. Before addressing some of these issues using Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, I explore assumptions about the 5 creative imagination, history, language, and the literary intellectual that anchor some of the earlier conceptions of the writer, writing, and society that third generation writings are challenging. Achebe’s notions about the writer and society are embodied in his vision of the writer as teacher. Achebe sees the writer as a modern-day manifestation of the village storyteller who often ends his or her tales and fables with a lesson about social mores and cultural values. Literature teaches society about collective survival particularly in African societies that Achebe believes have become culturally enervated and fragmented by colonial social and political impositions. The writer, through writings that counter myths of racial inferiority and correct Africa’s distorted histories, alleviates the “disaster brought upon the African psyche in the period of subjection to alien races” (29). Embedded within such a social condition and faced with an urgent “task of re-education and regeneration” (Achebe 29), the African writer does not feel inclined to join the European writer in his search for authenticity. Authenticity is an artistic consciousness defined by Lionel Trilling as the artistic drive towards self-realization in which the creative self strives to be as autonomous and self-defining as the created object (Trilling 100). Authenticity is also grounded on a relationship of conflict between artist and society in which the artist perceives society as an oppressive totality. In contrast, African writers like to see themselves, Achebe argues, as bound up with their societies in ways that efface the individual creative self in a relationship of co- creativity with the collective. Achebe’s humanist and moralist vision of the writer 6 as committed to a program of collective cultural reformation is appealing. What is less persuasive is Achebe’s representation of the writer-as-teacher, a figure of authority, in a power-neutral relationship with the collective. The image of the writer as teacher is not fortuitous. It establishes a particular notion about the social production of knowledge and projects the writer and the community in specific ways. For one thing, the image of the writer as teacher functions in relation to the construction of society as students: less knowledgeable human beings who have guilelessly accepted their racial inferiority and need to be enlightened on forgotten truths about past histories for cultural retrieval to take place. Another important feature of the teacher-image at work here is that the writer does not have to share the social and cultural condition of the collective, for the teacher’s authority is contingent on the assumption that the teacher does not share the student’s ignorance. How, then, does the African writer come to possess a body of cultural knowledge supposedly free of colonial ideology? As Achebe notes, “the writer and his society live in the same place” (27), within material conditions determined by colonial rule. In addition to this, the writer is trained within the cultural institutions of colonialism and is attached to an economic class organically bound to the economic institutions of colonialism. As a result, to attribute re-generative and reformative knowledge of cultural and racial retrieval to writers who are themselves as embedded within the social world of colonialism as their societies is to elide the reality of ideological and material restraints that construct the writer, cultural 7 resources such as language and history, and the society. It is not that the writer, using literature, cannot engender cultural transformation but that Achebe’s representation of the writer’s role in the cultural transformation process takes too much for granted. For example, as teacher, the writer does not have to account for his or her intellectual status and Achebe is not compelled to engage the contradictions and discontinuities that attend the writer’s intellectual becoming. Seen in this light, Achebe’s teacher fits the profile of Gramsci’s traditional intellectual. Traditional intellectuals are intellectuals who ground their social status on the “uninterrupted historical continuity” of their function (1139). As teacher, the writer is granted a social status because she is filling a public office that has always existed and that is fixed part of society. In placing the writer within a lineage of public educators—the storyteller, the teacher—Achebe somewhat naturalizes the writer’s social function and projects the writer’s intellectual status as “autonomous and independent of the dominant social group,” which in Achebe’s case is colonialism (1139). Another way to put this is to say that, as teacher, writers have an intellectual history that is before and, therefore, outside of colonialism, hence their ability to create cultural and social meanings independently of colonial ideology. As Gramsci notes, “this self-assessment is not without consequences in the ideological and political field, consequences of wide-ranging import” (1139). In other words, cultural representations that conceal the historical and material situatedness of the intellectual can be implicated in “the maintenance and 8 reproduction of social power” (Eagleton 13). Before addressing the social and political consequences of such an artistic orientation, I wish to use Soyinka’s social visionary to further the claims I am making about artistic representations that are

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