Indices of the esoteric: crime, rorensic science, and oral culture

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between geography, epistemology, and genre in Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009). More specifically, I will be discussing the perspectival modulation that both the novel and its protagonist undergo as a consequence of a simple journey into the Ghanaian provinces. Kayo Odamtten, a forensic pathologist, has been sent to investigate a suspected murder in the remote village of Sonokrom. Although he relies on standard forensic procedures when he first arrives in the village, Kayo is eventually forced to utilize other perspectives, other epistemologies, in order to solve the mystery. And as we shall see, this reorientation of the story also influences the novel at the level of discourse and genre, transforming a conventional work of detective fiction into something else altogether—something far more equivocal and difficult to categorize.