"Recalling-ls-Greatest": Personal Memory and Lyricism in Toyin Falola's A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth

The reflective disclosure of the past is a major trend in African literature as indicated in writers like Wale Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thi­ong'o. Personal memory is also often employed aesthetically to mirror what is embedded in the past. Toyin Faiola the author of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth presents his childhood and teenage years, fam­ily history and the social and historical events of Ibadan, Ilorin and Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He also details his personal experiences as a witness to the Agbekoya rebellion of 1968-70. In presenting actions in the two self-narratives, Toyin Faiola exploits the resources of indigenous and contemporary African songs, incantatory chants and transliterated version of many lyrics. He uses the lyrics to also investigate the symbolic meaning of words used in the past and reiter­ates the prevalence of songs in Yoruba culture. The lyrics link together many themes as well as serving as an avenue for community and individual expres­sion. We have memorial songs, songs of rebellion, songs of sexuality and sa­tirical songs which mock teachers, the police and government officials. Faiola presents an inseparable relationship of mutual exchange between the oral and written traditions. However, our point of emphasis is to evaluate the context and usage of the lyrics and panegyrics in the two texts.

Le problème de l’identité culturelle dans les romans Tout s’effondre de Chinua Achebe et Un nom pour un autre de Jhumpa Lahiri

The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri approach an acute and sensitive problem of the effects of colonization and of the self-exiled emigrant man. Each of the protagonists of these two novels expresses an upheaval, an inner cultural conflict. It turns out that their destiny is in a close connection with their images and emotional valences, strongly fed by a collective imaginary, by the deep reality of collective life. Thus, adherence and communication with the archetypal resources of the native community, with the essential that precedes the human condition, proves to be a vital necessity, of overwhelming importance for our protagonists.

ROOTLESSNESS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN'S THE DEATH OF THE HEART, AND CHINUA ACHEBE'S ARROW OF GOD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ANGLO-IRISH AND AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Postcolonial literature views the British Empire of the nineteenth century as unique in human history and literary products for it provides writers with different subjects that deal with the idea of how to resurrect the colonized identity even after getting liberation. Postcolonial literature seems to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other colonized and other colonial powers as British. Such literature and particularly novel, emerged to focus on social, moral, and cultural influences and their interrelation with the impact of English existence upon some countries as Ireland in Europe and Nigeria in Africa. Irish novel shares its genesis with the English novel. When we write of the eighteenth century and use the phrase ' the Irish novel', we are necessarily referring to novel written by authors who, irrespective of birthplace, inhabited both England and Ireland and who thought of themselves as English or possibly both English and Irish. This fact is apparent within hands when we talk about the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and her novels that show the obvious effect of her Irish identity upon her works during the period of World Wars I and II with a consideration to Ireland as a British colony. The same impact with African culture, postcolonial Nigeria, when its writers saw the changes crept to their traditions. Their literary products concentrated on questioning their nation how to keep and reserve African identity from alternations. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer tried to reflect his culture in a mirror to readers and challenge them with their own strength and weakness in his novel Arrow of God. His novel tackles these weaknesses of the traditional outlook and senses for change. The research paper tackles the concept of rootlessness in postcolonialism through Anglo-Irish novel The Death of the Heart (1938) of Elizabeth Bowen ,which is tackled in the first section , and postcolonial Nigerian novel Arrow of God (1964) written by Chinua Achebe in the second section. The paper ends with conclusions and works cited.

“What a Man Does Not Know Is Greater than He”: Analyzing Noos, Thymos and Akrasia in Achebe’s Arrow of God

This paper is an exposition of how Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) is engaged with philosophical concepts of thymos, noos, eros, and akrasia. The focus of this study is principally on Ezeulu’s thymos. To achieve this end, Francis Fukuyama’s notion of thymos or “desire for recognition” has been considered to provide a more tangible description of the term. This study explores that when a person’s body formation is mostly dominated by thymos, which has run out of control, the result is akrasia. Subsequently, it will be discussed that Ezeulu’s akrasia or “weakness in will” is the result of his ambivalent quest for self-worth. This article also seeks to examine the ways in which Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu, struggles to maintain his dignity to remain Umuaro’s cynosure. Ezeulu’s old age, his poor eyesight, his conflicts with his people, his insistence on revenge, and his desire for higher values provide some of the major sources of akrasia. By applying these aforementioned philosophical concepts to this novel, it is hoped that this article will contribute to a new conceptualization in terms of psychic disposition in Achebe’s Arrow of God.

Westernization and Colonization of the Mind in Chinua Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path”

British occupation in Nigeria has brought several impacts to the native land and also the indigenous people. Westernization and colonization of the mind are two inseparable effects of colonialism. These two issues are oftentimes depicted in literary works focusing on colonialism as their theme. The aim of this study is to analyze the issues of westernization and colonization of the mind raised in Chinua Achebe's "Dead Men's Path." The data were taken from quotes that prove the existence of these issues from a short story entitled “Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe and analyzed them using Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s theory of colonization of the mind. The results showed that westernization and colonization of the mind have affected Michael Obi, the main character in the story. Westernization influences Obi to adopt modern life and Western thoughts that show the process of mimicry, while colonization of the mind makes Obi downgrades Nigerian cultures. The issue of the management of land was also found in the story as a continuation of the previous problems. “Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe reveals that British colonialism has changed the perspectives of Nigerian elites, as seen in Michael Obi’s story.

