Introduction: Eustace Palmer, Critic, Novelist & Teacher

Abstract

This meta-criticism of Eustace Palmer’s approach to literary criticism seeks to affirm the work of one of the most influential pioneers of criticism of the African novel and one of the first to come up with a set of criteria for evaluating the genre. I content that Palmer deserves a place in any work devoted to a criticism of the African novel. In this Introduction to a Critical Series on Eustace Palmer, I return to the 1970s debate between Adeola James and Eustace Palmer on the role of the critic in evaluating the African novel. I introduce this controversial debate and its reception in literary circles and note that it provided the impetus for my own paper in this collection titled “Adeola James and the Problem of Subjectivity: Eustace Palmer’s Plea for Objectivity.” In this paper, I examine the merits of both sides of the debate while exposing the pitfalls and inconsistencies in James’ criticism of Palmer’s seminal work An Introduction to the African Novel. The rest of the essays in this Series illustrate the authors’ perspectives on Palmer’s approach to criticism. Together, they present a body or meta-criticism of Palmer’s approach to literary criticism and the aesthetics of creative fiction.

Keywords:

• Eustace Palmer
• African critic

In Fall 2019, our beloved colleague and friend of blessed memory, Tejumola Olaniyan, asked me to consider what I thought was a very serious, if not, daunting proposition: to anchor an edition of the Critical Masters series of the Journal of the African Literature Association. The Series would be devoted to the works of my former professor and colleague, Eustace Palmer. After the initial hesitation and moments of soul-searching, I decided to embrace the opportunity. I was particularly excited to do this work primarily because of my conviction in the significance of the works of Eustace Palmer both in shaping the canon of African literature and influencing the praxis of criticism in what has come to be known as post-colonial studies.

My other motivation for anchoring the Series stems from the latitude it offers me to return to the 1970s debate between Adeola James and Eustace Palmer on the role of the critic in evaluating the African novel. This controversial debate and its reception in literary circles provide the impetus for my own paper in this collection titled “Adeola James and the Problem of Subjectivity: Eustace Palmer’s Plea for Objectivity.” In this paper, I examine the merits of both sides of the debate while exposing the pitfalls and inconsistencies in James’ criticism of Palmer’s seminal work An Introduction to the African Novel. I conclude on the subject of using the same standards of evaluation for Western and African novels that: “If the novel is critiqued in the context of ethnography, then it changes the definition of the canon and inevitably draws from culture and identity to incorporate authenticity – who is qualified to write or critique African literature and to use what approaches or criteria? However, if we view the novel as a work of art, then Palmer’s objection is valid: literature must be appreciated independently of its historical, sociological, or cultural contexts. There is veracity in his contention that if African literature is to be accepted as serious literature it must be judged by the same standards and criteria as Western and other forms of literature and not treated as ethnographic data or historical and cultural documents.”

The rest of the essays in this Series illustrate the authors’ perspectives on Palmer’s approach to criticism. Together they present a body or meta-criticism of Palmer’s approach to literary criticism and the aesthetics of creative fiction. I take each of these essays in turn highlighting the salient aspects of their arguments.

Joseph McLaren’s essay titled “Social Justice in the Courtroom: Youth Culture and Multiple Narrative Voices in Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging Is Announced” is indicative of Palmer’s stellar contribution to the art of creative fiction. As McLaren puts it, Palmer “follows the tradition of the first generation of African writers in their concern for the political and social situations of Africa in general and in using the novel as a vehicle for exploring social justice.” With Caulker, he agrees that along with Abioseh Porter, Palmer’s edited Knowledge Is More Than Mere Words: A Critical Introduction to Sierra Leonean Literature (2008), is an “impressive introduction” to that body of work (174). McLaren further emphasizes that Palmer’s expertise as a critic and editor of Emerging Perspectives on Syl Cheney-Coker (2014), along with Ernest Cole, has been well positioned to consider the way his own fiction fits within the parameters of the Sierra Leonean novel. He adds that “Palmer is a prominent voice in giving more visibility to Sierra Leonean authors, who may have been overshadowed by the literary traditions of Nigerian, Ghanaian and Cameroonian writers” and in this way, “A Hanging Is Announced furthers the question of the relationship between politics and literature through viable political imperatives.”

