Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart : 1958-2008 [1 ed.] 9789401206839, 9789042033962

Citation preview

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

137 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 1958-2008

Edited by David Whittaker

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: Uche Okeke (born 1933, Nigeria) Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead) (1961; oil on board, H: 92 x W: 121.9 cm /36 1/4 x 48 in.) Gift of Joanne B. Eicher and Cynthia, Carolyn Ngozi, and Diana Eicher 97-3-1 Photograph by Franko Khoury National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3396-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0683-9 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix

I CHINUA ACHEBE IN CONVERSATION Chinua Achebe in Conversation with Jack Mapanje and Laura Fish (Newcastle University, U.K.) II

3

APPROACHES TO THINGS FALL APART

1 Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, and the Politics of Magic — MICHAEL JARDINE

13

2 The Art of Conversation: How the ‘Subaltern’ Speaks in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — RASHNA B. SINGH

35

3 The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart and Its Historical Meaning MICHEL NAUMANN

55

4 The Politics of Form: Uche Okeke’s Illustrations for Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU

III

67

THINGS FALL APART AND ITS LITERARY HERITAGE

5 Daughters of Sentiment, Genealogies, and Conversations Between Things Fall Apart and Purple Hibiscus — CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA

89

6 The Novelist as Teacher: Things Fall Apart and the Hauntology of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun — DAVID WHITTAKER

107

7 Re-Inventing Africa: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la Fantasia — MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI IV

119

THINGS FALL APART IN OTHER CONTEXTS

8 Teaching Things Fall Apart in Texas — BERNTH LINDFORS

141

9 First and Second Glances: Working-Class Scottish Readers and Things Fall Apart — ANDREW SMITH

149

10 Things Fall Apart: Culture, Anthropology, and Literature — RUSSELL MCDOUGALL

161

V THINGS FALL APART IN TRANSLATION

11 Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German — WALTRAUD KOLB

177

12 Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart in Polish and the Task of Postcolonial Translation — DOROTA GOŁUCH

197

Notes on Contributors

219

Acknowledgements

The editor and contributors would like to offer their considerable thanks to Professor Lyn Innes for all of her efforts in organizing the conference “Things Fall Apart: 1958–2008,” which provided the inspiration for this collection of essays. The conference was also offered invaluable support from the following institutions: the University of Kent; the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London; the Centre of African Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the Open University; the Booker Foundation; Pearson Education/Heinemann Books; Penguin Books; the Arts Council of England; and the Royal African Society. Thanks also go to Professor Linda Anderson, Dr Jack Mapanje, Dr Laura Fish, and Newcastle University for permission to publish the transcript of the interview with Chinua Achebe. The editor would also like to thank Dr Jamie Russell for his assistance in transcribing the interview with Chinua Achebe.

Introduction

When I’m describing this period, you must understand that this is in retrospect; at no point at the time was I sure where things were going. If anybody had asked me, “Will this book be published?” to me, I would not have known whether or not it would be. OK. Finally, the publisher in London said “Yes, we will take it” – but will it be a success? To me, just being published was a success. It could have died a death the next day. Everything was tentative, new, surprising, actually, almost crazy. Because it seemed that, in the future, very strange things would happen to this book. I’m surprised that the things that did happen to it did not end its life, because it could have happened that way too.1

F

IFTY YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe could still recall, in his typically poignant and understated way, the feelings of euphoria and cautionary realism of a young writer about to see his lovingly created first novel enter the world. Like any writer being published for the first time, Achebe conveys the excitement as well as the tentative knowledge that the vagaries of the literary world mean that his efforts were also likely to disappear without trace. The possibility that his novel would find an audience, either at home in Nigeria or outside Africa, must have appeared highly unlikely. The market for literary fiction in Nigeria at the time was very small, particularly if it was a book like Things Fall Apart costing fifteen shillings, a price far beyond the means of the average Nigerian.

1

Chinua Achebe, in conversation with Simon Gikandi, at the conference “Things Fall Apart: 1958–2008,” 11 October 2008, published under the title “Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart (1958). An Interview with Chinua Achebe” in Wasafiri 59 (Autumn 2009): 4–7; here 6.

x

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



European interest in its colonies was still intense in the postwar years, particularly as these colonies were demonstrably slipping away in the heat of the independence movements that were reaching their often explosive denouement across Europe’s fading empires. Books about Africa by Europeans remained extremely popular in the West, especially if they involved the exploits of big-game hunters or recounted lurid adventures among the primitive and exotic natives. The memoirs of returned missionaries and colonial officials also remained popular in Europe, together with the emergence of a considerable market for histories of the war, military memoirs, and even popular fiction set in wartime Africa. However, the idea that a novel by an unknown young writer from Nigeria, a book that confronted the unacknowledged legacy of colonial conquest from an African perspective, must have appeared a most unlikely prospect for survival, let alone literary success, in the West. Achebe was not the first African novelist to have his work published, of course, but he was certainly among a small number to have done so when Things Fall Apart was published in 1958. The years following the Second World War were witnessing the first sustained flowering of modern sub-Saharan African literature, and scattered across the continent a small number of writers were producing groundbreaking works to considerable acclaim: the anglophone writers Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Can Themba in South Africa; the francophone writers Mongo Beti in Cameroon and Camara Laye in Guinea, together with Ousmane Sembène and the poets Léon Damas Gontran and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, to name but a few. Achebe had also witnessed the improbable success of his countryman, Amos Tutuola, arguably modern African literature’s first internationally celebrated novelist, who had already had three novels published to wide acclaim in Europe and America. Unlike Tutuola’s idiosyncratic re-workings of traditional Yorùbá folktales, however, Things Fall Apart was a novel that immediately declared its serious intent. At a time when the Nigerian nationalist movement was on the eve of achieving its long fought-for goal of independence from colonial rule, Achebe, auspiciously, cast his eye back to the end of the nineteenth century and the epochal moment when the British colonizers first arrived in what was then the Igbo territories of south-eastern Nigeria. This was not a work describing the arrival of a benevolent colonial power, come to liberate and educate, as had been portrayed in numerous works by European missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials. The unique achievement of Things Fall Apart was that it was the first anglophone African novel to set out consciously to restore a sense of humanity and history to precolonial Africa, and to docu-



Introduction

xi

ment how Africans perceived the arrival of the colonizing Other. Achebe created a narrative that placed the African at the historic centre of the colonial encounter, with the imperialistic Europeans as the usurping outsiders, whose intervention brings about cataclysmic upheaval for the traditional African civilization being colonized. At the heart of Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo, one of the most compelling fictional creations in all of modern African literature. The novel opens with a description of Okonkwo which immediately foregrounds his heroic persona, portraying him as a symbolic embodiment of the values and ideals of his village. Okonkwo is presented as a man destined for greatness as a result of his conformity to his society’s ideals of masculine worth and achievement. His high status within his culture is largely measured in relation to his success in the male realms of wrestling and warfare, and against the culture’s patriarchal systems of sanctioning titles, polygyny, and wealth accumulation. However, no sooner are we made aware of his potentially iconic status than we are informed that Okonkwo is a deeply flawed individual. As the narrative unfolds we come to understand that the nature of his tragic character is related to the way he chooses to narrowly interpret his society’s ideals of the ‘masculine’ and his disavowal of the culture’s ‘feminine’ values and principles. Flawed he may be, but Okonkwo is also an heroic defender of his own culture and people, against what he correctly intuits is an invading force that will bring about the demise of their way of life. The ignominious suicide of Okonkwo, who is the symbolic embodiment of his people, can also be read as signifying the emasculation of the Umuofians. As their traditional way of life is irrevocably changed by the arrival of British missionaries and colonial officials, it triggers a crisis in the culture as a consequence of the latter’s inflexibility and internal inconsistencies. Although the novel ends in an unmistakably elegiac tone, when one considers the narrative in its entirety it is clear that Achebe is by no means uncritical of the culture that he both celebrates and mourns. It is this ambivalence that helps to give the work such power and relevance today, with so many countries still struggling to come to terms with the legacy of their colonial histories, and with the process of decolonization continuing in former colonies around the world. From what Achebe recalls as inauspicious beginnings, Things Fall Apart did become an enormously successful novel, in terms both of its readership and of its critical standing around the world. The reasons for the novel’s longevity and success are varied, and I can only outline a few of the major ones here. Initially, at least, one of the most important reasons that Things

xii

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



Fall Apart had not “died the next day,” as Achebe had feared, was the rather fortuitous decision of his publisher Heinemann to set up the African Writers Series, with Achebe appointed as Series Editor, a position he held from 1962 to 1990. The first book published in the series in 1962 was Things Fall Apart, and it was marketed across anglophone Africa as an affordable paperback. Heinemann had already built a profitable operation selling educational textbooks on the continent, and the A W S was aimed at an emerging market for indigenous literature, particularly in the schools and universities of the newly independent nations. Where school and university curricula had been largely based on European models under colonial rule, a process of ‘africanization’ that began with independence was gradually to bring important changes. In university English departments, for example, there was a shift from an almost exclusive concentration on studying the linguistics of the imposed linguae francae of the colonizers and the ‘great works’ of European literature. Alongside these disciplines were introduced the study of the linguistics of African languages, the study of the oral traditions of indigenous cultures, and engagement with literature written by Africans. Things Fall Apart, naturally, became one of the first African works to be included on the curricula for schools and universities on the continent. In the West, a parallel shift in the critical study of literatures was taking place. An increasing awareness of the literatures produced in the former colonies led, for example, to the development of Commonwealth literary studies in Britain and the other countries of the former Empire. The rise of comparative literary studies and cultural studies increasingly introduced interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature from across cultures. Indeed, interdisciplinary theoretical approaches typify what are now known as postcolonial or world literary studies. While these academic fields are often subject to critical debate (both from within and without) around questions of how to define and characterize the disciplines, what is usually not in dispute is that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is now a key text studied in these fields. What is surprising is that the novel is now not only studied on literature courses, but is just as likely to be found being studied or cited in the academic fields of sociology, anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, and religious studies, as well as in courses on African philosophy. To celebrate and commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Achebe’s remarkable first novel, Professor Lyn Innes organized the conference “Things Fall Apart: 1958 – 2008” in London in October 2008. The occasion drew writers, scholars, students, publishers, Africanists, and the



Introduction

xiii

novel’s admirers from all around the world. The conference was also honoured to have Chinua Achebe in attendance and to hear him discuss his novel, with great humour and insight, with Professor Simon Gikandi. Over the two days of the conference, participants presented over thirty papers on a diverse series of topics, and the present selection offers some of the most innovative and insightful of these essays. While in London for the conference, Chinua Achebe attended a number of celebratory functions, and the book opens with a fascinating, insightful, and wide-ranging interview with Achebe that was conducted, under the aegis of Newcastle University, by the renowned Malaŵian poet and writer Jack Mapanje and the celebrated British writer Laura Fish. The interview begins with Achebe discussing the literary and political milieu in Africa at the time that he was first writing, together with the inspiration that he found in poetry, particularly that of W.B. Yeats, and its influence on Things Fall Apart. He also provides his candid reactions and response to some of the recent feminist criticism of himself and his novel. He goes on to discuss his belief in the moral imperative to empathize with others and the responsibility of artists to articulate the Other in their work. In a reiteration of a theme that has been at the heart of his literary practice and theoretical writings, Achebe elaborates his views on the importance of the role of the writer in African society and in the process of nationalist renewal and decolonization. He discusses, with evident amusement, the sometimes prophetic nature of some of his own fiction. Nigeria is never far from Achebe’s thoughts, and he provides his considered views on the contentious issue of religion in the country and a timely plea for tolerance. He gives his thoughts on the future of African literature and concludes with a discussion of his views on the problems of the Nigerian publishing industry today and the threat that it poses to writers there. As one of the foundational texts of postcolonial literature, Things Fall Apart has received much critical attention since it was published, and the first group of essays here presents several contemporary critical responses to the novel in a section titled “Approaches to Things Fall Apart.” The first essay is Mick Jardine’s “Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, and the Politics of Magic,” in which he examines Achebe’s subtly political and ideologically charged representations of magic in the novel. He argues that Achebe challenged and countered Western notions of the primitive nature of traditional African cultures and the Europeans’ differentiation between the legitimacy of their own religion and the Africans’ ‘barbaric’ belief in supernatural forces and ‘magic’. Jardine deconstructs the complex ways in which the narrative voice in the

xiv

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



novel presents the religious practices and beliefs of the Igbos, and argues that Achebe discovered the means of conveying his own scepticism while celebrating the interaction between the belief in magical power and in human responsibility that characterizes traditional Igbo culture. Traditional Igbo beliefs take on an important political rhetoric in this cogent analysis, and Jardine concludes that Achebe accomplishes the difficult balancing act of countering the charge that an immature Africa has stood outside the flow of history by inventing a way of writing which defied Western attempts to infantilize Africa. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the Subaltern Studies group has been one of the most influential interventions in the development of postcolonial studies, and in Rashna Singh’s essay “The Art of Conversation: How the Subaltern speaks in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” she examines how a subalternist approach can be deployed, to radical effect, in deconstructing representations of discourse and speech in the two novels. Singh argues that Conrad re-inscribes colonial domination, even while exposing its most egregious practices, by refusing speech and logocentric expression to his African characters. By permitting them to ‘speak’ only through their bodies, he isolates them as subaltern in what Spivak has called “a space of difference,” but Singh posits that this becomes an ambiguous space in the novella. This is contrasted with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in which the Igbo are represented within a normative space and communicate through transactional speech. Singh persuasively concludes that Achebe’s novel uses discourse and speech to subvert the “writ of colonialist power” (Homi Bhabha) implicit in Conrad’s novel by re-inscribing its identifications into strategies of subversion. Michel Naumann’s essay “The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart and Its Historical Meaning” argues that one of the principal aims of Achebe’s novel was to rehabilitate African cultures, but that it is also, on its structural level, a novel which analyzes the anticolonial movement in Nigeria and anticipates the pitfalls of neocolonial independence. Naumann’s innovative thesis begins by analyzing the semantic structure of the relations between the characters, in a development of the ideas of the Romanian literary critic Lucien Goldmann, and concludes that it can be defined as an ‘ironic structure’, in that Okonkwo unwittingly produces the opposite response in his people to what he had intended. He then situates the novel within the politics of the anticolonial independence movement in Nigeria during the postwar years and argues that, on a political level, it both perceives the ambiguities of the times in which it



