Towards an "African Stylistics": Apprehending Cross-Cultural Creativity in the Works of Chris Abani

Anglophone African literatures have often been praised for their linguistic originality. More often than not, critics interested in the stylistic inventiveness of works from the continent have focused their attention on these texts’ specifically “African” features, from the use of proverbs to the presence of words from indigenous languages. While these scholarly studies have done much to demonstrate the richness of African aesthetic standards, they have also tended to obscure other facets of the creativity of African writers who, just like their counterparts all over the world, make ample use of such devices as metaphor, irony, and unreliable narration.
After a brief examination of the methodological and epistemological issues that have shaped the elusive field of “African stylistics”, I propose to investigate how contemporary stylistic theories may contribute to the understanding of the multiple forms of creativity found in the works of the US-based Nigerian writer Chris Abani. A self-proclaimed “global Igbo” (after the name of his father’s ethnic group), Abani boldly combines in his work African cosmology with influences from the Catholic and Buddhist traditions, also using formal devices – such as minor sentences and poetic metaphors – whose significance can only be fully appreciated through extensive stylistic analysis. Mainly focusing on Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail (2006), I will suggest that a combination of traditional culture-oriented approaches to African literatures and more typically “mainstream” stylistic techniques is needed to apprehend the Nigerian writer’s complex cross-cultural worldview.