As an African writer who has demonstrated concern about governmental authority and sought to explore the abuse of such authority and power in several circles, Palmer emerges as champion of social justice to, as McLaren puts it, “uncover the sources of injustice in the larger societal context, to redefine criminality beyond the focus on individual culpability.” In terms of stylistic considerations, McLaren’s essay underscores Palmer’s preoccupation as craftsman methodically shaping his message through the adoption, reconfiguration, and contextualization of narrative methods when he states: “A Hanging Is Announced exemplifies the search for social justice, using multiple narrative voices and the courtroom as literary space. Multiple narrative voices can be understood through musical analogies, such as counterpoint developed in such theoretical ideas as those of Edward Said in, for example, Culture and Imperialism (1994) and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006). In Culture and Imperialism, which considers narratives of the colonizer and colonized, Said suggests ‘looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of […] intertwined and overlapping histories’ (Said, Culture 18). The stories of the five narrative voices in A Hanging Is Announced are ‘intertwined’ and are of a contrapuntal or polyphonic nature, akin as well to the patterns of jazz improvisation, where individual soloists are given a defined space for presentation of their particular voice. Although Palmer’s novel is concerned more with the independent nation or state rather than a colonial relationship, Said’s contrapuntalism is applicable.”

Drawing from the symbol of the courtroom in literary and popular genes, McLaren places Palmer’s work squarely in the context of great fiction writing as follows: “Furthermore, literary works employing courtroom or judicial processes have become part of a popular genre, most pronounced in the West, and explored by diverse writers from earlier centuries to the present day. The larger question has been suggested by Ira Nadel, ‘Is justice possible in literature? Can it be represented fairly and convincingly?’ (Nadel 33). Novelists such as Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Melville in ‘Billy Budd’ (1924), Kafka in The Trial (1925), Faulkner in Sanctuary (1931), and William Styron in his controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) have offered situations in which ‘injustice reigns’ (Nadel 36). As it relates to social justice relevant to African descended characters, two noteworthy novels are Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). In Native Son, the courtroom becomes an arena for revealing racial inequities in the US. Nevertheless, critics have questioned the efficacy of fiction to achieve or represent social justice. Winifred Fluck remarks, ‘Can fictional texts such as novels, plays, or films offer meaningful contributions to the question of what constitutes justice? In what way can they authorize claims for justice?’ (Fluck 19).”

Mohamed Kamara’s piece, “Of Humans and Other 'Humans' also known as Nahums: Sameness and Difference in Eustace Palmer’s Canfira’s Travels” continues the conversation on Palmer’s style in creative fiction. Kamara uses the construct of sameness to elucidate perspectivism and in debunking the claim of essentialism as an aspect of duality in the novel. In the opening sections of his paper, he states the burden of his argument: to show “how Palmer’s novel–through a privileging of a discourse of sameness and difference duality–illustrates and interrogates notions of self and otherness.” In so doing he raises the following questions: “What is self, and what is the other? How are these two different from one another? To what extent are they the same? How do we and should we react when we encounter difference and otherness or sameness, or what appears to be such?” As he notes, “[t]hese are some of the questions that will serve as signposts as we accompany Canfira on his peregrination through what he refers to as a ‘strange land’.” He contends that ultimately, “the essay seeks to show how Eustace Palmer exploits the sameness-difference duality to levy a mordant criticism against individual characters and entire groups, demonstrating in the process the shakiness of the claim to essentialism inherent in the sameness-difference discourse, as well as the dangers of conformity.”

