'Thighs Fell Apart' online fan fiction, and African writing in a digital age
ABSTRACT This essay foregrounds Web's 2.0 recuperation of agency for the modern fan reader of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart through a critical dilation of Kiru Taye's 'Thighs Fell Apart' an online short story that details a fan reader's 'renarration' of Okonkwo's possibly voluptuous life. Taye's fanfic on Achebe's work is available on the blog page, Brittle Paper, an online platform whose portrayal of Achebe's classic hero demonstrates how the structure and design of digital media democratizes authorial space and enables user generated reproduction of traditional modes of cultural representations. I argue that 'Thighs Fell Apart' could be seen as a paradigm of fan writing that asserts itself as a rich and original literary landscape that can initiate more scholarly interrogations of the online behaviour of Nigerian digital natives. I show that online fan fiction is a digital practice that has the potential to extend critical debates around the contents of the canonical texts of African literature that they rework. I conclude that the poaching of textual meaning from a source material is an appropriation that underscores the original text, extending its critical articulations. This argument is in addition to the ways online fanfic experimentations affirm a digital contributory public of contemporary African writing, organized around new practices on form and content.