The polemic excited by Batouala's controversial Preface has
conditioned an enduring, near-universal acceptance of a disjunction
of Preface and novel. This is the first book to challenge that
premise. The fallacious underpinnings of the origin persistence of
this view are shown to lie in Western, dichotomously structured
thinking. Through offshoots of the civilised-versus-savage
dichotomy, namely oral-versus-written, form-versus-content and
music-versus-narrative, Batouala's Signifyin(g) discourse spills
beyond the novel's borders to reveal the sterility of dichotomy as
a conceptualising structure. Dichotomy's anachronism is thrust upon
it through the work's faithful representation of African ontology,
whose water-inspired philosophy precludes it. Batouala's structural
basis is compared with that of jazz, which similarly bridges
European and African civilisations, and whose African philosophical
stance also acts as a provocation to the dichotomous thinking
model. As Batouala "Fixed" transmutes to Batouala "Free", the
pejorative implications of its widely touted ambiguity evaporate to
expose a novel that is both lucid and coherent when viewed as
jazz-text and jazz performance.
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