Mending the Schizo-Text: Pidgin in the Nigerian Novel

Post-colonial West African writers writing in English may have been too scripturally schizophrenic, too busy with the dichotomy mother tongue/ other tongue, to account fully for the presence of auxiliary contact languages in their writing. Yet it is in that space in-between, in the contact language itself, that writers like Kafka and Louis Wolfson2 have nestled to redefine writing in the mother tongue. I will here examine how Pidgin has insinuated itself into the very texture of Nigerian writing, at first under the decorative guise of an unobtrusive, 'auxiliary' language confined to dialogues and, subsequently, as the potential vehicle for multilingual and cross-cultural hybridized poetics.