I ONCE looked at the importance of ‘centredness’ in literary analysis in 2014 but it seems to me that a good number of my followers are still not quite clear what the role of positionality in literature is.
I presume a good number may have missed this crucial sermon and yet this is a finding of fact that has arisen from my recent interactions with high school students in Tsholotsho, Bulilima and Plumtree districts of Matabeleland North and South provinces of our dear country, Zimbabwe, respectively.
I am convinced that this gap of critical knowledge is not only experienced by these young citizens of our motherland.
You have also noticed from my just-ended series that some of our writers demonstrate a paucity of understanding of the significant relationship between art and responsibility to community. It is obviously a gap which even adults may wish filled.
That is why I am revisiting this urgent reminder, hopefully with greater clarity. And to do so, first, several key concepts would need to be simplified. These are theory, ideology, centredness, Africa-centredness and literary analysis.
To begin with, let me categorically state that all thinking involves some form of reference to already existing knowledge of one form or another.
A child born into a vacuum, for instance, cannot develop thinking abilities.
But if it is born into some form of wilderness where some form of reality exists, its perceptive skills begin to relate to that environment to begin to make sense of that world.
Thinking then begins. Yes it begins as an attempt to make connections between surrounding phenomena.
It also takes the form of beginning to understand itself in relation to its surroundings.
I guess this was the first original thinking of the very first human creature.
Thereafter, there would never be anything purely original as succeeding generations could only base their new thinking patterns on already existing schemata established by earlier generations.
In fact, parenting generations make conscious efforts to pass on the corpus of knowledge they have developed to succeeding generations which are then expected to build on these schema through creativity and innovation.
That is what you call formal and informal education today. Simple!
No-one creates new knowledge out of nothing.
That is the privilege of the gods. I am yet to come across a worthwhile research output that is not informed by the following key concepts: need/necessity/problem, objectives, key research questions and methodology (guiding philosophy, principles and practices as well as research design).
Take note: Both discovery and invention benefit from reference to already existing ideas about the reality around us.
You discover connections that already exist in nature.
Then you combine these connections to come up with new inventions to satisfy your community’s needs. Inventions that do not benefit society are not valued by it. Equally so the genius that creates it is dismissed with the contempt that it deserves.
What this means is that your community is the main reference point.
Another way of saying it is that: “Your community is your centre”.
And by the way everyone has got their own centre.
And these do not need to conflict; rather they should commune and share experiences in a mutually beneficial way.
However, where knowledge systems clash, wisdom dictates that you find refuge in your own centre. This is all we are saying.
Now what do you mean by theory of literature?
And why are we condemning the theories that have dominated colonial and post-colonial literary appreciation? I am sure that if you have been following the argument, you can hazard correct explanations, but lest you struggle, let me elaborate.
A lot of what we refer to as literary theory was developed in Europe, by Europeans, to understand European literature including Europe’s views about Africa.
By literary theory, we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean.
It can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts (from Europe as a centre).
All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: Theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—‘the literary’—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself.
In both cases, the ideas that inform the writer and the interpreter are unmistakably European. You only have to read Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness to understand that European distortion of the image of Africa is deliberately informed by Europe’s imperialist attitude towards the continent which is one of artificial contempt crafted to justify oppressing its people and looting its resources under the false guise of civilising it.
Chinua Achebe could not have made a better observation when he says Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness ‘fails to grant full humanity to the Africans’.
It betrays a perspective informed by a post-colonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism.
In fact, the literary theory that has been used by Africans during the colonial and post-colonial times emerged in Europe during the 19th Century.
In France, the literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art.
Both ideas do not reflect the African way of thinking.
In Africa-centred knowledge systems, biography is not enough in understanding the entire social milieu which is the subject of any writer’s work.
Perhaps the greatest 19th Century influence on literary theory palatable to African systems of thought came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘That facts are not facts until they have been interpreted’.
One could add that they also have to have contextual relevance. It falls squarely in our line of thinking which places ‘centredness’ at the centre of any interpretation.
The word ‘theory’ indicates a view or perspective of the European stage, not the African one. It assumes a system of ideas arrived at systematically through scientific experimentation, testing, validation and conclusion.
That is why we have so many claims to competing theories manufactured over different times to answer European needs of each epoch.
This is precisely what European literary theory offers, with some specific theories claiming to present a complete system for understanding literature.
This fact will be demonstrated in ensuing instalments where a sample of European theories will be examined closely.
Africans view literature holistically.
There are no competing African theories of literature.
There is complementarity.
There is harmony which derives from a clear understanding of the African cosmos. We do not talk hypothetically about ‘theories’.
We talk about ‘notions’ of literature which take inspiration from the same source of hunhu/ubuntu.