Of Dares and Progress: A Conversation with Chinua Achebe

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]

Measuring Progress in Hunger Unleashed

As a freelance editor, I will, for added pay, take on a book project that has little to do with Africa. Well, directly at least. The current manuscript, forthcoming from a publisher in Princeton, is on Haiti circa 1959 when Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba--and the effects this historic period had on Haiti as a whole. The well-informed writer, Bernard Diederich, a former NYT correspondent and publisher of what was then Haiti Sun, writes brilliantly for the most part, with a keen and sympathetic eye.

Last night, as I put the finishing editorial touches on one of the chapters, I noted something that was gravely disturbing. Then, in 1959, under the dictatorial reign of Duvalier (Papa Doc), the very same issues that plague the Haitian populace today--poverty, severe hunger, inability to buy food--were at a time also rampant in the countryside. Yes, even then: We are talking at least 49 or so years ago. One year shy of a half a century. And little (if any) progress to show for it. Heartrending. One might say the same, in fact, progress-wise (but with fewer years of national liberation) about a certain country in southern Africa where a recent election has been irascibly contested. Despotism, indeed.

[Photo of the desecrated grave of Papa Doc]

And She Was Away

A few days ago, I drove north to Cambridge, Massachussets, covering over seven hundred miles (round trip) of roadway, to attend a Pushkin symposium at Harvard University.  

Surely, this was up my very alley...and the daily sessions engaged me, albeit some of them did so randomly.

I set up shop and sold some of our books, mainly the Africa/Russia volume, lunched and dined at the Faculty Club--and had fruitful conversations about Pushkin, literature, Africa, and books, including this one:

Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness
by Catherine Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny (Editor), Ludmilla A. Trigos (Editor)

Worth a look-at, and a read, too, if there is some time.

When Darkness Looms, Relatively

Mama says she was lost,
says she asked directions from my father
and doesn’t know how they ended up in bed,
[…]
When I look in the mirror
sometimes I think I can see his face
imposed over mine,
although it’s only an outline really
with a bare fact, a detail
my mother doled out grudgingly.
I truly only see what he left
going faster than any E=mc2 formula
could take him,
escaping fatherhood like any other man
who hadn’t planned on staying long,
my otosan, traveling light,
traveling at the velocity of darkness.
-“Relativity” (2003), From Ai's Dread

I do not remember when I first came across poetry by Ai, but I know that it was summertime and I was attending college in Michigan. I had already stumbled, deeply, upon the work of Anne Sexton, then Sylvia Plath, and finally, Ai. In that all-things-unhinged order--and I could not turn away. Against the conservative calm of my mid-western campus, I took in the unfettered consciousness of the radical poet Ai. She is at once dark, and darker. Hers is a reality soaked in starkness, with little emotion, if any at all. There is never enough light in her poetry; often, the darkness is already too much, overpowering what even then, from my early years, had formed as the always-possible "cloud-free" ideal, which would slowly become eroded by living more. Her world still fascinates me to this day--as it may you.

Walking Naked

At the press, I have been head-deep in the final details of wrapping up a prodigious poetry anthology called Temba Tupu (Walking Naked): Africana Women's Poetic Self-Portrait. This invariably means that I am combing every page of the latest proof to make sure all is in good order--and since this is poetry, it is at once easier to do so and more difficult as well. Minor textual anomalities in poetry books occur often and if you are used to looking at prose, as I am, then reviewing an anthology of poetry by some of the world's foremost women poets (like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Rita Dove) presents a few challenges. For one, there is more creative energy on the formatted page. Experimentation is rife.And it remains tempting to read some of the poems over and over again. Yes, they are that good. That brave.

Apropos of Nothing (1)

Once in a while, without warning or reason, I will forgo the quote and brief commentary on books and try my hand at some "regular" blog writing, most likely on a familiar subject matter. It may be, for instance, on the minutia of a book project I am working on, or simply, a day in the life of a book editor at an African publishing house. Either way, it will serve to break the stream of quotes-plus-commentaries and add another layer of material-type to the blog.

Just Like It Had Been Then

For all that it mattered, the depression of the early thirties did not seem on the surface to add an ounce of pressure more to the poverty of the Black man.

We still had one tarred street for the police to patrol and for the white superintendent of the location to drive his sleek shining car along. There were still a few electric lights dotted about street corners and none in the houses; the smell from the sewerage centre in the plantation below us still came in a suffocating wave. Of course fewer of us went to the Dougall Hall bioscope because the market and the golf links were scantier and the white people didn't want to pay as much as they used to. They brought the price down from nine pence to six pence for carrying vegetables five miles to Sunnyside suburb. Children still squatted in the street to relieve themselves, chickens still came to peck at the stools with relish.

There was much less to eat at home, and boys and girls of our age group raided Indian hawkers' backyards for discarded fruits, bread and vegetables in garbage bins. But then we had always done that after school. We planned our strategy of entering through the back gate. Some of the hawkers were vicious with the sjambok, especially Cassim Hassim. Some of the women connived at our acts; others poured rice crust and water on us from the balconies, just to have a laugh. Often we looked up to the balconies and laughed with them while we shook down rice grains from out of our shirts. We returned to rummage again. Little Links and Danie, the noisiest boy down Second Avenue whom we could seldom trust to 'pull off a job' with a sense of duty becoming a Fox, raided one yard....

--From Down Second Avenue, by EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE

It has been a good ten or so years since I read Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue, an autobiography, often narrated in wry tone, about the eventful life of a poor boy growing up in a South African township. Despite the ever-present and ominous "shadow" of apartheid and its woeful effects on the lives of the black and colored people of South Africa, the reading usually feels breezy, and you are humored again and again. In this book, despair and humor collide, resulting in an excellent read for the heart--and, if you believe in its existence, the soul.

[Photo Source: UN]