Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literatu ...

Akinola Oriola investigates forms of allegory and the notions of self and other by reading Kunle Okesipe's Professor's Last Death (2006) as a post-text and literary heir to Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel. Oriola argues that Okesipe's characters are made more dynamic through “free focalization” as this text refocuses the 1962 version for the twenty-first century. Dike Okoro offers another literary reinvention of Wole Soyinka, this time dealing with the genre of poetry. His study of Ogaga Ifowodo's poetry collection, Madiba (2000), reveals the voice and vision of third-generation poets—those born at or just after the independence of many African nations—who faced similar challenging circumstances to many of their political and literary forebears but whose reactions represent shifts and changes in response to such challenges when compared to first-generation voices. Lastly, R. Victoria Arana evaluates the various novels of two Nigerian writers—Chimamanda Adichie and Helen Oyeyemi—whose works, Purple Hibiscus (Adichie, 2005), Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie, 2006), The Icarus Girl (Oyeyemi, 2005), and The Opposite House (Oyeyemi, 2007), relate “emic” perspectives on contemporary African lives. Arana argues throughout that Adichie's and Oyeyemi's writing “amounts to an ambitious effort to expose the world, including fellow Nigerians, to the important if subtle underpinnings of recent African history and to reduce cross-cultural misunderstanding and the likelihood of further ethnic conflicts and calamity.” In reality, this argument regarding the work of Adichie and Oyeyemi could apply to some degree to the literary objectives of most new African writers.

Indeed, a clear and irrefutable raison d'être for this volume is to probe the aims and intentions of these new voices. Because of the multiplicity of experiences in their geographic locations in Africa and across the diaspora as well as their encounters and capabilities related to their place in the contemporary world, these writers continue to break new ground in African literature. Their work reflects the times and places in which they live and interact, and it is for this reason that their work will permanently occupy a key place in the evolution of African literature at the beginning of this new century almost fifty years after independence.