APPEALING TO THE MUSE AS EUROPEANISATION OF AFRICAN CREATIVITY: A DECOLONISATIONTHEORYONCREATIVEPOTENCYOFAFRICANCOSMOS

Abstract

Abstract This study is a critical survey explores the conventional practice in African Literary criticism. It revisits the general phrase ‘appeal to the Muse’ to designates the situation when a writer goes into trance as a way of evoking inspiration. However, this study maintains that continued designation of an African writer’s slip into trance as ‘appealing to the Muse’ is a retention and sustenance of European vestiges in Africa. This is a contravention of the goals of African Consciousness Campaign as expressed in the concept of Africanity and the de-Europeanisation of the African worldview.The study id anchored on the avant-garde principle which encourages an interrogation of existing truth, convention or extant practices. This is to expand the frontiers of knowledge. The qualitative model is employed in carrying out the research. It is posited in the study that since the Muse is Occidental, the dominance of the influence he commands in the pantheon in fertilising the inspirational and imaginative undertaking cannot be universal. This is particularly so that many African writers have been identified with their godheads in the African cosmos.In specifics, Wole Soyinka identifies with Ogun in Yoruba pantheon while Nawal el Saadawi romances Isis in the Egyptian transcendental world.To this end, the decolonisation agenda in Africa should not exclude the phrase ‘appeal to the Muse’ in literary criticism.Each writer should appeal to what he or she holds in spiritual awe in the creative process. This is the reflection of the existing realities in the critiquing of the African worldview in the context of cultural metaphysical cosmogony. Keywords: Literary Criticism, Muse, De-Europeanisation, Africanity, Isis