The stylistic reciprocity between textual errancy and cohesion in David Maillu's broken drum

Abstract

A stylistic analysis of David Maillu's Broken Drum reveals that the text is committed to both centripetal and centrifugal artistic goals. While these would, as a general rule, be opposed to each other, they are uniquely strategised in the novel to animate each other and thus produce a mutually generative unity that affirms the thematic mission of the text. This study presents an examination of how Broken Drum uses textual errancy and cohesion in a relationship that concretises the novel's ideas and thus enhances the work's intelligibility and beauty as an aesthetic object. The study provides a resume of the literary researches that have precipitated the present one. A review of these researches reveals that Maillu's stylistic achievements have not been given enough academic attention. The study also notes that although there is substantial scholarship of Maillu's earlier works, Broken Drum, which is no doubt Maillu's most ambitious creation, and his later works have largely been ignored in academic research. It is also revealed that cohesion, as a stylistic strategy that enhances a work's intelligibility and aesthetic beauty, has not been systematically studied in African literature. A study of Maillu's life, experiences, and ambitions is provided. The purpose of these biographical details is not only to serve as an introduction to one of the most prolific African literary personalities, but to show how the author's life affects the structure and theme of his. creations. Emphasis is placed on those aspects of Maillu' s life that illuminate the theme and style of Broken Drum. Taking advantage of recent developments in stylistics, deconstruction and the evolving postcolonial theory of literature, eaca chapter attempts to carry out a programmatic analysis of the thematic implications of the use of decentralised techniques of story-telling to enhance the novel's coherence. Ail analysis of the multiple voices and perspectives through which the narrative of Broken Drum is conveyed to the reader reveals the voices to be metonymic of the work's overall mission which is to demonstrate that knowledge comes from different sources and opposed categories can mutually enrich each other. The study's focus on the novel's thematic and formal presentation of time and space shows that the text combines cyclic and linear time schemes to emphasise its view that cultures should respect one another. The text's communion with others that preceded it undermines its essence and autonomy as an artistic construct. The intertextuality bred by this reference to other texts also enhances the novel's coherence by encouraging the reader to respond to it within certain established contexts. Intertextuality, superficially a centrifugal force, enhances the text's coherence in the long-run. The relationship between textual errancy and cohesion concretises the novel's meaning and its advocacy of free, non-colonising and non-colonised, relationships. The novel thus punctures the stereotypes of entities as opposed to each other in unchangeable binary categories by reversing the valences in essentialist hierarchies. The illegitimacy and undesirability of the prioritisation of some single categories as superior to others in an immutable dual split is well captured in the nove1's form in which opposed narrative methods reciprocate. Broken Drum's meaning and aesthetic beauty, then, are grounded in the reciprocation of one formal and thematic entity to its opposite.