TABAIM LO LIYONG'S FIXIONS: A STORY IN THE ABSURD+

ODUNBALOGUN

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ODUNBALOGUN

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(1) Taban lo liyong: the avant-grade artist There is hardly any short story writer in contemporary Africa who is as exciting as Taban lo Liyong.1 On reading a story by lo Liyong one is immediately aware of a new dynamic creative personality: the personality of a writer who despite popular opinion believes that trie best literature has not yet been written^ and, because of this belief, is himself determined to find the way of writing such a literature. Taban Lo Liyong is, therefore, not tied down to any of the old literary models. He is free of them and so free, in fact, that at times this freedom borders on irreverence for existing traditions. The road lo Liyong has chosen is that of active experimentation with and development of new literary forms. He constantly synthesizes old and new methods with the hope of creating a new style that is uniquely suited to his themes. The expansiveness and challenging quality of lo Liyong's creative spirit is evident, for example, in the following lines of one of his stories:

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There is however, a new crop of African short story writers with a flare for the experimental, who are beginning to make their presence felt. We should watch out especially for the Ethiopian writer, Solomon Derssa, the Kenyan writer, Bahadur Tejani, and the Liberian writer, Wilton Sankawulo.

Taban lo Liyong, to my knowledge, has not made any specific statement to this effect; but all his writings, as indeed is the case with all avant-garde writings, combine to suggest this conclusion.

Taban lo Liyong, Fixions (Heinemann, London, 1978), p. 32. This eighty-one-page collection of nine stories provides the material for this study. Further references will be indicated in the body of the essay.

A Manifesto of Italian Futurism", in The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, ed. Irving Howe (Horizon Press, New York, 1967), pp. 170-171.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entrophy, and Other Matters", in A Soviet Heretic, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970), p. 111.

Donald Barthelme,, "Sentence" in Superfiction of the American Story Transformed, ed. Joe David Bellamy, (Vintage Books, New York, 1975), pp. 213-220.

Han M. Zell and Helene Silver, A Reader's Guide to African Literature (Heinemann, London, 1977), pp. 153-4.

C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (The Odyssey Press, New York, 1960), p.4

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Anchor Books, New York, 1969), P-5

Ibid.

Holman, op. cit., p.4

Julius Lester, "The Outsider in European and Afro-American Literature" Okike, No. 10(1976), p. 93.

If in doubt, examine the outsiders in Ayi Kwei Armah's first three novels.

TABAIM LO LIYONG'S FIXIONS: A STORY IN THE ABSURD+

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