Like McLaren, Kamara situates Palmer’s creative fiction within a wider context. He writes:

Canfira’s Travels reminds one of such classics as Jonathan Swifts Gulliver’s Travels, Homer’s The Odyssey, Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage dans la lune, or such African classics as Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard and Birago Diop’s “L’Héritage,” among many other stories of journeys of discovery of the self and/or the other.” Based on the theoretical construct adopted for his paper, Kamara argues that to “identify (and sometimes seek out) sameness and difference, and to act upon them, is human. It matters little, in many cases, whether or not the sameness or difference is real or imagined. This instinct or urge to identify sameness or difference leads naturally to the categorization of newly encountered phenomena.”

Elaborating on this construct, he draws from “Sameness and Difference: A Cultural Foundation of Classification,” to argue in tandem with Hope A. Olson that the “duality of sameness and difference is an underlying principle of classification as we construct and practice it in Western culture. We try to group similar things together and separate them from things that are different. This principle is taught at an early age” (115). However, Kamara states that while, as Olson argues, binarism in classification is a typical Western praxis, it is by no means a practice unique to Western cultures. After all, the West, through colonialism and other expansionist enterprises, has managed to spread its attitudes far beyond its borders. He further clarifies that historically, societies have been organized on the principle of winnowing in and winnowing out things. Ultimately, as Joan C. Williams argues, “sameness rhetoric signals a societal choice to ignore a whole series of differences for strategic reasons,” which makes “claims of sameness… not mere assertions of pre-existing similarity,” but rather “a way of carrying on discussions about social ethics” (299). Consequently, classifications tend to “embody the biases most common in our culture” (Olson 115).

Working with Olson’s thoughts, Kamara postulates that sameness occurs when we identify in one entity one or more attributes that are purportedly similar to one or more attributes in one or more other entities that are otherwise different. In the strict sense of it, sameness between objects is an illusion, for no two things are truly the same. Hence, talking specifically about the Dewey Decimal Classification system (the focus of her article), he cites Olson: “Classifications such as the DDC set up pigeonholes for certain samenesses. Dewey himself recognized that dividing all of knowledge into tens is absurd in any theoretical sense but asserted that because it is efficient in practice… it is justifiable” (116). As he argues, the allure then of the sameness-difference duality resides therefore in its potential, if not capacity, to render the very human task of taxonomization more manageable. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Canfira tries to distinguish himself from Raselinoreans in the same way Raselinoreans remind him he is not one of them. Upon his arrival in Raselinorea, he is designated by the country’s ruler as an honorary-pigum since no one knows exactly what he is, and he, like everyone else, ‘needs’ to be categorized. This rather arbitrary edict that automatically categorizes Canfira as inferior emerges from the nahums’ belief they are superior to all other races. Canfira initially rejects the designation because on his own taxonomy of sameness, he is closer to the nahums than to the pigums whom he considers inferior to the already inferior nahums, with zero elegance and very disgusting lifestyles (91–92). However, realizing the windfall of his new classification, he gladly adopts the name Canfira-Pigum.

Kamara sums up the significance of the sameness construct for his critical analysis as follows: The sameness-difference discourse operates on two main levels in Palmer’s novel: the personal and the national. At the personal level, we see it in Canfira’s interactions with individual Raselinoreans, especially with his friend Ifars and the latter’s girlfriend, Kaynda, who later becomes Canfira’s girlfriend and business facilitator. At the national level, it involves implicit and direct comparisons between Raselinorea and Canfira’s home country. As his essay shows, Eustace Palmer exploits the sameness-difference duality to levy a mordant criticism against individual characters and entire groups, demonstrating in the process the shakiness of the claim to essentialism inherent in the sameness-difference discourse, as well as the dangers of conformity. In almost every case, when a character or group insists on their sameness or difference vis-à-vis another, it is usually to remind the other of their superiority or to justify some enunciation or act they themselves know to be inappropriate, immoral, and potentially detrimental to others.