Introduction

xv

was written and anticipates the crisis in the process of national construction in the country. Things Fall Apart came to hold an important position of influence for the wider movement for cultural renewal in Africa, and the last essay in this section, “The Politics of Form: Uche Okeke’s Illustrations for Achebe’s Things Fall Apart” by Chika Okeke–Agulu, examines the ‘creative dialogue’ that took place when Achebe, in acknowledgment of their shared artistic vision, asked Uche Okeke to create illustrations for the novel’s second edition in the Heinemann African Writers Series. Through an analysis of the five drawings that he produced to illustrate the book, Okeke-Agulu shows how Okeke used the occasion to announce his own experiment with a new formal language, similar to Achebe’s approach to the English language. Okeke-Agulu undertakes a comparative reading of Okeke’s illustrations and those of Denis Carradine, who provided the illustrations for the first A W S edition of Things Fall Apart, arguing that the radical formalism and postcolonial sensibility of Okeke’s drawings become apparent. Okeke–Agulu concludes that the formal conditions and ideological tenor of Okeke’s illustrations constitute equivalents of Achebe’s own seminal contribution to postcolonial literary modernism, for which Things Fall Apart was the inceptive gesture. Things Fall Apart has proved to be a remarkably influential work, not only for later generations of Nigerian and African authors, but also for writers from around the world wanting to address not only the impact of colonial occupation on indigenous societies, but also cultural and religious conflict and familial and intergenerational tensions. One of the most successful of the latest generation of Nigerian writers to acknowledge their indebtedness to Achebe has been Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and two of the essays in the next section, “Things Fall Apart and its Literary Heritage,” examine the influence of his work on Adichie’s novels. The first essay in this section is Christopher Ouma’s “Daughters of Sentiment, Genealogies, and Conversations between Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus,” in which he identifies the literary, personal, and cultural influences of Achebe on Adichie, together with the dialogue that Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus sets up with Things Fall Apart, as acts of (re-)creating the genealogy of the father and the daughter in African literature. For Ouma, the representations of filial relationships in the two novels demonstrate how depictions of fathers and daughters in African literature are significantly pooling into a continuous discourse on genealogies, traditions, and canons. He posits that the image of the father as stoic, persevering, canonical, and traditionally influen-

xvi

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



tial has something intriguing in its clutch and tenacity: while sons always need to proclaim autonomy from the patriarchal father-figure, daughters constantly grapple with it more subtly through attachment, seeking its affirmation, while exposing more nuanced perspectives in the relationship. Ouma argues that the ‘daughters of sentiment’ (Lynda Zwinger) found in the representations of Okonkwo’s relationship with Ezinma in Things Fall Apart and Papa Eugene’s relationship with Kambili in Purple Hibiscus represent the possibility of an androgynous genealogy-in-the-making, in which the fictional daughter embodies a patrilineal heritage, thereby problematizing her emplacement in the genealogically patrilineal familial line. The second essay addressing the influence of Things Fall Apart on Adichie’s work is David Whittaker’s “The Novelist as Teacher: Things Fall Apart and the Hauntology of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” in which he postulates that the contemporary renaissance in the Nigerian novel has problematized Achebe’s vision of the role of the African writer in a number of important ways. He begins by describing why Things Fall Apart should be regarded as the first incarnation of an influential African literary aesthetic that was developed by Achebe in his theoretical writings and later fiction. For Achebe, African writers have a crucial role to play in the process of nationalist renewal and decolonization, based on their socio-political role and a didactic literary programme of recuperation and (re-)education. Whittaker argues that the contemporary renaissance in the Nigerian novel has problematized Achebe’s literary manifesto calling for a radical applied literature in Africa, with a younger generation of writers often displaying quite different literary sensibilities and diasporic perspectives. However, he also argues that there is compelling evidence of the enduring influence of Achebe’s radical literary aesthetic in a work like Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which can be understood as being ‘haunted’ by the ghost of Okonkwo and the marginalized and voiceless spectres of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. He concludes that one of Adichie’s achievements in Half of a Yellow Sun is to create an inverted mirror-image, a subverted double of Things Fall Apart, by narrating the story from the subaltern positions elided in Achebe’s hierarchy of fictional voices. The final essay in this section is Malika Rebai Maamri’s “Re-Inventing Africa: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia,” in which she reveals the debt, often ambivalent and aggressive, that Djebar’s novel displays with regard to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, particularly in relation to its discourse of ‘silenced’ women. The affirmation of Afri-



Introduction

xvii

can culture initiated by Achebe has found echoes all around the world, and Maamri argues that it is no coincidence that Assia Djebar, a francophone Algerian woman writer who stands between the centre and the periphery, also sought to ‘reinvent’ Algeria. In bringing repressed colonial histories to light, she posits that Djebar’s and Achebe’s novels move between the dialectical poles of cultural assertion, on the one hand, and cultural demystification, on the other. Maamri’s essay joins a number of important feminist critiques of Things Fall Apart by arguing that when Achebe attempted to restore his own Igbo culture and history, he represented women as subaltern subjects in the range of discourses in the novel. Her reading details how Djebar reconsidered and re-narrated the legacy of French colonialism that had altered the identity of Algeria, and, like Achebe, she attempts to wrest identity from the vagaries of biculturality (and patriarchy). She argues that Djebar offers an alternative vision, a revisionist picture of the attitudes of traditional women to their status in African societies, one committed to challenging the picture limned in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The reception and teaching of the novel in other cultural and pedagogical domains is the theme of the third section of the collection, “Things Fall Apart in Other Contexts.” The first essay here is Bernth Lindfors’s “Teaching Things Fall Apart in Texas,” which describes an inductive method of teaching the novel that makes use of nineteenth-century accounts of Africa and Africans written by European and American natural scientists, missionaries, explorers, historians, and creative writers. Lindfors provides an insightful analysis of several key nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century primary sources that reveal the disparaging racist ideologies of Western stereotypes of Africans. He contrasts these Western notions of the ‘dark continent’ and its inhabitants with what his students learned about the African society and individuals depicted in Achebe’s novel. In “First and Second Glances: Working-Class Scottish Readers and Things Fall Apart,” Andrew Smith reflects on the reading of the novel by a variety of largely working-class Scottish readers who participated in the communityeducation courses in which he was involved for six years. His research emphasizes the active, interrogative, and sometimes implicitly critical nature of the encounter. Smith argues that this active ‘making sense’ of Achebe’s novel, and the historical events it describes, was not a process which proceeded in a kind of intellectual seclusion, but was clearly related to those readers’ on-going attempts to make sense of their own subjective experiences, and those of the communities and localities of which they were a part. The

xviii

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



essay explores how the active process of interpretation undertaken by these readers challenges our expectations of literary consumption and highlights the question of the cross-cultural reception of postcolonial fiction in the contemporary world. The final essay in this section is Russell McDougall’s “Things Fall Apart: Culture, Anthropology, and Literature,” in which he looks at the history of the novel’s changing reception and valency, and the different contexts in which it has been placed, particularly in terms of the shifting relations between the disciplines of anthropology and literary criticism. At the heart of McDougall’s polemical thesis is an analysis of how Achebe’s novel has increasingly become a ‘text’ that is read and situated within the globalized academy of transdisciplinary studies in a variety of educational and artistic contexts. He postulates that resituating Things Fall Apart primarily in terms of transdisciplinary globalization studies risks stripping the novel of its historical and literary power, as well as of the context in which it was written and produced. McDougall argues that this development may also empty the colonial moment of its political significance, particularly in terms of African history. He counters this by also conceding that there are a number of ways in which such interdisciplinary readings can produce interesting and productive readings. His essay ends with a consideration of the novel’s critical trajectory in Australia and how its powerful delineation of the psychological damage wrought by colonialism and its material effects have a particular relevance to the country’s attempts at reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. One way of measuring the phenomenal success of Things Fall Apart around the world is the fact that it has been translated into an estimated forty-five different languages, and the final section, “Things Fall Apart in Translation,” undertakes a much-needed examination of this important area in the life of the novel. The first essay is Waltraud Kolb’s “Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German,” in which she discusses the two German translations of Things Fall Apart (1959/1983) and their reception by readers and literary critics. She points out that readers are rarely aware of the power, and responsibility, inherent in the role of translators as negotiators and re-writers of literary texts and as re-creators of cultural representations. Kolb draws on recent approaches to translation in a postcolonial context and on Umberto Eco’s notion of translation as a process of negotiation, and, in particular, examines the radically different strategies adopted by the German translators in re-writing the Igbo metaphors and proverbs that are such an important aspect of the novel. She traces the various ways in which the



Introduction

xix

translators re-wrote and re-created cultural images for their readers, oscillating between the foreign and the familiar, and thereby gauges their success or failure to “carry the African writer’s peculiar experience” (Achebe), as the original does. The second essay in this section is Dorota Gołuch’s “Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart in Polish and the Task of Postcolonial Translation,” in which she discusses two Polish translations of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1989/2009). Gołuch states that the purpose of her essay is twofold: to seek to shed light on the presence and influence of Things Fall Apart in Poland; and to address the question of the relevance of domesticating and foreignizing strategies to the task of postcolonial translation. She characterizes Achebe’s text as an act of intercultural and literary translation, in order to compare his ‘strategies’ with those of his Polish translators. Gołuch postulates that, from a postcolonial perspective, domestication appears detrimental to the book’s message, yet she speculates that, when considering the effects of such domesticating translation strategies, one needs to read a translation in the context of the target culture’s norms and conventions. She interrogates current assumptions that domestication perpetuates imperialist or discriminatory attitudes whereas foreignization fosters intercultural understanding and, as such, is the preferred strategy for the future. Gołuch concludes by asking if there is a correlation between particular strategies of translatorial representation, increased knowledge of foreign cultures, and a genuine human understanding leading to tolerance. In 2008, at the conference which provided the inspiration for this collection of essays, Chinua Achebe could reflect back on his thoughts as a young writer and his belief, at the time, that “it seemed very strange things would happen to this book.” Indeed, that prediction has proved to be correct. Things Fall Apart is a novel that “could have died the next day” but has gone on to become the most celebrated and best-known work of African fiction today, read all over the world and translated into numerous languages. It is a work that continues to fascinate readers and inspire literary critics and postcolonial theorists, while becoming a text that is studied in a variety of academic fields in schools and universities around the world. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, this collection of essays aims to commemorate what is widely regarded as one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. The hope is that these essays will add to our understanding and appreciation of the novel, and may inform future scholars

xx

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



and students who will be studying this work in the years ahead. From uncertain beginnings, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart remains in good health today, and now looks certain to go on being read and enjoyed for many years to come. DAVID WHITTAKER OCTOBER 2010

I C HINUA A CHEBE C ONVERSATION WITH M APANJE AND L AURA F ISH IN

J ACK

C HINUA A CHEBE C ONVERSATION WITH J ACK M APANJE AND L AURA F ISH N EWCASTLE U NIVERSITY (L ONDON , 14 O CTOBER 2008) IN

J

M APANJE : I’ LL START THE INTERVIEW BY ASKING YOU SOMETHING that a lot of people don’t ask about, about the inspiration you had all those years ago for the writing of Things Fall Apart. Specifically, I would like to find out, if you can educate us, on the use of literary journals at the time. For instance, Black Orpheus and Présence Africaine, and there was Okiki, which you edited. Now, what influence did they have on your writing in general, if they had any influence at all? Or tell us something about those, their origin, and what it meant to people who were writing at the time. A C H E B E : Yes, what it meant to have those magazines coming up at the same time in different places – the indication, I think, was that there was something moving in our hearts and minds. It was fighting to come out. That was the nature of our history. It was reminding us of our history. If you look, for instance, at the people who were involved, they were not just anybody. They were people who were moved by what they had come to know of their own history, exactly who they were. People don’t know who they are unless they’re taught; a child doesn’t just know everything about his identity. So those publications you mentioned were indications. It’s almost like signs of, I wouldn’t say unhappiness, but signs of both joy and a sense of duty and a sense of accomplishment. ACK

M A P A N J E : What I liked about Black Orpheus was that you had Alex La

Guma from South Africa, Langston Hughes from America, and George Lamming, as well as the Nigerian writers. You had this community of writers and far away in South Africa we were sitting and watching out for the latest copy of Black Orpheus to read.

4

JACK MAPANJE, LAURA FISH & CHINUA ACHEBE



A C H E B E : It was a good indication of what was coming. It’s a pity that, if you

look back from where we are now, all that was expected, all of it was not accomplished. There were many setbacks. All of the struggle that went on did not produce what it should have. Kwame Nkrumah’s position was immediately undermined by the enemies of this movement and so the glorious hope that independence was supposed to bring was almost killed in infancy by what came to be known as the Cold War. That Cold War was fought in Africa even though it was not our fight; we had nothing to do with it. But somehow those who were in power decided that Africa was a good place to fight. So that killed our own revolution. M A P A N J E : We teach creative writing and one aspect of creative writing is,

we tell students to pick up a line from somebody and develop it in their own way. You picked up a line from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” And, then, “No longer at ease” is another one, a T.S. Eliot quotation. What is fascinating is how you were able to pick up a line and write a whole world of a novel. How do you feel about that? A C H E B E : Well, I think that there is a potency in poetry and language which goes beyond the immediate environment and surroundings of those words. If you find a really powerful poem, a line there could open up the world for you. Your own imagination will have to come in to recognize the potentials of the line. It seemed to me that I was very fond of Yeats. Somehow he resonated for me, so when I became familiar with that poem I thought: “Well, Yeats is a good poet, I’ll look up whatever of his I see.” I wasn’t thinking of my novel at that stage. That’s the nature of art; you can recognize friendships or meanings everywhere. That’s what happened to me in choosing the title Things Fall Apart. That was not the first thing I got hold of, I got hold of that title much later and it was like a sudden recognition. These words serve the different story that I have. And, secondly, what I found attractive about it was Yeats was talking about another civilization, and my own revolution was very different. It was a revolution of black people who had been mistreated for a long time, and the coming of Christianity. So that’s the way poetry can take us through different turnings. The more you think about it, the more you can get out of it. L A U R A F I S H : I’m aware that some feminists have criticized Things Fall Apart

for not presenting a feminine perspective. But I am also aware that there are more enlightened ways of looking at the book and perceiving it as creating a



