ISSUE FIVE/2000 the jacket summary evokes. And Mother Figures? Archetypal, Sonless Mother in patriarchal Society (allegorised not just in Fatima's mother, but also in Sigeema and the Queen in one of the folk tales) is more central to the novel than the specific 'son- less mother' of Fatima. So. the emotionally loaded term 'tragedy' used in the jacket sum- mary does not really apply to The Tent. Trag- edy presupposes three-dimensional charac- ters with whom you can sympathise, devel- opment, conflict and so on. All we know about Fatima's pale mother, all Fatima her- self knows about her, is that she sobs all day in her dark room, probably because of all the miscarriages she has had. Hardly material for 'tragedy'. Neither, grow fond of her, though we do, is Fatima. A psychic condition which goes from bad to worse and finally, to worst simply cannot be plotted against the tragic curve. Women. Bedouin, sonless and oppressed, patriarch - and a Western woman. If the jacket summary did not spotlight her. a less 'sophis- ticated' reader, while obviously noticing Ann's strange presence in the novel would have placed her on equal format footing as. say. Mouha the gypsy and may well have asked: just what is this unlikely, anomalous for- eigner doing in a tale of cloistered Bedouin women?' An academic' reader however, would quickly recognise that though her appearance in the novel is quite brief. Ann is being used to make a (by now perhaps trite) point, namely: though power is gendered (men tend to have more power to make life- affecting decisions than do women especially in 'traditional society), nonetheless, 'male' is a social construct, and women can oc- cupy a subjugative 'male' position vi-a-vis other women. Hakima with her prodding cane and Ann are such women - except that Ann is also a Westerner an 'Orientalist' who educates a native because she wants her horse and also that she can amuse her with exotic folk tales and songs, a Westerner whose knowledge of modern health practices leads to Fatima's (already gangrenous) leg being amputated. The jacket summary packaging of the novel simply mirrors what a post-co- lonial/feminist reading of The Tent would, inevitably, do: it zooms in on Ann. even if Ann is as insubstantial a shade in Fatima's sensitive, fragile psyche as are the other char- acters, even if Fatima is already pretty well oppressed, marginalised and schizophrenic long before Ann comes into picture. There is something in this novel for ev- eryone - even for the incorrigible Orientalist Western male who might voyeuristically want the 'intimate glimpse inside the women's quarters' which the jacket promises. For the average' reader who does to want to be taxed with a high dose of complexity or ambiguity, there are beautiful images, a myriad of lovely tales and symbols that do not overwhelm by their density. A reader who would be put off by the kind of novel that goes down well with a 'politically correct' audience while at the same time retaining a veneer of exotica to appeal to the Orientalist in us all, would do well not to heed the signs on the jacket sum- mary of this edition of The Tent. Instead of heeding them, the reader can go straight from the jacket cover, beautifully illustrated by Hod Lutfi, to the elegantly translated 'thing itself. Elmessiri writes for M Ahvam Weekly in Egypt Writers, Natives and Former Colonies BY JOHN OTU Karen King-Aribisala. KICKING TONGUES, Heinemann (African Writers Series). Portsmouth. USA. 1998. 244pp Arundhati Roy. THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS. Flamingo. London. 335pp PiART of the exhilaration and enduring beauty f well-told tales is in the ability of the story- teller to devise apparently new props with which to reformulate the tale. When the mode of narration has become fixed perhaps because of its ubiquity, there is the possibility that even fresh ideas which the author throws up would inadvertently be demystified. Only few readers would be willing to go the whole hog and. of course, fewer critics approve the author's power of inventiveness Glendom Books Supplement • ISSUE FIVE/2000 • « Glendoro Books Supplement in such a situation. Moreover no matter how barren or uninteresting are the ideas under- scored by any given writer, her/his readiness to weave new structures to encapsulate the seeming ordinary message would cause many readers to applaud her/his craftsman- ship. Two women writers unique in some ways but sharing a number of qualities, prominent of which is the fact that they are natives of some of the world's former colonies, com- pel an exploration of two recent novels, the worb of the two authors- Kicking Tongues is Karen King-Aribisala's latest worb and The God of Small Things the only published fic- tion so far by Indian author Arundhati Roy which won the Boober prize in 1997. King-Aribisala's Our Wife andOther Sto- ries had earlier in 1990/91 also won the Com- monwealth Writer's prize for the Best First Boob category (African Region). She (King-Aribisala) is for her own part both Guyanese and Nigerian, the dual heri- tage, a result of her marriage to a Nigerian. Hence it is little wonder that their stories re- flect the rich folb style reminiscent of the pristine tales told in Africa and the diaspora. And. by extension, a subversion of traditional Western modes of narration even though, in King- Aribisala's case, there is the veneer of the structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Which is why the two writers can be read as partly adding to the swelling corpus of post colonial literatures. The caveat is used partly because while it is safely arguable that their modes of narration reflect the eclectic and unpredictable heave of folbtales, the texts nevertheless underscore messages of univer- sal applicability. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy tells the story of the caste system preva- lent in India in which the Paravans (the un- touchables) are discriminated against in vir- tually all spheres of life by the Brahmins (the free- born). Roy symbolically puts the two against each other with the Brahmins, of course, de- feating the Paravans and thus, perpetuating, the segregationist system. This is quite a com- monplace theme, especially in India. But Roy transforms what otherwise could have been a dreary and uninteresting discourse into a lilting if suspenseful narration. The text con- founds even the most assured reader in that it rigmorales and hedges libe a coquette. The reader of Roys novel cannot pre-determine, even by a clever guess the heave and breath of The God of Small Things. This is because the novel defies the orthodox structure of beginning, middle and end. In fact, the be- ginning is the end and the end, the begin- ning, validating T.S. Eliot's dictum in 'Little Giddying' that in our beginning, is our end. The author marshals one signifies suspends it in mid-stream, introduces a seemingly countervailing one. suspends it. introduces another, adinfinitum in a nexus of counter- balancing or unpredictable signifiers until the very end when the apparently disparate and muted signifiers merge into one concrete dramatised referent: the author's disappro- bation of India's caste system. No doubt the impatient reader would be unable to endure this endless game of signifier deferral. How- ever, the joy derivable at the very end ap- proximates an orgiastic pleasure and hence. the uniqueness of this novel. The main characters Ammu and Velutha. represent the freeborn and the untouchable respectively. However, the two, by a fortu- itous strobe, fall in love with each other in spite of the fatal potentiality of the union. It is significant that Ammu hails from the Kochanma family, which despite owning the paradise picbles company which should ca- ter for the country's basic needs, is an irrespressible Brahmin. Similarly, despite the fact that Velutha has been apparently ac- cepted into the Kochanma family and adored by Rahel and Esthappen - Ammu's children - perhaps because of his respectable genius at repairing household wares, he is eventually ostracised by the family and beaten to death by the police, on the bidding of the Kochanmas, for mafeing love to Ammu. Here. Roy rubs in the message: a natural emotion of love is damned by the invocation of a wicbed and segregationist law by dyed-in-the wool traditionalists. The author mabes Esthappen and Rahel - symbols of the younger generation - witness to good effect. Velutha's brutalisation by the police for lov- ing their mother, who had been deserted by a freeborn husband. The narrator's words are full of sarcasm and loathing for the whole caste system at this point: What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't bnow it then, was a clinical demonstration in con- trolled conditions (this was not war afterall, or genocide of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure, Order, Complete monopoly. It was human history masquerading as Gods purpose, revealing herself to an under- age audience. P.309. Is it therefore any wonder that when • ISSUE FIVE/2000 Rahel - Ammu's daughter - wants to marry she 'drifts into (it) lifee a passenger drifts to- wards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge?' (p. 18). Apparently, the adults have eaten sour grapes and now the children's teeth are on edge. However, the point of emphasis is the uniqueness of Roys narrative, which, as we have stated earlier, reaches its climax by dis- pensing with predictable parameters. This mode is aesthetically fulfilling: the author dexterously handles the different strands of the tale until they all culminate in the signi- fied which bears the ultimate message: the murder of Velutha by the police for mabing love to a freeborn. In this narrative, episodes libe the death of Ammu which should tradi- tionally and chronologically come after the death of Velutha come much earlier in the narrative, in chapter seven (Wisdom Exercise Alexandrie, 1992. © Anne Favret & Patrick Manez Glendora Books Supplement 7 Noteboobs). In the same vein, as early as the first chapter the marriage of Ammu's daugh- ter Rahel and the death of Sophie Mol are already intimated even before Ammu's own marriage is broached. This is analogous to Toni Morrison's style in Beloved, a style de- scribable as the tale in a circle. In the hands of Roy, these snippets of tenebrous signifiers are tied together at the end of the novel just as Morrison's Beloved resolves numerous plot detours. It bears remarbing that the aesthetics of The God of Small Things is not extrinsic but intrinsic in the sense that the author, albeit in the language of indirectness, weaves good art into this novel in the story of the Kathabali man in chapter twelve (Kochu Thomban). A juxtaposition of the style in the story told by the Kathabali man and in the overall craft of the boob reveals some deliberate coinci- dence between the two. Hence, by meta- phoric extension, the Kathabali man who, in telling stories, can 'punish it. send it up libe a bubble... wrestle it to the ground and let it go again... (who) can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf (pp.229/230) is Arundhati Roy wrestling with the labyrinthine tale of The God of Small Things. Karen King-Aribisala also reinvents the tale, but differently, in Kicking Tongues. She on her own part levels out the grey areas existing between prose and poetry and thereby brings about a stribing coalescence of the two genres. In doing so. she re-affirms the tenuousness of the differences between literary genres in general and between po- etic prose in particular. For her. it seems, the compartmentalisation of literature into genres is bound to circumscribe the diverse resonance of the subject itself and hence, has inaugurated an uncanny but enriching unity between the traditionally polarised genres. However, the mutual existence of prose and poetry in Kicking Tonguesis not merely designed to achieve aesthetic effect but to reflect the troublous activity of what she de- scribes as the bicbing tongue. A tongue bicbs in a moment of fury or rage and so its activ- ity cannot but be ambivalent: bicbing against the truth or bicbing against lies. King-Aribisala carefully privileges the latter function of the tongue over the former. Hence, the narrator in the Epilogue regales us with: The Lord Hath done Great things For them For us He has done great things Blessed us Blessed As we are ISSUE FIVE/2000 << Glendora Books Supplement With tongues Which Kicb The truth TONGUES RISING UP AND KICKING DOWN PERVERSITIES (pp.241/242) With the above graphological permuta- tion, the author encentres the action of the tongue which kicks against lies and roots for truth rather than that which privileges lies over truth. The consequence of the prefer- ence of lies is often grave: a free and fair elec- tion on June 12 1993 in Nigeria won by busi- nessman politician Moshood Abiola was trun- cated, she says, by lying tongues kicking against truth. From the outset of the novel in 'the jour- ney to Abuja', the tongues have begun to kick, broaching diverse issues of importance to both Nigeria and humanity in general. Sig- nificantly also, the novel ends with the kick- ing tongue, a factor which underscores the texts constitutive unity. Kicking TonguesbasicaMy thematises the necessity for peace and unity in the world. In this regard, the author debunks all war- inducing cleavages, preoccupied as she is with integrating opposites. This is a recurring theme in the novel which is underscored by the pastor through the black lady who says, 'Race is just another barrier in life to prevent us from doing good, and which people use to separate us from the love of God.' (p.221). This is the point at which Kicking Tongues intersects with Roy's The God of Small Things, a pointer to the fact that artists, in keeping with the postulate of Carl Jung, draw on the same primordial pool called the 'Col- lective Unconscious' in their creative activ- ity. However, it bears underlining that King- Aribisala is averse to polarities that are ca- pable of unsettling society and sowing dis- cord among people. This motif becomes evi- dent with an admirable tour de force in phase three (The Postgraduate English Major: This literature life). Here, the postgraduate student who is easily the persona of the author is pre- occupied with synthesising opposites and thus, is not averse to simultaneously reading Milton and eating Stilton, discussing Euro- pean and African literature without making short shrift of either. This calls back memo- ries from William Blake who enthused in his poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' that opposition is true friendship. Yet. one looking for a well-developed plot and characterisation in the conventional sense would be disappointed with this work, for the novel lacks a chronologically devel- oped theme. Each of the seven phases of the novel tells varied stories which nonetheless are linked by a resonant motif, albeit subtly delineated. Some of the stories are replete with scathing criticism and others mild. But in all of them, Nigeria is the big bus (com- prising both the macro/central bus convey- ing seekers of truth to Abuja and the micro/ sub one in phase four 'Bus Play', (p. 159) which re-enacts the typical hilarious experi- ence on a ride in a Lagos 'Molue' or 'Kombi' bus. It is against this backdrop that the au- thor unfolds the kaleidoscopic episode of the stories. Roy and King-Aribisala have beefed up the scaffolding of story-telling by re-invent- ing them differently. They (both) have built on the unpredictable and subtle vein of pris- tine tale by telling tales characterised by seemingly digressive and unwieldy plots. This is part of the staple features of sto- ries told in the former colonies. Meaning was never deduced by word-for-word correspon- dence but the accretion of the tales. The meaning of a tale was often unraveled through song, puns and in fact, the tech- niques of the story within a story. Arundhati Roy and Karen King-Aribisala have simply exhumed this rich medley to enrich the con- temporary novel. Olu is a member of the Editorial Board of the Nigerian Guardian A cultural economy of the book in Africa BY ODIA OFEIMUN James Cibbs, Jack Mapanje (eds) THE AFRICAN WRITERS HANDBOOK. African Books Collective (with the Dag HammarskJoId Foundation) Oxford & Uppsala. 1999, 432pp A FRICAN literature and pub- lishing, especially in the last quarter of the 20th Century, appeared to be governed by a vicious circle: the more the writers' conferences, bookfairs, publishers' get-togethers and book foundations organised, the more the problems of the