Continuing the conversation on Palmer’s creative fiction, Arthur Hollist’s essay titled “The Critic as a Novelist: Migrating Between Writing Genres, Execution, Executing, and Self Determination in Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging is Announced” focuses on “new directions in African literature, [by which critics]… invariably assert, among other things, its movement away from social commitment and protest toward some understanding of art as an object whose primary purpose should be to invite contemplation rather than to provide instruction.” Hollist’s essay explores the role of the critic turned writer or artist and the poetics by which their work should be judged. He contends that in a person as Eustace Palmer in which the two roles are fused, it is important to note that “[w]hen the critic and the artist conjoin in one person… the adjoining forces us to think acutely,” Mendelsohn notes, about “qualities proper to each genre—and about why few writers excel in both” (“Do Critics Make Good Novelists” 2014).

Grappling with the question of whether the critic makes a good writer, Hollist draws from Leslie Jamison to substantiate his point. He writes: “Leslie Jamison points out that the issue may not be a question of why the critic-novelist finds difficulty in exceling in both but more a matter of an unstated hierarchy nested in the shift from one mode of writing to the other.” She observes that “[w]hen we talk about the novelist as critic, or the critic as novelist, the as [emphasis mine] matters. It creates a hierarchy by tucking one identity inside the other, like a pair of Russian nesting dolls.” Jamison further notes that “[w]e seem to have more patience for the novelist who writes criticism than the critic who writes novels.” She concludes that we appear to see “[t]he novelist who writes criticism is sending dispatches from inside the maelstrom – translating creativity into sense – while the critic who writes novels is learning to fly from a set of instructions, trying to conjure magic from recipes. The critic of the critic-novelist ratifies a certain Romantic notion of art: Creativity should rise from intuitive inspiration, not conceptual overdetermination” (“Do Critics Make Good Novelists” 2014).

From this awareness, Hollist gives an overview of Palmer’s writing: “As a body, Palmer’s critical philosophy eschews privileging one type of interpretive methodology over another.” Criticism of African literature, he argues, “evaluates the literary quality of the work and also discusses issues that are relevant to the lives of people (8). Palmer’s views have inspired intense debate in African literature. Two of his seminal works of literary criticism—An Introduction to the African Novel (1972) and The Growth of the African Novel (1979) and numerous articles in reputable international venues devoted to African literature express his views across a broad spectrum of topics. Also, he has penned four novels—A Tale of Three Women (2011), A Hanging is Announced (2010), and Canfira’s Travels (2010), A Pillar of the Community (2012). Through these novels, Palmer joins a long list of distinguished Africans intellectuals—Senghor, Soyinka, Clark, Ngugi, and Achebe—who, for the most part, theorized as they practiced and vice-versa. One can thus make the argument that their essays and art arose organically, synergistically, out of the postcolonial ethos when African writers and critics were wrestling with the new genre, simultaneously creating it while also defending it from critical approaches trying to marginalize it as a stepchild of British and American literature.”

Hollist’s paper is important precisely in the case it makes for intentionality and privileging of technique over content in Palmer’s works. He states: “That intentionality is evident in Palmer’s four novels. The critic-novelist delves into topics and engages stylistic techniques Sierra Leonean writers have either hesitated to deal with and or have deployed in limited forms. To that extent, Palmer’s work meets J.M. Coetzee’s desire for fiction to try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself and break free, or attempt to break free, from the strictures of an inherited tradition or system (‘The Outlaw Novelist as Critic’).” Clearly, then, “In A Hanging…the botched robbery of the five subaltern young implicates a ‘rebellion’ against the status quo that leads to the state executing them. In the analysis that follows, [Hollist] explore[s] Palmer’s migration or ‘rebellion’ from critic to novelist to determine how and to what extent he has performed the conventions of African fiction that he has spent a lifetime codifying and refereeing.”