Chinua Achebe in Conversation

5

space because it created a new tradition in African writing. It was at the start of a new tradition of African writing, and it therefore creates a space in which women can write. My question is: how important, do you think, in fiction, are silences in order to create a space for the reader to think, or for other writers to answer to? A C H E B E : A lot of that’s absolutely necessary, that space. Space is very important because without it things are choked up, killed by just having too many [...] too many people in this room, for instance, would immediately become uncomfortable, and to carry on without doing anything about it just makes it worse. So space is very important; and also, I think space is necessary for people to be able to see around corners. The kind of automatic criticism of Things Fall Apart that you referred to from a particular quarter, the feminists – that’s entirely up to the people involved. But I would simply suggest that they should have thought more about Things Fall Apart. They would see that I am not their enemy but their friend. They would see, for instance, that the reason Okonkwo came to the tragedy in his life was that he ignored women. Therefore, how could he be an anti-feminist, or how could I, who used his story to point to this great weakness? It’s not just women, he ignored everything feminine – like music, stories of peace rather than stories of war, compassion; all of that I group with the female in our nature. F I S H : What I’d be interested to know is how you would determine what makes good fiction. Is there a way of determining that? A C H E B E : No! I think everything makes good fiction. I say that because some people are beginning to hide behind the excuse that good events, good stories, are no longer happening, and that they happened in my time or in the time of my generation, and that’s it’s finished. You find young people who want to write, or who say they want to write, making that excuse – maybe not so crudely. How can one write about all this nonsense going on around us? Every nonsense going on is a very good subject for fiction. If you can’t handle it maybe it’s not your kind of story, but somebody can. So don’t allow your students to excuse themselves by saying ‘Well, you know things are no longer what they used to be’. F I S H : My next question concerns religion. You have said that your second

novel was originally going to be concerned with how a person could give up their own religion and adopt the religion of a stranger, and this was something that you struggled with. I’m interested to understand about your views on religion, because it plays such an important role in Nigeria today with dif-

6

JACK MAPANJE, LAURA FISH & CHINUA ACHEBE



ferent religious groups, the divide between the north and the south, between Christianity and Islam. What are your views on religion and your views on the role of religion in Nigeria? A C H E B E : That’s a very big question and it could take up the rest of our lives if we were to get into it. My position simply is that religion is not something for which people should go to war. It’s not only unproductive, it is actually cruel and foolish for religion to be a subject over which people fight and kill themselves. Somehow religion has the potentiality to develop very quickly into something that cannot be defended. Children are being killed; children have been banged against the walls and killed because people were fighting religious wars. My limited comment I want to make on this is that we should not allow conflict in the name of religion. There are some people that are particularly drawn to this and that is not what artists are there for. Artists are there for peace, unity, and diversity. If you have five religions in your village, there’s no reason to insist that there should only be one and that the other four should be wiped out. F I S H : This question concerns the imagination and whether the writer has a

responsibility to engage with the Other. What I mean by that is, at the end of Things Fall Apart, at the very end, the perspective changes, in a way, to the perspective of the white Commissioner. It’s a kind of shift in perspective. I’ve read quite a lot of Doris Lessing’s work, and at the end of The Grass is Singing when she writes about Mary being murdered by the houseboy, she says that it’s impossible to know what was going on in the black man’s mind. I’m interested in crossing these boundaries – gender and racial divides – and whether the writer has a responsibility to do so, to empathize with the Other, as it were. A C H E B E : Well, I don’t know whether it’s a responsibility. I would only say that a writer is well advised to recognize the validity of the Other. I don’t recommend how people should grow up or what they should value. I only suggest what, in my view, is useful in terms of society and correct in terms of morality and attitude. That’s the answer that I have. Empathy is, of course, highly recommended for anybody, but particularly for the artist, because the whole business of writing is like attempting to live inside somebody else’s skin. And that’s what we are challenged by literature to do – to be able to look at the Other and put yourself there. It’s a very difficult project, because we are mostly in our own skin, you know. That’s where we were born, and we’d like to die there. To go out and put yourself in the place of the Other, if we did it,



Chinua Achebe in Conversation

7

all kinds of problems would be solved. We would not be locked up for three years by somebody because of what we thought or said, or what he thought we said. M A P A N J E : The other question that I’d particularly like to take advantage of this occasion to ask you, Professor, concerns the role that your generation played, the role of writers as nationalists. You were fighting a war as well as everything else, not just through art, but also politically. The question I want to ask, after fifty years of Things Fall Apart and your publications that followed, is: What do you think about this role now? I know that a lot of young Nigerians ask you questions about whether you support the new government. Have you reached a stage where you can say ‘How long am I going to fight this war for?’ Or have you reached a stage where you think: ‘Perhaps I have said what I need to say. If nobody wants to listen, it’s their business’? A C H E B E : Well, I feel that way sometimes, but I don’t allow myself to go down that road. I think that if one continues to live, you are also supposed to be doing something. Now, if you genuinely decide that what you have done is enough for that particular problem – because we’re dealing with problems a lot of the time – if you think that you would be wasting your time if you continued flogging the same old thing, then that’s a decision you take. It’s for the writer to look at his life and decide: ‘Okay, I’ve tried this, it’s not working, I want to try something else’. But I am always afraid, or sceptical, of doing it for somebody else, advising somebody else, ‘I think you’ve done enough talking and I think you should now settle down’. I think that’s impertinent. This is a decision a particular writer or artist should take. M A P A N J E : I was reading the other day Femi Osofisan’s résumé of African literature in Nigeria. He has lots of stories about the frustrations – his own frustrations and his generation’s – but really the central point was the future of African literature. Now, earlier on, in answer to Laura’s question, you raised the issue of morality. What seems to be happening now is that writers, even in Africa, are writing about sex and soft porn – topics which probably the first generation like yourselves didn’t have time to write about or just thought wasn’t interesting enough. Where do you think African writing will go in the future? A C H E B E : It will go where the writers take it. The point behind your question is that the quality of the material that the writer chooses, if it is not carefully considered by the writer, he or she could be diverted from what is, to me, the most valuable service in the community. There are many dangers, and I see

8

JACK MAPANJE, LAURA FISH & CHINUA ACHEBE



some signs of people, who are not really the people of your story, becoming rather loud in prescribing for us which way we should go, which way art should take us. The young generation may not have the experience that my generation had and so they may come to a decision that ‘all this seriousness is too much, let’s take it easy’. All I can say is, ‘Well, take it easy and see what happens’. But I foresee some danger. One last thing on this – I had a friend who I thought admired my work, but it turned out that he didn’t. He was resentful that I did not give adequate recognition to the service, to the work, of the Europeans in Africa; he thought that they deserved better treatment. So I was disappointed, because for years I thought we agreed on that role of nationalism and the role of colonialism in our history – in my history. Suddenly, it’s my story, it’s not his. So that’s the only danger that I see there, in the choice of subject. This is an area where, if you’re not very experienced, if you’re not aware of your history, you may be misled. M E M B E R : Some have argued, and I think rightly so, that Things Fall Apart is prophetic in the light of the Nigerian civil war and the following influence of foreigners across Africa. Do you consider yourself a prophet, and when can the writer be considered or seen as a prophet? A C H E B E : It’s a matter of definition. I think we all have prophetic potentiality. An artist may have it on a rather larger scale than others. And, also, it depends who your readers are. Some of them may say you are a prophet and another group may be saying at the same time that you are a member of the coup or the coup plot: it’s no prophecy – you were part of the plotters. This is a true example; this is what happened to me with my novel A Man of the People. Someone like J.P. Clark said: “Chinua, you are a prophet!” on Friday. On Saturday there was a coup. So the people who were not pleased by that coup then found it easy to believe that I was one of those they should be looking for. So we have to be careful, that’s all I’m saying. If you watch your society carefully, you will often anticipate what will happen.

AUDIENCE

M A P A N J E : The sense of responsibility that you mentioned earlier, that the

writer has – we seem to have reached a stage where the whole notion of irresponsibility is acceptable as a thing to do. Sometimes I get worried where writing is going, and the role of the writer himself. Have you got any views on this, where writers seem to think that anything goes? Which is fine, but I don’t know. What do you think about it? Where is the future going with this? A C H E B E : It depends on how you got involved in writing and what you expect writing to do for you or your society. If you take the view that it really doesn’t



Chinua Achebe in Conversation

9

matter what your attitude is, that’s your view. My view is different. I’m rather serious about how society develops, especially African society. It’s important to me that we do the right things for the ordinary people, that we bring ourselves up and that we develop. There’s no reason why we should continue to be called the second-poorest country in the world. These are issues of great consequence to me. I can’t see literature which neglects this view, this aspect of the world, being terribly important. It is not in keeping with our traditional beliefs, the origin of our stories. We did not learn stories from anybody, we had our own stories. I think you’ll find the aspect of morality is sometimes put in a roundabout way in our stories, so that it is more interesting than the straightforward ‘Be good’. M A P A N J E : Do you think that things are falling apart for the writer today? A C H E B E : Well, in some ways yes, because writers are part of a team, if you like, that works together. The writers create the texts and the material, and the publisher moves in and takes over the production of this book. They engage a printer and then all the other accessories, the booksellers, they all participate in this grand programme that was started by the writer. For literature to be healthy, to grow, all these various elements should be working there. Today in Africa that’s not the case. I’m not even talking about the economists or the government. What is happening if you look at Nigeria, for example, is, the book business seems to be in great trouble. And in that situation the writer’s condition is threatened. That’s the fact of this case. M A P A N J E : What do you think about the use of the internet? Has it come to

Africa in a big way? You were talking about publications. These days people can publish their own things. A C H E B E : Yes, all that is part of the new future that we are only just becoming aware of. How it’s going to turn out for us, I’m not sure. I think writers who understand the internet and its uses and want to bring this into the business of writing, they should, of course, go ahead. But as long as pen and paper exist, some of use will go to the pen and paper on which we were brought up and work there. It’s better to be working on the old things you know than not doing any work because the internet has come and someone says that publishing or writing is now out of date. I think one should be rather conservative and not be the first to decide that writing is no longer of any use. M A P A N J E : Thank you very much, Professor Chinua Achebe, for this inter-

view. 

II A PPROACHES TO T HINGS F ALL A PART

1

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, and the Politics of Magic

————

M ICHAEL J ARDINE

“But even Herodotus called the Negroes sorcerers […] it is they who command the elements, and this they call ‘magic’.”1

H

E G E L ’ S L A B E L L I N G O F “ N E G R O E S ” A S “ S O R C E R E R S ,” drawing, as he puts it, on “the copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries,” is a forceful reminder of how the practice of magic was identified by colonizing nations as a principal sign of Africa’s “self-incurred immaturity,” from which it needed enlightened deliverance. Things Fall Apart was, of course, conceived as a counter-narrative to such misrepresentation, but the potentially irresolvable problem facing Achebe, on the eve of Nigerian independence, was how to celebrate traditional African beliefs in a more positive light without reinforcing such embedded Western prejudice. The argument developed here is that it was only by resolving this problem that

1

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, quoted in James Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish: the Materiality of Prospero’s Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (Fall 2002): 433–34. Kearney comments: “For Hegel, the people of ‘the land of childhood’ are excluded from human history because they are already slaves to the merely material world, slaves to their barbarous fetishism.” See also Amar Acheraiou, Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), for a useful broader discussion of conventional representations of Africa in classical Europe.

14

MICHAEL JARDINE



Achebe was able to write Things Fall Apart. The artistic solution involved crafting a narrative perspective to effectively reconcile the traditional with the modern, while the political solution lay in placing the Igbo people, and by extension Nigeria and Africa, within the continuum of history, equipped to embrace the future without abandoning the past. Much was at stake, then, in Achebe’s decisions on how to represent magic in his ground-breaking first novel.2 What is meant by “magic” is, of course, highly contentious and its deployment problematical in a postcolonial context. Abdul JanMohamed faced a similar dilemma when coining the awkwardly oxymoronic phrase “sophisticated primitivism”3 to describe Achebe’s handling of Igbo beliefs. David Whittaker and Mpalive–Hangson Msiska express surprise at JanMohamed’s blindness to the fact that within the cultural politics of decolonization in which he locates Achebe, the term ‘primitivism’, however subtly deployed, is unambiguously seen as signifying negativity, as the quintessential expression of the colonialist economy of representation of the African Other.

They add: “The difficulty is that JanMohamed lacks a positive vocabulary in which to articulate Achebe’s aesthetic.”4 By problematizing the negative association of magic with the primitive and relating the term to supernatural beliefs held by both colonizer and colonized, this contribution seeks to avoid the pitfall identified here. It is clearly the case, however, that to refer to practices and beliefs which are dependent on supernatural forces as “magic”5 is inherently offensive for any faith-based culture, as the embattled distinction between magic and religion has long marked the hotly disputed borderline between civilization and barbarism. Keith Thomas reminds us that a strict 2

Simon Gikandi places Achebe among a generation of writers, “the sons and daughters of the Igbo Christians who had renounced African traditions” and “were bent on recovering and re-valorizing the traditions their fathers had denounced and desecrated.” See Reading Chinua Achebe: Language & Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991): 15. 3 Abdul JanMohamed, “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 15.4 (October 1984): 19–39. 4 David Whittaker & Mpalive–Hangson Msiska, Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2007): 69. 5 From this point the scare quotes will be dropped, but their presence is implied throughout, in recognition of the sensitive implications of this term in this context.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

15

separation between the two was fundamental to the Protestant Reformation, which “presented itself as a deliberate attempt to take the magical elements out of religion,”6 and it was crucial for colonizers to maintain, as did Prospero, a distinction between facile or barbarous magic and their own advanced beliefs and practices. Indeed, this was the key basis for differentiation between colonizer and colonized. It is worth recalling that Homi Bhabha’s celebrated formulation “sly civility” is borrowed from a colonial missionary, exasperated by the frustrating ability of the colonized to contest this crucial distinction. Bhabha quotes from a sermon delivered by Archbishop Potts in 1818: If you urge them with their gross and unworthy misconceptions of the nature and the will of God, or the monstrous follies of their fabulous theology, they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb. You may be told that “heaven is a wide place, and has a thousand gates”; and that their religion is one by which they hope to enter […] By such evasions they can dismiss the merits of the case from all consideration; and encourage men to think that the vilest superstition may serve to every salutary purpose, and be accepted in the sight of God as well as truth and righteousness.7

Thus Bhabha’s influential analysis of the despotic nature of the colonial encounter substantially rests upon the unforeseen and subversive capacity of the colonized to frustrate the colonizers’ key distinction between religion and magic. In Things Fall Apart, the missionaries, believing their success rests on maintaining this distinction,8 persistently seek to infantilize the Igbo by accusing them of endowing “bits of wood” with magical properties. Olufemi Taiwo has entertainingly demonstrated how an entire set of prejudices rests on this unsustainable hierarchy of beliefs: “Ancestor worship” (African) and “religion” (the rest of the world); “tribalism” (African) and “nationalism” (the rest of the world); “traditional thought” [...] (African) and “philosophy” (the rest of the world); “simple

6

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971): 76. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 99. 8 In the theological debate between Brown, a Christian missionary, and Akunna, “one of the great men of the village,” the latter states, “It is indeed a piece of wood” (162), conceding its symbolic, ritualistic function, in an exchange which repeatedly exposes blind spots in the missionary’s theology. 7

16

MICHAEL JARDINE



societies” (African) and “complex societies” (the rest of the world); “lineage division” (African) and “class division” (the rest of the world); “order of custom” (African) and “rule of law” (the rest of the world); etc.9

