Browsing by Author "Moolla, Fiona F."

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    The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka�s Ak�: the years of childhood
    (Sage Publications, 2012) Moolla, Fiona F.
    The scarification in Ak� is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka�s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically �opens� the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Ak� is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba sociocultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka�s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification.
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    Border crossings in the African travel narratives of Ibn Battuta, Richard Burton and Paul Theroux
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012) Moolla, Fiona F.
    This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the 21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It examines the mutually constitutive relationship between conceptions of literal territorial boundaries and the figurative boundaries of the subject that ventures across borders in Africa. The border is seen as a liminal zone which paradoxically separates and joins spaces. Accounts of border crossings in travel writing from different periods suggest the historicity and cultural specificity of conceptions of geographical borders, and the way they index the �boundaries� of the subjects who cross them. Tracing the transformations in these conceptions of literal and metaphorical borders allows one to chart the emergence of the dominant contemporary idea of �Africa� as the inscrutable, savage continent.
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    When orature becomes literature: Somali oral poetry and folktales in Somali novels
    (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012) Moolla, Fiona F.
    The article discusses Somali literature, with particular focus given to the influence of Somali oral poetry and folk tales on modern novels. The difference between the concepts of orature and oral literature is examined, and the history of print and oral literary culture coexisting in Somalia is commented on.