On the question of technique, Hollist traces Palmer’s preferences to his influence by early critics like Arnold Kettle: “In An Introduction to the African Novel (1972), Palmer, following in the tradition of Arnold Kettle, describes a well-made novel as a composite of message and technique.” He argues that a “novelist’s techniques, the devices [an author] uses to shape, explore, define and finally evaluate his material” are the elements that distinguish and transform a work from something that is purely political, sociological, or ethnographic to one that is art. In other words, the inventive and instructive manipulation of technique and message set aside imaginative from non-imaginative writing. Based on this premise, Palmer describes a good novelist as one who presents relevant content, demonstrates “signs of technical competence,” and through the combination, provides readers with an implied or discernible consistent moral message or attitude. Palmer also expects the well-made novel to display fully realized or rounded main characters whose language must sound authentic and, in African literature “reflect African speech rhythms;” finally, the work must make a conscious attempt to “clarify and order the chaos of experience… and to manifest a ‘consistent moral attitude’ (xii).” The rest of the paper details the execution of Palmer’s artistry in the novel A Hanging is Announced.

A similar case for intentionality and literary technique is made by Abioseh Porter in his piece “Paying Tribute to One of Africa’s [Genuine) Literary Heavyweights: Eustace James Taiwo Palmer.” Writing in defense of what some have seen as the absence of a distinct literary theory in Palmer’s approach to criticism, Porter explores the dangers of “theory for theory’s sake” and validates Palmer’s emphasis on close-reading as vehicle of identification and execution of meaning. While acknowledging the place of theory in literary criticism, Porter warns us of the unethical practice of imposing theory on a literary work without allowing the work to speak for itself. He argues for using theory to enhance and not determine meaning.

That Palmer’s body of literary criticism could have benefitted from some integration of theory into analysis Porter acknowledges is true but besides the question. What he sees as crucial is privileging theory over context as the hallmark of interpretation in literary criticism. He writes: “One does not need to subscribe to Larson’s views or accept the stridency of his tone to accept the fact that a distinct theoretical focus in his writing would have sharpened even more so Palmer’s very fine close reading of texts.” To give but one example: a consideration of novels according to the different genres to which they may belong would have helped to make Palmer’s selection of fictional works more inclusive. A reading of Ekwensi’s novels as examples of popular fiction, including detective fiction, Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future, as gay fiction, or Flora Nwapa’s and Emecheta’s writing as pioneering models of feminist writing would have enabled Palmer to be more inclusive. Still, a response to Larson’s objection will also partly explain why I have deliberately avoided any grand theoretical foundation or jargon in the discussion of Palmer’s critical work: although Palmer seems to have been heavily influenced by earlier critics of English Literature such as Lord David Cecil, F. R. Leavis and, especially, the Marxist critic, Arnold Kettle (the author of the two-volume An Introduction to the English Novel), Palmer always interested in using the text and context of individual works to demonstrate their relevance to a particularly African audience. Nowhere in Palmer’s writings would a reader find pronouncements against theory such as these made by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels against literary theory: “Meaning is just another name for expressed intention, knowledge just another name for true belief, but theory is not just another name for practice. It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end” (Knapp and Michaels 742).

Bernth Lindfors, a close associate and colleague of Palmer, titles his paper “Eustace Palmer’s Early Scholarly Contributions.” His essay is instructive in tracing the pioneering influence of Palmer’s writing in shaping the canon of African literature. Beginning with biographical details on Palmer, Lindfors situates Palmer’s writing in a larger context of literary criticism. He writes: “However, his first major book project came out the following year as An Introduction to the African Novel: A Critical Study of Twelve Books by Chinua Achebe, James Ngugi, Camara Laye, Elechi Amadi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Mongo Beti, and Gabriel Okara, and this immediately established his reputation as a serious critic of African fiction. There had been some earlier surveys of African literature by Janheinz Jahn, Gerald Moore, Margaret Laurence, Judith Gleason, Wilfred Cartey, and Oladele Taiwo, but none of these dealt in such depth and with such sophistication on the particular novelists that Palmer chose to examine. The only rival was Charles Larson’s The Emergence of African Fiction, which was published in the same year as Palmer’s book.” This is crucial information for it substantiates Palmer’s contributions to establishing literary approaches and methods of criticism in African literature that were crucial to canonical formation and scholarly evaluation of the roles of critic and writer.

