Ambiguity and the Modernist Question: Characterising Estrangement in Selected African Novels

Modern African literature since its inception explores several modernist tensions such as ambiguity, alienation, solitude, and estrangement, these foreground the uncanny and the defamiliarization experienced by Africans as a result of colonial conquest and political disillusionment. Consequently, it can be said that there is a detachment, whereby the people no longer recognize themselves from the existing coloniality that interferes with their indigenous way of life. Scholarship shows that this estrangement is mostly felt in the isolation that comes with migration and urban dwelling. However, it is observed that defamiliarization and estrangement do not necessarily involve migration as local dwellers have their immediate environment defamiliarized in postcolonial regions. From Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, this essay examines the uncanny, which comes with the detachment of characters in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Tanre Ojaide’s The Activist, and Nawal El’ Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. It is discovered that from the uncanny the characters are established as modernist question foregrounded in contradiction and the postcolonial modernism.