Historicism as a Literary Discourse: a Study of Isidore Okpewho’s the Last Duty, Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra and Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy
CHAPTER ONE
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:
In terms of its objectives, this thesis is designed to:
Substantiate the historicists‘ claim that any statement – philosophical, historical or aesthetic – can be situated in its historical context, and that in this regard, the novel form, is a flexable and veritable source of discourse that negotiates between past and present;
- Prove that the discourse of historicism is all about textual reconstruction of the past, that is, from tissues of past citations, bits of codes, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social language and documents already in circulation in some form or other; and
- Illustrate the discourse of historicism with war literatures as a way of authenticating their distinctiveness within the economy of other texts andthus presents an analytical discourse on the constitutive process of war literatures as a continuum in the search for identity, stability, and the true meaning of good and evil by individuals and societies.
CHAPTER TWO
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR IN ISIDORE OKPEWHO’s
THE LAST DUTY AND ELECHI AMADI’s SUNSET IN BIAFRA
This chapter examines the relationship between Isidore Okpewho‘s The LastDuty and Elechi Amadi‘s Sunset in Biafra and their historical contexts which are drawn from personal and vicarious experiences. Basically, historicism is concerned with the prime importance of historical contexts to the interpretation of texts of all kinds. To be sure, historicists take for granted the fact that ―history always manifests itself in the form of text‖ (Oppermann: nd). This notion therefore negates the empiricist epistemology about objective reality. In other words, history is always narrated from ―…a certain point of view which can never attain certainty in any objective sense‖ (Oppermann: nd). This certainly opens up a new vista in research undertaking to find out how text in deed is said to come to terms with its putative contexts.
This type of research undertaking is exemplified by Stephen Greenblatt in his book Shakespearean Negotiations, where, as explained by Anton Kaes (1992), he states that Shakespeare‘s play King Lear benefited from the circulation of Samue Harsnett‘s tract entitled ―A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures‖ which
―railed against exorcists in the Catholic Church.‖ According to Kaes, in the chapter on ‗Shakespeare and the Exorcists; Greenblatt ―works from the assumption that the names, motifs, and figures of speech in King Lear had been appropriated from Samuel Harsnett‘s tract‖ the theological polemic regarded ―as the raw material and
historical background to the literary text.‖ While further accentuating the historical contexts and the dynamic cultural field embedded in Shakespeare‘s plays, Anton Kaes (1992) notes that:
Diaries and autobiographies, records of dreams, chronicles of festivals and local fairs, protocols of witches burned at the stake and of exorcisms, primers on sexuality, descriptions of clothing and cosmetics, eyewitness accounts and illustrations of disease, insanity, birth and death, and so on: all these documents taken from the ‗Slime of history‘ may be obscure but they are not irrelevant for the study of Shakespeare.
Anton Kaes further states that these diverse sources reveal, for instance, ―how around 1600 the human body was controlled, how deviance was regulated, how power was represented, how women were portrayed, and how political unrest was thematised.‖ And that ―these non-literary texts are themselves complex material and symbolic articulations of a society‘s imaginative and ideological structures.‖
This demonstration of how a text comes to terms with its putative contexts will serve as a paradigm for the analysis of the texts for this study. In the main, this task is remitted by three suppositions which are based upon the self-reflexivity of the writers as well as the historicity of the texts. Also, these suppositions are important vistas through which the past dissolves into literature. The suppositions are, that the writers are Nigerians of Eastern Nigerian extraction and so are products of the environment they wrote about; that the war situation and symbols depicted in the two novels point invariably to the Nigerian Civil War which provide substance for the texts; and that the social and political causes and effects of the war as well as the systems of culture of the Nigerian Society (i.e. Nigerian Army, Biafran Soldiers,
Cities, Infrastructure, names, etc.) replicated in the two novels provide their historical contexts.
In the main, the two writers under study have written their novels as Nigerians by drawing upon their personal and vicarious experiences of the Civil War. Thus, the two novels thematise the civil war experiences as a process of historical representations using literary contextualization of the events during the war. The writers self-reflexivity and imagination are veritable instruments in this process of reconstructing the Nigerian civil war. This means that Elechi Amadi reflects upon his personal experiences of the war both as its victim and participant, while Isidore Okpewho reflects his vicarious experience of the war using ―anthropological detail to reinforce the fictional focus of his novel(s)‖ (Aiyejina: 2001). Nonetheless, the two novels range from formal rewriting of remembered events, in the case of Amadi‘s Sunset in Biafra, to the recontextualising of the entire sociological climate of the war, in the case of Okpewho‘s The Last Duty. It can then be claimed that the two novels ―draw attention to how the documents of history turn into a fictional context in the writing process‖ (Oppermann: nd).
