Abstract
Critics writing of Margaret Laurence’s experiences in and presentation of Africa in her fiction have tended to fix her writings within a fictional frame of their own creating.1 The form this fictional framing has taken has been that of the epic or romance quest or journey. The road to Manawaka lies through Ghana, Nigeria and the searching desert sun of the Haud. The ‘African experience’ is not an exotic interlude but an integral part of the making of the mature novelist. It is a view which Laurence herself did much to support. Africa was a stroke of luck in allowing her the ‘necessary distancing from her prairie background’;2 in an unpublished article she proclaimed that ‘It was really Africa which taught me to look at myself’; elsewhere she wrote, ‘I had come back to Canada via Africa, both physically and spiritually.’3 Ultimately, it is a comforting image of migration, and one which it is difficult to resist or deny; a progress of the self, assimilating the matter of experience into new material. The prairie is, after all, just another desert.
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Notes
Patricia Morley, ‘Canada, Africa, Canada: Laurence’s Unbroken Journey’, Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. 27 (1980) pp. 81–91;
Jane Leney, ‘Prospero and Caliban in Laurence’s African Fiction’, Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. 27 (1980) pp. 63–80;
P. Morley, ‘The Long Trek Home’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 11, no. 4 (November 1976) pp. 19–28.
Margaret Laurence, Long Drums and Cannons (London: Macmillan, 1968) p. 29.
Margaret Laurence, ‘Ivory Tower or Grassroots?: the Novelist as Sociopolitical Being’, in W. H. New (ed.), A Political Art (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1978) pp. 15–25.
Jean Margaret Wemyss (Margaret Laurence), ‘The Mask of Beaten Gold’, Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. 27 (1980) pp. 23–40.
Margaret Laurence, ‘The Rain Child’, in her The Tomorrow-Tamer (London: Macmillan, 1963) pp. 105–33.
Ann Wilson, Traditional Romance and Tale: How Stories Mean (Ipswich, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1976) pp. 84–5.
Margaret Laurence, ‘Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel’, Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. 27 (1980) pp. 54–62.
Arthur Ravenscroft, ‘Africa in the Canadian Imagination of Margaret Laurence’, in S. Chew (ed.), Re-visions of Canadian Literature (Leeds: University of Leeds IBTC, 1985) p. 39.
Wole Soyinka, Ake (London: Rex Collings, 1981) p. 17.
Cf. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Margaret Laurence, The Prophet’s Camel Bell (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963) pp. 65–6.
Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or What Mr Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, in H. L. Gates (ed.), ‘Racc’, Writing and Difference (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 138–62.
Clifford Geerte, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) p. 22.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) p. 1.
B. W. Andrzejewski and G. Innes, ‘Reflections on African Oral Literature’, African Languages, vol. 1 (1975) pp. 5–58.
B. W. Andrzejewski, ‘Poetry in Somali Society’, in Pride and Holmes (eds), Sociolinguistics (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1972); J. W. Johnson, Heellooy, Heellellooy: The Development of the Genre Heello in Modern Somali Poetry (Indiana University: unpublished PhD Thesis, 1974).
B. W. Andrzejewski and G. Innes, ‘Reflections on African Oral Literature’, African Languages, vol. 1 (1975) pp. 5–58.
J. W. Johnson, Heellooy, Heellellooy: The Development of the Genre Heello in Modern Somali Poetry (Indiana University: unpublished PhD Thesis, 1974).
Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Josue V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies (London: Methuen, 1980) p. 77.
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© 1990 David Richards
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Richards, D. (1990). ‘Leave the Dead some room to dance!’. In: Nicholson, C. (eds) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7_2
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