(Re‐)Forming stereotypes: Modes of mimicry in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time

Abstract

Chinua Achebe’s seminal work Things Fall Apart inaugurated the project of writing back to empire that many subsequent African writers have continued to develop, disrupting and destabilizing colonial texts. With his novel Measuring Time, Helon Habila enters the intertextual arena, recuperating images constructed through colonial discourse and turning them back on themselves, at the same time appropriating these colonial stereotypes and using parody and caricature in order to censure the excesses of postcolonial governing structures. Even as he defetishizes colonial authority, Habila reduces representatives of local authority to figures of fun, caricatures that unwittingly mimic colonial constructions of themselves. With the annual performance of “The Coming”, local women self‐consciously play colonial figures, thereby representing an assumption of ownership in which the actors “contain mimicry" in Graham Huggan’s words, appropriating and reconfiguring meaning to produce something outside of the exploitative practice of colonial and postcolonial authority. Unlike the aimless and disillusioned inquisitors of Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters, and perhaps more like Beatrice’s improvisational ritual at the conclusion of Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, these “new interpreters” hold out some hope for change, however much it may be qualified by the novel’s pervasive mood of disillusionment.

Keywords:

• mimicry
• counter‐discourse
• stereotypes
• colonialism
• appropriation
• Helon Habila

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Neil ten Kortenaar for suggesting Taussig’s book during a discussion following the author’s presentation of a version of this paper at the CACLALS conference, Carleton University, Ottawa, 23–25 May 2009.