Deconstructing the terrible gift of postcolonial African lives: An intertextual reading of Martin Egblewogbe’s Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories.

Abstract

This paper situates Martin Egblewogbe’s short story collection Mr. Happy and the Hammer of God & Other Stories (2008) within intertextual discourses as they relate to the tri-generational canon of Ghanaian, and by extension, African literature. It argues against the easy temptation of reading the work via uncontextualized metaphysical or existentialist paradigms, or what Wole Soyinka (1976) refers to as the undifferentiated mono-lenses of “universal humanoid abstractions,” and instead situates it within the Ghanaian tradition by pointing out the collection’s filiation to the specific trope of madness-as-a subversive-performance-of-resilience against the oppressive socio-political status quo in that tradition. The paper excavates the works of first generation postcolonial Ghanaian authors such as Armah, Awoonor and Aidoo, and reads Egblewogbe’s relatively recent debut oeuvre against them in a grounded epistemic manoeuvre that fractures assumptions about the work’s uniqueness and places it in on-going trans-generational dialogic exchanges about how to negotiate the fractious crucible that is postcolonial Ghanaian experience.