رسائل دكتوراة
English
2008
Linguistic and Intentional Hybridity, or the African Aesthetics of Proverbial Quoting in Selected Novels by Ayi Kwei Armah
GuendouziI Amar
كلية الاداب واللغات-جامعة مولود معمري - تيزي وزو · الجزائر
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 themappropriation and abrogation. Abrogation, on the one hand, is a disjunctive process whichinvolves the rejection of the Western language and its culture, because it perceives them asremnants of the colonial past. Appropriation, on the other hand, is not as clear cut. It looksfor accommodation rather than rejection. It involves two languages, two cultures in anegotiation process that attempts to create local meaning, a particular worldview, withforeign words. Postcolonial literature, therefore, grows out of a tension, an agon, in thepoetic imagination of the writer, torn as he is by these two creative impulses, these twoideological postures.Translated into the discursive categories of hybridity, appropriation andamalgamation correspond to Bakhtin’s typology of hybrid discourses (1992): the organic,"unintentional, unconscious" hybrid, and the deliberate “intentional” hybrid. The former isthe discourse in which the mixture of languages is fused into a new system, which elicits thehistorical evolution of all languages, whereas the latter is the "internally dialogic" form, inwhich languages and ideologies are consciously set against each other. Bakhtin sees the firstkind of hybrid structure as characteristic of any living, evolving language, while heassimilates 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 partand parcel of a natural process in language and cultural contact. Bakhtin explains that theyare 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 todialogize hybridity; an artistic intention that produces disjunction rather than fusion. Theaim of this disjunctive type is separation, because it is essentially a contestatory site of morethan one discourse, with one of them trying to unsettle, disarticulate the other discoursesrepresenting authority. For Bakhtin, therefore, hybridization, best concretized in the novel, isclosely linked to subversion of authority.Applied to the modern development in creative writings in Africa, organic hybriddiscourse 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 theBakhtinian terms, was born among African popular writers as a result of a generationalconflict between the elderly and the young. At the level of linguistic performance, includingliterature, the young popular writers affirmed their social status vis-à-vis the elderly, whomanipulated 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 withwhich words are eaten. But in the acculturated context of the colonized society, the quotationreplaced the proverb in its function of putting across and articulating arguments related tosocial issues such as money, corruption, gender relations etc.Unlike market popular writers, Africa’s international novelists seem to have resortedto intentional hybrid forms in their novels. Moved by deep nationalist convictions, thesefiction writers assimilated their creative task to the nationalist struggle for political liberationand 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 andanxiety 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 Africannovel may also exist side by side. In our view, the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah is anovelist whose poetic imagination accords equal importance to the intentional and organichybrid discourses. It is true that in his extra-literary writings he has encouraged critics to seethe 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 parallelsbetween his two first novels and many novels belonging to European writers, mainly thefictions 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 thepopular novelists, whose imagination was lit up by the poetic fire of their Westerncounterparts.Our interest in Armah’s novels is also sustained by the recent orientation in culturalstudies towards the issue of hybridity. This aspect of his work has been overlooked by thecritics of his early novels, written in the 1960’s and 1970’s, long before the translation ofMikhail Bakhtin’s works on the discourse of the novel and the publication of Homi Bhabha’sground-breaking study The Location of Culture (1994). Subjected to literary and ideologicalcategories which borrowed mostly from the existential ideology of Jean Paul Sartre, thesenovels were rejected on the basis that they lacked authenticity and commitment. In otherwords, The Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? weremisread because they were not timely; timely in the sense that they demanded criticalcategories that were not yet fully fledged at their time of publication. Today, with the recentpublications on hybridity, Armah’s novels can be said to have become, in Nietzsche’s term,timely.