The powerful narrative implied here is of a simple, magic-based world “falling apart” upon evolutionary exposure to a kryptonite combination of religion, law, and science, and criticism of Things Fall Apart over the past fifty years shows that the novel has often been read to support this narrative. However, I would argue that, perhaps more effectively than any other single work, Things Fall Apart challenges this world-view, which, with its identification of an Age of Magic superseded by an Age of Religion,10 has proved so enabling to Western colonial aggression. Achebe subverts this powerful narrative of progress principally through his deft handling of the magic–religion interface, in showing how the Igbo nation continued to evolve and adapt through a constant practice of what Chima Anyadike has called a “dialogic construction of the real,”11 whereby supernatural belief is afforded a respectful scepticism. What could be written off as mere superstition is carefully depicted in the novel as a means of approaching an understanding of aspects of life which defy rational explanation, as captured in the key Igbo concept of ‘double in unity’. Thus, for example, Chielo has to be understood as both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, and the astonishing metamorphosis which occurs when she assumes her role as priestess of Agbala is treated with respectful sympathy by Achebe’s narrator. Such sensitivity allows Achebe to develop a narrative voice which admits scepticism of magic without resorting to satire, affording Igbo metaphysics a dignity that compares favourably with colonizing Christianity. Achebe understood full well, long before Bhabha’s work, how “sly civility” functioned to deconstruct comfortable narratives of progression from error to truth. As is clear from the following extract, for Achebe it was only the “uninitiated” who adopted an unquestioning attitude

9

Olufemi Taiwo, “Exorcising Hegel,” African Studies Quarterly 1.4 (1998): 32; http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/2.htm (accessed 10 September 2008). 10 Note the significance of the “Journey of the Magi,” the birth of Christ undermining “the old dispensation,” persuading these “magicians” to convert, being “no longer at ease.” Achebe’s use of the latter phrase as the title for his second novel suggests how sensitive he was at this time to the detrimental impact of this Western story on Africa. 11 Chima Anyadike, “Duality and Resilience in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Philosophia Africana 10.1 (March 2007): 53.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

17

towards what he calls “spiritland,” though even initiates accept the “validity” of these traditional cultural forms: The masked spirits who often grace human rituals and ceremonies with their presence […] are said to emerge from their subterranean home through ant holes. At least that is the story as told to the uninitiated. To those who know, however, the masked “spirits” are only symbolic ancestors. But this knowledge does not diminish their validity or the awesomeness of their presence.12

As a young lecturer in Ahmadu Bello University in the early 1970s, I first received Things Fall Apart as the African Writers Series had packaged it, as a realistic portrayal of primitive African life tragically disintegrating when confronted by a superior culture, and painfully progressing into the modern world. It was not until a much later re-read that I became aware of my blindness to the subtlety of the text, to the trap set by Achebe for careless readers, those basking in advanced modernity and knowing better than to accept magic for real. Such readings replicate the blindness of the British in the text, a handicap which cuts them off from the possibility of learning from a civilization deemed primitive. It is noticeable that depiction of the spiritual elements of Igbo culture declines in the final third of the novel, after Okonkwo’s return from exile to discover that the British grasp over village life had intensified. It is the argument here that Achebe’s artistic breakthrough in Things Fall Apart resulted from his discovery of a means of addressing the problematic of how to validate the so-called primitive without endorsing credulity in magic as a means of mechanically securing one’s desires. This can be linked with Abdul JanMohamed’s insightful comparison of Achebe’s artistry with that of Picasso, though with the traffic of ideas moving in opposite directions: While Picasso drew his inspiration from West African art, Achebe draws his from West European fiction. Like Picasso’s paintings, Achebe’s novel presents us with sophisticated primitivism, with a deliberate return to an innocence re-presented.13

The phrase “sophisticated primitivism,” suggestively akin to “sly civility,” points towards the doubling effect the term “magic” conveys, as one which by itself can function as an oxymoron, combining both duplicity and creativity. It

12

Chinua Achebe, “ ‘ Chi’ in Igbo Cosmology” (1972), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975): 134. 13 JanMohamed, “Sophisticated Primitivism,” 37.

18

MICHAEL JARDINE



is this dynamic, dual property of magic that is explored to such powerful effect by both Picasso and Achebe. Graham Huggan’s influential idea of “the anthropological exotic” is also relevant here. For Achebe, like Picasso, in handling the primitive there was always the risk of appealing to the voyeurism of the Western consumer, intrigued and appalled by the ‘dark continent’, with the practice of magic as a major constituent of this exotic appeal, a fascinating and repellent badge of barbarism. Achebe’s challenge in Things Fall Apart was to find a way of avoiding this exoticizing trap by representing traditional African life, at the point of encounter with the West, as infinitely more complex than a clash between advanced colonizer and primordial colonized. Any outright rejection of magic in this context would have a clear political and ideological function, in assuaging Western guilt at the gross material inequity produced by the colonial encounter. They had magic, we had Christianity – no contest. We brought them out of superstitious darkness into light; if we stole land from them we gave them enlightenment. As Huggan shows, the “self-designated founder” of the African Writers Series, Alan Hill, shared this prejudice: In place of the misconceptions of colonialist times [the African Writers Series] has given us a true picture of African traditional societies as they move into the modern world, depicting their humanity, their artistic achievements, as well as their cruelty and superstition – a mixture very familiar in the history of Western European civilization.14

As Neil ten Kortenaar has pointed out, competing narratives of colonization as either progress or “loss of self” created a “tremendous ambivalence” in preindependence Nigeria,15 particularly for the new generation of Western-educated intellectuals, such as Achebe. Achebe’s striking achievement was to find a narrative method to create validating positives out of this potentially crippling uncertainty. Central to this success was Achebe’s construction of a narrator in Things Fall Apart, reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s village intellectual, who is both within the community and yet with knowledge in excess of it. A.G. Stock comments that Achebe “writes like a son of the tribe for whom this way of life is the norm, though wider knowledge has made him 14

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 53. 15 Neil ten Kortenaar, “Chinua Achebe and the Question of Modern African Tragedy,” Philosophia Africana 9.2 (2006): 88.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

19

aware that it is not everyone’s.”16 This figure is developed into the perfect narrative vehicle to straddle a dual perspective capable of suggesting, as Adebayo Williams puts it, a “martial and ontological superiority” for the colonizers while avoiding “denigrating the self-validating customs of the colonized.”17 The tensions suggested in this balancing act have triggered shock-waves across criticism of the novel, with some critics feeling the need to protect Achebe from a damaging association with the primitive. Part of the felt need here is to distinguish Achebe from Amos Tutuola, whose books, as Ulli Beier put it, “are violently rejected in Africa,” on the grounds that his work “creates the impression abroad that Nigerians are a superstition-ridden people.”18 Thus, we find Umelo Ojinmah writing: Achebe does not only portray the virtues of the society, he also shows the society simultaneously practising superstitious beliefs. These include the practice of viewing twins as portending evil, and of throwing them into the Evil Forest to die, human sacrifices, and exaggerated shows of manliness, such as when tribal members drink publicly from the human skulls of their first victims during certain ceremonies.19

By implication, “superstitious beliefs” are equated here with vice. Similarly, Abiola Irele concludes that in Things Fall Apart “the scepticism natural to the rational viewpoint is barely held in check […] masked only by the neutral tone of the narrator.”20 This is a neutrality, however, from which Irele is 16

A.G. Stock, “Yeats and Achebe” (1968), in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978): 87. The narrator arguably occupies a perspective born of Achebe’s own hybrid childhood experience: “I was brought up in a village where the old ways were still active and alive, so I could see the remains of our tradition actually operating. At the same time I brought a certain amount of detachment to it too, because my father was a Christian missionary, and we were not fully part of the ‘heathen’ life of the village.” Quoted in Carey Snyder, “The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings: Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart,” College Literature 35.2 (2008): 159. 17 Adebayo Williams, “The Autumn of the Literary Patriarch: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Remembering,” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001): 15. 18 Ulli Beier, “In Search of an African Personality,” Twentieth Century 165.4 (April 1959): 332. 19 Umelo Ojinmah, Chinua Achebe: New Perspectives (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991): 14. 20 Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001): 138. Irele further argues that Achebe’s mind “hovers between fascination and unbelief” (138).

20

MICHAEL JARDINE



careful to distance Achebe himself, because, he continues, “It would clearly be absurd to suggest that [Achebe] identifies with them [the superstitious] at any level of his intellectual makeup.”21 To further demonstrate the sensitivity of this issue, we can observe how Isidore Okpewho charges Achebe with betraying his roots in Things Fall Apart by employing a Western relativism in his sceptical representation of traditional Igbo beliefs: As an undergraduate at University College, Ibadan, he studied under (mostly British) scholars trained in the relativist discourse on the “primitive” Other. When he came to write his first novel shortly after graduation, it was too soon for him to realize that, in referring to his own people as them, he was unwittingly identifying with an us who did not look too kindly across the divide.22

The case here is that Achebe was anything but “unwitting” in his handling of this “divide.” What Okpewho has in mind is the distancing technique found in such passages as the following, but note again that Achebe assigns credulity to the “uninitiated,” and invites the sensitive reader of Things Fall Apart to identify a practical value in supernatural belief: Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string. (9)

Here the possibility of the appeal of the “anthropological exotic” is also clear;23 indeed Neil ten Kortenaar identifies this passage as one in which Achebe “lapses into the knowing tone of an anthropologist,”24 but I would argue that the novel educates the reader cumulatively to become wary of 21

Irele, The African Imagination, 139. Isidore Okpewho, ed. Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 32. 23 This provocative term is Huggan’s, who goes on to argue that Things Fall Apart “implicitly addresses a Western model reader who is constructed as an outsider to the text and to the cultural environment(s) it represents.” See Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008): 114. 24 Neil ten Kortenaar, “How the Center is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart,” in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, ed. Okpewho, 132. 22



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

21

Othering and sentimentalizing the Igbo people as credulous fools. The “Western model reader” identified by Huggan, if such a reader exists, is by no means a stable construct, but must learn to judge on its merits each episode in the novel. For example, the transformative magical power of words, as referred to in the above passage, is shown to be anything but delusional,25 as is the “uncanny” effect of darkness in a world without electricity. A sentence such as, “No-one had ever beheld Agbala [the Oracle], except his priestess” (15), may be read as an invitation to a superior Western scepticism, but when the Oracle tells Unoka he needs to “Go home and work like a man” (16), the practical value of such an institution can be gleaned by the reader, as it confirms what the novel’s opening had established in recording the detrimental impact of Unoka’s work-shyness. The reader’s judgement on the role of the supernatural in the community is further destabilized by the contribution of the Oracle to the jarringly ruthless sacrifice of Ikemefuna. Achebe’s sceptical but sympathetic narrator is used to alert the reader to the possibility that something whose literal existence is believed only by the credulous can provide substantial value to the community. Inflexibility in the realm of belief is unfailingly destructive in Things Fall Apart, as it disallows peaceful coexistence between peoples with different belief systems. Judgment on belief systems, Igbo or Christian, does not relate to the degree of suspension of disbelief involved in specific practices but to the moral principles which underpin them. Achebe’s numerous comments in interviews illustrate his preoccupation with the need to move beyond prejudice in the realm of belief in order to secure progressive coexistence. He repeat25

Christopher Wise, in reconciling Things Fall Apart with modern Western philosophy, argues that “In Things Fall Apart […] Achebe shows us how the Igbo possess an uncanny awareness of language’s often harmful and alienating nature, the powerful being of language that evokes in its subjects of Igboland the greatest caution and dread. This is most evident, for example, in the case of Ikemefuna of whom the Oracle demands a ritual sacrifice. However, we are also shown how the Igbo are not (as in Barthes, Derrida, and other poststructuralists) the ‘pure’ products or ‘constructs’ of their language (that is to say, the purely powerless products of human language), but they are instead endowed with a strikingly logocentric and powerful individualism, an in-dwelling ability to determine their own fate, status, and well-being within the real or historical world.” See “Excavating the New Republic: Post-Colonial Subjectivity in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Callaloo 22.4 (1999): 1063–64. This fits in well with the case made here that Achebe sought to qualify any impression that the Igbo belief system diminished free will and sense of personal responsibility.

22

MICHAEL JARDINE



edly warns against a conception of reality that excludes the imaginary: “Myth in the African context [...] is not the opposite, much less a negation, of the real. It reinforces, structures, rationalises reality.”26 And again: “The mythic and the real merge in natural symbiosis in the radical, undifferentiated innocence of children.”27 Arguably, such a merging is fundamental to Achebe’s artistic vision. His creativity draws on this coming-together and on resistance to a polarized and hierarchized relationship between magic and science. In an often-quoted passage, he has stated: I think this is the most important and fascinating thing about our life – the crossroad. This is where the spirits meet the humans, the water meets the land, the child meets the adult – these are the zones of power, and I think this is really where stories are created.28

In keeping with such a commitment, magic in Things Fall Apart is never represented as weird, strange or ludicrous, but as the strong underpinning of a sophisticated, mature and evolving civilization. For Achebe, to adapt Raymond Williams, magic is ordinary, insofar as it is an integrated part of daily life, part of the bedrock of Igbo culture. “Our life”, he has stated, “was never compartmentalized in the way it has become today [...] In fact we don’t even have a word for religion in Igbo. It’s simply life.”29 Thus, he can claim on the one hand that, “if you were to divide the world into the scientific and non-scientific people, we would be in the non-scientific. We are a magical people,”30 and on the other, in apparent contradiction, that, “if your view of the world is scientific – and my view of the world is scientific – then you don’t accept the role of the gods in the same way that my father would.”31 Here there is continuity with the past, but one that allows a re-

26

D.V.K. Raghavacharyulu, K.I. Madhusudana Rao & B.V. Harajagannadh, “Achebe Interviewed” (11 March 1981), in Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1997): 90. 27 Raghavacharyulu, Madhusudana Rao & Harajagannadh, “Achebe Interviewed,” in Conversations, ed. Lindfors, 92. 28 Jonathan Cott, “At the Crossroads” (1980), in Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Lindfors, 80. 29 Jonathan Cott, “At the Crossroads,” 79. 30 Robert M. Wren, “Those Magical Years” (1982), in Conversations, ed. Lindfors, 99. 31 Wren, “Those Magical Years,” 107.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

23

spectful deviation and acceptance of change in response to healthy exchange of ideas. Achebe, in his essay “The Truth of Fiction,” applauds Frank Kermode’s definition of fictional reality as “something we know does not exist but which helps us to make sense of, and move in, the world,”32 and he rejects Milan Kundera’s definition of the novel as “‘an investigation into human existence … [It] proclaims no truth, no morality’,”33 on the grounds that it denies the novel’s didactic and social functions. In other words, far from evading political and social responsibility to community, Achebe asserts that the task for the novelist is, rather, to bring imaginatively into being a “different order of reality from that which is given to him.”34 Achebe and his narrative voice may well take a sceptically ‘scientific’ view of the world but he was fully aware at the time he wrote Things Fall Apart that the politics of magic demanded a sympathetic acknowledgement of the complex potency of the magical in Igbo culture and that this was vital to the restoration of his people’s dignity. Writing in 1964, he insisted that “the fundamental theme” for the African writer was that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African peoples all but lost in the colonial period, and it is this dignity that they must now regain.35

It is to achieve this aspiration that, while creating a narrative voice which admits scepticism, he avoids the sort of ironizing of magic which is often seen as the defining feature of ‘magical realism’, such as that associated with Salman Rushdie, whose satirical method in The Satanic Verses controversially set out to expose and debunk certain traditional Islamic beliefs. There has been considerable discussion of magical realism in African literature, with Achebe commonly identified as a realist, rather than a magical realist, al32

“The Truth of Fiction” (1978), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988): 96. 33 Achebe, “The Writer and His Community” (1984), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988): 37. 34 Achebe, “The Truth of Fiction,” 95 (my emphasis). 35 From “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine 81 (1964): 157, quoted in Kolawole Ogungbesan, “Politics and the African Writer” (1973), in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978): 37.

