Achebe and Daoud as African Authors Writing Back to Conrad and Camus Respectively: A Pstcolonial Study

Abstract

This article aims at shedding light on the colonial and postcolobnial use of language in relation to the description and literary portrayal of the native. It takes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1900) and Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942) as prominent European texts dealing with colonial Africa and Africans and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Kamal Daoud’s Meursault Investigation (2013) as postcolonial responses respectively. The analysis is undertaken through the lens of Bill Ashcroft’s et al’s notion of writing back. This, according to Ashcroft, comes as a political rejection of the imposition of language on the colonized by means of dialects, variants, unorthodox use of grammar, and refusal to use certain vocabulary. The writer’s attitude therefore oscillates the use of colonially imposed language from a means of oppression to a defiant voice that broadcasts his community’s frustrations and resistance. This study highlights the use of techniques and tools such as the first-person narrative and silence, which allowed the reinforcement of colonial discourse to paint Africa in a negative light. The colonized people are reduced to the margin only serving as background to develop the stories of Marlow and Meursault. In response to that, postcolonial writers reclaim the narrative and offer alternate perspectives which are descriptive to their experiences rather than be limited by the marginalization of their people. Such counter discourse is in fact very important in terms of repairing the historical narrative from which they were systematically excluded, as argued by Bill Ashcroft in his acclaimed book on postcolonial literary responses to the voyeurism of the empire on its colony’s suffering. Okonkwo and Harun thus emerge as symbols of the reframed and reclaimed African identity separate from the confinements of the rigid European tale.