Linguistic and Intentional Hybridity, or the African Aesthetics of Proverbial Quoting in Selected Novels by Ayi Kwei Armah
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Date
2008
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri
Abstract
Two creative thrusts straddle the poetic imagination of the modern African writer,
with regard to the literary heritage of the West. Ashcroft et al. (2004: 37) call them
appropriation and abrogation. Abrogation, on the one hand, is a disjunctive process which
involves the rejection of the Western language and its culture, because it perceives them as
remnants of the colonial past. Appropriation, on the other hand, is not as clear cut. It looks
for accommodation rather than rejection. It involves two languages, two cultures in a
negotiation process that attempts to create local meaning, a particular worldview, with
foreign words. Postcolonial literature, therefore, grows out of a tension, an agon, in the
poetic imagination of the writer, torn as he is by these two creative impulses, these two
ideological postures.
Translated into the discursive categories of hybridity, appropriation and
amalgamation correspond to Bakhtin’s typology of hybrid discourses (1992): the organic,
"unintentional, unconscious" hybrid, and the deliberate “intentional” hybrid. The former is
the discourse in which the mixture of languages is fused into a new system, which elicits the
historical evolution of all languages, whereas the latter is the "internally dialogic" form, in
which languages and ideologies are consciously set against each other. Bakhtin sees the first
kind of hybrid structure as characteristic of any living, evolving language, while he
assimilates the second to the immanently dialogised nature of the language in the novel.
In other words, organic hybrid discourses involve mixing and fusion. They are part
and parcel of a natural process in language and cultural contact. Bakhtin explains that they
are always mute and opaque. Nevertheless, they remain historically “productive [… with]
potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world” (ibid. 360).
Contrary to this kind, the intentional hybrid comes as a result of an artistic intention to
dialogize hybridity; an artistic intention that produces disjunction rather than fusion. The
aim of this disjunctive type is separation, because it is essentially a contestatory site of more
than one discourse, with one of them trying to unsettle, disarticulate the other discourses
representing authority. For Bakhtin, therefore, hybridization, best concretized in the novel, is
closely linked to subversion of authority.
Applied to the modern development in creative writings in Africa, organic hybrid
discourse finds its most conspicuous expression in the productions of the popular writers.
According to Stephanie Newell (2000), organic hybridity, even if she does not use the
Bakhtinian terms, was born among African popular writers as a result of a generational
conflict between the elderly and the young. At the level of linguistic performance, including
literature, the young popular writers affirmed their social status vis-à-vis the elderly, who
manipulated the traditional proverbs, by drawing authority from “a shared pool of [foreign]
literary languages, crossing different genres and language registers and, in the process,
creating narrative whirlpools that are self-consciously textual” (18). In the traditional society,
proverbs were, to paraphrase one of Chinua Achebe’s famous proverbs, the palm wine with
which words are eaten. But in the acculturated context of the colonized society, the quotation
replaced the proverb in its function of putting across and articulating arguments related to
social issues such as money, corruption, gender relations etc.
Unlike market popular writers, Africa’s international novelists seem to have resorted
to intentional hybrid forms in their novels. Moved by deep nationalist convictions, these
fiction writers assimilated their creative task to the nationalist struggle for political liberation
and cultural revival. As a consequence, they meant their fictions as contestatory sites, in which they grappled with all the symbols of Western hegemony. Polemics, parody and
anxiety of influence are all hallmarks of the discourse of these literary productions.
Our aim in this study is to show that organic and hybrid discourses within the African
novel may also exist side by side. In our view, the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah is a
novelist whose poetic imagination accords equal importance to the intentional and organic
hybrid discourses. It is true that in his extra-literary writings he has encouraged critics to see
the hybridization process of his novels as essentially contestatory vis-à-vis Western writers.
For instance, in his response to Charles Larson (1971), who has drawn many parallels
between his two first novels and many novels belonging to European writers, mainly the
fictions of James Joyce, he took him to task by calling his criticism “larsony” (1976).
However, Armah’s corpus of novels to date clearly shows that he is also the heir of the
popular novelists, whose imagination was lit up by the poetic fire of their Western
counterparts.
Our interest in Armah’s novels is also sustained by the recent orientation in cultural
studies towards the issue of hybridity. This aspect of his work has been overlooked by the
critics of his early novels, written in the 1960’s and 1970’s, long before the translation of
Mikhail Bakhtin’s works on the discourse of the novel and the publication of Homi Bhabha’s
ground-breaking study The Location of Culture (1994). Subjected to literary and ideological
categories which borrowed mostly from the existential ideology of Jean Paul Sartre, these
novels were rejected on the basis that they lacked authenticity and commitment. In other
words, The Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? were
misread because they were not timely; timely in the sense that they demanded critical
categories that were not yet fully fledged at their time of publication. Today, with the recent
publications on hybridity, Armah’s novels can be said to have become, in Nietzsche’s term,
timely.
Description
360f. ; 30cm.(+CD Rom)
Keywords
African litterature, Linguistique
Citation
Literature