Espoon Science Fiction ja Fantasiaseura ESC ry
ESCAPE 1/2024
Realist Literature, Storytelling and Speculative Fiction in the African Speculative Fiction Society: An overview.
By Donald Mullany
I think it is long overdue to weigh in with what I regard as a pending showdown between what is considered the forms of Literature and the forms of Storytelling. The ASFS and its members have been plodding into this arena, unaware up until now, but things may change quickly specifically with regards to the adoption of ChatGPT models in AI. The only real distinction that human authors have is their understanding of, and their use of their human stories. Their Oral tradition and their written tradition. These two forms are as old as time itself, but recent trends have set to create what I consider to be an antagonistic relationship between the two forms, when they should be complimentary. In the same way that the use of music in literature have been artificially estranged from each other, I think the risk of Oral Tales and Written works going the same way is increasing. I explain at length, and all opinions are of the author.
Part One – Where to start?
Some years ago, I posed the question ‘What elements defines [continental] ‘African’ fiction?’ to the ASFS bulletin boards to see if I could corroborate statements made about African Authors by Western critics. My responses were at best, variable. I was interested in defining characteristics in the African Fiction to determine if all successful fiction from the Continent was stylistically different from other Regions (Asian, European, American) or not. I did not think to specify commercial or critical ‘success’ factors as these were less important to me as the first name that would rise to mind when the topic would be opened for discussion, and why.
A response by Nikhil Singh stayed with me the longest, it was that he writes African Fiction even if it doesn’t say it is African fiction. I agreed then as I agree now that African writers have an incalculable format in creating stories, or they may create stories with an underlying unique flavour, irrespective of topic. I was not getting anywhere definite, and amidst the shambolic state of current academia research paywall sites, article lockouts and bad-actor paper mills leaving little confidence in current analysis papers, it was back to the reference sections of the National library dig around.
Part Two – Into the breach!
The first outline that I found useful with regards elements of African Literature came from Abiola Irere (The African Experience in literature and ideology, 1981) who provided analysis on exploring themes, styles, and linguistic choices for literature in [west] Africa.
Irere postulates that there is a greater distinction based on geographical elements rather than ethnic, historical and sociological elements. Thus, where a story is created is more distinctive than any other elements in modern African literature. He states that ‘aesthetic modes’ related within ‘social and cultural structures’ of place then determine and define African literature.
John Samuel Mbiti explores (Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity, 1969) various elements which are peculiarly African but positioned within the modern world such as; highly cooperative, and not focussed on the individual character; no single protagonist overwhelms other characters; a culture continually struggling to maintain its practices; and, external forces primarily do not introduce change. This line of inquiry provided more useful information, although obviously extremely dated. Irere could explain why, for example, South African and Nigeria literature appear qualitatively different from Ghanaian authors.
Why certain themes and tropes are prioritized differently, or why elements of cultural transformational stresses are internalized, and would be central to those stories. I was not persuaded by the moral authority aspect; such as an overt inherent spiritualism to all Africans. Continental Africans are no more nor less materialistic, than any other person anywhere else in the world. I also did not think that Modern (21st century) environment valued an importance of moral capital, as those values comprising his description of the elements of ‘moral capital’ have been in flux for centuries, at least.
So yet again my trail came back to the original premise; perhaps there is something unique about African Literature… maybe. But what? This situation was at the risk of becoming circular, with decades-long canon cluttering my reasoning with its unfalsifiable statements and unexamined cliques. If it follows that African literature is the recording of african stories, then the way in which the stories are told may provide the answers I was looking for.
Margery Fee (Writing Orality: Interpreting literature in English by aboriginal writers in North America, Australia and New Zealand 1997), examined the interpreting of literature in English by Aboriginal writers, and has used the term “writing orality”. This is to describe how orality in Aboriginal literature is composed through writing but is meant to be read and/or performed within an oral context.
If I could apply that concept to a more general examination of all underlying story creation, then the elements of (written) story recording should have inherent similar underlying concepts, and that would finally shed some light on what I was seeking.
The elements of Orality in a written context. Some of the features of orality that have been identified include: natural oral dialogue between characters; stylistic allusions and digressions; embedded oral narratives; proverbs, riddles, magic realism; and, a polyphony of narrative voices. Add to this, the culturally specific shorthand signalling tropes that Irere and Mbiti allude to and regard the digressions in cadence and register that are geographically distinct. I could finally answer my own questions about what, specifically, makes the elements of African Literature distinct. I could apply these conditions to a comparative study and see where it led to.
