From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Cycle and Song—The Griotic Function of Unfinishedness in Postcolonial Narrative
This dissertation was supervised by Prof. Ama Asare at the University of Ghana, Legon. For related scholarship, see Griot oral epics and The Incompletion Collective—Why the Glitch Stays Unfinished.
A doctoral dissertation arguing that the novel A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight and its embedded unfinished story reproduce the structural and epistemological logic of West African griotic epic narration—specifically, the principle that a story is never completed by a single narrator because completion would privatise the story, removing it from collective ownership.
The thesis contends that the glitch—the irreparable seam between the novel's two halves—is not a textual failure but an intentional refusal modelled on griotic practice. In West African oral epic traditions (Mandinka epic of Sundiata, Fulani Kaydara, Yoruba itàn Ifá), the griot does not finish the story; each griot's performance is an opening, a pause, an invitation for the next griot to continue, revise, and reinterpret. Completion would be a violation.
The dissertation traces this principle across the franchise: every adaptation (anime, opera, film, game, LARP) is a new griot's telling. The contradictions between adaptations—different resolutions of the glitch, different interpretations of Leif's question, different outcomes for the cycle—are not failures of fidelity but proper griotic variation. The thesis positions this as a decolonial counter-model to Western narrative demands for closure and authorial control.
A core chapter argues that C. W. Smith's essay Subject (Ontological Incompleteness) (consciousness as irreducible gap) is itself a griotic articulation of the unfinished—the subject as always-already incomplete, the story as forever open because the teller is incomplete. The dissertation concludes that Surgipelago itself—the wiki-archive with its contradictions, edits, and contested canon—is the realisation of griotic collectivity in digital form.