“Real Africa”/“Which Africa?”: The Critique of Mimetic Realism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Short Fiction

Summary

People are expecting from literature serious comment on their lives. They are not expecting frivolity. They are expecting literature to say something important to help them in their struggle with life. That is what literature, what art, was supposed to do: to give us a second handle on reality so that when it becomes necessary to do so, we can turn to art and find a way out. So it is a serious matter. That's what I'm saying, and I think every African writer you talk to will say something approaching what I have just said — in different forms of words, except those who have too much of the West in them, and there are some people, of course, who are that way But the writer I am referring to is the real and serious African writer. I think you will find them saying something which sounds as serious, as austere, or as earnest as what I have just said.

(Chinua Achebe in Rowell 1990: 88)

A great deal of postcolonial literary criticism about African literature naturalizes the notion that African writers produce literary artwork whose primary function is the exposure of the atrocities of the colonial era — and the lingering effects of that era — in order to redress injustice via a true account of history. The idea is that, once people know this true story of their own history, they shall be more able to resist the psychological and sociocultural effects of imperialism and its attendant racist dogma. In the words of the epigram above, the ‘serious’, ‘austere’, ‘earnest’, and above all the ‘real’ African writer, who does not ‘have too much of the West’ in her, meets the ‘expectations’ of ‘the people’ by producing literature that has a positive, direct, material impact on the lives of African readers.