By Isidore Diala
In Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004), Isidore Okpewho harnesses the distinctive virtues of the African imagination and worldview to both complement and interrogate Western paradigms of knowledge. Where in his earlier novels The Victims (1970), Last Duty (1976) and Tides (1993) Okpewho conformed to the tradition of European realism, Call Me by My Rightful Name appropriates the techniques of magical realism that the novelist locates in African folk imagination. However, with both the techniques of orality and embodied textuality to excavate common bonds of black experience, Okpewho treads the challenging path between transvaluation and reification of colonial myths about Africa.
Keywords: Isidore Okpewho / colonialism / postcolonialism / oriki / magical realism
Call Me by Rightful Name is an exceptional novel in Isidore Okpewho’s oeuvre. Hitherto an innovative heir of the tradition of social and psychological realism in fiction, Okpewho in Call Me by My Rightful Name embraces magical realism as a mode that epitomizes the distinctive virtues of theAfrican imagination. Previously preoccupied with the fictionalization of pivotal historical and contemporary events in national life, Okpewho is here concerned with general black experience. It is a scholar’s novel, grounded in precise and verified information on oral African literature and in the methodologies of such study deriving from the author’s experience. Call Me by My Rightful Name, like the canonical work of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, has a scheme that is ultimately extra-literary. This is a consequence of its epistemological and selfconscious striving to illuminate African systems of belief and general worldview. Okpewho’s crucial claim, anticipated by these earlier African writers, is that the conception of life and death as complementary and interactive phases of existence crystallizes in the concept of reincarnation: life and death are in reality only relocations, and memories of previous incarnations are re-membered. In tracing the genealogy of an African American family back to its roots in Nigeria, using the oriki — a traditional praise poem — as a trope for collective memory, Okpewho makes the African concept of reincarnation metonymic of a general African worldview. That is, reincarnation is a representative figure incarnating cardinal virtues characteristic of the African vision of life.
`In this novel, Okpewho claims magical realism, a mode that abjures the objectivity that defines his earlier realistic novels, and does so not merely as a narrative technique, but even more importantly as a means of incorporating a distinctive (African) view of life as well as showing the possibilities in all human experience. Magical realism, characteristic of the writing of the postcolonial world, is a mode in which “the real and the surreal, reality and hallucination, the quotidian and the extraordinary” (Moudileno 32) mingle, thereby providing a distinctive way of apprehending that world. Thus, the mode of narration is not simply an arbitrary contrivance but is integral to Okpewho’s artistic vision and indicative of the narrator’s experience of life itself. Brenda Cooper underscores this fact when she contends that “magical realism arises out of particular societies— postcolonial, unevenly developed places — where old and new, modern and ancient, the scientific and the magical views of the world co-exist” (216). In Call Me by My Rightful Name, Okpewho consciously invokes magical realism and the worldview it epitomizes to measure contrasting rationalist Western modes of thought.1
Published in 2004 but set in the United States in the 1960’s, Call Me by My Rightful Name is primarily concerned with the distinctive heritage of African Americans and their responsibilities to and appropriations of that unique patrimony. The novel foregrounds the traumatic experiences that compel an apathetic young African American, Otis Hampton, into a consciousness of his identity and, moreover, to a commitment to the Civil Rights Movement, then at its historical peak. It takes the reader through the mysteries and complexities of the African world and beliefs. Otis’s pilgrimage to Nigeria, with a knowledgeable diviner as guide, is a generously annotated text that leads through the labyrinth of African culture apparently aimed especially at non-African readers.
The novelist’s compelling exploration of his protagonist’s transformation from Otis Hampton to Akimbowale Otis Hampton traverses varying concepts of literature, music, history, religion, politics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and education. It aims to affirm both cultural affinities and differences. It privileges naming as a revealing site of cultural distinction, as well as social valuation and contestation and, moreover, as pivotal in the understanding of the concept of “home.” For Call Me by My Rightful Name presents the African American’s search for his/her authentic name as inextricably linked with his/her search for a true identity and a true home. Thus, the novel seethes with political, cartographic, clinical, and metaphysical conceptions of home, and how these define one’s identity and ideas about life. Okpewho guides his protagonist through the signal motif of an ancient, interrupted ritual that is insistent on completion to achieve thereby the sobering apprehension of both the imperatives of history, the compulsions of blood, and the necessary dynamism required in negotiations of cultural and social transition. Thus Otis is led to reappraise “truth” and the varied approaches to it, as well as develop a nuanced conception of home.
