Identity text history: the concept of inter/nationalization in African fiction

This paper examines the dialogical relationship between fictionalizing and identity formation, identity formation, and historical textualization in Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘Why are we so blest’ (1972) and Son’-Allah Ibrahim’s ‘Zhat’ (1992). Though written in English and Arabic respectively, both texts seek to define their national identities in relation to an international other, by creating a cross-linkage between author and reader, the history of the self and that of the nation, the national and the international community. The reading process creates channels of communication, opening up possibilities to restructure the self/history in terms of the text. By interliving the experience through different textual strategies, the reader is made to ‘feel’ relationships between characters, places, and events through a metaphorical process. Both works convey a global loss of identity, which needs to be restored by restructuring history. This implies a restructuring of the self in mutual relation to the ‘other’, in which case the national and international community would eventually be brought into harmony with each other. Bibliogr., notes.