24

MICHAEL JARDINE



though it is, revealingly, in the area of the representation of magic that his status as a realist has been most tested. As Mark Mathuray puts it, “Interpretive activity seems to flounder in the face of the preponderance of the representation of myth, ritual and religious beliefs and practices in the realist novel.”36 Enough has been said in this study to suggest that Achebe is no straightforward realist, if such a category exists, but there is no doubt that it would have been politically regressive in 1958 Nigeria for Achebe to treat Igbo beliefs with the same robust scepticism with which Rushdie treated Islam thirty years later, just as it arguably would have been as regressive to simply recycle fables, Tutuola-style.37 Elleke Boehmer defines magical realism as a “world [...] made incredible by cultural displacement,”38 but it would not suit Achebe’s purpose to represent traditional beliefs of the Igbo nation, traumatized by such displacement, as simply “incredible.” What could have been mocked with aloof knowingness as primitive superstition or treated as invitingly exotic for a Western reader is depicted in Things Fall Apart as a mature community’s means of approaching an understanding of aspects of 36

Mark Mathuray, “Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God,” Research in African Literatures 34.3 (Autumn 2003): 49. 37 Ato Quayson points out that Achebe’s choice of a realist mode of fiction was conditioned by historical context, as part of a recognition that a commitment to reason and fact could be equated with a maturity and fitness for independence: “The assumption that realism shares a community of values with other non-literary discourses was particularly important in the general conceptions of the role of literature in the newly emergent African nations. And especially in the period just before and after Independence in West Africa when a burgeoning newspaper culture and the Onitsha Market Literature emphasized an empiricism and rationalism embodied in a recourse to ‘facts’ and factual reporting, the perceived affinities between the economy of realism and those of other non-literary discourses were taken for granted in the espousals of cultural authenticity.” See “Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It,” Research in African Literatures 25.4 (Winter 1994): 130. This provides another context (empiricism and rationalism) for understanding why Achebe, himself a journalist as well as a novelist, might not want to be read as unreservedly validating magic, even in a text which has as one of its prime objectives a celebration of traditional culture. 38 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1995): 235, quoted in Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction, Seeing with a Third Eye (London: Routledge, 1998): 11.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

25

life which elude rational explanation. The magical-realist mode can certainly accommodate both magic and material reality, but only by ironizing the former.39 The risks are set out by Lydie Moudileno: According to Connell, aligning the postcolonial with magical realism proves to be problematic in that it implies a hierarchical polarization between science and magic and the reiteration of the opposition between the West and the rest.40

As noted, Achebe develops for his narrator the voice of a village intellectual, through whose vision the archaic, the ancient, the traditional, the proverbial, the local stuff of fantasy and legend are familiarly orthodox rather than samples of exotic Otherness. Any irony is internalized, so that both narrator and participants are fully aware that the magical and the diurnal coexist. This can be seen in the example of Okonkwo’s appearance as an egwugwu, where reader, narrator, and characters in the novel believe and disbelieve in magic, a scene that has been identified by numerous critics as a key moment of rupture in the text: “Okonkwo’s wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo [...] But if they thought these things they kept them within themselves” (81). Huggan comments on this episode: The “thoughtful silence” of the women before this all-important masculine institution is ironic. The narrative works both to reveal the “natural” and “instinctive” female attitude to Power and also to ironize the pretensions of the masculine social institutions. But it is important to note that the irony does not work to radically undermine the hierarchy at the centre of the power structure because the women constrain themselves to “thinking” their knowledge, but leave it unexpressed.41

Here masculinity and magic coalesce, placing magic firmly within the controversial gender politics of the novel, and, once again, Achebe’s handling has to 39

It is revealing that Neil ten Kortenaar, in his discussion of Achebe’s complex treatment of superstition in Things Fall Apart claims both that “Achebe’s narration recounts what happened without comment or irony,” only to add that “there is an irony implicit nonetheless.” See “How the Center is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart,” 127. This double reading of the same scene neatly illustrates the ambivalence of Achebe’s novel in this area. 40 Lydie Moudileno, “Magical Realism: ‘Arme miraculeuse’ for the African Novel?” Research in African Literatures 37.1 (2006): 29. 41 Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 112.

26

MICHAEL JARDINE



enable critique without sacrificing dignity. This balancing act has seemed too evasive for some feminist critics of Things Fall Apart, who would prefer a clearer denunciation of gender hierarchization in the community depicted in the novel. It is revealing that Huggan is cautious about the nature and impact of irony in the egwugwu episode, denying any “radical” subversion, as any debunking of magic is confined to the mental reservations of the female mind. Such caution, I think, points to the skill with which Achebe handles this crucial aspect of the novel, as his narrator strives to balance celebration and critique. The following comment by Huggan further illustrates the difficulty facing a critic in identifying Achebe as an ironist in his representation of traditional Igbo beliefs: What we are left with then, I would suggest, is in part a deconstructive exercise in ethnographic parody, a series of pointedly exaggerated, at times caricatural cultural (mis)readings aimed at a Western model reader confronted with the limits of his / her cultural knowledge and interpretative authority. And it is also in part a recuperative attempt at celebratory autoethnography, one which, turning the language of Western evolutionist anthropology against itself, enables an allegedly “subordinate” culture to regain its dignity.42

Deconstructive, parodic or caricatural readings are here set against the “dignity” of Igbo culture, but the bracketed “mis” is indicative of Huggan’s uncertainty about the validity of such readings. I think Huggan is right in his inference that Achebe teases Western readers who negotiate the novel form with confidence but find themselves at the limit of their “interpretative authority” when confronted with such ambivalent treatment of the supernatural. This limit can be related to Christopher Wise’s observations regarding Achebe’s adaptation of the novel form to centralize the needs and values of the community: What may be most remarkable about Things Fall Apart is its ability to both deploy and subvert the traditional European novel form itself in the service of purposes distinct from those which have historically defined it. Specifically, Achebe transforms the “bourgeois epic” of homelessness and alienation into a recuperative celebration of collective social existence.43

42 43

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 43. Wise, “Excavating the New Republic,” 1060.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

27

JanMohamed’s analysis of what he calls the “Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes” is useful here in understanding how Achebe developed artistic methods to solve political problems. He identifies in Things Fall Apart a deliberate ambiguity, a double consciousness in keeping with the syncretism of a written narrative about an oral culture, the narrator refuses to emphasize either the chirographic / scientific or the oral / mythic viewpoint, thereby reinforcing once again the flat surface.44

It is in his complex handling of what JanMohamed calls “the border between the secular and the sacred”45 that Achebe achieves his political objective of correcting what he saw as centuries of misrepresentation of Africa by the West, including that by celebrated novelists such as Conrad and Cary. The challenge set by the specific circumstances of colonial domination in Eastern Nigeria is brilliantly managed by means of Achebe’s novelistic devices, “ensuring that his characters do not seem foolish because they believe in the absence of that border while he is obliged to acknowledge it for the same reason.”46 Tellingly, it is not until the advent of the British that reason and magic collide, and it is with catastrophic consequences for the Igbo people. The famous words of the District Commissioner at the close of the novel illustrate the dangers of disequilibrium between the two: “One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate” (187). At this point in the novel, an alert reader should be duly suspicious of the sufficiency of a narrative based on reason alone. Magic in the communities depicted by Achebe is not allowed to become an index of embarrassing gullibility, but has a range of vital public functions, spanning ritual, folk drama, and communal entertainment. Nor are the individual members of the community depicted as a homogeneous group; there is flexibility, dissent, and a range of attitudes from zealous belief to moderate toleration. In privileging this complex Igbo perspective, Achebe effectively deconstructs the colonizers’ hierarchized religion / magic binary by neutrally presenting Christian claims that their deity can have a son and yet be single alongside Igbo supernatural beliefs, both of which equally challenge a sceptical reader’s credulity. As Archbishop Potts had perceived in an Indian context, with “sly civility” a distinct vein of pragmatism predominates, which 44

JanMohamed, “Sophisticated Primitivism,” 33. “Sophisticated Primitivism,” 32. 46 “Sophisticated Primitivism,” 31. 45

28

MICHAEL JARDINE



constantly reassesses the role and value of superstitious belief, as when we are informed, late in the novel, that There were many men and women in Umuofia who did not feel as strongly as Okonkwo about the new dispensation. The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also brought a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia. And even in the matter of religion there was a growing feeling that there might be something in it after all, something vaguely akin to method in the overwhelming madness. (161)

Okonkwo is at odds with this view, an inflexibility which is not endorsed by the novel, even though its heroic grandeur has the ambivalent appeal of tragedy. Both cultures have their magic beliefs, which appear “lunatic” to each other, but the equation of magic with lunacy is demonstrably destructive. The way forward is to be prepared to recognize ‘method’ even in apparent ‘madness’; Achebe’s strategy at this historical juncture had to be to allow neither magic nor method to dominate to the exclusion of the other. The new District Commissioner and the new missionary, Mr Smith, together provoke the novel’s final catastrophe because of their blindness to what the reader is tutored to recognize, the unfolding beauty of the delicately complex balance and interaction between belief in supernatural power and insistence on human responsibility that characterizes traditional Igbo culture. This paradox is no less absorbing than Milton’s exploration of the same perplexing human condition in Paradise Lost. The following extract, spoken by Obierika, draws attention to this tension: The people of Umuike wanted their market to grow and swallow up the markets of their neighbours. So they made a powerful medicine. Every marketday, before the first cock-crow, this medicine stands on the market-ground in the shape of an old woman with a fan. With this magic fan she beckons to the market all the neighbouring clans. She beckons in front of her and behind her, to her right and to her left. (103)

Simon Gikandi’s reading of this passage, in which he quotes from Michel Foucault’s Order of Things, inverts the apparent priority of the magical over the material: The people of Umuike had found an appropriate symbolic expression for their economic dominance; here, the exchange of goods is represented as if it



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

29

is both ‘a hidden presence and a visible signature of all the wealth in the world’.47

The more the realm of the supernatural is summoned up, the more the characters’ personal responsibility is reduced.48 The Umuike traders benefit from their business skill in proportion to the dependency of the market upon magic. Are the magical properties of the fan the “symbolic expression” of value or the source of value? For Gikandi, it must be the former, but I would argue that Achebe does not want the supernatural dimension of the economic transaction to be wholly discounted, as it contributes no less to the economic life of the African community than does capitalism’s apparently “lunatic” reliance on the invisible corrective hand of the market to Western countries. It is clear from the opening of the novel onwards, with its emphasis on hard work, that material well-being is central to Igbo culture – it has to be, as it is a subsistence economy. Hence, one advantage the colonizers had is that they introduced the ‘magic’ of capitalism (the market is enhanced) and the ‘magical’ transformation to material prosperity merely from learning English or adopting Christianity, which contrasts forcefully with the hard-won material benefits of yam production, which is back-breaking. Clayton McKenzie refers to the “seemingly irresistible social and economic imperatives” which cut across spiritual concerns, illustrating an Igbo pragmatism which comfortably coexists with piety: “This new relationship [...] is not founded on mystical ordination or divine machination. It is a relationship of pragmatism and commodity.”49 A startling and painful illustration of the new power of exchange is the transformation of two hundred bags of cowries shells into the lives of six 47

Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991): 36. 48 In an interesting gloss on how the mechanical aspect of belief in supernatural powers has survived into modern Nigeria, Kalu Ogbaa contends that ‘the Igbo belief in the role of sacrifice in their relationship with the divinities has degenerated into a strong belief in manipulation and bribery […] In all parts of Nigeria, these various forms of manipulation and bribery are expressed by the phrase ‘offering of kola,’ which derives from the ritual habit of offering kola and pouring libations to appease the gods and ancestors.” See Understanding “Things Fall Apart”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1999): 132–33. 49 Clayton G. Mackenzie, “The Metamorphosis of Piety in Things Fall Apart,” in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, ed. Okpewho, 159.