In this essay, I examine Okpewho’s inscription of names as central in constructing identity and as integral to the concept of home. Considering the novelist’s foregrounding of naming in the title of his novel a crucial indication of his preoccupation in the work, I investigate both Okpewho’s insights into naming as deriving from a complex metaphysical worldview rooted in an African idea of birth and rebirth and a colonial scheme of negative attribution. Naming, derogatory name-calling, repeated invocations, incantatory oriki panegyric hailing, ululations, branding, and other diverse forms of denoting the self or the Other are presented by Okpewho as ideologically charged social codes that reflect and impinge on complex conceptions of identity, real or imagined. These codes indicate and, even more crucially, determine the caller’s valuation of the self and the Other’s humanity. Thus, two focal, contrasting social codifications are highlighted in the scheme of the novel: African onomastics rooted in self/communal-affirmation and exhortation to social transcendence and racist colonial stereotyping aimed at excluding the European Other from the “human family.”
The novelist’s exploration of “naming” as subversion and resistance is related to contemporary debates on the concept of “home” in discourses on the African diaspora. Also, as in his exploration of his protagonist’s metamorphosis, Okpewho’s dominant technique both reifies and complicates Homi Bhaba’s insights about the menace of colonial mimicry in its subtle defiant deviation from the mere replication of colonial models and prototypes. In Okpewho’s novel, Bhaba’s formulation of the “reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite” (86) illuminates the protagonist’s status as representative of colonial ambivalence and slippage. Initially a mimic man in his embodiment of colonial prejudices against Africa and the African, Otis is transformed into a figure of disruption. Experiencing Africa first hand and seeing through the delusions of the colonial stereotypes on which his prejudices had been built, he contests the assumed superiority of the “original” colonial copy and finally affirms his unique in-betweenness, his distinctive double consciousness and dual heritage.
By far the most well-known literary allusions in Nigerian literature to African cultural beliefs in reincarnation are arguably to the myth of “abiku.” The mythic “abiku” (its Yoruba name) or Ogbanje (its Igbo name), is an errant child who torments his/her earthly parents by choosing a destiny of recurring births and premature deaths. This mythic figure is crucial to the conception of Ezimma in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and is the subject of J.P. Clark’s poem, “Abiku,” and Wole Soyinka’s poem, “Abiku.” The abiku has perhaps received its most extended fictionalized treatment in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy. Writing in 2002, Douglas McCabe counts some thirty works in the corpus of written Nigerian literature in which “abiku” plays a crucial role (45). McCabe’s ideological reading of the “abiku” myth contests its homogenous interpretation and suggests its differentiation from the “ogbanje” myth by privileging its hegemonic role in Yoruba history and politics.2 However, his examination of traditional oral Yoruba texts about “abiku” — especially names, salutations, and praise-names — locates the myth in its deeper religious origins and sets in relief the compact between naming and African belief systems. Categorizing “abiku” names as primarily derogatory insults, veiled threats, or plangent supplications, McCabe argues that the appellations are also invoked as incantations aimed at breaking the “abiku” cycle and normalizing the human status of the errant child. The much-used depreciatory “abiku” name, “Aja” (dog), given its pejorative connotations in Yoruba culture, exemplifies name-calling aimed at shaming the “abiku” child into giving up its errancy, as well as dissuading his/her kindred spirits from desiring to reclaim him/her by disguising his/her true value. Examining an oriki salutation of the “abiku” in which the dog is also central, “Aja o maa ja kun, dakun ma lo Aja”, McCabe concludes: “As an oriki, the salutation evokes and affirms the powers of the abiku; as an incantation, it tries to reverse the flow of those powers and bring a new reality into being. The salutation’s central trope — the spatial confinement of an errant subhuman (‘Dog, don’t break your leash’) — is thus a self-conscious instrument of normalization, an attempt to reform a hypermobile delinquent (the abiku) into a stable citizen” (51).
