From Ireland to Equatorial Guineaa comparative study of Sean O’Faolain and Donato Ndongo?

Resumen

The thesis begins by establishing how, in spite of the apparently disparate origins of these writers, we can establish that both in fact belong to a common Atlantic space of transnational commercial and intellectual traffic, with the history of Ireland and Equatorial Guinea displaying strikingly suggestive points of overlap, surprising ¿contact zones¿ which allow us trace in both individuals a common ¿intercultural positionality.¿ Subsequently, before focusing on the feasibility of ¿reading¿ both men as postcolonial public intellectuals, contemporary debates around culture and identity politics, particularly in relation to the Northern Irish conflict and to the clash between what can be broadly termed ¿revisionism¿ and ¿postcolonialism¿ are examined. Turning to look at the nature of the public intervention of both men, a conspicuous pattern of continuity emerges as we establish the remarkable similarity of their intellectual projects in which they contest the autarky of the postcolonial nations that have emerged from the processes of decolonization. I examine closely their prose work, especially as editors of the cultural magazines The Bell and África 2000, establishing a pattern of intellectual engagement that closely corresponds to the model of public intellectual provided by the key postcolonial critic Edward Said and expressed through a critical language of speaking truth to power, amateurism, exile and counterpoint and developed particularly in Representations of the Intellectual. The study, however, proposes that more than through their roles as public intellectuals it is in the writing, telling and performance of self that the most radical potential of these men can be interpreted. We find that it is the proposal of both as literary artists as well as intellectuals in the world which allows us interpret as appropriate to them a paradigm of critical consciousness that, to follow Said, can be described as spatial, demanding as it does a remapping of self in constant renegotiation between fact and fiction, self and the other and home and away. Such a spatial paradigm challenges the hegemony of what Said calls Hegelian temporality and its metropolitan insistence on the teleological resolution of the contradictions of peripheral identity. In O¿Faolain and Ndongo we see a late resistance to a model of centred, authoritative, non-contradictory subjectivity manifest in their willingness to cede authority over self to their interlocutors, those with whom they dialogue, particularly in O¿Faolain¿s case to the women in his life. My thesis concludes by recognizing the potential of such a paradigm given that it does not demand the abandonment of ethnic identity in favour of dominant, putatively mature metropolitan models, while having what is, in effect, an in-built safety feature which works to critique any excess of identity politics. It is a paradigm which insists on travel away from the self, on being outward looking while recognizing a natural point of departure. Consequently, the attempt to follow ¿unapproved routes¿ from Ireland to Equatorial Guinea is undertaken not in the hope of establishing a crude empirical equivalence but of engaging with or democratically dialoguing between two places whose relationship is not explicitly encoded as primitive and advanced. Similarly, this model of spatial, literary consciousness, predicated as it is on negotiation and dialogue, is deployable in relation to the conflict that has marked Northern Ireland over recent decades. It is a model which disavows any vocabulary of extremes, respects collective expressions of identity while enacting a reciprocal belonging to humanity as a whole and ultimately privileging peace over war. The study ends by relating my ¿close reading,¿ in the Saidian sense, of O¿Faolain and Ndongo to the contemporary political sphere and to recent high profile events in Ireland and Africa, ultimately defending the value of the transnational postcolonial idiom I have been outlining and proposing it as potentially productive of more enabling relations for all who have inherited the problematic legacy of history in Ireland.