Ambiforms as an African Indigenous Literary Theory – A Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a Comedy

Africans spring surprises: laughing during the most sensitive disastrous moment or crying during the most sensitive amusing moment. A critical literary theory that accommodates this erratic lifestyle should have emerged as a framework, following the endless void created by the ever-expanding critical space. This is the void ambiforms/ambigenres has emerged, as an African culture-specific indigenous theory, to fill: paying attention to the unsaid in the said and or the said in the unsaid. Thus, a text could be studied as both a tragedy and a comedy, yet not a tragicomedy. This departure from conventionality is a search for a new African culture-based literary theory that exists not to imitate European theoretical postulation just as it is not just a facsimile of traditional African virtuosity in protest against colonization of knowledge invention by the West. Rather, it is to justify literature as a profound experience of inevitable shifts particularly when inspired by cultural canons. With Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as the source of evidence, this paper, relying on all the evidences in the text, locates the missing logics to offer it to dialectical interpretations of six fundamental processes and mechanisms. Keywords: Tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, African culture, African indigenous theory