As abuse, subterfuge, camouflage, or incantation, names embody powers that can procure desired palpable physical results because, though they derive from the supernatural, they nonetheless retain the capability to influence the supernatural. These beliefs illuminate the spiritual world of Okpewho’s narrative even when his subject is the much awaited triumphant homecoming of an abducted warrior father, rather than the dreaded return of an “abiku” child. Both the “abiku” torn between the contrasted invocations of his/her human family and spirit consorts and Okpewho’s protagonist seeking his identity through a landscape of emblematic names, share the experience of discovering the signal spiritual economy of names. Okpewho foregrounds this theme in an epigraph, a traditional spiritual whose persona is cast at the moment of his/her agonistic recognition of nameinvocation as a vehicle of spirit possession.
The epigraph to the first part of Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name epitomizes his insight into the invocation of names as an irresistible spiritual solicitation that strikes at the core of the individual’s being, leaving him deeply perturbed and pliable:
Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name
Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name
Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name:
Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, what shall I do?
This traditional spiritual anticipates the deep turmoil of Okpewho’s protagonist.The person invoked through repeated name-calling is in spiritual anguish because his/her name is part of a complex chain of beliefs that endows names with metaphysical value and accounts for the complexity of naming schemes. To name is often to assume the power to arrogate meaning; but to “name for,” on the other hand, is generally to seek to immortalize. In this latter case, names become emblematic memorials of the dead believed to be reincarnated in the young, and often recur in families. Naming therefore becomes a crucial way that societies remember and seek perpetuity. Thus, names invariably have power, even spiritual power, and are a potent weapon in ritual invocations. The utter helplessness of the person invoked in the traditional spiritual that Okpewho uses as an epigraph is an acknowledgement of a more powerful spiritual antagonist and anticipates his protagonist’s own lot.
In its repetitions, the traditional spiritual also approximates the incantatory invocations that typify the oriki, Okpewho’s pivotal cultural artifact for the archaeological excavations of his protagonist’s background. A ceremonial salutation chanted with the accompaniment of talking drums, the oriki epitomizes naming in its invocational form. It is a lyrical confirmation of an indisputable identity and status as each subject has his/her distinctive praise woven around his/her given, earned, and assumed names as well as accomplishments. It is also a society’s way of constantly revivifying its values by exalting its privileged forms of heroism and excellence. One’s oriki incarnates one’s identity, a self-image canonized by society and thus is the obverse of the colonialist projection of an undifferentiated generic identity of Europe’s Other. Significantly, even in its distorted form, the identity of Otis’s chant recited in the appropriate society is unmistakable. Okpewho uses the scholar-character, Bolaji Alabi, as a surrogate in the novel through whom he offers scholarly annotations on the oriki:
Among the Yoruba, poetry of this kind, which is called oriki, is used for saluting or describing the main attributes of persons (e.g., rulers, warriors, and hunters) or objects (e.g., wild animals which the hunters meet in the bush). The oriki used for one person or object can hardly be used for another person or object. This is why it would help to be sure whether the person named in this song is Akindiji or Akindeji.
However, I should add that if you sang an oriki like this one in the area from which it came, the citizens of that area would be able to tell you the family that owned it even if you got the name slightly wrong. This is because a family’s oriki (or oriki orile, as it is generally called) often carries attributes that belong to that family alone. (72)
The strength and depth of Okpewho’s insights do not derive only from an insider’s intimacy with the cultural institutions of his people: he is also a preeminent scholar of African oral literature. The traditional spiritual equally delineates Okpewho’s evaluation of the African ancestry of the African American as indicating a profound link. His protagonist receives the call to attain this defining consciousness as an irresistible spiritual soliciting. The subliminal voice that beckons Otis on to a realization of his African heritage is identified as that of Ifa divination and is graphically represented in the text in italics as disruptions in Otis’s stream of consciousness or as breaks in the narrative voice. Expectedly, Otis’s instinctive response is incomprehension and unease:
Boston, Massachusetts. A voice came one night to Otis Hampton as he slept. It spoke in a strange tongue [. . .] Otis had not woken suddenly, as from a bad dream. There had been no dream. So he remembered nothing when he woke up in the morning. He had heard none of these words. They had not been spoken into his ears, but
implanted into his instincts. From this point, he was conscious only of a burden of duty he could not grasp. (3)
Like the protagonist in Okpewho’s epigraph, Otis is aware of a virtual hypnotic pull that he is helpless to resist, coming from a source he cannot fully understand. By locating this experience between sleep and wakefulness, Okpewho accentuates the liminal space occupied by his representative African American protagonist.
