Dialogical Dynamics and Subversions of Political and Ideological Boundaries in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah

Abstract

This article examines the subtle allegorical political nuances and implications in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987). The novel foregrounds and grapples with the problematics of voice, representation, and history where the more inclusive voice appears to be, the more suppressive and exclusive of other voices it is. Hence, the text enacts a journey toward a realm that rises above gender and class-based rigidities, fusing facets of Nigerian sociopolitical and environmental crises (in the past and present). The novel takes on multiple narratives that engender continuation and sharing vis-à-vis historical realities of political cleansing and ideologies and systems of exclusion. Counteracting condescendingly patronizing doctrines and reductive dichotomies, dialogism and ecofeminism pay equal attention to all parties and reject polarizations and divisions. A combination of these approaches precludes tantalization, and it also humanizes ecofeminism and gives it a wider scope. In principle, combined, these approaches guard against any rejectionist or exclusionary superstructures they seek to deconstruct. Ecofeminism, much like Bakhtinian dialogism in its quest for justice, hinges environmental degradation to gender-based, class-based, racist, and imperial variables, and it disrupts these ideologies and systems of oppression in order to assuage human and nonhuman conditions.