Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Durrant, Sam

Titel

Creaturely Mimesis: Life After Necropolitics in Chris Abani's Song for Night

Ist Teil von

• Research in African literatures, 2018-09, Vol.49 (3), p.178-206

Ort / Verlag

Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The common goal of both historical and animist materialism is the re-enchantment of the world. To realize this goal, contemporary African literature must do more than simply represent the world. Its most vital role is to perform itself as a surrogate rite of re-ancestralization, one that engenders a radically expanded, trans-species spirit of relatedness. Chris Abani's 2007 novel Song for Night is an exemplary allegorization of this expansive process of re-ancestralization in that its narrator, blown apart by a landmine, must reinvent his Igbo grandfather's forgotten song of connectedness in order to rejoin the world of the ancestors. Insofar as his lyrical song for night transposes the improvised sign language of his platoon of muted minesweepers, the narrative mimes their creative resistance to the instrumentalization of human life. However, this creativity does not constitute a recovery of the human so much as a spirited affirmation of corporeal similarity, or what I term creaturely mimesis. The calculus governing cultural and political practices no longer has as its goal the subjection of individuals so much as the seizure of power over life itself. Its function is to abolish any idea of ancestry and thus any debt with regard to the past. (Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing” 269) [The sacred lake] is the repository of human souls who are yet to enter into the world: a source of great power for any dibia who enters there. Legend says that the fish in the lake guard the souls, swallowed deep in their bellies. (Chris Abani, Song for Night 65) Incidentally, Kafka is not the only writer for whom animals are the receptacles of the forgotten. (Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka” 810)