30

MICHAEL JARDINE



Umuofia clansmen – “a new kind of fiscal logic,”50 as Mackenzie labels it. The balance that is struck between magic and reason or between superstition and pragmatism is part of a wider Igbo philosophy of balance or duality. To choose one above the other is dangerous, as it is dangerous for Okonkwo to dismiss entirely his weak but artistic father. The subject of magic thus straddles the key debates within postcolonial studies, sometimes reduced to Paul Gilroy’s ‘routes’ vs. ‘roots’, or to the need to modernize/ hybridize against the need to preserve tradition and celebrate the past. David Hoegberg’s reading of Things Fall Apart is useful in this context. He writes: In my reading of the iyi-uwa scene, it is not the finding of the buried object that matters most but the relationship between child and community that is set up in and through the journey.51

Hence, the medicine man is not depicted as a fraudster but as a valuable source of social harmony. We should also note that the character who shows the most incredulity towards Igbo beliefs is the Reverend Smith, whose overzealousness it is that drives the novel to its violent conclusion: Mr. Smith was filled with wrath when he heard of this. He disbelieved the story which even some of the most faithful confirmed, the story of really evil children who were not deterred by mutilation, but came back with all the scars. (167)

Smith’s perspective is discredited precisely because of his failure to recognize what the perceptive reader has been taught to understand during the course of the novel – that the Igbo system of belief is complex, effective, flexible, and relatively humane. Here I part company to some degree with Neil ten Kortenaar, who states that “in novels we are invited to judge characters who believe in omens or in magic as superstitious,”52 and, by implication, unsophisticated. Hence, for this critic, Things Fall Apart is identified as lacking “faith in the world it describes,”53 as is illustrated by the appearance of a mosquito just prior to our introduction to Ezinma’s fever, which, it is argued, affords the

50

Mackenzie, “The Metamorphosis of Piety,” 160. David Hoegberg, “Principle and Practice: The Logic of Cultural Violence in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” College Literature 26.1 (Winter 1999): 72. 52 Kortenaar, “How the Center is Made to Hold,” 132. 53 “How the Center is Made to Hold,” 130. 51



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

31

reader a “level of understanding higher than that of the literal account.”54 This is a fine illustration of the tightrope which Achebe treads in negotiating the politics of magic. Here I would argue that what Kortenaar terms “the literal account” is distinct from but not lower than the scientifically informed reading. There are moments when the possibility of detecting fraud is indeed offered the reader, but such “higher level of understanding” is available in the novel also, with characters who have the wisdom and maturity to judge the efficacy or otherwise of belief in supernatural forces. Even the youthful Nwoye is quite capable of testing the credibility of the Christianity to which he converts and finding it wanting, basing his conversion on a sophisticated aesthetic response: “It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow” (134). The current global financial crisis suggests that magic as represented in Things Fall Apart is far less dangerously delusional than that which stock markets practise, as it is an integral part of communal ritual which, in Mathuray’s words, “emphasizes its own artificiality (its arbitrariness) rather than concealing it behind an appearance of naturalness.”55 Achebe repeatedly returns in his writings to the need for African and European cultures to coexist on an equal footing. As we have seen throughout this discussion, it was his handling of magic that played the pivotal role in this design, unsettling a colonial discourse which claimed enlightened advancement over deluded Africans. To achieve his ends, Achebe had to invent a mode of writing which conveys the complexity of a belief system at least as adaptable and fit for purpose as that of Christianity, and disarms any suggestion that Africans were somehow susceptible to colonization and religious imperialism because of a culpable backwardness. Whereas ethnographers, such as Frazier in his Golden Bough, treat magic in an abstract way, Achebe returns it to the level of ordinary human activity, of language, stories, rituals, and passions. For the materialist critic looking for magic to be exposed as a distracting opiate, there may well be a preference for a reading of Things Fall Apart which identifies a revulsion from all forms of supernatural belief, but part of the perennial freshness of the novel is that it disallows readers’ efforts to occupy a stable position vis-à-vis magic and reason, just as readers may struggle to share Okonkwo’s unswerving denigration of his father, Unoka. As Simon Gikandi has put it, Achebe’s great achievement in Things Fall Apart 54 55

Kortenaar, “How the Center is Made to Hold,” 128. Mathuray, “Realizing the Sacred,” 50.

32

MICHAEL JARDINE



was to “shift the idea of Africa from romance and nostalgia, from European primitivism, and from a rhetoric of lack to an affirmative culture.”56 This study has sought to demonstrate that he accomplished this by means of his deep grasp of the politics of magic at a key stage in the history of Africa. In neither choosing nor abusing magic, he created a transformative text which both celebrated and exonerated Africa’s past while providing it with a springboard for its postcolonial future.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “ ‘ Chi’ in Igbo Cosmology” (1972), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975): 135–45. ——. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). ——. “The Truth of Fiction” (1978), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988): 95–105. ——. “The Writer and His Community” (1984), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988): 32–41. Acheraiou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Anyadike, Chima. “Duality and Resilience in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Philosophia Africana 10.1 (March 2007): 49–59. Beier, Ulli. “In Search of an African Personality,” Twentieth Century 165.4 (April 1959): 324–44. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1995). Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction, Seeing with a Third Eye (London: Routledge, 1998). Cott, Jonathan. “At the Crossroads” (1980), in Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Lindfors, 76–87. Originally in Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition 6.2 (Spring 1981): 30–39. Gikandi, Simon. “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (Fall 2001): 11–15. ——. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language & Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991). Hoegberg, David. “Principle and Practice: The Logic of Cultural Violence in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” College Literature 26.1 (Winter 1999): 69–79. 56

Simon Gikandi, “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (Fall 2001): 13.



Achebe and the Politics of Magic

33

Huggan, Graham. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008). ——. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Irele, F. Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001). JanMohamed, Abdul. “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 15.4 (October 1984): 19–39. Kearney, James. “The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (Fall 2002): 433–68. Kortenaar, Neil ten. “Chinua Achebe and the Question of Modern African Tragedy,” Philosophia Africana 9.2 (2006): 83–91. ——. “How the Center is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart,” in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Casebook, ed. Isidore Okpewho (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 123–45. Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Conversations with Chinua Achebe (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1997). Mackenzie, Clayton G. “The Metamorphosis of Piety in Things Fall Apart,” in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Casebook, ed. Isidore Okpewho (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 147–64. Mathuray, Mark. “Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God,” Research in African Literatures 34.3 (Autumn 2003): 46–65. Moudileno, Lydie. “Magical Realism: ‘Arme miraculeuse’ for the African Novel?” Research in African Literatures 37.1 (2006): 28–41. Ogbaa, Kalu. Understanding “Things Fall Apart”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1999). Ogungbesan, Kolawole. “Politics and the African Writer,” in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978): 37–46. Originally as “Politics and the African Writer: The Example of Chinua Achebe,” Work in Progress (Zaria) 2 (1973): 75–93. Ojinmah, Umelo. Chinua Achebe: New Perspectives (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991). Okpewho, Isidore, ed. Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). Quayson, Ato. “Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It,” Research in African Literatures 25.4 (Winter 1994): 117–36. Raghavacharyulu, D.V.K., K.I. Madhusudana Rao & B.V. Harajagannadh, “Achebe Interviewed” (11 March 1981), in Conversations, ed. Lindfors, 88–93. Snyder, Carey. “The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings: Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart,” College Literature 35.2 (2008): 154–75.

34

MICHAEL JARDINE



Stock, A.G. “Yeats and Achebe,” in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978), 86–91. Originally in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 5 (1968): 105–11. Taiwo, Olufemi. “Exorcising Hegel,” African Studies Quarterly 1.4 (1998); http://web .africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/2.htm (accessed 10 September 2008). Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971). Whittaker, David, & Msiska Mpalive–Hangson. Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2007). Williams, Adebayo. “The Autumn of the Literary Patriarch: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Remembering,” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001): 8–21. Wise, Christopher. “Excavating the New Republic: Post-Colonial Subjectivity in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Callaloo 22.4 (1999): 1054–70. Wren, Robert M. “Those Magical Years” (1982), in Conversations, ed. Lindfors, 99– 109.



2 ————

The Art of Conversation How the ‘Subaltern’ Speaks in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

R ASHNA B. S INGH

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.1

T

G AYATRI S PIVAK FAMOUSLY DECLARED in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”2 In Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, the African as subaltern becomes the historically muted subject, forced to speak through the body and denied logocentric expression. In this essay I argue that Conrad’s representation of the African as more or less mute may be a recognition that colonization rendered the subaltern voiceless rather than a true silencing. Conrad isolates Africans as subaltern in what Spivak has called “a space of difference,”3 but 1

HE SUBALTERN CANNOT SPEAK ,”

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Greenwich C T : Fawcett, 1959): 10. Unless otherwise stated, further page references are in the main text. 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Post Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia U P , 1994):104. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Talk: Interview With the Editors,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996): 293.

36

RASHNA B. SINGH



the space of difference becomes an ambiguous space in the novella. Chinua Achebe arrives at a similar recognition in his novel Things Fall Apart, where the normative space of Igbo society transitions into a space of difference. Achebe’s characters are silenced once the old order, and their place in it, no longer survives, once they have, in effect, become subaltern. The Igbo are presented as logical, rational, and entirely verbal, privileging the spoken word. It is only after the colonizing order is well established that they lose their power to speak discursively and transactionally and must resort to physiological expression. This essay will examine how Achebe uses speech in Things Fall Apart to interrogate the silences of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Spivak examines the production of “the Other of Europe” and the complicity of the intellectual “in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow.”4 In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow, as Chinua Achebe notes in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” can barely bring himself to acknowledge the common humanity of the Africans he encounters. They are not so much the Self’s shadow as only tenuously connected to the Self by a thin thread of humanity. “Herein,” says Achebe, “lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: ‘What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours […] Ugly.’”5 In Heart of Darkness, Conrad creates an Other that is not the “irretrievably heterogeneous” colonized subaltern subject Spivak insists upon in a different context,6 but monolithic and undifferentiated: “unhappy savages,” “Black shapes,” “moribund shapes,” “black shadows,” “black bones,” “bundles of acute angles,” “phantom.”7 Only one is marked out by the scrap of white worsted tied round his black neck, a sort of travesty of the accountant’s starched collar. But where the accountant is afforded speech, the man with white worsted round his neck is the classic muted subaltern, denied both speech and logocentric expression. The Africans that Marlow describes here are sick and starving, and it is only through their bodies that they can communicate or, indeed, protest their condition. Indeed, 4

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 75. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1975), in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Editions; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 339. 6 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 79. 7 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 23– 25. Unless otherwise stated, further page references are in brackets in the main text. 5



The Art of Conversation

37

Marlow himself, with heavy irony, employs “the body of a middle-aged Negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead” that he stumbled upon, to comment on the colonizers’ propensity for road building (29). The most striking instance of how black men within this space of representation have no other way in which to express their condition than with their bodies is when Marlow witnesses a chain gang pass by him. He describes their upright posture but slow step, the small baskets they balance on their heads; he describes the clink of their chains and the iron collars on their necks, their emaciated bodies, the joints of their limbs like knots in a rope, and the black rags wound round their loins. He then hears another report from the cliff and thinks back to the ship of war he had seen “firing into a continent.” What is so arresting is that Marlow then says “It was the same kind of ominous voice” (22), obviously suggesting that the condition of the men’s bodies and their evident distress constitute a voice, for it is only through their bodies that they can ‘speak’. The white worsted tied around a black neck intrigues Marlow. Clearly, it is matter out of place. “Why?” he asks, “Where did he get it? Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it?” (25). It does not, of course, occur to Marlow to ask the man. True, they did not have a common language, but Marlow seems to assume that he lacks language altogether, just as he later assumes that the African fireman’s successful operation of the boiler must be based on superstition – he could not possibly understand it in any scientific sense. Spivak clarifies: “The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.”8 Nor can the subaltern as African in this space of representation. The accountant, by contrast, whose whiteness is emphasized – “a white man,” “white cuffs,” “light alpaca jacket,” “snowy trousers,” “big white hand” (25) – has the capacity to both speak and write; he carries the metonymic markers of logocentric transcription: a penholder behind his ear and his devotion to his books, which he kept “in applepie order” (26). Mostly mute and muted, the African in Heart of Darkness is permitted speech only on rare occasions. Achebe indicates two in his essay: the expression of cannibalistic desire: “‘Catch ’im,’ he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth – ‘catch ’im. Give ’im to us [...] Eat ’im!’” (58) and the famous pronouncement: “‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’” (100). In both instances the speech is cartoon-like pidgin English 8

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104.

38

RASHNA B. SINGH



rather than transactional speech. In Conrad’s novella, the African speaks mostly through “physiological inscription,”9 through, in other words, the body. Whether this means that Conrad regards the Africans as subaltern and isolates them in a “space of difference”10 or that he recognizes the historical, political, and material forces that preclude their presence in the space of representation is arguable and hinges perhaps on one’s interpretation of Heart of Darkness. With regard to the problem of defining and classifying the subaltern, Spivak asks: “What taxonomy can fix such a space?” Here, we must ask whether the Africans in Heart of Darkness are effaced by text or context. Spivak has persuasively argued: Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.11

In similar fashion, the African disappears in Conrad’s text, becoming a figure of the ‘savage’ shuttling between liberal humanism and the race theories and thinking of his time. As Achebe remarks, “Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth.”12 What is missing in Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s acknowledgement of his “own implication in intellectual and economic history,”13 an allegation Spivak levels against Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Marlow is prescient in his recognition of the corruptive nature and racial basis of conquest: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. (10)

Yet he also sees conquest as redeemable by an idea, and that idea is also predicated on racial superiority. What Rudyard Kipling would later describe as the “White Man’s burden” is the burden of race, expressed also in the 9

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. Spivak, “Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors,” 293. 11 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 102. 12 Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 349. 13 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 66. 10



The Art of Conversation

39

mission civilisatrice of the French Empire, the areas of the map marked, in Marlow’s words, by “a deuce of a lot of blue” (14). By using the imagery of idol worship, however, Conrad suggests that the idea itself can become corrupted, “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to” (10). In a sense, Conrad is here subverting his own text, but through Marlow he maintains a distinction between British imperialism, which he perceives as ideological and altruistic, and the colonization of the Congo by King Leopold, which he recognizes as materialistic and exploitative. Marlow notes with approval the vast amount of red on the map in the Company’s offices in Brussels, “good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there” (14). Kurtz’s mother was half-English, while his father was half-French, and in a sense “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” His English education, however, meant that at least “his sympathies were in the right place” (71). Marlow thus re-inscribes imperialist ideology even as he exposes its worst excesses. As such, he participates in “the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism,” which, as Spivak states, quoting Foucault, has as its subtext “subjugated knowledge,” a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.14

When Marlow and his party leave with Kurtz, they are aware of the presence of people behind the curtain of trees. This awareness countermands the discourse of absence and emptiness so prevalent in colonial writing and reflected in Marlow’s determination, as a boy, to go someday to the “blank spaces on the earth” (11). The blank spaces on the earth are not blank after all but peopled by native inhabitants. Yet Conrad’s deliberate choice of imprecise and nebulous words to describe them, words such as “crowd,” “mass,” “bodies” (96), denies them individuality and even humanity. Above all, he denies them rationality and speech. The reference to massed bodies is repeated. They are bodies and, again, it is as bodies that they speak: “When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies” (96). Aside from the pronouncements referred to earlier, Africans are occasionally afforded speech of sorts in Heart of Darkness:

14

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 76.

40

RASHNA B. SINGH



they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.

