The trickster as a semiotic figure for construing postcolonial experience: Kwakye’s “The Clothes of Nakedness”

Abstract

This essay examines an instance of the use of folklore by writers in postcolonial African societies to problematize postcolonial systems in fiction. The essay discusses how Benjamin Kwakye exploits the trickster character as a semiotic figure to construe the themes of survival and social and economic insecurity in The Clothes of Nakedness. The features of the trickster deployed include the spider imagery and his webbing across geographical margins, the use of trickery and manipulation as survival and power-building strategies, and the role of the trickster as a “hero-scamp” and villain. Towards the end of the narrative, the trickster is removed from focalization, and villainous events he engineers are construed as happening in spite of him. He remerges at the end as the ubiquitous spider in whom all mysteries make sense. These strategies are related to postcolonial issues of corruption, socioeconomic marginalization, and international aid.

Keywords:

• African continuities
• African literature
• narrative style
• orality
• postcolonial literature
• trickster tale

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and to Wincharles Coker and HE Quiping for proofreading different versions of the paper. They also thank Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang for his lessons on Oral Literature in Africa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Ghanaian folklore and also in other African cultures, the trickster character is normally a gendered male. Among the Akan of Ghana, Ananse normally has a wife, called Asɔ, and a son, called Ntekuma.

2 “New disease” refers to the HIV AIDS pandemic across Africa in the 1990s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isaac N. Mwinlaaru

Isaac N. Mwinlaaru holds a Ph.D degree from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and is currently a lecturer at the Department of English, University of Cape Coast, Ghana. His research focuses on African languages and literatures. He has published in internationally recognized journals such as Research in African Literatures, Functions of Language, Functional Linguistics, and Language Sciences. He has also recently contributed to The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics.

Samuel K. Nkansah

Samuel Kwesi Nkansah is a senior lecturer at the Department of English, University of Cape Coast. His research interests include oral literature in Africa, literary stylistics, the literary aesthetics of contemporary Ghanaian music, and eco-criticism.