Citing Palmer’s ideological and theoretical conception of literary criticism as spelled out in his seminal work An Introduction to the African Novel, Lindfors took pains to examine Palmer’s conception and execution of the principles of literary criticism; principles that were instrumental in foundational work on the African novel. It is particularly important to be cognizant of Palmer’s ideological stance at this early period of his writing because they were later developed into full-blown praxis of criticism in his later works that eventually constitute his critical oeuvre. Lindfors cites one moment of demonstration of such ideological stance: “Palmer declared in his introduction that he decided to comment only on novels that he regarded as ‘well-made…a composite of message and technique’ (x). He said, ‘One expects of a good novelist [that] he should have some concern for the appropriate style and show signs of technical competence…[Each] of these authors has shown in some or other of his works that he understands what the novelist’s art is about and has striven to master it’ (xi). This led Palmer to exclude several early authors that he felt did not measure up to such rigorous standards. He said nothing at all about Amos Tutuola. He found Cyprian Ekwensi’s fiction vulgar, clumsily constructed, and lacking a consistent moral concern (xi-xii). The structure and style of Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters left an impression of ‘tedious formlessness’ (xiv), and Lenrie Peters’s The Second Round was ‘one of those novels in which the novelist has failed to keep his themes clearly before his mind, and pursue them to their logical conclusion’ (xiv).”

Lindfors notes that Palmer himself concluded his introduction by validating his (Lindfors’) perspective when he states that: “I have concentrated instead, on the dozen or so novels which seem to be of some importance, and which are gradually finding their way into school and university syllabuses. Although this book is also directed to the general reader, I have mainly had in mind a student readership. Consequently, I have concentrated on detailed discussion, not general remarks (this accounts for the number of quotations from the texts), to demonstrate what is in the text, only bringing in sociological or historical information when necessary. I feel that this is the kind of help that students need (xv).”

Another moment of criticism that demonstrates Palmer’s literary stance is seen in Lindfors assessment of Palmer’s treatment of Ngugi’s early novels in An Introduction to the African Novel. Lindfors writes: “The book opens with chapters on Ngugi’s first three novels: Weep Not Child, The River Between, and Arrow of God. Palmer discusses them in chronological order of publication, even though he is aware that The River Between was actually written before Weep Not Child. The first point he makes about Weep Not Child is that though the story is told against the backdrop of the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya in the 1950s, it is not a propagandist work about political matters but rather an examination of human relationships affected by the pressure of events. The young protagonist Njoroge is presented as a ‘visionary and dreamer living in a world of illusions, and seeking every possible opportunity to escape from tough reality into phantasies about a bright and better future’ (4). He has a strong belief in the benefits of education and places great faith in teachings in the Bible, but a series of setbacks and shocks shatters his ideals and eventually leads him to contemplate suicide. Ngugi has sympathy for such a conflicted character but also recognizes his immaturity and inability to face up to realities in his society. As a consequence, Palmer concludes that: The main weakness of Weep Not Child is the choice of Njoroge as the central consciousness. Not because Njoroge is too passive and ineffective to be at the center of the novel’s events, but because a young, inexperienced boy is not the best vehicle to demonstrate that an obsession with education as a panacea is escapist. It is in the nature of young boys to dream, and have illusions about the future, and one can hardly expect them to understand the complexity of national affairs (10).” Such insightful thematic and sociological analysis of the African novel provides a critical frame for criticism of African literature.

Another close associate and colleague of Palmer, Janice Spleth, explore Palmer’s women writing. Her essay titled “In an African Context”: Eustace Palmer’s Critical Studies of African Women’s Writing “identif[ies] the specifically African context within which Palmer’s volume views these women writers and their works and to show how his scholarship constitutes a coherent theoretical approach to the reading of African women’s literature, both drawing from and contributing to the more complex dialogue on the nature of African feminisms.” She notes that in Palmer’s Of War, Women, and Oppression, he recognizes “the rise to prominence of several African women writers who have at last found their voices and are articulating the concerns about African women in African society” as one of the new trends in the evolution of the African novel (6), and he featured chapters on several landmark works by women whose novels had appeared during the seventies and eighties, including those by Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Yema Lucilda Hunter. As with the other studies in the collection, Palmer framed his readings of African literature as an African critic with an African readership in mind, maintaining that to approach this literature solely through the eyes of Western critical theory amounted “to one of the more unwelcome aspects of cultural hegemony or cultural globalization” (5).

