Belief in Our Judgment, Faith in Ourselves: Using ADF to Write More Human Stories

On The Character of African Fiction

It has always been my sense that the African imagination urges, perhaps, more than anything that everything is story; that there is a requisite character to story; and that without these stories, we cannot build personal and greater identities and therefore cease to exist.

My own literary imagination is partly informed by my childhood experience with conventional literary imagination as well as my personal and professional relationship with literature as a writer and student. I remember reading nothing in school, and very little thereafter, that wasn’t perfectly degenerating, regressive, and an insult to Black being.

I remember approaching the desk of my ninth grade Honors English teacher, with the text The Once and Future King, and telling her that I would not like to read another book with the word “nigger” in it if no one else in the class would be expected to regularly submit to and intellectualize similar insults, relevant each to his or her own race.

She said there was nothing she could do, she didn’t make the rules, she just followed them… So it goes that the master’s tools won’t bring down the master’s house, but to this I say, let us dare to break the rules as we take up the master’s tools.

As an English major, I found some relief evaluating assigned texts in their intended opposite form, contrary to Black being. I did not look for “universal values” to appropriate and commiserate with my own. I could hardly do so if I would, without neglecting the conscience of the work, in order to digest what’s left. Instead, I started by looking for the basic elements, how the author used color, movement, and audience. How the author defined humanity and justice. I found further resource in evaluating the “white literary imagination,” using the method tetranalysis, as coined and presented in the work of playwright, professor, and activist Dr. Arthur J. Graham, who unpackaged the algorithm for racist imagination in his 1979 dissertation, The Manichean Leitmotif: The Psychology of Racism in American Fiction, and in his most recent work, Southern Renaissance (2012).

As a reader, I find it significant that there are no Black literary roles I would model myself after. There are plenty of fascinating white ones to play if I could suffer the change of color and conscience, but no Black literary “heroes” that define a particular or significant role in the canon, for better or worse.

I would not want to be in any of Zora Neal’s books. Not one of Toni Morrison’s. And yes, Maya, the white man has long known that I have diamonds between my thighs, so I will say “no thank you” to that position as well.

There is notably no redemption, no place, no future for the Black hero, or Heru; just a tragic complacence for injustice at the hands of anyone.

If our authors are so encumbered for vision, should we be surprised to find ourselves, as a people, altogether lost?

An African proverb carries the memory that “children are the wisdom of a nation.” I would add that storytellers, griots, are the children of ages.

My work as a storyteller, and then informally as a researcher, is interested in the character of universal African literary imagination with emphasis on the elements, or character, of African fiction and the idiom of “ironic imagination” as a means of navigating foreign influences and intellectual imperialism.

Everything we do is a contribution to culture. The literature we write or read, depending on its methods and its outcomes (its vision), means any “mix” or “influence” will contribute more to one side, or tradition, than another. It is not enough to simply “write about” the singularly African phenomenon we discover and are inspired by in a western context, the writer must write within and to these phenomena, making their contexts the model for their stories.

In An Essay On African Philosophical Thought, Kwame Gyekye (pronounced “je-che”) defines tradition as the “philosophy of a people” while also owing that tradition “requires…its elements be related among themselves in a meaningful way, that they endure and be sustained, and that they be the subject of continuous pruning and refinement.” Gyekye defines African philosophy as “the product of the rational, reflective exertions of an African thinker, aimed at giving analytical attention or response to basic conceptual issues in African cultural experience.” Therefore, we might infer Gyekye’s definition of an “African thinker” from his position on the question of ‘influences,’ to which Gyekye notes that “alien elements” can only “enrich a tradition [if] such a tradition [is] already standing on its own feet, as it were.”

How then do we get African fictive imagination on its own feet, as it were?

For the purposes of storytelling and defining the character of an ‘African literary model’ we might easily exchange Gyekye’s expectations of ‘African philosophical imagination’ for our expectations of an ‘African literary imagination.’ African literary imagination, as philosophy, will therefore ‘analyze and reflect basic conceptual issues in African cultural experience;’ and we might take the implied definition of an ‘African thinker’ being one ‘standing on ones own African feet’ and apply that same expectation to an ‘African author,’ to say that an African thinker and an African author must be solely invested in African input and outcomes in each their respective craft.

Gyekye’s distinction insofar as tradition is significant because it mandates that in order to take “influence” a culture must first be under its own weight or imagination. The sense implied here is that a culture or tradition that will assume influences without being under its own weight is a culture imperialized or otherwise suffering under hegemonized imagination and intellectual colonization. The “diverse” efforts of this culture to “assimilate,” “prove itself,” or otherwise stand on its own will only serve to contribute to its own demise more than these efforts could ever firmly establish an autonomous society or “nationhood” of its own.

This statement, that modernity is the evolution of self, not the self to others, suggests that the African American, African Diasporic, and African Continental literary traditions are more so presently contributing to a dominating western culture than they are establishing, enriching, nourishing, modernizing a singular and universal African sense and tradition. African and African diasporic literary traditions must therefore be re-imagined and the present ‘canon’ redistributed as category to a more universal and African focused literary context instead of demonstrating and emphasizing a “universal” allegiance to a singular and more Europeanized justice (outcome).

I believe that truly African storytelling will demonstrate fiction that is both self-aware while giving “something more,” where the primary goal is not simply uncovering or fostering resentment.

These “missing feet” otherwise tend to leave us with a frustrated culture of contrarians given to disintegrating and dis-integration as opposed to integration and interdependent imagination among Black people; in such a mind, liberation is an eternal process, never achievable, and “the black race” constantly expected to divide into more “perfect” parts (determined more so by narrow and violent exclusion).

