Postmodern Thoughts in Dawit’s Alämänor: Critiques on Normativity, Absolute Truth and the Sovereign SelfPostmodern Thoughts in Dawit’s Alämänor: Critiques on Normativity, Absolute Truth and the Sovereign Self

Abstract

The advancement of communication technology in this postmodern era exposed
people for multiple narratives – viewpoints that are often subversive to the existing
metanarratives. This condition, in turn, delegitimizes objective worldviews such as
truth, social norms, self-identity and so on. But is there such a thing as objective
truth? To what extent does an individual‟s inner self be affected by normativity in
the Ethiopian social setting? Having these couple of questions in mind, an attempt
to scrutinize how Dawit in his novel Alämänor (2017, literally translated as
“Nonexistence”, deconstructs people‟s conception about truth and reprehends
one‟s obedience to collective norms at the expense of their inner self is made. In
this analysis, we illustrate that the novel is devoted to prove how people‟s intuitive
knowledge about „truth‟ is mistaken, and condemn some social norms that make
people pretend to behave, communicate and act against their inner selves.