Characteristics of Absurdist African Literature: Taban lo Liyong's Fixions—A Study in the Absurd

Extract

The absurd, both as an element of satire and as a style in its own right, has always been manifest in African literature both oral and written. However, in an effort to redirect the focus of African literature and criticism from eurocentricism to a literature and criticism informed by African aesthetics, vocal African critics like Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike have persistently condemned the encouragement of modernist tendencies in African writing (1980: 239): “If African literature is not to become a transplanted fossil of European literature, it needs to burst out of the straightjacket of anglomodernist poetry and of the ‘well made novel’.” Their advice to African critics is that the latter must “liberate themselves from their mesmerization with Europe and its critical canons” (p. 302) and must stop encouraging “the manufacture of a still, pale, anemic, academic poetry, slavishly imitative of 20th-century European modernism, with its weak preciosity, ostentatious erudition, and dunghill piles of esoterica and obscure allusions, all totally cut off from the vital nourishment of our African traditions ” (p. 3).

The antagonism of these critics toward modernism appears to be based on a seemingly incontrovertible evidence (Chinweizu, 1973: 8):

There was a specific burden of tradition that Western modernism reacted against in its revolt. But however familiar we may be with all that; however familiar we may be with that tradition or with the various modernist against it (Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, etc.) they are not part of our history. They do not belong to our past….