Spleth contends that in Palmer’s appreciation of the role of women writers in African literature, he recognizes that African women writers were scarce indeed during the colonial period and during the first two decades after independence. She adds that they were so rare, in fact, that no chapter in Palmer’s previous volumes on the novel had featured a woman writer. Elsewhere, she continues, Palmer confronts what he refers to as the dearth of women writers in those early years, admitting that “with the dawn of modern African literature, women were largely represented by the male writers as playing very limited and largely inferior roles” (80). She cites Palmer: “The male writers have in fact been accused of consigning women in their writings to a few stereotypical categories and of failing to represent the full complexity of African womanhood. The categories were, again not surprisingly, wife and mother, but also witch and prostitute” (80–81). Evidently, Spleth contends that Palmer agrees with those who were looking for a more complex representation of African women in African writing and who believed that “it would be left to the African woman writers to redress the balance and present the totality of the African woman’s experience” (82). Clearly, and at first, the number of women writers was extremely limited, although Palmer names Flora Nwapa and Ama Ata Aidoo as pioneers. Those who were teaching during that period remember the ecstasy of identifying even one woman writer who could confidently be added to an introductory course on African literature. Spleth concludes her article by asserting that “[w]hile Palmer’s overall contribution to scholarship on African literature is recognizably distinguished and groundbreaking, his studies of African women writers are remarkable both for their insights into the individual works themselves and for the development and application of an Africa-centered approach to African women’s narratives.”

Eustace Palmer’s influence in literary criticism is not limited to his former students at Fourah Bay College, colleagues, and associates. As Oumar Diop’s paper makes clear, his influence spreads beyond the borders of his native Sierra Leone to impact students of African literature in Cheikh Anta Dip university in Senegal. Using the epistolary technique and framing his paper in the context of Francophone literature, Diop analyzes what it means for a critic of Anglophone origins to critique Francophone literature and establish the parameters if not prism through which its literary tradition can be conceptualized and critiqued. Writing a letter to Palmer on behalf of his Senegalese colleagues, Diop’s essay titled “Lost and Found Memories: Letters to Dr. P from his Senegalese Students,” explores his contact with Palmer as first, student and then, professor, and details his use of Palmer’s critical perspectives in his own teachings. The burden of his paper is an exploration of how students from a Francophone university used Palmer’s theory of the African novel to further explore the rise of the Francophone novel. He further adopts a letter format to reflect on two key aspects of Professor Palmer’s work: the anthropological bias of the African novel and its Western lineage, and the way Palmer describes his critical approach to literary criticism.

As in the tradition of the griot, Diop begins his paper by acknowledging Palmer’s influence and charitable contributions to literary criticism. He expresses deep gratitude to Palmer for his scholarly contributions, which in many ways have shaped him into the professor and scholar that he has become. He writes: “For the past decades, you have given gifts of knowledge and intellectual rigor to students and teachers of literature. To express our gratitude for your contributions to excellence in literary studies we have summoned the wisdom of Wolof sages encapsulated in the above proverbs from the Senegambian region. My cited Wolof sayings always remind us to express our profound gratitude for having stood on your shoulders to be where we are today in the field of literary studies. We are equally thankful to have been among those of your ndongo (student) who have become sëriñ (professor) in literary studies because you spent decades to tirelessly deliver, and resources, which have paved our paths to academic and professional success.”

