World Literature 2013-2014

Masks! Masks! Black mask red mask, you white-and-black masks Masks of the four points from which the Spirit blows In silence I salute you! Nor you the least, Lion-headed Ancestor You guard this place forbidden to all laughter of women, to all smiles that fade You distill this air of eternity in which I breathe the air of my Fathers. Masks of unmasked faces, stripped of the masks of illness and the lines of age You who have fashioned this portrait, this my face bent over the later of white paper In your own image, hear me! (Owomoyela 42). In the mid-60s, Nigeria replaced French West Africa as the largest producer and consumer of African literature, and literary production in English surpassed that in French. Large numbers of talented writers in Francophone Africa came to occupy important political and diplomatic posts and gave up creative writing. Furthermore, the tenets of Negritude seemed far less relevant after independence and as newly independent nations found themselves facing civil wars, military coups and corruption (Gerard 53).

They often recount the heroic exploits of ancestors

oral literature, is most characteristic of thos

e sub-Saharan cultures

In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic

In this vein, Oodgeroo Noonuccal writes: Let no one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within. Haunted by tribal memories, I know This little now, this accidental present Is not the all of me, whose long making Is so much of the past … A thousand thousand camp fires in the forest Are in my blood. Let none tell me the past is wholly gone. Now is so small a part of time, so small a part of all the rare years that have moulded me.

‘Stone Age’

Noonuccal

hite superior race, only time is between us – As some are grown up

 and others yet children. We are the last of the Stone Age tribes, Waiting for time to help us As time helped you.[302]

Maureen Watson writes: ‘Aboriginaland’, yes, your birthright, No matter what some name it; So dig your fingers deep in the soil, And feel it, and hold it, and claim it. Your people fought and died for this, Tho’ history books distort it all, But in your veins runs that same Aboriginal blood, So walk tall, my child, walk tall …

The Cake Man is an historical play which makes pointed comments about black/white interracial history in Australia. The key point is that, unlike Davis, Merritt does not use the black oral tradition to convey this sense of the Aboriginal past. For example, in the overtly historical opening scene of the play, the author relies upon caricature – the symbolic stereotyping of the Priest, Soldier and Civilian and the Aboriginal Man, Woman, and Child – to satirise rather heavy-handedly the combined forces of ‘God and Gun’. There is no Aboriginal dialogue at all here (the black characters are either dumbfounded or dead in this scene). The music is not Aboriginal but is, instead, a re-working of the Bing Crosby tune ‘There’s A Happy Land Somewhere’. In short, the first scene is predominantly white in speech, content, and action.

Aside from its symbolic aspects, one of the most distinctive elements of the novel is the author’s usage of traditional song rhythms to evoke the atmosphere of special tribal occasions. This is the first Aboriginal novel in which such traditional Arnhem Land oral literature is recognised and emulated in poetic fashion: The women sit thinking of their men folk: They stand thinking of their men – While we dance thinking of our women, Thinking of our beautiful women – While they dance thinking of their Handsome men, handsome men – Handsome men thinking of beautiful women. The eyelashes flutter together – Breast to breast together – Heart to heart together – Fluttering, seeking, finding – Dance, men, dance you to me – Sing, women, sing me to you: We come, we are coming – You come, you are coming – Hallahoo, hallahoo hoho: Hallahoo, hallahoo, hoho! (pp. 163-164).