Nefertiti Van der Riese

SOSO ADAE, L3C

522 N. Central Ave.

#2082

nefertiti@sosoadae.com

vanderriese@email.arizona.edu

“Jinsi ya SOSOADAE: Using African Dramatic Form to Realize Black Fictions”

Panel 059: Theory and Method in African and African American Literatures

Friday, March 16, 2018

9:30-10:45am

Abstract:

Black literary imagination tends to start in foreign places and then, somehow, find its way home; although more often, it never finds home for getting tangled in the intentions of a non-African literary structure. This is not always bad when done ironically, say, in a way that plays with the colonial nature of western literary forms, as in Achebe’s ever-popular Things Fall Apart; but shouldn’t we wonder, “How many of these tools can a writer borrow before his African ideas are affected by the influence of foreign ideas implied in them?” This is in fact the question posed by G.A. Heron in his introduction and close reading of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol. Indeed, when African writers use non-African languages and non-African forms to express African ideas, run the risk of unintentionally borrowing from the “stock of common images,” that exist in that language and invariably “limit a writer’s manner of expression.” To this end, African dramatic form is designed to help African-descended storytellers and image-makers reclaim the figure of story to create empathy, meaning, and movement in a way that dignifies the African human experience. This presentation considers the problem of anti-Blackness in literature and introduces African dramatic form as a method for anti-racist, afro-autonomous story development and analysis. Through the substantive analysis of four African fictions, this essay will argue that using ADF for story development can help writers avoid “borrowing” anti-Blackness from non-African imagination, making their stories more empathetic, more meaningful, and more “Black.”

@sosoadae #FictionMatters