Untitled - witz cultural

350HYPERTEXT 3.0 out that "the importance of orality in the first generation of [postcolonial]novels certainly eluded the first generation ofreaders and critics, whose responsesdefined European approaches to the novel for half a century" (33).Jayalakshmi V. Rao has catalogued dozens of the proverbs Chinua Achebecites in Anow of God, Things Fall Apart, and No Longer at Ease, and she alsoshows his use of folktales in his writings. In Antills of the Savannah, Ikem'sspeech to his countrymen who have come to the capitol to inform the governmentof their plight, like many such addresses in recent African novels,attempts to recreate the glories of an oral culture within the novel, the genreWiwa's 'A Death in Town," though far briefer, works in much the same wayby demonstrating the force and elegance of the speaker's words.The central importance of the colonial importation-andthat epitomizes print culture. Duzia's funeral oration for Adda in Ken Saro-impositionofwriting and print on indigenous oral cultures problematizes Ngugi WaThiong'o's famous decision to abandon writing novels in English and thenceforthwrite only in his native language, Gikuyu. Ngugi's declaration prompteda fiery often bitter debate, containing, as it had to, claims of authenticity andrevolutionary commitment. I don't propose to rehearse these debates again,but I would like to draw attention to a set of associated issues, which placethe entire subject in an important light. Following Mcluhan and Goody, Iwant to emphasize that the movement from an oral to a print culture bringssuch radical changes in conceptions of self, authorship, society, and verbalarts that the question of which language is more authentic to a particularindigenous people seems incredibly ill-conceived. Whether writing inGikuyu or English, Ngugi thinks and expresses himself in a way foreign toprecolonial times. This is not all. The modern novel, a literary genre thatderives from-andepitomizes-print culture, represents a major Europeaninfluence on a colonized people. The novel, in other words, is a major colonialimposition on African and other oral cultures. One can appropriate it,and turn it against its originators: think of Wide Sargasso Sea's rewriting ofJane Eyre or Jack Maggs as a rebuttal to Great Expectations. But one simplycannot wite an authentic work of orality. Of course, there are many politicaljustifications for promoting the language of a nation newly freed from animperial power, and one does not have to go to Africa for examples of languagesthat countries have revived or even created as an act ofdecolonization:the invention of Norwegian after Norway's independence from Denmark inthe nineteenth century and Gaelic after Ireland's independence from Bdtainin the twentieth.