From this point, Diop launches into the main points of his meta-criticism of Palmer’s criticism. His letter dated 1970s begins with Palmer’s anthropological criticism and moves on to assessing its impact on evaluating Francophone literature. I cite some aspects of the letter: “In your article ‘The Criticism of African Fiction: Its Nature and Function’, you argue that a good many of the early African novels had a distinctly anthropological bias because their authors wished to teach their people as well as the outside world about their culture, but this ethnographical preoccupation was clearly temporary, and is now giving way to other concerns.” […] You attribute the anthropological bias of the early African novel to the wish of their authors to teach their people as well as the outside world about their culture, a temporary preoccupation that gave way to other concerns. Among their concerns were the “disastrous consequences of the impact of Western civilization on indigenous cultures.” As English majors in a Francophone university, we are required to read English, Anglophone, French, and Francophone literatures. Thus, the origin of African literatures in Western languages and their anthropological bias have been recurrent topics in our debates in the English department as well as in our exchanges with our peers in the Department of Modern Languages. Reading your works has helped us further problematize these issues by asking questions about the identities and perspectives of the first Francophone writers and their motivations to share their indigenous culture. Such an acknowledgment of Palmer’s approach to literary criticism puts the significance of his work beyond geographical borders.

Having acknowledged this critical approach, Diop assesses its impact in the context of Francophone literature in Senegal: “According to Roland Lebel, in the colonial context in which the first Francophone novels emerged, fiction writing appeared after travel literature and scientific treatises that correspond to the phase of exploration and conquest and the phase of organization of the colony respectively. In 1847, after accompanying the French Naval Commissioner into the Soudanese hinterland, the Senegalese mulatto Léopold Panet wrote an account of the journey in 1850. It was published the same year in the Revue coloniale under the title ‘La Relation d’un voyage du Sénégal à Soueira’. In addition to detailed descriptions of adventures, the landscape, and people, Panet’s travel narrative captured every aspect of local life. Three years after, his compatriot David Boilat wrote Esquisses sénégalaises, a comprehensive study of all the regions of the colony in which he covered history and topography; climate and ethnic groups; languages and customs; different types of rulers and laws of succession; culinary habits and basic diets; religions and myths. Prisoners of their time and upbringing, both Panet and Boilat envisioned the economic, cultural, and spiritual advancement of the colony in terms of dissemination and entrenchment of French culture and education. Commenting on their writings, Dorothy Blair remarks: Later, when writers with some literary talent began to emerge, they used it to sing the praises of the colonial system and especially of the education that had opened up new horizons to them. The very first writers from Senegal, the mulattos Léopold Panet and David Boilat, identified totally with their French origins, even while proclaiming themselves natives of Senegal” (32).

Based on this analysis, he concludes: “This brief overview allowed us to better engage Palmer’s arguments about both the form and substance of the early African novel. Considering the context of its birth, we were able to trace its anthropological bent to the colonial academic environment and the ethnographic monograph-centered pedagogy in institutions like École Normale William Ponty in Sénégal. Our study of the evolution of colonial writing genres in relation to the stages of colonial expansion and the engagement of the African elite with their political and sociocultural environment confirmed the colonial lineage of the Francophone novel. Thematically, the early novels dealt with contemporaneous issues related to the political and sociocultural dimensions of colonial expansion. Thus, alongside the unconditional proponents of the colonial mission civilisatrice and staunch critics of African customs and traditions, there were other writers, who, in spite of their acceptance of the assimilationist agenda, drew attention to the excesses of colonial rule. There were also more radical writers, who joined the chorus of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial militant groups.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ernest Cole

Ernest Cole, PhD is Professor and Chair of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, where he teaches Postcolonial literatures of Sub-Saharan Anglophone Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Previously he taught African literature at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, The Gambia College, Brikama; and the University of The Gambia. He has published two monographs – Theorizing the Disfigured Body (2014) and Space and Trauma in the Writing of Aminatta Forna (2017) and two collected volumes – Emerging Perspectives on Syl Cheney Coker, with Eustace Palmer, and Ousmane Sembene, Writer, Filmmaker, & Revolutionary Artist, with Oumar Cherif Diop.