García Márquez in Africa

The title of this article is multidimensional. How was García Márquez’s writing received and distributed in Africa? Beyond Africa’s colonial languages—Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Arabic—into what continental languages was it translated (Swahili, Berber, Chichewa, Malagasy, Sotho, Amharic, Swazi, Comorian, Somali, Oromo, Manding?) and distributed, in what numbers, by what networks, and to which cities of Africa’s forty-eight sub-Saharan nations with their 750 to 3,000 languages? García Márquez published a few articles about Africa and traveled to Africa, reporting, speaking, and conferring. Thereafter the African diaspora in the Caribbean figured more prominently in his work. Finally, and most importantly, the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude inspired and validated writers in possession of rich regional folklore crossed by the stresses of modernization, postcolonialism, and language politics. African writers had already novelized their folklore (e.g., Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola and Guinea’s Camara Laye), experimented intertextually and historically (e.g., Mali’s Yambo Ouloguem), and ironized their history (e.g., Cameroon’s Mongo Beti and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe). The term that was originally interchangeable with “magic realism,” “the marvelous American real,” had been coined to describe Haiti, that is, the African diaspora. Such writers as Sierra Leone’s Syl Cheney-Coker, Nigeria’s Ben Okri and Chika Unigwe, Ghana’s Kojo Laing, Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Mozambique’s Mia Couto found their realities newly believable—and readable. As the British-Ghanaian Nii Parkes observed, “One Hundred Years of Solitude taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own.”

Birthplace Revisited – a look at Humanity in Nnedi Okorafor

Enquanto berço derradeiro da Humanidade, África é um terreno fértil para escritas e reescritas da História humana. As tragédias e as atrocidades do seu percurso civilizacional acrescem à relevância de refletir sobre a Humanidade com recurso a África. Também por isso, a ficção científica africana (AfroSciFi) tem um papel central no pensamento utópico e distópico do século XXI. Na dianteira da literatura africana tem estado a Nigéria, com contribuições notáveis como as de Chinua Achebe e Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Na segunda década do século XXI irrompe o trabalho de Nnedi Okorafor como voz afrofuturista, cosmo/afropolitana. Todos três partilham uma escrita altamente politizada e a total oposição a leituras redutoras e dogmáticas do mundo e, particularmente, de África., assim como uma tradição híbrida de formação ocidental(izada) em contexto Africano, com ecos da experiência agreste de opressão. Rejeitar a “narrativa única” e todos os estereótipos é um tópico contante na ficção Africana contemporânea e quando o trabalho de Nnedi Okorafor chega à Nigéria as possibilidades já são ilimitadas e unir passado e futuro Africanos é simultaneamente factível e desafiante

Re-creating the hybrid text: postcolonial Indian writings and the European scene

For a language with a wealth of great literature such as English, globaliza-tion has been a mixed blessing. The International English of Mc World is a poor descendant of the language of Shakespeare and Dickens. On the other hand, English literature has been tremendously enriched by writings from the former colonies of the British Empire, creating their own ‘norms’ of English – ‘a new English’, as Chinua Achebe famously put it, “still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new surroundings ”. In the postcolonial literary scene, such ‘hybrid’ texts – or ‘métissés ’– are now a familiar feature, but a complicated one for translators working into other European languages. This essay concentrates on India, and looking at writings by Sethu (Pandavapuram in English translation) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things in English and in German translation), it investigates the striking features of hybrid source texts and the cultural and linguistic problems involved in re-creating them for a European target culture.

Transitivity Analysis of Proverbs in Achebe’s A Man of the People

The language of literary texts is adorned with proverbs, a cultural element which to some extent has become significant in the growth and development of African literature and in the portrayal of meaning assigned by the writer. This paper explores the relationship between linguistic structures and culturally constructed meaning in Chinua Achebe’s novel A Man of the people by critically examining the transitivity of proverbs used in the work. This study is anchored on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. The analysis reveals that Achebe uses more material processes, followed by mental processes and then relational and verbal processes. Furthermore, the types of transitivity process, participants, circumstatials contribute towards the construction of themes reflected in the novel. Based on the results, the paper concludes that Achebe uses a variety of transitivity processes as proposed by M.A.K. Halliday with the exception of existential and behaviour. He uses actors, sensers, carriers, identifiers, to convey message of his novel. Achebe mostly uses circumstances of extent, location, and manner to show that the actions take place in a certain place, time, and at a certain frequency. The paper concludes that Achebe’s use of varieties of processes, participants and circumstances has made his novel interesting and readable.

UNEARTHING PARENTHOOD IN THE NIGERIAN CULTURE THROUGH THE EXAMPLES OF THE PARENTAL FIGURES IN THE NOVEL THINGS FALL APART BY CHINUA ACHEBE

This essay aims to unearth parenthood in the Nigerian culture through the examples of parental figures in the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This paper will be citing various studies about Nigerian family structure, bonds and relationship it will also be analysing various incidents throughout the course of the novel. The paper will also be discussing the short term and long term effects of parenting on a child. The paper will take a deeper look into the familial relationships in the Igbo society and the parenting style that they usually followed. It will outline the failure of parental figures in certain incidents with reference to the attachment theory. The paper will be analysing the relationship between Unoka and Okonkwo and its long term effect on Okonkwo, the relationship between Ikemefuna and Okonkwo and the relationship between Nwoye and Okonkwo. The paper will be discussing major events in these relationships and will compare it with the ideal style of parenting. To conclude, the paper would finally unearth parenthood in the Nigerian culture through the examples of parental figures.