Desert ethics, myths of nature and novel form in the narratives of Ibrahim al-Koni This broadly comparative essay contrasts environmentalism in the fiction in English translation of the Libyan writer, Ibrahim al-Koni, with dominant trends in contemporary environmentalism. An analysis of three of the most ecocritically pertinent of the novels in English translation suggests that the natural world is viewed through the lens of the mythical, encompassing the religious worlds of both Tuareg animism, as well as monotheism represented by Islam and early Christianity. The novels to be considered are The Seven Veils of Seth, Anubis and The Bleeding of the Stone. Unlike environmental approaches which derive from the European Enlightenment of procedural rational disenchantment, human beings in Al-Koni's work are accorded a place in the sacred order which allows non-parasitic modes of existence within the framework of a sacred law. This conviction is articulated most powerfully through the symbol of the desert which inspires all of Al-Koni's work. The social and sacred desert ethic out of which Al-Koni's fiction is forged, strains at the form of the novel, the genre which constitutes and is constituted by an immanent, individual vision of the world. As a consequence, Al-Koni's narratives tend towards allegorical modes which highlight the radical complexity and simplicity of allegory.
The scarification in Aké is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka’s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically “opens” the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Aké is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba socio-cultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka’s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification.
Food studies are a productive lens through which to view the impact of social, cultural, historical and political shifts on conceptions of female identity. Nervous Conditions (1988) and We Need New Names (2013) are two novels which link the coming of age of two young women with the development of nationalism, in the first case, and the forced transnationalism of Zimbabwean refugees and exiles in the second. The story of these female and national identity transformations is conveyed, in part, through food—its production, sale, preparation, consumption, and cultural significance. The replacement of sadza and mbodza by the British cuisine of the 1960s in the novel of colonialism and national independence is paralleled in the replacement of food scarcity (symbolized by NGO beans, maize, and sugar) with the fast food of American consumer culture, and its impact on the Zimbabwean diaspora in the later novel of transnationalism. The centrality of the cultivation of mealies, which paradoxically both burdens and “liberates” in Nervous Conditions, occurs only as a pastoral backdrop to caricatured indigeneity in We Need New Names. In the later novel, the nutritional and cultural significance of maize is reduced to the mealie meal handed out by NGO workers. Maize’s centrality is replaced in We Need New Names by constipation-inducing guavas. But in this novel also, maize finally holds out the symbolic possibility of new senses of belonging and home.
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