By Neil ten Kortenaar
Interpreting photographs of literacy in African and West Indian novels, Neil ten Kortenaar appears at how postcolonial authors have thought of the act of writing itself. Writing arrived in lots of components of Africa as a part of colonization within the 20th century, and with it an entire global of book-learning and paper-pushing; of college and paperwork; newspapers, textbooks and letters; candles, storm lamps and electrical energy; pens, paper, typewriters and published kind; and orthography built for previously oral languages. Writing purely penetrated many layers of West Indian society within the comparable period. the diversity of writers is vast, and contains Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and V. S. Naipaul. The chapters depend upon shut interpreting of canonical novels, yet speak about normal subject matters and traits in African and Caribbean literature. Ten Kortenaar's delicate and penetrating remedy of those subject matters makes this a huge contribution to the starting to be box of postcolonial literary reviews.
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Sample text
As a new Christian challenged to take a stand against heathenism, Oduche decides to kill a python by stuffing its living coils into a box where he hopes it will ‘die for lack of air’ (50). The image of the box in which the python refused to die may have been suggested to Achebe by the title Azu Ndu. Oduche’s box, after all, could be labelled ‘Live Python’. 46 Paul Wearing’s graphic image of the snake in the box, the round in the square, on the covers of the African Writers Series editions of Achebe’s novel after 1986, reminds us that the book is itself an airless rectangular container filled with elements that have never been contained this way before.
That is, it will tell us something about the activity that I and the readers of this book, whoever and wherever, are engaged in now. Ch apter 2 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe Achebe’s Arrow of God is an extended meditation on what it means to write in Africa. The hearth scene in which Oduche reads while his mother tells a story radiates outward so that we find images of literacy everywhere in the novel, even where it does not appear on the level of the story. In particular, the experience of reading and writing informs three different narrative spaces integral to the novel:€the container so confining as to be suffocating, the straight line that cleaves through the natural world, and the small room with a single occupant receptive to a disembodied voice but disturbed by the voices of people outside.
The notion of Igbo remains incipient and vague. The prime level of identification continues to be the village and the clan, and there is as yet no sense of the Igbos as one ‘tribe’ among others, such as the Yoruba and the Hausa. By the time the novel is written, of course, there will be. All translators face the problem that an unwritten language is always a family of unwritten dialects. 90 Dennis did not, as Crowther had done for Yoruba, choose one dialect to be the standard written language. 92 In effect, the missionaries decreed that the people of Umuaro speak the same language as the ‘curious dialect’ that Ezeulu hears in Okperi, in which ‘Except for the word moon he could not make out what they said’ (163).