Narrativising Community, Surviving Contagion

Abstract

This essay is a meditative reflection on the critical, creative, and narrative labour involved in making the community “real” as a part of contemporary lived and temporal experiences of modernity. I analyse the crucial role that fiction plays in realising the community. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s provocation regarding the “derangement” of normative notions of realism as the starting point, this essay re-examines the place of orality in the contemporary African novel. Chief among its claims is that orality and realism are companionate terms. The deployment of oral forms provides a more expansive view of reality that is otherwise unavailable within capitalist conceptions of time and linear development. In the essay, I read Véronique Tadjo’s ‘Ebola’ novel In the Company of Men (English trans. 2021) as an invitation to the community in the wake of the devastation struck by deadly diseases such as Ebola and COVID-19. I argue that Tadjo organises a literary imagination of community and solidarity as the basis of a collective reckoning that is yet to come. In this sense, the book operates as a “portal,” fashioning both a cultural memory of collective survival (from human and nonhuman perspectives) and raising an urgent, anticipatory call for more expansive forms of imagination facing the future.

Keywords

• orality
• community
• pandemics
• temporality