Of Languages and Borders: Chinua Achebe and Nuruddin Farah
Open Access
Author:
Abukar, Ilyas Omar
Area of Honors:
Comparative Literature
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Alexander C Y Huang, Thesis Supervisor Alexander C Y Huang, Thesis Supervisor Sydney Sue Aboul Hosn, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
language achebe farah nuruddin texts obi askar literature
Abstract:
As African writers working in the postcolonial period, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe and Somalia's Nuruddin Farah engage the colonial legacy in their novels. However, Somali and Nigeria experienced two different colonialisms embedded in each country’s unique history. In the fiction of the African novel, making sense of issues of personal identity and greater national culture after colonial intervention is central. Farah’s protagonist Askar grows up to understand how his Somali ethnic identity is constructed around and maintained by the singular Somali language spoken in different neighboring territories. Meanwhile, Achebe’s protagonist Obi Okonkwo, via diglossia, manipulates language to affirm his identity as an ethnic Igbo. Both writers point towards investigating the way language and border attach themselves to each other as ethnic markers in the post-colony to define personal and cultural identity.
