This book is about home. With Malawi as its focus, it seeks to understand ideas about home as expressed through poetry written by Malawians in English. Although African Literatures are studied those of Malawi have not received agreeable attention. This book surveys poetry by five Malawian writers Felix Mnthali, Frank Chipasula, Jack Mapanje, Lupenga Mphande, and Steve Chimombo. The discussion negotiates scribed experience of exile, engendered by Dr. Bandas regime, and shows that the selected poets effectively converse with a sense of home, reflecting on its transformations in their work. Interrogating the strict definitions of home, the argument highlights that far from home-less exiles in fact clarify the sense of what home is. The manoeuvre is one of thinking towards an unboundaried home. This book will be of value not only to readers interested in the cultures of Africa but to all those with an interest in worldwide literary phenomena, and ideas therein of home and exile.
The construction of an "Igbo epistemology," however, is as much a creative, narrative act as the creation of a personal narrative of home and exile. Intertextually, it creates links between Achebe's works and serves as a countertext to the assumptions of colonial narratives. Intratextually, its narrative elaboration provides what Riffaterre would call a subtextual "mirroring of the whole into one of its parts,"16 the most essential element for Riffaterre in creating fictional truth. Extratextually, it offers an explanatory interpretation of Igbo history: of its weakness in the face of "an enemy with a centralized power," and its flexibility in dealing with cultural dualities. Yet, I would argue, these "truths" are not mutually compatible and reinforcing, but mutually deconstructive, since each identifies truth or authenticity with a different locus: the extratextual with the biographical cum cultural quest for a counterpoise to "hundreds of years of sustained denigration we and our home had been subjected to in order to make colonization possible and excusable" (H 33); the intertextual with the wrestling match of texts for space and voice in a world which remains, Achebe writes, divided between two sides who will "never see the world in the same light" (H 77); and the intratextual with the effort of the autonomous author to create narrative truth, a different undertaking than winning the intertextual wrestling match.
Home And Exile Chinua Achebe Pdf Merge
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