CHAPTER THREE
THE SECOND WORLD WAR AS A HISTORICAL EVENT IN BIYI BANDELE’S BURMA BOY
Given that historicists are concerned with the prime importance of historical contexts to the interpretation of texts, this chapter will attempt to connect Biyi Bandele‘s Burma Boy to its historical contexts. The remittance of this task is reinforced by Bandele in his admission of the fact that the novel is shaped by various historical accounts both oral and textual.
In his acknowledgement, he expresses his indebtedness to the following sources: Sergeant James Shaw‘s ―unforgettable account of his Chindit experience, The March Out; Captain Charles Carfrae‘s Chindit Column which ―proved similarly invaluable;Brigadier Michael ‗Mad Mike‘ Calvert‘s Classic war memoir, Prisoners of Hope, a―first-hand accounts of the Chindits‖. He also stresses that these books are salutary chronicles of:
…instances of the courage and resourcefulness shown by the Africans who served with them in Burma, and enabled me in no small way to rediscover that searingly vivid and yet dizzingly phantasmagoric world of the jungles of mainland South East Asia into which my father‘s stories of carnage, shell-shock and hard-won compassion first immersed me when I was little more than an infant.
Other sources that gave the writer the leeway in his rediscovery mission are the Imperial War Museum where he ―spent many afternoons delving into declassified military files about the Second World War and its least documented and most brutal theatre, the Burma campaign,‖ Orde Wingate by Christopher Sykes; Orde Wingate:
Irregular Soldier by Trevor Royle; Five in the Night by John Bierman and Colin Smith; War Bush by John A.L Hamilton; West Africans at War by Peter Clarke; and The Last Public Execution in Sokoto Prison by by H.A.S. Johnson which he said he borrowed from quite liberally. No doubt, these sources not only shape the narrative and provide the historical contexts from which the novel materializes, they are also various voices in which the text is discursively couched.
Nonetheless, it is pertinent to premise this study on three suppositions, if only to expand the contexts of the novel and to assert its verisimilitude. These suppositions are that, as a Nigerian, Biyi Bandele‘s interest in the roles played by Nigerians in the prosecution of the Second World War invariably shaped the novel, Burma Boy (this interest is whetted by his father‘s participation in, and account of, the war); that the war situations depicted in the novel represent the substance of the story of the Second World War (as the novel‘s historicity copiously indicated), and not those of the First World War or any other war, for that matter; and as such the eventual story as depicted in the novel is not only its historicity, it also comes across as the war between imperial powers brought about by their struggle to own and control colonies in the wake of the great world economic depression, and the subsequent subjugation of Africans in that struggle. These suppositions are in line with the three criteria in the cultural poetics for unlocking textual meaning, which are, the life of the author, the social rules and dictates found within a text, and a reflection of a work‘s historical situation evidenced in the text (Bressler: 2002).
CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
This study deploys Historicism as a literary discourse to the analysis of selected novels of Isidore Okpewho, Elechi Amadi, and Biyi Bandele. This is purposely to determine and underscore the constitutive processes of the novels with a view to situating appropriately in their contexts. The study is therefore based on the premise that, writing as historicists, these writers appropriate historical events, vicarious and personal experiences, and recorded or documented activities, all of which had hitherto passed into history as past; and that these variegated experiences, having been refined and reconstituted, appear aesthetically resplendent as novels and new experiences or what is termed ‗perpetual present,‘ conformable to the patterns of literary discourse.
Apart from proving the applicability of the discourse of historicism to Isidore Okpewho‘s The Last Duty, Elechi Amadi‘s Sunset In Biafra and Biyi Bandele‘s Burma Boy, this study also articulate the poetics of historicism and relate them to the internecine Nigerian Civil War and the reconstruction of the roles of Nigerians in the prosecution of the Second World War. Hitherto, treatises on the application of Historicism as a literary discourse on Nigerian war literatures has been sparing. In this regard, it substantiates the historicists claims that any statement or text can be situated in its historical context. It also proves that it is possible to apply the discourse of historicism to the texts used in the study; illustrates the discourse of historicism with the historicity of war literatures as a way of authenticating their distinctiveness within the economy of other texts; and elaborates the boundary of knowledge
especially on the constitutive process of war literatures and the discourse of historicism generally. This, therefore, constitutes the analytical framework which is then guided by the library method of data collection that entails secondary sourcing of materials through the library, bookstores, internet and the likes.
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