Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Multiple Worlds, Material Culture & Language
- 2 Virtual Objects & Parallel Universes: Biyi Bandele's The Street
- 3 Everyday Objects & Translation: Leila Aboulela's The Translator & Coloured Lights
- 4 Possessions, Science & Power: Jamal Mahjoub's The Carrier
- 5 Words, Things & Subjectivity: Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles
- 6 Breaking Gods & Petals of Purple: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- 7 An Abnormal Ordinary: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- 8 Conclusion: The Rifle is not a Penis
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Virtual Objects & Parallel Universes: Biyi Bandele's The Street
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Multiple Worlds, Material Culture & Language
- 2 Virtual Objects & Parallel Universes: Biyi Bandele's The Street
- 3 Everyday Objects & Translation: Leila Aboulela's The Translator & Coloured Lights
- 4 Possessions, Science & Power: Jamal Mahjoub's The Carrier
- 5 Words, Things & Subjectivity: Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles
- 6 Breaking Gods & Petals of Purple: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- 7 An Abnormal Ordinary: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- 8 Conclusion: The Rifle is not a Penis
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The street referred to in Biyi Bandele's novel of the same name is Brixton High Street. At the same time, the novel occupies parallel universes – the worlds of the living and the dead, the lands of reality and of dreams, the Nigeria of Bandele's birth and growing up and the London of his chosen home. In the process of spanning these universes, of mixing and mingling these dimensions, Bandele Africanises Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland mode of nonsense writing and flies Amos Tutuola's West African oral tradition of The Palm-Wine Drinkard to London.
When Diez-Tagarro suggests to Bandele ‘So you could say that your writing is a mixture of these Nigerian experiences and your life in London’ (1995: 58), he replies:
Yes. If you have seen I have written TV films which I always set here. … they are all set in London. For me, this is my way of responding to this environment that surrounds me and was not part of my life some years ago, but it is now. I felt I had to do this. There are writers who would not respond to a society that is not their own, but I do. It is my choice, I am here. At the same time I want to stop writing about Nigeria because I prefer this gipsy aspect of my life. (58)
What Bandele is acknowledging is that this response to his new home might only be accomplished through the intersection between his many lives – in Africa and in Europe, in the material and the spiritual dimensions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A New Generation of African WritersMigration, Material Culture and Language, pp. 24 - 42Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008