African Literary Aesthetics: Continuity and Change

In literary discourse, one reads about poetic aesthetics very often but not much about literary aesthetics, especially when it concerns African literature. The aesthetics of the different genres tend to be isolated and discussed separately; hence poetic aesthetics, narrative aesthetics, and dramatic aesthetics tend to be treated in isolation of each other. While such a study of individual genres is simpler to undertake because of the uniformity of the generic features, a study of the aesthetics of literature also makes sense in a disciplinary manner as one would also look at art, music, and dance, among other artistic productions. This chapter therefore deals with the aesthetics of African literature in general, including traditional, modern, and contemporary literatures, as well as in all the literary genres as known today with emphasis on drama, fiction, and poetry.Only a few literary scholars have attempted discussing the aesthetics of African literature directly. Among the functions of the critic that Chinweizu and others enumerate in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature is "educating the taste of the public" (286-287). The strident condemnation of the euro-modernist tendencies of poets such as Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and J.P. Clark for their indebtedness to Western poetic traditions is meant to make the point of how difficult it will be for African readers to understand and relate to poetry written by African poets with borrowed techniques and poetic forms. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature may not have addressed the question of literary aesthetics directly but covers it in the general concern of a people's literature without regard to their environment and culture, especially their orature. To a large extent, the study of modern African poetry since the early 1980s, especially of its content and form, is incomplete without addressing the alarm that Chinweizu and his group raised in their controversial book.Another literary scholar that has contributed to the issue of literary aesthetics is Emmanuel Ngara whose three significant books, Stylistic Criticism & the African Novel (1982), Art & Ideology in the African Novel (1985), and Ideology & Form in African Poetry (1990), deal with African literary "modes" and form, aspects of the aesthetics of African literature. Despite the rigid ideological stand of inflicting Marxism on what has always obtained in Africa from time immemorial, the utilitarian function of art, as Marxist, his studies of African poetry and the novel are relevant works that attempt to deal with major aspects of African literary aesthetics. In Ideology & Form in African Poetry, he defines "aesthetic ideology" as referring to "the literary convention and stylistic stances adopted by the writer" (12). He admits that there are "several layers" of aesthetic ideology and identifies repetition and parallelism as well as the para-linguistic affective devices of myth, allusion, and irony as enabling poetic aesthetics. He makes the strongest case for African literary aesthetics as follows:In the process of reading, the reader and the text also enter into a dialectical relationship. There is no one-sided cause and effect relationship. The text bares itself to the reader, exposes its multiple layers of meaning and aesthetic effects and the reader responds by not only receiving what the text offers but also by injecting into it something of his or her perceptiveness, ideological insights and sensitivity. The reader and the text enter into a relationship similar to that of a man and woman making love (16-17).It is in subsequent chapters of the book that he deals with the poetic devices used to generate the aesthetic effects by the authors he selected to discuss. Ngara is an unapologetic Marxist in his approach and ignores the fact that literature is a cultural production. Still, his works on African poetry and fiction are few of a kind in the criticism of African literature. …