Magic Realism as Postcolonial Aesthetics in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures

Magic Realism as Postcolonial Aesthetics in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures Ousmane Ngom The concept of magic realism, with its irreducible opposition, arises from the axiological opposites of Western and Third World antithetical visions and perspectives, such as modernity and decadence, materiality and spirituality, or rationality and fantasy (Le Fustec 127; Mumtaz 108). In this article, I contend that, by cutting across the real and the magic, the literary strategy of magic realism is an apt tool for representing the dual natures of post-independence Africa and post-emancipation America, such as the contradictions contained in the terminology of “postcolonialism.” In the frame of this work I understand postcolonialism as a situation, a mode or theory that simultaneously negates and confirms the institution of colonialism, a continuous “imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft 2). The term postcolonial aesthetics refers to the range of literary, artistic, and cultural tools that formerly colonized peoples use to voice their situations that result from the colonial experience, especially with the view of countering colonial and neocolonial enterprises. Indeed, “postcolonial thinking is basically concerned with speaking for/about the other and providing the subaltern with tools of resistance” (Nedaee 40). As such, I consider magic realism and other aesthetic elements of the subaltern culture of which it is a product as tools of “resistance to the violence of official history” (Donadey 113). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Boubacar Boris Diop’s Doomi Golo, The Hidden Notebooks (hereafter referred to as Doomi Golo)1 use mythical characters and circumstances to aesthetically reveal the unreal reality of postcolonialism by narrating the unnarratable. Because it encompasses multiple types of characters in the mythic figure and condenses time and space, magic realism can transversally examine, and offer a firsthand narrative about, African and Afrodiasporic societies before, during, and after colonization, thus countering the colonialist discourse that denies history and culture to the colonized. For this reason, [End Page 196] Homi K. Bhabha suggests that “magic realism […] becomes the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world” (7). The mythic figures in these three novels— Matigari, Ali Kaboye, and Beloved—are polymorphic characters who can physically and psychologically commute easily to different times and places. They transcend the history of their respective countries with no concern for boundaries of time or space. This article examines the modalities at play in the writing of magic realism, and shows how magic realism is both an interface between history and memory for the reconstruction of the postcolonial past and an instrument for the regeneration of the African identity and culture. The Ambivalent Characterization of the Magic Realist Figure The inscription of the matrix of myth in the novel reconfigures the writing of this genre since “magical realism is defined by the paradoxically equal and non-hierarchical coexistence of realism and magic” (Aldea 145). A characteristic of magic realist writing, as Aldea contends, is the levelling of the magic and realist modes so that they constitute a crossroad between the fairy tale and social realism genres. This means that neither the magical nor the realist component supersedes or outweighs the other; they are, rather, at the same diegetic level. But at the same time, she also observes, following Chanady, that it is crucial that the real and the magic be perceived as two distinct elements in the text. In fact, the unequivocal presence of the two different “codes” (Aldea 145) is what differentiates magical realism from fairy tales and fantasy. The narration upholds a dialogical discourse, in the Ricoeurian term, meaning two dissonant voices operating at the same scale, neither embedding the other. The ironic co-presence of these contradictory qualities in a novel influences the modalities of the story’s components, including narration, characterization, representation of time and space, and language. The characterization of the magic figure in a magic realist novel vacillates between the construction of the mythical hero and the representation of the realistic, ordinary character. The character thus created displays a puzzling bipolarity in that he/she can physically and psychologically move from one end to another, leaving simultaneously the impression of a...

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