However, in the description of Otis’s compulsive telepathic response to the eventual irruption of that voice in the insistent rhythm of African talking drums, Okpewho dramatizes this apparent mental turbulence as symptomatic of spirit possession: “A strange sensation is creeping over him. Not of cold nor of warmth. Some kind of agitation. First it’s mild, but soon it grows to a throb. His arms and legs begin to shake” (Call 6). The emphasis is not only on his macabre dance, but also on his incomprehensible verbal supplement to the music: “Now his lips are shaking, rattling some incomprehensible sound”; “Otis is ejaculating his strange speech with even greater agitation” (6). His brief moment of respite coincides with the temporary cessation of the music as his frenzy resumes on his further exposure to the “flourish of drum music:” “Again he is driven into a state of frenzy, his whole body shaking, his mouth ejaculating strange, unintelligible words, and his fingers now working free of the wheel as though being steadily pried by an invisible hand” (Call 7). Okpewho highlights the compact between African American experience and the Caribbean with the African in his protagonist’s similar response to Jamaican music, with a frightful display. His body jerks in powerful movements, somewhere between boogie-woogie and St. Vitus’ dance. For a very tall man the scene is better imagined than witnessed. Now and then he rears in a menacing leap. From his mouth sounds of an unintelligible language issue forth. He has a grin on his face, yet he hardly seems to be enjoying the exertions. (38)
In all these instances, the common denominators of Okpewho’s descriptions of Otis’s speech and dance are apparently the grotesque and maniacal. In spite of himself, Otis is a possessed medium in a state of entrancement, completely overwhelmed by the force whose incarnation he becomes, and whose oracular voice he assumes. In an early examination of Nigerian playwrights’ theatrical appropriation of trance as manifested in indigenous African ritual and festival, Dapo Adelugba draws attention to the centrality of equestrian metaphor in the discourse of possession. He remarks: “The spirit rides the person and the possessed is synonymous with the spirit for the duration of the possession” (205–206). Adelugba’s insights derive from investigations focused primarily on the Hausas and the Ijaws of Nigeria. However, Christopher Balme extends the scope of Adelugba’s comments in his remarks on the presiding metaphor of the horse in Elesin’s final, long, pretrance- dance speech in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and its relevance to Elesin’s imminent possession: “Not only is he the king’s horseman, but the notions of horsemanship, riding, and being ‘mounted’ by a spirit are integral to Yoruba spirit possession. Expressions such as ‘make my limbs strike earth like a thoroughbred’ or ‘the stallion will ride in triumph on the back of man’ abound and not only refer to the notion of the possessed person being ‘ridden’ by the spirit, but also reflect aesthetic principles” (217). Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman illuminates Otis’s experience, especially because the dead Alafin in that play also speaks through a medium, the Praise Singer, to his horseman. Okpewho’s novel is not only consciously located in a non-rational African tradition, it also alludes to African literary expressions of cultural beliefs deriving from that tradition and rooted in such concepts as reincarnation, spirit possession, and the manifestation of ancestors to the living through the activity of particular cults. He moreover retains the pivotal role of music and dance in the achievement of entrancement or possession in both the traditional cultural practice and the literary heritage he appropriates.
