Religion, Science, and Sex: Faith, Hope, and Transcendental Love in Four African Novels

Abstract

"When we turn to postcolonial novels set in Africa, we find the fallacy in the divine-platonic formulation of erotic-carnal love, that one kind is being confused with the other, and the consequences are disillusioning. Needless to say, this myth fails almost every time, disastrously so in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup, and Norman Rush’s Mortals. On the other hand, the failure of sex is non-existent in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, because in this narrative, the mystified sexual energy is turned on and quickly harnessed and channeled into illusory prophecy and proto-feminist politics."