N°021_Vol.1_03

Introduction: The French word ‘étranger’ is often translated into English as foreigner, stranger or alien. Whereas foreigner is “indeed endowed with a legal meaning: it refers to a person who is not a citizen of the country in which he resides.” (Kristeva, 1991: 41), stranger is associated with the unknown, the unfamiliar, a distinction between self and the other. As for alien, it commonly means “belonging to a different country, race, or group, usually one you do not like or are frightened of’’[1]. No matter the translated version used, the three concepts raise the question of location to make a clear difference between someone who is at home and another person who is not a member of this home. Popescu, quoting the anthropologist Mole (1972), makes a clearer distinction stating that ‘‘home, is a place for exercising ownership…whereas away, though a similar place, is the possession of another[2]’’.  Therefore, Home is for the native whereas away is used for the stranger/foreigner/alien. Space fuels scholarly debates on the concept of stranger/foreigner/ alien in social sciences and humanities where the latter is perceived as the other, someone different from self, and treated accordingly. For example, Tzvetan Todorov in his research documents distance as a source of rejection and persecution of the Persians. In this respect, Todorov refers to Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, as the founding figure of cultural differences as he writes:

• « Among the other peoples, they respect, after themselves, their close neighbors, then the latter’s neighbors, and so on, according to the distance separating them; the most distant peoples are for them the least worthy of respect: as they consider themselves the most noble people from all points of view, the others‟ worth ranges for them according to the rule in question and the most distant nations also seem the most despicable. » Todorov (1999 : 243)

In this paper, the concept of stranger is preferably used to embrace the three English word. The stranger’s perception as the other also pertains to the relationship between African literature and European one because the former is referred to as the non-native literature. That is why it is known under different names like ‘anglo’, ‘franco’ and luso and the suffix ‘phone’ to designate colonised people’s literature’. Phillipe (2012) denounces this categorisation she names ‘ghettorisation’ of the writer in exile in a foreign land.  Backing Phillipe, Gayatri Spivak terms this demarcation between Africans and Europeans as the Other versus the other where “the Other corresponds to the coloniser and the other is the colonised. (Aschroft et al,2007 :156). Nonetheless, the coloniser was not exempted from this categorisation on the colonised land either :

• « Dans les textes littéraires où circulent personnages occidentaux et personnages africains, en effet, nous croyons pouvoir percevoir de part et d’autre et à dimensions égales, des sentiments d’étrangeté, de déchirure, de frustration de la perte, et des attitudes de repli et de synthèse face à la culture étrangère… chaque groupe vit l’action de l’autre comme une étrangeté, un scandale et surtout comme une menaçante expérience qui déracine les convictions anciennes[3]. » Abossolo (2010: 2)

Clearly, no matter what power relations are, a person outside his own territory is always treated differently. However, in Africa, the word stranger carries various connotations.  Chinua Achebe and Chigozie Obioma, though both Nigerians of Igbo origin from different generations in terms of birth and literary career, enlighten the reader on the traditional African perception of strangers and the different transformations this concept undergoes from colonial to postcolonial times respectively in Things Fall Apart and The Fishermen. The main research question is to find out how Achebe and Obioma construct each strangeness and otherness/alterity. This research question is subdivided into two sub-questions: who is a stranger in Africa especially in Igbo and Yoruba communities in the novels? Is alterity still relevant in characters’ daily life? The hypothesis sustaining this study is that Achebe and Obioma employ the word strangers in different ways in Things Fall Apart and The Fishermen to deconstruct its primary interpretation. The main objective of this paper is to revisit the traditional representation of stranger in African literature. In this respect, Edward Said’s version of postcolonialism, orientalism, and Claude Duchet’s method, sociocriticism, provide the necessary tools to achieve this objective.  The paper is twofold. In the first section, a typology of strangers in accordance with African realities is discussed. In the second, the stranger as the other; alterity/otherness, is explored in both novels.  

• [1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/alien
• [2] POPESCU Corina Daniela, ‘’Several Representations of the Foreigner in Romanian Popular Epics Notes for a Folkloric Imagology’’ https://diversite.eu/pdf/12_1/DICE_12.1_Full_Text_p107-p118-Corina-POPESCU.pdf, p.110
• [3] My English translation : “In literary texts where both Western and African characters are featured, it is believed to perceived equally from both sides feelings of strangeness, of being torn apart, frustration from loss,  withdrawal and synthesis before the foreign culture…each experiences the actions of the other as an oddness, a scandal and above all a threatening situation that uproots old convictions.’’