Thus, Okpewho’s fixation on music has both specific and general explanations. The iterative references to music highlight it as fundamental to Otis’s mysterious malady and thus subtly indicate the novel’s gradual and careful building up of the various particulars that will authenticate the resolution of that mystery. Music is, moreover, linked to the ceremony associated with African naming of which the oriki is the great exemplar. As performed panegyric poetry accompanied by music, the oriki appropriates the celebratory impact of music for the public lionization of the accomplished oriki subject. “Fragmentary quotations from past texts — histories, songs, proverbs, local gossip, and so on — are cobbled together in surprising ways to capture whatever is most noteworthy and distinctive about a subject at the present moment” (McCabe 61). When the context of the oriki performance is a funeral, as it is in Call Me by My Rightful Name, the laudatory invocation of enduring human accomplishments remains an integral component of the symbolic valorization of the value of life in spite of death. But while validating the centrality of music in African culture and the roles it plays as a crucial marker of identity, given the distinctiveness of oriki appellations to the subject of its praise, Okpewho also makes his protagonist’s initiation into African music the occasion to explicate its peculiar nature. Deliberately disavowing the inclination to repeat the notes of the human voice, African instrumental music, unlike the Western, instead strives to play corresponding notes. Typically using a surrogate, Okpewho explains through Chip, who guides Otis:
[I]n European music, both voice and instrument generally express themselves in the same notes. The next time the same tune is played, you may be damn well certain they’re going to do exactly the same thing. That’s because the musicians think that, like scientists, they’ve achieved a system that should be capable of being reproduced again and again. The system has been established in the form of a musical score, with notes carefully written down, so anyone who wants to play the music can follow the notes faithfully. But African music is basically different. It relies on the principle
of challenging one set of notes with a corresponding set of notes without actually changing the structure of the music. (209)
Abjuring scientific objectivity, the procedures of African music, much like those of magical realism, are described as “poetic” (210). The African musician is depicted as adopting a glancing or indirect approach to the melody and as having the basic challenge to create something new yet related to the melody he is given. This approach establishes the kinship between African music and jazz as they both operate on the “basis of chords or a block of notes that can be lifted from one context and transferred to another where it takes on a life of its own [. . .] The challenge is to play the borrowed phrase in another song, like a quotation [. . .] This way, the chord or block of notes becomes a code representing a unit or concept that could be used in a wide range of contexts where they would fit, without disrupting
the even flow of sounds in the new context” (209–210). This insight enables Otis to appreciate that given their mobility, the coded phrases invariably become the peculiar texture of drum sounds. He thus approaches an understanding of the impact of drum music on him: “[S]ince Africans moved from here to America, taking their drums along with them, some of these peculiar codes have a chance of cropping up whenever drums are played. If I am a reincarnation of my enslaved ancestor, as everyone seems convinced I am, I can see why some drum sounds, buried deep in memory since the traumatic moment of his capture, might excite certain sensations in me every time I heard drums play” (211–212).
However, by citing the British scholar, Carrington, and the Ghanaian
scholar, Nketia, to dispute colonial imputations of primitivism to African music, Okpewho is also fascinated by African music as a fundamental site of colonial denigration. His depictions of Otis’s frenzy offer deliberate parodies of the dance which are, however, consistent with colonial representations of the African dance as demonic. In Conrad’s influential representation of Africa in Heart of Darkness, images abound of Africans without language, except, perhaps, monkey-like chattering, and in wild frenzied gyrations. Conrad’s narrator in the novel describes African speech as a “violent babble of uncouth sounds” (69) and refers to “certain midnight [African] dances ending with unspeakable rites” (118). Typically, the same narrator’s apprehension of a probable African performance with a sense of cultural superiority turns a white man’s ignorance into the Black man’s damnation:
“[. . .] a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping,
of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage [. . .] The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us — who could tell?” (96). The ascription of greater authority to the parodic gaze denies agency to the undifferentiated herd it describes in spite of the suggestion of activity by the iterative use of the gerund. With reverberative effects, Okpewho’s caricatures mimic the absolutes of colonial writing. He thus extends and deepens his insights with regard to the derogatory naming of Africans and African culture to justify their exclusion from “civilized” Western categories.
Okpewho’s often oblique reinscription of colonial discourse assumes familiar material form when Otis is called “monkey face” (23) in a basketball game by a white player in an opposing team. Okpewho, however, goes beyond name-calling to reveal that the enduring myth of Africa as the primordial jungle with its chattering monkeys constantly mutates and, moreover, is naturalized to account for Africans’ physiognomy. It is not until its implosion that Otis becomes fully cognizant of this guise. He muses: “you could reasonably tell an African. Something about the way they walked. It is said that, while African Americans walked with a cocky swagger, Africans picked their every step because they had trouble adjusting
from swinging on branches to walking on paved ground” (41). The policeman who calls Otis “asshole” (9) on the night of his initial frenzy and considers him and his girlfriend, Norma, “Motherfuckers” (10) demonstrates the aim of denigrating name-calling: an apparent justification for denying the Black Other human dignity. Like Otis asserting his self-worth in defiance of racist imputations, Norma refuses to be treated like “animals” (9). The policeman’s conduct in the episode illuminates Norma’s earlier anxiety about two Blacks, she and Otis, being apprehended in the car by the police at night. Her fears are both of unwarranted persecution and negative attribution. The ascription of criminality to Blacks is a component of the complex colonial myth-making that name-calling helps to entrench.
