While listening to the public conversation between writer Chinua Achebe and scholar Anthony Appiah in Princeton on Wednesday, March 26, 2008, I made a sweeping observation, if you might call it so, about the reason Achebe penned his novel, Things Fall Apart. It had come to be, I believe, mainly because of several "dares," all of them as valid as they were unusual for their time in 1958 when the book was first published.
In response to a slew of books by non-Africans that portrayed Africa in an inherently exotic light, Things Fall Apart was Achebe's way of "daring anyone who reads about the habits and culture of Igbo people [in the novel, that is] to say, 'these people are not human.'" If one were to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for instance, this very dare, put forth this way, makes a lot of sense. An African story, as Achebe knew it, could be told from a perspective that was essentially underutilized at that time -- a non-European/colonial one, with the equally complex humanity of the African firmly intact.
Additionally, there is the issue of language for Achebe. While literature about Africa may have portrayed Africans living in a language vacuum of sorts -- that is, one consisting of sounds, not actual words -- then Achebe's inclusion of the Igbo language in his primarily English-language novel is yet another dare. Surely, he seems to be saying, we do have our own language even though you may not think too much of it or conclude that is has too many dialects and wish to remove some of them.
And then, of course, there is the greatest dare of them all: “the existence of our own story.” As Achebe noted during the event that night, all the stories he had read about him and his people at that time were unacceptable. He wondered, in desperation, why "our story was not read." He then set out to do precisely this, producing a literary masterpiece and becoming what Simon Gikandi aptly called that night, "a cultural institution."
As it were, it is almost impossible to be at an event on Nigerian literature and not discuss Nigeria itself, which according to Achebe, who lived in the country during the bloody civil war and pre-independence period, is "a catastrophic failure" and a disappointment. This is true, no doubt. But what now? One Nigerian story has been told with tremendous skill and success by Achebe, who has, as Gikandi noted, become the conscience of Africa and its talented writers, some of them up and coming.
Scoffing at what he believed was an unfair treatment of his own people in written narratives, Achebe single-handedly put African literature on the map very early on, creating a literary legacy for his now failed nation and its struggling people. His is a success story indeed. Could it be that Nigeria will, too, reach the very depths of its own desperation and dare to come up against its loud, exasperated critics, proving that it too can engage progress head-on, as was the original projection for it? This, of course, still remains to be seen.
Also, this piece will be published as part of a writers-at-large blog by Wild River Review (www.wildriverreview.com) later in the week.
[Photo by Cie Stroud, courtesy of Princeton Public Library]
