earticle

영어

Trickster-like characters appear in a wide variety of written and visual media, and in recent decades a figure more or less directly linked to the traditional trickster has appeared repeatedly in works of postcolonial fiction. The present exploration of three West African novels is intended to illuminate the ways in which modern West African literature in particular and postcolonial writing in general. However, the presence of folk elements like the trickster in the postcolonial novel does not merely imply antagonism between cultural groups. The trickster contributes to these positive developments in some of the same paradoxical ways he plays a positive role in oral literature: his irrepressibly transgressive, destructive, self-destructive, and scandalous habits are both mediatory and funny. While each of the three tricksters in the novels studied here participate in all facets of the rebellion Gakwandi delineates, the Tortoise story in Achebe’s novel seems oriented mainly to “the exploitative colonial set-up”; Danda’s actions in Nwankwo’s novel bespeak skepticism about “the authoritarian hierarchy of traditional society” and “the commercialism” and religion “of the West”; and the beggar in Sembene’s Xala exposes mainly the injustice and corruption of neocolonial, Western influenced “commercialism” and the “philistine society of post-independence” Senegal.