NEIL TEN KORTENAAR

FICTIVE STATES AND THE STATE OF FICTION IN AFRICA

Fredric Jameson has argued that all Third-World texts are national allegories where there is no room for private dramas, a sweeping generalization that suggests that the "Third World" is at once wholly other than the first world and guilty of belatedness.  I, too, want to characterize Third-World literature by focusing on the depiction of nation-states. However, in African literature—as in Caribbean and Latin American literature but unlike in Western European or North American Literature—what is often depicted is an anonymous or pseudonymous fictive nation that is in all important ways like the author's own and yet not the author's own. That most African novels appear to be set in recognizable nations does not affect my point—namely, that state borders are so uncertain in the African literary imagination, and particularly in the West African imagination, that it is always possible to imagine another republic called Kangan, Songhai, the Ebony Coast, Nakem-Ziuko, Congheria, or Kanem, or perhaps not called anything at all. Nor do authors who have invented fictive nation-states thereby display a superior or inferior imagination; they simply take advantage of the imaginative resources available to them in order to examine the conditions resulting from the colonial imposition of the system of nation-states in Africa

The convention of setting an otherwise realist novel in an anonymous or pseudonymous nation-state can be found in such African novels as Kourouma's The Suns of Independence, Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, Beti's Remember Ruben, Soyinka's Season of Anomy, Conton's The African, and Achebe's A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah. Other African texts whose settings cannot be located on a map because their frame of reference has no extratextual equivalent include Ben Okri's The Famished Road, the novels of Amos Tutuola, and Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The same convention makes possible such Caribbean islands as George Lamming's San Cristobal, the Isabella of V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men or Nigel Thomas's Spirits in the Dark, Harold Sonny Ladoo's Carib Island, Neil Bissoondath's Casaquemada, and the anonymous island settings of Austin Clarke's The Prime Minister, Caryl Phillips's A State of Independence, Dionne Brand's Another Place, Not Here, and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. Anonymous and pseudonymous African territories also figure prominently in European and American novels by Haggard, Céline, Waugh, Naipaul, Updike, Bellow, and Boyd. There is also a generic Latin America: for instance, the Costaguana of Conrad's Nostromo.

There are many reasons for imagining a fictive state, especially when writing about military dictatorships, but this essay is less concerned with motivation than with the potential for fictive substitution allowed by African states. Western narrattives about Africa often imply that, while Europeans are defined by the nations they belong to, non-Europeans are defined by their race. African novels that feature anonymous or pseudonymous states also imply that the continent and the race (frequently treated as if coterminous) are more integral to identity than is the state. But when the anonymous state resembles the writer's own, it cannot be a matter of indifference. Somewhat paradoxically, those African texts that feature anonymous and pseudonymous states are in fact most concerned with the state and its relations to civil society.

Franco Moretti asks, "Why do novels so often mix real geographical sites and imaginary locations? Are the latter needed for some specific narrative function? Are there, in other words, events that tend to happen in real spaces—and others that ‘prefer’ fictional ones?" In attempting an answer with regard to the African novel, I will first examine why anonymous states are impossible in Western Europe. The comparison with Western literature is instructive, not just because African writers are often writing about a world already mapped and defined by others elsewhere, but more importantly because Western literature provides a simpler answer than African literature does to Moretti's question.