Are the words amazing in themselves or because they issue from the mouths of “a mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies” (96), bodies not known to have the faculty of speech? Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marlow cannot distinguish between the uncomprehended and the incomprehensible. That which is unintelligible to the European does not signify as speech and becomes ‘babble’. That which is abstruse is also necessarily arcane, a “satanic litany.” ‘Satanic’ serves as code, of course; it is intended to recall to the reader not only the supposedly diabolical nature of Africans but also the binary oppositions that so clearly structured difference. Of particular interest here is the opposition between rational and irrational, communicative and inchoate. When Kurtz’s mistress “shouted something the “wild mob” takes up the shout “in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance” (96). While their response is “articulated,” it is not authorized in Foucault’s sense of a discourse that is authorized.15 It is not speech but, rather, sound, utterance that is undifferentiated: shouted, roaring, chorused, murmured. Earlier in the text, while Marlow is waiting in the station, the murmur of voices and tramping of feet from a caravan are barely distinguishable from the steady buzz of flies and the general noise of the station. Against the “violent babble of uncouth sounds” and “in the midst of the uproar” a voice is audible, “lamentable” (27) but singular; it is the voice of the chief agent. He is an individual silhouetted against “Strings of dusty niggers” and the “stream of manufactured goods” (26) they trade for. His “correct entries” and “correct transactions” (27–28), like his starched collars, offer resistance to the commotion and chaos, a white space of order, a space of definition against the nebulous darkness. When Marlow asks Kurtz if he understands the rejoinder of the wild mob, clearly he is not asking whether Kurtz understands what they are saying but why they are roaring. “Do I not?” answers Kurtz (97). As the steamer makes its way up the river, Marlow describes it as toiling along slowly “on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy” (51), counterpoising its linear progress with the chaos on the banks of the river. Once again the language of the ‘primitive’ is the undifferentiated language of 15

Michel Foucault, “The Incitement to Discourse” (1976), in The Discourse Reader, ed. Adam Jaworski & Nikolas Coupland (London: Routledge, 1999): 518.



The Art of Conversation

41

the body, resonant and gestural: “a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling” (51). Whether they were praying to them, cursing them or welcoming them, Marlow did not know. But then he says something strange and unexpected: “We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings” (51). The use of the passive voice does not make it clear who cut them off and why, but it seems to suggest that comprehension might otherwise have been possible. However, Marlow goes on to uphold European rationality against the frenzy, “wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.” Later, Marlow says: “We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember.” Too far from what? What could they not remember? Was it their own primitive origins? Was it “the night of first ages” of which they no longer retain memory? It is at this point that Marlow affirms his kinship, however remote, with the “wild and passionate uproar” and admits that something stirred in response to the noise (51). It is also here that he entertains the possibility of meaning in their uproar, meaning that may potentially be comprehensible. It is the closest Marlow comes to considering the possibility, however “Ugly,” not only of a common physical humanity between the European and the African, but also of mutually intelligible discourse and transactional speech. Paul B. Armstrong suggests that Marlow invariably attributes significance to the cries he hears coming from the shore. Marlow assumes, says Armstrong, “that these sounds are signs which carry meaning to their users and which could be translated if he knew the code.”16 Of course, Marlow’s interpretation of the sounds is entirely subjective, but it does suggest, as Armstrong argues, that Marlow’s “intuition that another world – or worlds – which he cannot penetrate can be vaguely and obscurely heard in the sounds of Africa” and this “credits Africans with semiotic capacities which could be, but are not, the basis for further reciprocity and exchange.”17 Another powerful instance of how the African ‘speaks’ through the body in this text is the scene where the helmsman dies. Using the technique Ian Watt

16

Paul B. Armstrong, “Heart of Darkness and the Epistemology of Cultural Differences,” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Editions; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 440. 17 Armstrong, “Heart of Darkness and the Epistemology of Cultural Differences,” 440.

42

RASHNA B. SINGH



calls “delayed decoding,”18 Conrad describes how Marlow feels his feet warm and wet and looks down to see his helmsman on his back staring straight up at him, his blood filling Marlow’s shoes. The blood itself becomes a powerful reckoning, but most of all the pilot speaks through his eyes; in his expressions are to be found “physiological inscription.”19 Before he falls upon Marlow’s feet, he looks at him “in an extraordinary, profound, familiar manner” (65). As he lies wounded, his eyes shine with an amazing lustre and he looks at Marlow anxiously, as if afraid that he would try to take his spear away from him. In a reversal, it is the European who struggles to free his eyes from the gaze of the African, and it is a gaze so powerful that Marlow feels that the helmsman might actually speak “in an understandable language,” but he dies without uttering a sound. In the very last moment he frowns, and the frown becomes his death-mask, his requital, “sombre,” “brooding,” and “menacing” (67). The helmsman becomes the historically muted subject. As Spivak famously observed: “The subaltern cannot speak.”20 Immediately after this scene, we learn that Kurtz, in obvious contrast, not only has a voice but is personified as a voice. It is as a voice that he presents himself. Of all his gifts, it is the attribute of speech that stands out, “his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression” (68). Even in his attenuated condition, when he did not seem capable of a whisper, Kurtz is defined by his voice: “A voice! A voice!” (86). What Marlow regrets more than anything else when he thinks that Kurtz may be dead is that he will not be able to hear him. The manager’s agent describes him as “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else.” This is “the cause entrusted […] by Europe,” described by the manager as a cause born of “higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose” (36); this is the cause of the mission civilisatrice, a mission that Kurtz eventually betrays. Despite his backslide into the darkness, however, Kurtz communicates logocentrically and dialogically: “Kurtz discoursed” (98). Worn out by the exhaustion of his disease, prostrate on his stretcher, his hand still searching feebly for his correspondence, Kurtz is not only defined by his voice but becomes a disembodied voice: “He was very little more than a voice.” But here again Conrad subverts 18

Ian Watt, “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness” (1979), in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Edition; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 356. 19 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. 20 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104



The Art of Conversation

43

his own text. Kurtz’s voice merges with other voices in Marlow’s head into “one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense” (69). The consolidation of many voices into jabber recalls the collective babble of the Africans in the caravan and the roar of the wild mob, suggesting Kurtz’s regression to a savage state or subverting the white man’s claim to rationality and discrete language. By contrast, Kurtz’s mistress, though magnificent, is mostly mute. We hear her through the jingling of her baubles, and we see her in the glint of the yellow metal and in the sway of her fringed draperies. Like the pilot, however, she ‘speaks’ through glance and gesture, her face expressing “a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve,” but her steady gaze merges with the “inscrutable purpose” (87) of the wilderness itself. Similarly, when she throws up her bared arms and holds them rigidly above her head as though compelled to touch the sky, her very gesture is silenced by “the swift shadows [that] darted out on the earth” (88), subsumed by the wilderness of which she is the image, part of “the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land” (87), part of the silence and the silencing. But there is one occasion on which, significantly, she does speak, and it is the Russian who tells us about it. He relates how she was in a rage about the rags he picked up to mend his clothes with and “talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour.” However, such speech is again represented as monologic and incomprehensible. “‘I don’t understand the dialect of this tribe’,” the Russian declares (88). The journalist, who, upon Kurtz’s death, seeks news of his colleague’s fate, informs Marlow that Kurtz was more of a talker than a writer. Yet Kurtz’s legacy, ultimately, is not the prodigious amounts of ivory he collected but his famous Report and the slim packet of letters for his Intended. As manuscripts, these are derived or secondary logocentric expressions. The lighted torch in the portrait Kurtz paints evokes the torch of the Enlightenment; the draped and blindfolded woman carrying it is the emblem of a-priori transcendental European logocentric knowledge. Whether the famous postscriptum to his report: “Exterminate all the brutes!” represents a breach of reason or its ultimate exercise will depend on how we understand the reference to brutes. The generally accepted reading is, of course, that the brutes refer to African ‘savages’. But that the brutes to be exterminated might be those who betray “august Benevolence,” and Kurtz’s injunction one of true reason and enlightenment, is suggested by Conrad in Marlow’s description of .

44

RASHNA B. SINGH



the postscriptum as “the exposition of a method” and “a flash of lightning” (72). As Spivak indicates, For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation.21

Despite his disgust at the blatant cruelty and exploitation he witnessed on his journey to the Congo, Conrad construes the ‘African’ as different, as the Other of Europe, in Spivak’s terms,22 and as a group that cannot know and speak itself except through the non-linguistic space of the body, although the text would sometimes seem to suggest that the possibility exists. I concur with Paul B. Armstrong when he observes: “Truly reciprocal, dialogical understanding of the Other is the unrealized horizon which this text points to but does not reach.”23 Achebe has indicated that Conrad withholds “an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.”24 However, that alternative frame of reference would open up a space of representation where the subaltern can speak, and Conrad may simply be acknowledging that such a space cannot be accommodated in the colonial context. Spivak points to Pierre Macherey’s formula for the interpretation of ideology: “What is important in a work is what it does not say.” This is not the same, Spivak explains, as what a work refuses to say but what the work cannot say.25 In terms of the consciousness of the subaltern, what the work cannot say becomes especially important, she points out. Conrad can neither “speak to” nor “speak for” the “historically muted subject of the subaltern.”26 The silences of his text might perhaps be read as an acknowledgement of that muting. Or they may point to his participation in “a collective ideological refusal [that] can be diagnosed for the codifying legal practice of imperialism.”27 Conrad does not abstain from representation of the subaltern 21

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 80. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 75. 23 Armstrong, “Heart of Darkness and the Epistemology of Cultural Differences,” 431. 24 Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 342. 25 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 81. 26 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 91. 27 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 82. 22



The Art of Conversation

45

in Heart of Darkness, but his representations may be seen as acknowledging the powerlessness of those who are occluded from the space of representation, those who cannot speak for themselves because their speech is not authorized and they can therefore ‘speak’ only through their bodies. “It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the ‘rudimentary souls’ of Africa. In place of speech they made ‘a violent babble of uncouth sounds,’” Achebe asserts in his essay on Conrad.28 One must ask, however, if conferring language upon the African would have been credible in this space of representation. Whether Conrad rehearses or simply reproduces the power-structure thus becomes a hermeneutic question. But it can be postulated that Heart of Darkness, to use Spivak’s terms, “articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility.”29 In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, by contrast, the Igbo are represented within a normative space, and the text articulates the non-Igbo reader as Other. Although deceptively simple on the surface, Things Fall Apart is a layered text that functions on a number of levels. Achebe postulates an Igbo universe in which the non-Igbo reader is compelled to the margins. Achebe is not so much dismantling centre and margin as re-aligning positionality. Through his sophisticated temporal and spatial structuring of this universe, Achebe induces the reader to go beyond cultural relativity and participate in a normative Igbo world. From the opening sentence of the novel, Achebe situates his main character, Okonkwo, at the centre of the universe with no concession to the reader, who must immediately reassess his or her relative perspective: “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (7). There is no mention of where these villages are located on the map. We are not told that they are in what is now Nigeria, or even in Africa. The use of the definite article suggests that we ought to know. We comply and put them at the centre of the universe, as Okonkwo’s people would have. The nine villages constitute a particular geography, a physical, political, and cultural space; they are not a diorama of African rural life, “an ethnographic postcard on turn-of-the-century Nigeria” as Joseph Obi puts it.30 Achebe is not concerned with satisfying the self-referential need for universality that the Western reader often presumes. Instead, he structures a specificity. There are 28

Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 341. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 80. 30 Tanure Ojaide & Joseph Obi, Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature: Texts and Contexts (Durham N C : Carolina Academic Press, 2002): 22. 29

46

RASHNA B. SINGH



scenes in Things Fall Apart – for example, the scene where Okonkwo and his wife Ekwefi are anguished over their daughter’s illness – with which a Western reader can easily identify, and there are scenes, such as the throwing away of twins or the killing of Ikemefuna, that a Western reader is bound to resist. The text assumes shared cultural codes, but these are internal codes. For those outside the community, the text shifts and perhaps even subverts the reader’s codes in an act not so much of decoding as of recoding. Achebe does not offer the reader a guidebook or a map. Instead, he reveals the material basis of such practices and historicizes them. Achebe claims the authority of his text, and readers must resist ‘colonizing’ it by imposing their own social and even narrative conventions. Achebe may be responding to colonial texts (Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary especially, as has so often been noted), but he is also reconstructing an historical encounter. Achebe writes in English and knows that Western readers will make up a good part of his readership, but he does not write specifically for them. When Okafo’s supporters sing “Who will wrestle for our village?” they establish a discrete space to be distinguished from other villages. When they continue “He has thrown four hundred Cats. Then send him word to fight for us” (50), the ‘us’ constitutes a community but also a consensus: a social, cultural, and linguistic consensus. It is the consensus indicated by the word “everybody” that is involved when the narrator issues the declarative sentence “For although locusts had not visited Umuofia for many years, everybody knew by instinct that they were very good to eat” (55). Achebe writes for this consensus, and it is one in which the novel obliges all readers to participate. Achebe facilitates that participation through his use of Igbo proverbs which craft the “structure of feeling”31 of this society, to use Raymond Williams’ wonderful term. In his article “Semiotics and Deconstruction,” Jonathan Culler writes: To put it very schematically, if writing is set aside as dependent and derivative, accounts of language can take as the norm the experience of hearing oneself speak, where form and meaning seem given simultaneously and in an event of incarnation, rather than, say, the act of deciphering an anonymous inscription.32 31

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia U P ,

1958): 39. 32

Jonathan Culler, “Semiotics and Deconstruction,” Poetics Today 1 (Special Issue: “Literature, Interpretation, Communication,” Autumn 1979): 139.



The Art of Conversation

47

If one thinks of a proverb as a linguistic unit that is multivalent and a disembodied presence (with reference to Jacques Derrida’s term “metaphysics of presence”33), one can see it as an event of incarnation, in Culler’s words, that incorporates form and meaning simultaneously. The nine villages comprise the world of the novel and, having established that in his opening sentence, Achebe goes on to re-create a temporal scheme in which the reader participates and to which he or she adapts. Unobtrusively, and without explanation, we are positioned in Igbo time, measured by planting seasons and dry seasons, carefree seasons and harvests, moons and market days. The Week of Peace and the Feast of the New Yam punctuate the calendar, not Christmas or Easter. Oye or Eke market days mark the week. In writing this novel, Achebe stakes out a space of representation. Referring to Heart of Darkness, Achebe comments in an interview, “That’s not the way my people respond […] by unintelligible grunts, and so on; they would speak. And it is that speech that I knew I wanted to be written down.”34 The interior space of the novel, however, is historical, and in this precolonial space the Igbo are not silenced subalterns but can and do speak. Achebe assumes the storyteller’s voice and sometimes refers to them as “these people” (13) or “the Ibo people” (29), but he does not speak for them. When Ogbuefi Ezeugo, known as a powerful orator, stands in the midst of a gathering and bellows five times: “Umuofia kwenu,” ten thousand men together answer “Yaa!” (14). This is the voice of the clan, and Achebe is simply recovering their voice. Although the cry issues forth from an assembly of people, their collective voice is clearly enunciated and does not become mere blather. Early in the novel, Achebe stresses the importance of transactional speech in Igbo society: “Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” Over and over again we hear his characters speak dialogically. They speak about many things: “about the heavy rains which were drowning the yams, about the next ancestral feast and about the impending war with the village of Mbaino” (10). Unoka does not want to speak about war, and so he speaks about music. Okoye, a great talker, speaks for a long time, finally asking Unoka to repay his debt. Whenever the 33

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. & ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie, 1967; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1997): 22. 34 Hillel Italie, Chinua Achebe: A Golden Jubilee For a Literary Masterpiece: 50 years later, ‘Things Fall Apart’ is still required reading (22 February 2008), www. IMDiversity.com (accessed 23 March 2009).

