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Facts And Fiction In Akachi Adimora - Ezeigbo’s Chldren Of The Eagle And The Last Of The Strong Ones
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1.2 DEFINITION OF TERMS:
a) FACTS.
Facts can be defined as
concrete reality or actual reality or actual presentation of events that
have historical record. The reality could be social, economics or
politics. The rise of facts in the novel was necessitated when there
came the need for the actual documentation of events that occurred in
the life of the people in a society or the society itself. Example are
autobiographies, Biographies, documentary. All these give the actual
events as they occurred and are recorded down through an element of
creative imagination.
A writer like Adimora-Ezeigbo has shown in her
trilogy an attempt to understand her society and relate with it in the
context of a global historiography that shaped the works of pioneer
writers and which as has been stated, is still unfolding. In simple
terms then, the span of Nigerian literary history is still too short to
evaluate the performance of writers on the basis of ‘generation’. The
task of periodizing, and indeed, of writing a comprehensive and reliable
account of Nigerian literature is rightly that of a future generation
of critics for whom compilations of the nature attempted here would
function as data. Facts are real issues discussed in Akachi Adimora
Ezeigbo’s works like: feminism/gender issues, The Orature of the Igbo’s
and the Aesthetics of facts and fiction. Akachi Adimora. — Ezeigbo in
her The Last of the Strong Ones (1996) emphasized on the issue of
feminism. In The Last of the Strong Ones(1996) Adimora — Ezeigbo
continues what Chinua Achebe had begun more than forty years (40) before
with his novel Things Fall Apart (1958). He wanted to show;
That
African people did not hear of culture for the first time from
Europeans; ... their societies were not mindless but frequently had a
philosophy of great depth and value and beauty. They had poetry and;
above all, they had dignity .... The worst thing that can happen to any
people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty
is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened
to them, what
they lost. There is a saying in Igbo that a man who
can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried
his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat
them.
Achebe’s literary portrait of the history and culture of the
Igbo was limited to the extent that he marginalized women and neglected
their voice. While Achebe thematizes the curse of colonialism with a
view to men alone, and without a deeper examination of gender relations,
Adimora — Ezeigbo is interested not only in colonialism, but also in
gender relations on the eve of colonization. Unlike in Things fall Apart
(1958), existing gender relations are not merely portrayed, but
institutions such as polygamy and violence against women are put in a
critical light. This double — tracked thematic orientation of the novel
is also manifested in the narrator, who is commissioned by the
inhabitants of the village “to preserve our tradition and guide our
people back to our way of life before ‘Kosiri’ infested us with their
presence†(p.82). In very concrete terms, she has the task of recording
the life stories of the four Oluada, the “top women representatives†of
.Umuga, who are also the main figures in the Umuada, the association of
the daughters of Umuga. Later she is appointed chronicler of the
colonial destruction of Umuga. The first person narrator lives up .to
both tasks in the novels. By using the medium of literature for
remembrance, she puts herself in the oral narrative tradition, to which
the first-person narrator herself refers when she names “the family
historian, the storyteller and the custodian of tradition†in one breath
(p.83). This goes along with the fact that the narrator tells the story
in an oral narrative style. Ezeigbo manages to imitate conventions of
spoken language, so that when reading one has the impression that one is
hearing the novel rather than reading it.
b) FICTION
Fiction is
an abiding social beauty, the expression of human activities in written
words; the expression and the impression of the people who have created
it; it is the production of what purports to be an authentic account of
the actual experience of individuals.
The novel reflects actual
human experience narrated in a straight forward manner. While reading
any novel, the reader might feel that he is reading about his own
character or about his neighbors. This kind of reading is purely for
enjoyment, leisure and probably to while away time, Besides, since prose
is a narrative form, it becomes more accessible to the reader than
other genres of literature especially in the African setting where the
culture involves storytelling techniques.
Here, the literary artist
is able to use very effectively, l for communicative purposes through
imagination and creativity. And basically, the novel can be classified
into fiction and non — fiction. Fiction in opposition to non — fiction
is the prose from which the element are based on mere creative
imagination of the artist rather than the real life situations presented
by the non — fictional writers who are the novelists.
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This research work addressed itself to the way people tend to see fictional works. People see fictional works as being fictitious, but they are over laid with fact. This long essay, using Akachi Adimora. Ezeigbo’s works as guide, demonstrated the impact of the intermeddling of fact with fiction in literary works. They do not always obstruct each other and when harnessed depending on the ingenuity of the artist they can serve multiple purposes. The sociological socialist realism theory is ... Continue reading---
