“African dramatic form is the parallel movement of common elements through a system of condition, ritual, and change.”

The chair of a California university’s creative writing department once asked me what I was reading so that he could recommend some proper canonical literature. I told him Gil Scott Heron’s Nigger Factory and other such. I told him that I was reading books about me for once.

Yeah, he said, when he started as a writer, wanted only to read books about himself too and then began to discover others.

I told him we were crossing paths: He was venturing out into the world, and I was coming home because unlike most, Black imagination tends to start in foreign places and then, somehow, find its way home.

Too often Black imagination never finds “home” for getting tangled in the intentions of a non-African literary structure.

Indeed, for fitting ones imagining within the language of novels, sci-fi, speculative fictions and more, African descended authors hoping to break free of the horrors of oppression find themselves adopting self- contradicting devices with the hope that they will inspire something altogether new.

This is not always bad when done ironically, which is to say, in a way that plays with the colonial nature of modern literary form, as in Achebe’s ever-popular Things Fall Apart. 

At the same time, “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 asked by G.A. Heron to begin his introduction and close reading of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol. 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.”

African dramatic form is designed to help Afro-ethnic storytellers and image-makers reclaim the figure of “story” to create empathy, meaning, and movement in a way that dignifies and compels the African human experience. 

Next: The Problem of Anti-Blackness in Literary Imagination