Michael JF Chapman (Southern African Literatures, 1996) is perhaps the most concise examination of literary forms in Southern Africa because he includes San storytelling as a literary expression among a variety of literary forms such as poetry, plays, popular and elite literature. He also lays the foundation for examining some of the egregious fixations of South African literary creators currently struggling with competing narratives in the space of African Literature by some decades. If Irere and Mbiti are to be believed, then the South African idée fixe of race, class, ethnicity and languages as a primary distinction is less important than the geographical location those stories come from.
Thus, in practice in contemporary South Africa, the cultural value of the many south african ‘minor’ authors are considered insignificant compared to the select ‘major’ authors, because they often adopted orality elements where the ‘major’ pure Literary authors did not. South African authors who dare to include these, or genre elements are permanently consigned to ‘minor author’ status.
The value of comparative methods between literary expressions may also be of value in examining any of the underlying orality aspects over all cultural story creation. This could also be useful over different Regions (Asian, African, European, American), if we accept that orality elements are a fundamental foundation to the written word in many cultures.
Part Three – Speculative Fiction and orality; is Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie’s assertion ‘Isn’t realist Fiction enough?’?
I would argue that a weakness of realist fiction is the danger of an eternal ‘presentism’ and the morality of sophistry that is evident in South African realist fiction. The danger of ‘poverty porn’ and ‘elitist praise-singing’ creep into these stories because realist fiction is focused on the eternal present, and that there is nothing else to temper this fixation. I have the opinion that Realist fiction often becomes boringly repetitive, sometimes even debilitatingly so. It also ignores many fundamental underlying concepts of orality, and as such is often a barometer of a type of literary bigotry as discussed above in Chapman’s analysis.
In direct contrast to Orality concepts and culturally-specific shorthand signals, realist fiction attempts to seize the narrative as a universally fixed, eternal and unfalsifiable point of view. So, my considered answer would be ‘No, realist fiction is not enough.’ A story that goes: ‘Once upon a time, somebody was poor and miserable. Nothing could be done. The End’ does not fulfill the conditions of orality elements. It does, strangely enough, describe the sum of my realist fiction experiences.
This is the point at which Literature and Storytelling start to head off for the pass. Literature (apparently) has already distanced itself from elements of Orality, and I think that Modern Storytelling and Storytellers are beginning to do the same.
The greater emphasis in recent years with codifying and qualifying the practice and art of storytelling by the hallowed Halls of the Great Western-centered Universities appears to be dis-empowering the actual storytellers. Culturally, the eagerness to extract control of a local narrative at the expense of the local practitioners is ultimately corrosive. Generational local storytellers are self-propelling themselves towards a uniformity of theme, style and execution that is indistinguishable from mid-century American cable television programs.
It is pointless to go into more in depth analysis of how oral traditions influence and counter-influence each other along the boundaries of shared spaces. There are far too many perforations to account for in these borders, and a diaspora of skilled ex-patriots and emigrants confuse this dynamic further.
Ultimately, the elements of local orality weaken the further away in space and time from the source, and the more like the new location they become. The continent of African has many immigrant populations that are primarily not western-centered, by definition. The African population has emigrants living in places that are western-centered, by definition. The western definition of ‘immigrant’ does not, for example, distinguish between refugee, migrant or ex-patriot immigrant often or accurately enough.
Cultural diffusion by proximity is entirely normal, and always has been. Tales and Sagas pick up new elements or lose old ones, adapt in tempo and blend with the new location’s traditions relatively rapidly. The same is true of the written works overlaying these oral traditions. Orality and the quality of story-telling is significantly cultural in the shorthand expressions of pace and tempo, cadence and register.
The classification of the type of story is also specific and is often of a frozen language register, for example, a cosmological origin tale or a morality tale or even a devotional tale. ‘Once upon a time’, ‘for ever and ever, amen’, ‘hear ye, hear ye’ set a specific type of orality technique that is being eroded by modern attentions.
