Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Waiting at the Heart of Colonial Time Regimes
- 2 Projects and Promissory Notes: The Waiting Rooms of V. S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer
- 3 Marooned Time: Disruptive Waiting and Idleness
- 4 Gendered Timescapes of Waiting: Patience and Urgency in Novels of Disillusionment
- 5 ‘Strategic Waiting’ and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Conflict
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Gendered Timescapes of Waiting: Patience and Urgency in Novels of Disillusionment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Waiting at the Heart of Colonial Time Regimes
- 2 Projects and Promissory Notes: The Waiting Rooms of V. S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer
- 3 Marooned Time: Disruptive Waiting and Idleness
- 4 Gendered Timescapes of Waiting: Patience and Urgency in Novels of Disillusionment
- 5 ‘Strategic Waiting’ and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Conflict
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The anteriority of the nation, signified in the will to forget, entirely changes our understanding of the pastness of the past, and the synchronous present of the will to nationhood.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (2004)As Homi Bhabha points out in his work on nationhood, these performances of synchrony may seem to consolidate collective life, but the coherence they provide is fragile.
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (2010)To date, the label ‘novels of disillusionment’ has been applied almost exclusively to fiction from the African continent that reflects the disappointment with several unrealised hopes: for a full representative government after independence, a unified nation and state, an even promotion of political, social and economic welfare across all segments of society, and a cultural, institutional and political break with the colonial past. Despite the initial euphoric optimism of independence, the fiction of the immediate postcolonial period depicts the struggles of the people, still waiting for these promises to be fulfilled. Given that ‘high-sounding rhetoric’ at the time of independence predominated where ‘framing political principles or social visions’ ought to have guided, Derek Wright remarks, it was ‘not surprising’ that independence was an uneven process, benefiting a handful of professional elites. The fiction written during this ‘“disillusionment” period’ levelled criticism at the ‘indigenous ruling elite’ who exploited the masses and often exacerbated intra-national conflict. Arthur Ravenscroft’s early 1969 account of the proliferation of disillusionment themes, ‘Novels of Disillusion’, was published less than a decade after large swaths of the African continent achieved independence, and focused on Chinua Achebe’s 1966 A Man of the People and Wole Soyinka’s 1965 The Interpreters. Writing in 1976, the Ghanaian writer Kofi Awoonor remarked that Ayi Kwei Armah, among other African writers, seemed ‘to epitomize this era of intense despair’. Thus, Armah’s novels, beginning with his first, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, have long been associated with postcolonial disillusionment. Neil Lazarus’s Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, a study of Armah’s oeuvre, contends that Armah’s work is ‘exemplary of the passage from messianism to disillusion’, marking the disappointment that succeeded the optimism of independence.
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- Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial TimeWaiting for Now, pp. 121 - 158Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022