ABSTRACT
I begin with a look at two frames for considering animism in the postcolonial context of Nigeria. First I examine Harry Garuba’s warning against reducing African animist ontology to the status of a fixed object in a western constellation of empirical knowledge, a danger that risks setting the modern western time of “progress” against a prerational, premodern, and eternally undifferentiated Africa. Second, I invoke Tim Ingold’s distinction between animist things – increments of matter existing in and for themselves, and interrelated with other beings in what he calls a meshwork – and dead objects, dead because they are bounded, contained, and hierarchically arranged in human-controlled spaces. In both these cautionary accounts, I locate a complexity of meaning that guides how we might read animism in postcolonial literature as a structuring narrative force, and not merely for its presence in imagery. To that end, I present a comparative reading of China Achebe’s magisterial Things Fall Apart alongside a recent Nigerian novel, Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, and ask the reader to consider these two novels in animist terms simultaneously and in combination. An animist rendering of traumatic experiences in the colonial period (in Things Fall Apart) and the contemporary postcolonial period (in The Fishermen) hinges on reading both novels concurrently, letting meaning “leak” from one into the other and vice-versa, establishing a relational view of Nigerian trauma that argues for narrative structure in both works as fundamentally animist in shape and ethos. Reading these novels, I suggest, means orienting ourselves into an unfamiliar shape, a posture in which we are attentive to the way apparently apocalyptic prophecies (fulfilled in both texts) give way to a provisional notion of survival – which involves more than the fate that befalls the characters therein.
