“Re-storying” the Ancestors and Us in Ojaide’s Selected Short Stories
Abstract
This essay examines Tanure Ojaide‟s use of traditional African mythopoeia in reassessing western ideological viewpoints in his fictional works, particularly his short stories. A critical study of selected stories from his two collections, God’s Medicine Men and Other Stories and The Old Man in the State House and Other Stories reveals Ojaide‟s cultural activism in which he carries the burden of reassessing the path to the domain of African myths, beliefs and cultural aesthetics and in the process, displaces all vestiges of Eurocentric ideological models on African literature. He juxtaposes various Eurocentric and Afrocentric values and creates a hybridity that justifies his notion of cultural harmony. The dexterity with which he handles the various melting points between conflicting cultures is also highlighted to demonstrate his ideology that no culture is superior to the other. The essay leans on insights from the postcolonial theory in interrogating the idea of a cultural conflict between the dominant and the resistance group as well as the dichotomy between European ideology and African values. The paper, therefore, concludes that part of the indices of “re-storying” as propagated by Ojaide is the desire of the oppressed peoples of the world to look inward in fashioning narrative models in telling their stories from their own cultural perspective.References
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