The Sick Novel From Anemic State: Sickness As Praxis In The African Novelist’s Agenda

Abstract

The African novel, like most other literary genres from the same region, has thrived under different nomenclatures. Hence within the sub categories of the genre are critics’ labels like pre-colonial, colonial, post colonial, disillusionment, political and apolitical. Interestingly it has been discovered that the christening of the African novel has always been the directives of the self-instructive profile of the genre, adequately powered by the analogous critical idioms supplied by the critics. For instance Chinua Achebe had labeled Armah’s The Beautyful ones are not yet Born as ‘the sick book’ in his popular, and instantaneous criticism of the novel. Little did Achebe know that his emblematic utterance on Armah’s premier narrative would serve as a signature to understand what other African novelists have done in their works. In this essay, we attempt to hypothesize with the notion of ‘sick novel’ in a bid to buttress the enduring themes and tropes in selected novel.