Cheryl Stobie   

Review

Gerald Gaylard. 2006. After Colonialism: African Postmodernism

andMagicalRealism.Johannesburg:Witwatersrand

University Press.

Gerald Gaylard begins his timely and wide-ranging book by setting out his methodology. Viewing African postcolonialism as comprising a poetics of defamiliarisation and a politics of dissidence, disillusionment and imaginative speculation, he argues that the most appropriate methodology for examining its works of fiction is a neo-formalist comparative induction. Instead of providing close readings of specific texts he compares pertinent features of works by authors such as Zakes Mda, Ashraf Jamal, Ivan Vladislavic, JM Coetzee, Anne Landsman, Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, Mia Couto, MG Vassanji, Moses Isegawa, Kojo Laing, Sony Labou Tansi, Syl Cheney-Coker, Ben Okri, Naguib Mahfouz, Assia Djebar, Jamal Mahjoub, Tayeb Salih and Biyi Bandele.

Following other authors before him, Gaylard points out that, from the time of the struggles for independence to the 1980s, African fiction and criticism were dominated by the realist form inherited from the Western humanist tradition. While this African realism was politically engaged and accessible to readers, it tended to be co-opted into political orthodoxy, at the expense of an imaginative breadth and variety through which to , but moves beyond an action/reaction social paradigm. It allows itself the freedom to explore the magical: the uncanny, the wondrous, the taboo and the inspiring. Gaylard suggests that, using techniques of identification, defamiliarisation and extrapolation, African magical realist authors enable readers to think more clearly and empathise more deeply through their imaginative entry into "sceptical heterotopias" (317).

Most of this study consists of two weighty chapters, on magical aesthetics and real politics. Gaylard discusses the effects of such aesthetic usages of defamiliarisation as metaphor, parallelism, self-reflexivity, tense shifts, manipulations of space and time, orature, oxymorons, irrealism and the revision of myths. To expand slightly on the last two of these usages, irlism (employing auxiliary verbs such as "can" and "might") opens up the desire-ridden space of possibilities, while revised myths offer multiple, flexible and suggestive responses to existential questions. Gaylard pays particular attention to significant imagery employed by African postcolonialist writers, such as the archaic, metamorphosis, mutation, hybridity, the city, desire, gender and the innovative. His discussions of the trickster figure and the image of the labyrinth are particularly interesting. He also discusses examples of genre reflexivity, such as reinscriptions of the Bildungsroman or the detective novel, which have effects of subversion of tradition, fluidity and indeterminacy. He considers the common criticism that postcolonialism cynically dishes up selected tropes of the exotic to sate metropolitan appetites in the alterity industry, and acknowledges that there are elements of melodrama in certain texts, but concludes that exoticism functions more oppositionally than opportunistically, given authors' use of selfconscious irony and readers' access to difference and destabilising ambiguity.

In his chapter on politics Gaylard points out that portrayals of power relations in African postmodernism are many and varied, and include a psychological dimension and a broadly progressive agenda beyond narrow nationalism. This dissident politics includes giving attention, beyond the simplicity of binarisms, to such issues as the past, international relations, identity, the body, gender, domesticity, and the environment. Gaylard observes, for instance, that an absence of women's voices characterised African realism; however, in his chapter on politics he analyses ways in which postcolonialist authors have addressed this lack, although he notes how fewAfrican women writers fall into this category. Focusing particularly on the work of Djebar and Landsman, he shows ways in which a country's past needs to be re-interpreted through women's eyes in order to visualise a more egalitarian future, while also commenting on the difficulties inherent in this project of speleology, a haunting and evocative image of personal and national exploration used by Djebar. Gaylard views gender awareness as quintessential to a self-questioning turn in postcolonialism, and he provides analyses of varied representations of women and which challenge the traditionalist, realist portrayal of Mama Afrika figures who are authorially endorsed, while their polar opposite, prostitutes, are vilified. African postcolonial fiction is seriously re-evaluating gender relations, revealing the effects of misogyny and patriarchy. The influence of feminist ideas can be seen in depictions of the body, the emotions, the domestic realm, the family and sexuality. Some authors create ambiguous, powerful, transgressive figures, such as the witch, who embody social anxieties about shifts in the position of women. Others, such as Marechera, venture into the scandalous domain of the libidinal and carnivalesque. Gaylard comments that "feminists have shown that it is the body which often bears the brunt of oppression and it must therefore be reinscribed, re-imagined, and rewritten in order to speak and sing" (239).

This sense of qualified optimism is characteristic of After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism. This is a lively, engaging, scholarly yet accessible work, lucidly argued and illustrated, with an apposite use of quotations from literature and criticism. In this compendious text Gaylard not only shows characteristic features and effects of African postmodern writing, but usefully compares it with that of its counterparts situated outside the African context, such as Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcz and Salman Rushdie. His prose glitters most beguilingly when he discusses issues of the transformative power of the imagination, creativity, inspiration, desire, the mythic and the symbolic. He argues, for instance:

Magic is enabled by the belief in interconnection and correspondences; that all things are in relation, association, contiguity, contagion, correspondence, and proximity with each other, and hence influence may be extended from one to another. Knowing the name of an entity or phenomenon enables the ability to influence that phenomenon or entity, enables power. Hence knowledge is power, and words have the ability to influence reality. Indeed, by this reasoning it might be argued that all writers are magicians to some extent. (44)

 

This is a generous text, which is responsive to its chosen authors'visions of the new, and which enacts the political dissidence it suggests, symbolised by the constellation, matrix or web. Gaylard is particularly astute in his placing of Okri, Marechera, Jamal, Djebar, Vassanji and Vladislavic within this constellation. To take on such a massive cartography is ambitious. Given the scale of the undertaking, there are inevitably some minor errors and solecisms, which would provide grist to the mill of Vladislavi character, Aubrey Tearle; likewise, Vladislavic himself might be surprised by the inaccurate synopsis of his short story, "The Box". Such small lapses do not, however, detract from an impressive and a valuable book.