Magic Realism and the Clash of Cultures in Rosemary Nixon’s The Cock’s Egg
Magic Realism and the Clash of Cultures in Rosemary Nixon’s The Cock’s Egg

Summary/Abstract: In The Cock’s Egg, Rosemary Nixon presents Africa as a culture full of mystery, magic, and witchcraft. Her stories are about Africa, not of it. Nixon’s keen personal interest coupled with her work as a teacher prompted her to investigate and write about Africa that surrounds her. As a result, Rosemary Nixon succeeds in presenting African and expatriate characters who come off the page as vibrant, believable individuals living in an equally vibrant and believable place. The clash of Western and African cultures is a central theme throughout the collection. Nixon does not presume to understand Africa--rather, she presents it as a foreigner would experience it, a culture full of mystery, magic, and witchcraft. Finding realistic fiction inadequate to depict Zaire, she employs narrative techniques such as lush, sensual descriptions, verbal pastiche, and magic realism. Nixon thereby negotiates new means of describing an African world, reinforcing her fundamental respect for Zairian people and places in the process. She refuses to tell Westerners her stories in logical fashion using straightforward plots and chronologies. Instead, she experiments to great effect with magic realism as one means of narrating the Zairian Other’s ways. This paper examines Nixon’s employment of magic realism in her stories and discusses The Cock’s Egg central theme: the clash of African and Western cultures.

• Details
• Contents