ABSTRACT
In her book, Elechi Amadi—The Man and His Work, Ebele Eko notes, “Art for Amadi is the foremost consideration before theme, and the pleasure it affords before the moral it teaches”. And Amadi himself, in his work, Elechi Amadi—Speaking and Singing (Papers and Poems) (2003, p. 29), maintains that “aesthetics and utilitarianism do not often make good bed-fellows.” The implication of this ideological disposition for Amadi's art is that his writing is essentially speculative and far more dependent on his own creative and inventive imagination, fueled by interplay between humans and the supernatural, than by the concrete daily events and happenings in his material world. Perhaps the greatest manifestation of this artistic inclination of Amadi is to be found in his unusual venturing into the genre of science fiction, a rarity among his other Nigerian and African contemporary writers. Yet, despite his ideological distancing from committed literature, or from the ideology of using literature to “teach,” Elechi Amadi's work has been found to hold eternal lessons for humanity from many flanks, including gender, environmental issues, a vote for peace as against war, a shunning of greed and avarice, etc. These eternal teachings chiseled out of Amadi's works, typically The Concubine and The Great Ponds , in which the supernatural interface with humans in directing the course of events in society, are the focus of this study. The study aligns Amadi with the position held by Sir Philip Sydney that art, by not setting out to assert, is closer to reality than history. In other words, what is most beautifully, creatively and inventively speculated often turns out to reflect reality more succinctly, accurately and long-lastingly than that which is predicated on the concrete material world of reality.