Storytelling that carries the appropriate character makes ‘liberation’ a short-term goal and is quite honest about dramatizing its resentments along the way.

It can therefore be concluded that education is not our problem more than imagination and, as Alice Walker states, ‘belief in our judgment and faith in ourselves.’

This essay will not elaborate on “ironic imagination” as a method of transit one might take from a Euro-focused imagination to a more African centered one but will briefly describe the character of African literary imagination as the African and African diasporic author might properly consider.

It would be beneficial for Black storytellers to re-imagine the popular and conventional creative tropes and models such as “The Hero’s Journey” and the “Elements of Fiction.”

The Hero’s Journey is not particularly fitting or properly defined for black people given that African imagination concerns we, not I. If one knows nothing about African ‘philosophy,’ has at the very least heard of “call and response.” This very simple exchange demonstrates the “we” and should inform the modern writer, to say that the “reader” is not a novelty of the story but a necessity. “Call and Response” carries multiple dimensions, but should very simply imply that there is no single “hero” in African fiction that is not somehow trying to inform the “we” and no ‘hero’ that is not informed by the “we.” The story telling is about no single person but relevant to us, where the significance is not an afterthought. It also suggests a needed sense for “interdependence” among “individuality,” even between writer and reader.

The black writer might also re-imagine the elements, or character, of fiction as the concentric relationship between four elements: reflection, wisdom, morality, and community, where reflection concerns an identity; wisdom, vision and memory; morality, the principles of right and wrong; and community, the greater identity or the “we.”

This does not mean such fiction is simply an allegory written to reflection, wisdom, morality, and community, but that the story carries the body, or character, of these elements.

Consider, for example, that the impetus for story in western imagination comes traditionally by overcoming an obstacle, and that fiction, therefore, is essentially concerned with a “protagonist” who is presented with an obstacle that he “needs” to overcome. This is the basic build of “odysseys” and “horror movies” in the western “literary” imagination—that one must find their “I” and overcome obstacles to the “self.”

Ironically, the black writer could pull “Africanness” into an “I” and push a story forward in that way, but it still has to be satisfied in a wholly African sense to be both African and well, satisfying.

Chinua Achebe demonstrates “ironic imagination” quite well in Things Fall Apart, in which he uses a European tragic form to tell a “universally” African story in which the African universe prevails if the African people do not. Though many are critical of his novel, I take some satisfaction in the fact that the missionaries, in fact white “alien” imagination, become the embodiment of The Evil Forest and the ultimate realization of African fear, and that the African “oracle” is the foremost universal authority given it is more correct in its pronouncements than Christianity. If one has any familiarity with “critical reading” of Western tradition and/or the African American literary ‘canon,’ these little benefits of Achebe’s novel cannot be taken lightly.

Things Fall Apart is not only “ironic” in imagination but as well holistically African, given that Achebe is trying to tell black people a story about Africa through the reflection, or identity, of Okonkwo and his subsequent suicide after ‘the community,’ or Igbo clansmen, become cowards and are incapable of change, to include reintegration of their lost souls and a general renewal within all of the diverse African universe. Okonkwo’s cowardice, then, leads us to the greater cowardice of the Igbo people, and by them, the greater cowardice of African people leading ultimately to us, the shame-filled reader, who has, by their lead, become disconnected with faith in our selves and a collective vision/wisdom of our own, thus failing morality.

Therefore, African imagination essentially comes by the joining (interrelationship or interplay) of the four elements listed, which is to say that African drama, at origin, is driven by the satisfaction, or full realization, of all elements, even by omission or deforming of one or more. The African imagination can easily be understood as a system of becoming. The Igbo could not reconcile the parts, thus they did not become something that could overcome their “pacification.” They thus remain content in quarrelling with their brothers and sisters.

The purpose of African story is to educate, inspire, and entertain. The storyteller high and low carries this responsibility. To understand Okonkwo as an I does not yield the same story as “Things Fall Apart,” we. I would argue it is a lesser story, less determined, less coherent, less relevant than its place in the whole, but wholly relevant to the greater story. If an author feels there is something “missing” in his or her own fiction, might find it is the pattern of these elements. The challenge to include all four is what will no doubt give ones work that “something” more.

It is no longer enough to take for granted that “elements” were appropriated from African civilizations “long ago” and that we can simply appropriate, or as Gyekye says, “contribute” to the greater western tradition and “hope it becomes our own.” It is not enough to notice “here and there” traces of African-ness in our friends, family, and acquaintances and say that, by this, we are all “all right.” It is similar to finding an unconscious body under rubble and leaving it with no further assistance simply because it is breathing, since breathing is what the living do. To do so is to celebrate a suffocating, dying humanity.

As Achebe teaches us in Things Fall Apart, if we are not willing to make the necessary changes within the breadth of our great and universal African tradition, there is nothing the old ways can teach us. They will simply sit down and wait for us to come around, another two thousand seasons.

“[H]aving received their philosophical training mostly in western countries, such as Britain, France, and the United States, or [from institutions] based largely on the education systems of these countries, contemporary African philosophers are more likely than not—in fact predisposed—to be greatly influenced by that training in their conceptions of the nature of African philosophy: to think, for instance, that a philosophical heritage must be a written one, and that, in the absence of an indigenous written philosophical heritage, what they can—and must—do is simply take over the entire corpus of a philosophical tradition developed in some other cultures and contribute to the appreciation of that tradition in the hope that some day it will become their own.”

—Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought

“ There is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to explore, forbidden to question or to know. Looking back on my parents’ and grandparents’ lives, I have often felt overwhelmed, helpless, as I’ve examined history and society, and especially religion, with them in mind, and have seen how they were manipulated away from a belief in their own judgment and faith in themselves.”

—Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved