Time Never Lines Up like a Street: Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra

Extract

Africanist studies conventionally restrict considerations of space to its physical dimensions. affective representations in literary writing oppose the village to the city, imbuing the village with comprehensible, but rarely historicized, routines. Until disturbed by uninvited and troubling ideas, institutions, and individuals from unknowable distances and places, the village nourishes existential certainty and sustains spiritual balance. In contrast, the corrupting, bewildering city signals instabilities of all kinds, even in the social sciences. Across the disciplines, while organic production and genuinely reciprocal relations dominate in the village, the insatiable city absorbs without giving back and never offers spiritual renewal. The village half of the spatial dyad represents what is truly African, and folklore, or orality in general, holds Africa's romance together. Its schematic character notwithstanding, the predisposition toward construing space as little more than the thin cover of more vital substances that facilitate self-understanding has produced enduring parameters for interpreting African expressive forms. With convivial marketplaces and festivals, evil forests and sacred groves, village squares and humble homesteads, depictions of the village in novels set at the beginning of colonization have fixed, perhaps permanently, perceptions of the African cultural past in reader's imaginations, and efforts to read these narratives have generated useful, axiomatic insights about meanings of traditional, everyday African life and its ritualized calibrations of the movement of time, its reifications of the social compact, and its coded references to the society's cosmic bearings. he African city has not been that fortunate.