Many orality techniques also blur the boundaries between poetry and music, epic and hymn, genealogy and myth to name only a few. Modern storytellers fall over their own feet to avoid using ‘licensed content’ to enhance their stories and as such may appear reductionist in their craft. The storytelling tools of a paleolithic tribe gathered around a fireplace that is so often evoked never had these concerns, they are a modern infection.
These paleolithic traditions obviously pre-date modern classifications of story types, where interpretation of these older oral structures is ‘unfrozen’ in register and re-compiled to form modern types of hero journey, bildungsroman, epic saga, morality tale to name a few.
It should go without saying that oral tales evolve as much as the people telling them do. Although it is possible to recite a Bardic Saga such as the Finnish Kalevala to a class of middle school pupils in an unabridged original version, for example, it would probably fail to impress for any number of reasons. Archaic language use, shifting geopolitical relationships and changed social mores would set structural limitations on audience understanding as much as interpretation of meaning.
The focus of the African Speculative Fiction in the body of work of its Creators centre orality as much as it does story-telling (not Storytelling as that concept begins to strangulate). We also need to address the assumption that ‘African Speculative Fiction is rising…”, in that it is becoming more like the expectations of what Western notions of what ‘proper’ Science Fiction should be like.
That, if the work is not recognised by a clique of self-serving imperialists as Science Fiction, then it must be ‘magical realism’ or ‘jujutech’… or more egregious I think, the converse. That to insist that any mystical flavour in a piece must be considered ‘science’, even though, patently -by all definitions of the term-, it is not. Or, where the narrative of what is -and is not- must be seized and proclaimed in a purely contrarian manner.
To be clear, Africans do write hard science fiction, they do write ‘soft’ or social science fiction, they do write science fantasy, bizarro, and everything in between. The presence of the underlying orality of the author, of the authors voice, is what determines the likeability of the work. An apparent dislike of a piece, or of the style of a piece, does not indicate the level of skill in the craft of the work the last time I checked in on that point.
To insist otherwise, or to try and cram cross genre work into an aged imperialist cultural-bias concept, or other set of definitions would be equally disingenuous. It could get you excluded, for example, as a nominee for a Literary Awards because your work matched a prevailing discerning feature, or may be considered unsuitable based on low expectations or other arbitrary reason. It is tiresome becoming bored with opinion and preference that is being presented as a matter of fact.
Part Four – What other orality aspects found in the African Speculative Fiction Society that is seldom seen in other organizations?
Typically, elements of news and opinions from abroad, spicy gossip to amuse a local potentate, specific warnings to self-same personages, Delphic style analysis and social regulation to name only a few. The interaction and reaction in reviews and in reception of these certain types of work, such as one-star reviews or opinion critiques may be quite negative in terms of tone in many aspects. The expectations of the reviewer are challenged by the presentation of the work, with unexpected elements such as spelling and grammar, pidgin dialogue and a ‘folksy’ element that is not preferred by an individual that is fixed in a modern, industrial, technological and, possibly capitalist, society. A preference for a specific type of theme, and an opinion on that specific theme does not overrule the right for that work to exist.
Subject matter aside, the underlying differences in storytelling techniques within the culture are more to do with the popularity of cross-cultural literature. The difference in language register is also noticeable and distinct. African Modern Literature is usually in a formal and occasional consultative register, while African genre and cross-genre fiction is usually in casual register (Sci-Fi is often consultative, and Fantasy is often frozen). Unusually for ASFS, any type of genre or cross-genre work may be set in the intimate register.
I think I have finally found an answer that is satisfying, I’ll leave this here. African Speculative Fiction authors do tell their stories differently to others; stylistically, conceptually and fundamentally differently. A GPT bot cannot (as yet) off-sort the Large language model complexities of orality elements.
The ASFS still has distinctly human authors that are skilled in the creation of human stories with a distinctly human flavour. They may or may not be Storytellers, but the stories they tell are uniquely theirs. Authentic at least, for now.
The End
References:
Mbiti, John Samuel. (1969) Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity. Oxford: Heinemann
Irere, Abiola. (1981) The African Experience in literature and ideology. London: Heinemann.
Chapman, Michael JF. (1996) Southern African Literatures. University of Natal Press.
Fee, Margery. (1997) Writing Orality: Interpreting literature in English by
aboriginal writers in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Journal of intercultural studies.
Vol18, No1.