SOURCE: “Orality in the African Historical Novel: Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, 1988, pp. 91-101.

In the following comparative essay, Wright examines the use of oral history and mythology in Bound to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons.

The transmutation of oral literary forms into written ones is an uncertain and unpredictable process, and the survival of the styles and narrative techniques of the oral story-teller into the modern African novel is an especially haphazard affair. The graphic hyperbole of the traditional griot or oral historian is, for example, as pervasively in evidence in novels with contemporary urban settings, such as Soyinka's The Interpreters and Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, as are his other stock-in-trade in historical novels which deal with traditional cultures in an earlier period: for example...