Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE
- Leaving Home/ Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature
- ARTICLES
- Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- Wait No Longer?: The Temporality of Return in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- ‘Our Relationship to Spirits’: History & Return in Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
- The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’: Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah's Links & Crossbones
- Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye's The Other Crucifix
- No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- ‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah & Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- The Problem of Return in the Local Gambian Bildungsroman
- Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging 185 in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi
- ‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu
- FEATURED ARTICLES
- LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
from EDITORIAL ARTICLE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE
- Leaving Home/ Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature
- ARTICLES
- Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- Wait No Longer?: The Temporality of Return in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- ‘Our Relationship to Spirits’: History & Return in Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
- The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’: Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah's Links & Crossbones
- Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye's The Other Crucifix
- No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- ‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah & Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- The Problem of Return in the Local Gambian Bildungsroman
- Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging 185 in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi
- ‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu
- FEATURED ARTICLES
- LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Summary
The experience of the African immigrant, in the Diaspora or returning to the continent, has been integral to the fiction of Pede Hollist from the inception of his career as a writer. The preoccupation is evident in his first four short stories, as implied in the titles: ‘Going to America’, ‘Foreign Aid’, ‘BackHomeAbroad’ and ‘Resettlement’. His novel, So the Path Does Not Die, is probably the most profound in its handling of the issues surrounding immigration and return, not merely because as a novel it is more expansive but because the popular theme of biculturalism is interwoven with highly controversial ideas, including ideas on female circumcision – dangerous ground for any man to tread. Fortunately controversy can be accommodated since African literature is not static. As the literary critic, Ernest Emenyonu, states in ‘The African Novel in the 21st Century’, ‘new voices are emerging from all parts of the African continent not only to reinforce the voices of the generations before them, but also to reveal the new realities, visions and concerns of Africa and its people’ (xii).
Emenyonu's statement foregrounds a primary intention of many new African writers, which is to keep the past in the present. The objective is to ‘reinforce the voices of the generations before them’ at the same time as they ‘reveal the new realities, visions and concerns’ (xii, emphasis added). In effect, they need to look backward and forward simultaneously. This phenomenon is pronounced in So the Path Does Not Die, where the backward glance, in particular, is incisive. So the Path Does Not Die has an unusual reliance on repetition and return, demonstrating in several ways the author's bid to both reinforce and reveal. The Palestinian-American critic, Edward Said, elaborates on the achievability of this in a discussion on the eighteenth-century philosopher and historian, Giovanni Battista Vico, in The World, the Text and the Critic. Expounding on Vico's theory of the cycles of human history, Said employs an example from music that demonstrates how repetition and originality, reinforcement and revelation, can successfully happen together:
- Type
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- Information
- ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in FictionAfrican Literature Today, pp. 123 - 142Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016