Beyond the Domain of Literacy
The Illiterate Other in The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart and Waiting for the Barbarians
In: The Politics of English as a World LanguageSearch for other papers by Helga Ramsey-Kurz in
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Abstract
The controversies of critics and writers over the suitability of English as a vehicle of African identity, Abdul JanMohamed warns, erroneously suggest a linguistic choice which, in actuality, most Africans have never had. Far from being an alternative language, so JanMohamed, English represents a profoundly alien phenomenology for sub-Saharan indigenous communities, who possess no chirographic traditions of their own. The idea of the most foreign aspect of English for an African being its writtenness is absolutely central to the novels The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart and Waiting for the Barbarians. While comparing the different ways in which Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee portray the encroachment of anglophone literacy on African life as an assertion of colonial power, the essay will also show how all three authors discover in the illiteracy of the African native a focal point for their own legitimization of literary inscriptions of African orality.