The spirit -child as idiom: Reading ogbanje dialogic as a platform of conversation among four black women's novels

This study is a speculative attempt to expand on how we generally see textual interaction in the African American literary tradition. Grounding the effort on cultural, critical, and theoretical ideas drawn multidisciplinarily, I innovate the idiom ogbanje dialogic---conceived from discourses grafted in ogbanje, the Igbo name for a religious belief in a spirit-child that dies and returns cyclically to the same mother---as an interpretive platform that enables an "inter-textual" conversation among novels of the tradition. I suggest that novels of the tradition engage in ogbanje dialogic in their deliberation of issues of black folk epistemology, ontology of good and evil, resistance, and destiny, which are encoded in ogbanje but fragmented, interestingly, in the tradition's fiction.;The study unites in dialogue four black women's texts, namely, Tina McElroy Ansa's Baby of the Family, Toni Morrison's Sula, Gayl Jones's Eva's Man, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. In the context of ogbanje dialogic, Baby's concern with black folk epistemology, Sula's engagement of the ontology of good and evil, Eva's Man's deliberation of the issue of resistance, and Praisesong's exploration of the question of destiny---all cross path inextricably, co-producing a coherent, empirical affirmation in the process. In being individual authors/issues/texts that take turn to "talk" and illuminate a unifying premise, and generate meaning collaboratively as occurs in conversation, their discursive cooperation contrasts the way we normally envision textual interface in the African American tradition.;Textual interplay in the black tradition is posited commonly in terms of the works' self-reflexivity and their repetition and revision of earlier influences. This critical approach undoubtedly reveals much about the political consciousness and the communicative tendencies of the tradition's texts. I suggest, however, that it is somewhat narrow in failing to accommodate either conceptually or in praxis a setup where meaning ensues from among surficially incompatible issues explored by separate texts. This occurs, for instance, and as ogbanje dialogic illustrates, where select novels of the tradition are read apart but their different/core motifs are mediated into conversation through metaphor. I advance the paradigm as a way to contemplate that possibility.