“Monkey,” “asshole,” “black,” “nigger,” and later “slave” and “native” could be designated as attributive “social names” and are not appellations with which we signify kindred humans; they designate instead the Other and constitute part of the ideological baggage meant to justify imperialism, the institution of slavery and its aftermath, especially Jim Crow laws and the lynching and burning of blacks. These evils could not be deemed inhuman if they were not committed against humans. Sartre’s renunciation of European humanism as an ideology of lies aimed at extenuating European aggression is insightful here: “[. . .] the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to justify the settler’s treatment of them as beasts of burden. Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them” (13). Social names are never neutral: they embody powerful and highly consumable mythologies, have currency, and are particularly easy to deploy because they are relatively concise. Okpewho foregrounds corresponding discursive practices in colonial Africa and the civil rights scene in America during the 1960’s.
Okpewho’s reinscription of colonial discourse in Call Me by My Rightful Name is meant in part to draw attention to the rise of American imperialism and its inevitable inheritance of and entrenchment in the old, notorious vices. The privileged location of the American embassy as a site of power is stressed: “The U.S. embassy is at the south end of Broad Street, close to the hub of political power in Nigeria’s capital city. Looking southwest across Broad Street, one can see the lagoon along the Marina Drive. There stands State House, residence of the country’s president [. . .] the American embassy is situated on prime territory from which it can witness and, when necessary, influence events in Nigeria’s political life” (108). There are also revealing references to riots that arise as a consequence
of alleged American intentions to establish a military base in Nigeria, as well as because of imperialistic American designs in Vietnam. Moreover, in his conversion of his African driver into a beast of burden, his contemptuous remarks on Nigerians and the Hamptons’ slave ancestry and his zealous flaunting of American power as in his dealings with the Baale, the American envoy, Bigelow, is a familiar character in African fiction. Ostensibly emancipated from slavery, the African American remained emasculated by institutionalized discrimination that necessitated the Civil Rights Movement, which later attracts Otis’s sympathy and commitment. However, Okpewho’s more important concern is African Americans’ inheritance of colonial prejudices against Africa (which the likes of Bigelow epitomize) and the spiritual trauma that results from accepting that heritage.
Adetayo Alabi has appropriately located Call Me by My Rightful Name in the crucial context of Back-to-Africa Movement, which was part of the Civil Rights Movement, and in the context of African spirituality (146). Alabi pays some attention to Otis’s great-grandfather, a slave whose African name was corrupted to “Daley” and who was given his master’s surname, “Hampton,” as well as to Otis’s aunt, Ella Pearl. Alabi stresses the fact that the former is described in the novel as “a good man. Stubborn Af’can. Didn’t let no man give him no horse shit” (18), while the latter is the president of a group called “Daughters of Africa,” whose mission is to redeem the “[. . .] ‘true’ facts of Africa’s history and culture from the ‘tarnishment’ of white prejudice, giving firm support to the call by Marcus Garvey and the UNIA for a return of Negroes to Africa” (18). The critic then moves to the rather inaccurate conclusion: “The stubbornness of Otis’s great grandfather, Daley Hampton, shown in his use of ‘silence as a discreet strategy of self-preservation’ (18), and Ella pearl’s [sic] involvement with ‘Daughters of Africa’ suggest that Otis is born into a long line of people conscious of the ‘realities of race’ and who resist it in various ways. Looking up to Africa in the context of the time becomes, of course, a crucial way of challenging their racialized society” (146–147). Thecritic’s assumption in reality becomes a revelation that the novel’s protagonists attain only through their disquieting experiences.
To be continued
This essay, which was first published in Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 4, won the 2014 NLNG Prize for Literarry Criticism). Prfofessor Isidore Diala teaches in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Imo State University, Owerri.