48

RASHNA B. SINGH



clan meets in the marketplace to discuss their course of action, they all speak and decide by consensus. This privileging of the spoken word is classically logocentric or, more specifically, phonocentric – Derrida’s “metaphysics of presence” again.35 The white man’s lack of understanding of land customs is clearly linked to the fact that he does not speak the vernacular. The man who acts as an interpreter for the missionaries, although Igbo, does not speak the local dialect, with humorous consequences. Instead of saying “myself,” he says “my buttocks” (134). But what is more significantly lost in translation is an entire cosmology and theology. The Christian messengers do not take into account the appeasement of neglected gods and ancestors, and when Mbanta’s gods are represented by the translator as mere pieces of wood and stone, the men realize just how wide the gap in understanding is. The Oracle, like Kurtz, is a voice, a terrible voice that resounds through the dark void. When the Oracle decrees that Ikemefuna is to be killed, elders from all the nine villages discuss the decree. Their discussion is both relational and transactional. As they start their grim journey, the men talk and laugh “about the locusts, about their women, and about some effeminate men who had refused to come with them” (57), falling silent only as they draw near the outskirts and the time to slay the lad approaches. Only once, in Heart of Darkness, does Conrad suggest that the African is capable of restraint, and that is when he wonders why they didn’t just eat the white men in their hunger. Although anthropologists have pointed out that cannibalism was mainly about ritual and fetish, not hunger, Conrad’s point indicates that he is willing to consider Africans as capable of restraint. Achebe shows the Igbo acting in a restrained manner throughout, with the exception of Okonkwo, whose lack of restraint is an individual trait, not a trait of the clan, and turns out to be his undoing. The scene where the egwugwu settle a case exemplifies the logocentric and rational nature of Igbo society. Once readers get past the masked spirits with a leader called Evil Forest from whose head smoke pours out, once they get past the rattling staff and the smoked raffia body, the horned headdress and the bells and rattles, they will realize that they have just witnessed a court of law in action. From beginning to end, the case is conducted through rational argument and dialogic speech. Despite the appeal of the iron gong, the drum and the flute, it is the voices of the egwugwu, “guttural and awesome,” that assert power and command attention. A “pandemonium of quavering voices” fills the air: “Aru oyim de de de dei! flew around the dark, 35

Derrida, Of Grammatology, 22.



The Art of Conversation

49

closed hut like tongues of fire” (84). The imagery indicates the sway and supreme importance of language, its force and energy. Evil Forest represents himself in terms of his voice: “I am Evil Forest, I am Dry-meat-that-fills-themouth, I am Fire-that-burns-without-faggots” (89). His power is constituted in his disembodied voice, which also recalls Kurtz. The people who in this situation are at least temporarily subaltern, and on whom he will pronounce judgment, are, however, merely bodies and as bodies alone are greeted: “Uzowulu’s body, I salute you” or “Uzowulu’s body, do you know me?” (88). Similarly, Ajofia, the leading egwugwu of Umuofia, greets Mr Smith, the white missionary, as a body, thus establishing his authority and ascendance over him: “The body of the white man, I salute you” (174). By contrast, the ancestral spirits, the egwugwu, self-reflexively greet each other in “their esoteric language” (84), and there is little doubt that Achebe’s choice of that word is deliberate. “Esoteric” is semiotically associated with philosophy and thus with logic and rationality. Arguments on both sides of the case are made and heard, and finally Evil Forest pronounces judgment. By the end of the scene, we acknowledge that justice has been done, and that the trappings and trimmings no more impede the progress of justice than do wigs and gowns in an English court of law. The only people who cannot speak in this scene are the women: “No woman ever asked questions about the most powerful and the most secret cult in the clan” (84), and to some extent they are subaltern in this society or at least in this context, because in other contexts they do speak. In fact, one of the most powerful voices in the novel is that of Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, whose voice is vigorous and powerful, clear as metal and sharp as a knife. Even Okonkwo is forbidden to speak to her or, rather, to Agbala through her, because a man does not speak when a God speaks (95). When Ajofia addresses Mr Smith, we witness once again the rational and restrained nature of Igbo society: You can stay with us if you like our ways. You can worship your own god. It is good that a man should worship the gods and the spirits of his fathers. Go back to your house so that you may not be hurt. Our anger is great but we have held it down so that we can talk to you.” (175)

Mr Brown, predecessor to the intolerant missionary Mr Smith, was a far more humane man and spent long hours with Akunna in his obi talking about religion through an interpreter. Akunna’s explanations of Igbo cosmology are further evidence of the importance of discourse in this society. In Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o asks sardonically: “Surely the

50

RASHNA B. SINGH



oral did not belong to reason, to logic, to history? Orality connoted magic, superstition, and the fleeting.” In showing the Igbo, an oral society, acting with restraint and rationality, with logic and a strong sense of precedence, Achebe disassociates orality from “the barbarous, the savage, the primitive, and even the simple,”36 associations that Ngũgĩ attributes to the epistemological constructions of anthropologists. In fact, by conjoining what we have been led to believe is barbarous, savage, primitive, superstitious, and so on with what we come to recognize in the text as restraint and reason, logic and a sense of history, Achebe denies that it was the European Enlightenment that engendered these attributes. Heart of Darkness itself is proposed as an oral text, a story told by Marlow to his fellow sailors on a boat and related to readers through a frame narrator. Armstrong argues that there is a lack of reciprocity between Marlow and his listeners,37 but their occasional grunts and injunctions do recall the audience– performer nature of oral storytelling that Ngũgĩ discusses and the oral–aural connection. Ngũgĩ emphasizes the role of messengers, analogous to Macaulay’s “interpreters” or go-betweens and points out that the manager’s boy who announces the death of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is a messenger,38 which makes sense when we recall that he is afforded language and can be insolent: his announcement is made “in a tone of scathing contempt” (100). Messengers signal the end of Umuofia and become interpreters in Macaulay’s sense of the word. The six leaders of Umuofia who are arrested remain “sullen and silent” and find “no words to speak to one another.” The very community falls silent: “Umuofia was like a startled animal with ears erect, sniffing the silent, ominous air and not knowing which way to run” (178–80). The village crier who calls the men to a meeting in the marketplace the next morning breaks the silence. For the last time we hear the voice of the community: “Everyone knew that Umuofia was at last going to speak its mind about the things that were happening” (183) and the salute “Umuofia kwenu!” (186) rings through the air. When the five court messengers approach the gathering, which has been discussing whether to resist the white men by fighting, Okonkwo springs to his feet. He confronts the head messenger, trembling with hate, but unable 36

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 107. 37 Armstrong, “Heart of Darkness and the Epistemology of Cultural Differences,” 443. 38 Ngũgĩ, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, 81.



The Art of Conversation

51

to utter a word. The man stands his ground, and his men line up behind him. “In that brief moment,” Achebe tells us, “the world seemed to stand still, waiting. There was utter silence” (188). The exercise of discourse on which the Igbo placed so much value subsides into silence. The silence is broken, significantly, by the head messenger, an agent of colonial authority. He pronounces the white man’s word, and Okonkwo draws his machete and slays him. In this changed interior space of the novel, Okonkwo is rendered subaltern and made mute; the only way he can now ‘speak’ is through the “physiological inscription”39 of his body. Okonkwo hangs himself, and his suicide may be read as an interventionist “subaltern rewriting”40 of the Igbo social text in which suicide is an abomination, just as Spivak reads the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri as a “subaltern rewriting of the social text of satisuicide.”41 Obierika understands the personal cost to his friend of this final act, considered “an offense against the Earth” (190) by the Igbo. As a result, he cannot even bury Okonkwo, because only strangers now can. In his anguish, Obierika turns to the Commissioner and angrily says: “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog” (191). Obierika chokes up and cannot say any more. But, like the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, Okonkwo’s suicide, while an effort at self-representation, is not “heard or read”42 in this altered social structure. To the District Commissioner, the enormity of his act is reduced to an interesting ‘primitive’ custom. It is significant that the Commissioner re-enters the space of representation at this point, and that it is with his voice that the novel ends. It is also significant that he perceives as one of the most infuriating habits of the Igbo “their love of superfluous words” (189), and that even while he recognizes the verbal nature of this society he denies them their right to logocentricity. The Commissioner orders the body to be taken down, and ruminates that during the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned that he must never personally “attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree” (191). He resolves to stress this point in the book he is planning to write, for which he has already chosen the title after much thought: The 39

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. 41 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. 42 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. 40

52

RASHNA B. SINGH



Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. Although this book is proposed as a written text, we encounter it orally, in that we learn about it in the third person from the novel’s narrator. Through the title itself, Achebe problematizes the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. Of course, these are not primitive tribes but a highly sophisticated, complex, and developed society. “Can the subaltern speak?” is not a rhetorical question, nor an ideological one. It is an historical and material question, and Okonkwo’s suicide is his response to the epistemic violence of colonization against which he can express no further resistance but with his body. It is also a literary question, and because the cartography of the novel has changed, this has been acknowledged through textual representation at the end, as we have seen. However, Achebe ultimately restores the novel’s cartography to the Igbo. In “Signs Taken For Wonders,” Homi Bhabha describes how Towson’s book becomes for Marlow “the Word in the wilds,”43 an insignia of colonial authority.44 “The colonial presence,” Bhabha argues, “is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference.”45 In Things Fall Apart, the displacement does not occur mimetically but by the writ of a text that destabilizes the authority of the English book because what has preceded has rendered it unreliable. To apply Bhabha’s words, Things Fall Apart can be seen as unsettling “the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power” and re-inscribing its identifications “in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.”46 The Commissioner’s book may be “the triumph of the writ of colonialist power,” or “the Word in the wilds,” but it has already been subverted – snatched away, if you will – by the confident Igbo world in which we have just been immersed. The Commissioner’s book is articulated as repetition and difference; the Igbo text is original and authoritative. This is the space of double inscription that Chinua Achebe has afforded us.



43

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 149. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 146. 45 The Location of Culture, 153. 46 The Location of Culture, 160. 44



53

The Art of Conversation

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1975), in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Editions; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 336–49. Originally in the Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782–94. ——. Things Fall Apart (Greenwich C T : Fawcett, 1959). Armstrong, Paul B. “Heart of Darkness and the Epistemology of Cultural Differences,” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong. (Norton Critical Edition; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 429–44. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Culler, Jonathan. “Semiotics and Deconstruction,” Poetics Today 1 (Special Issue: “Literature, Interpretation, Communication,” Autumn 1979): 137–41. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, tr. & ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie, 1967; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1997). Foucault, Michel. “The Incitement to Discourse” (1976), in The Discourse Reader, ed. Adam Jaworski & Nikolas Coupland (London: Routledge, 1999): 514–22. Italie, Hillel. “Chinua Achebe: A Golden Jubilee For a Literary Masterpiece: 50 years later, ‘Things Fall Apart’ is still required reading” (22 February 2008), www .IMDiversity.com (accessed 23 March 2009). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Ojaide, Tanure, & Joseph Obi. Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature: Texts and Contexts (Durham N C : Carolina Academic Press, 2002). Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” (1993), in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Edition; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 422–29. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 66–111. ——. “Subaltern Talk: Interview With the Editors,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996): 287–309. Watt, Ian. “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness” (1979), in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Editions; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 349–65. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia U P , 1958).



3

The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart and Its Historical Meaning

————

C

M ICHEL N AUMANN

A C H E B E ’ S T H I N G S F A L L A P A R T 1 H A S B E E N D E S C R I B E D by critics like Eustace Palmer as a splendid cultural manifesto: “he gives a powerful presentation of the beauty, strength and validity of traditional life and value.”2 The writer himself had already clearly explained, in an article entitled “The Novelist as a Teacher,” that such a rehabilitation was the aim of his novels and the reason behind his vision of the artist as a teacher: HINUA

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.3

I intend to show that Things Fall Apart goes even further, that it is a highly complex novel which not only refers to a past in need of rehabilitation at the time of the coming independence of Nigeria, scheduled to take place in 1960, but also perceives the ambiguities of the present and anticipates the crisis of the process of national construction in Africa, which Frantz Fanon described in a chapter of The Wretched of the Earth entitled “The Pitfalls of National

1

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Eustace Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1979): 64. 3 Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as a Teacher” (1965), in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G.D. Killam (London: Heinemann, 1973): 4. 2

56

MICHEL NAUMANN



Consciousness.”4 These two aspects of the novel – cultural rehabilitation, on the one hand, and assessment of the present political situation, on the other hand – are not to be separated: the past is a short-cut towards the future because a strong nation is a nation with a strong identity and traditions bring concepts and stories that enable a people to cope with modern realities. To understand how a novel whose action is situated between 1850 and 1900 evokes contemporary and even future problems, the critic must think beyond the content of Things Fall Apart. To do so, I followed the ideas of the Romanian literary critic Lucien Goldmann. In his works published in France in the 1960s, he explained that we should take into account what he called the semantic structure, which he defined as the logic that organizes the relations between the characters as well as between the characters and their values. As a Marxist, he interpreted this structure as the way the author brings into a coherent whole the trends and tensions he is exposed to within his society. He showed, for instance, in his French thesis, later published as Le dieu caché [the hidden God],5 that Racine’s tragedies set in ancient time actually dealt with the anxieties of some magistrates and members of regional parliaments in seventeenth-century France. Deprived of their traditional authority and prestige by the process of royal centralization, they came to see any worldly commitment as a source of disillusion, tragic failure, and even as the cause of sin. They tended to withdraw from any kind of political or even social activity in order to meet God far from the lures and trappings of this world. Racine’s tragic heroes have to discover this disturbing truth about faith and society. The semantic structure which organizes all the relations between Racine’s characters was called by Goldmann “the hidden God,” which meant the ghostly presence in human relations of God and the secret values which cannot be perceived in social life. Critics such as C.L. Innes have used Lucien Goldmann’s ideas to show that Things Fall Apart is about the passage from an epic world to a fallen one connected with the novel genre.6 The epic stories describe a world rich in 4

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967): 119–65. 5 Lucien Goldmann, Le dieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). 6 C.L. Innes, “Language, Poetry and Doctrine in Things Fall Apart,” in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (London, Heinemann: 1979): 111–25.



The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart

57

heroic values, whereas the novel genre only knows degraded values, manipulated by the petty materialistic interests of the bourgeois world. The epic stories are linked to the prevailing use-value of traditional societies when human beings were directly related to each other, and novels to the prevailing exchange-value of market economies when the relations between human beings are determined by the mechanical laws of supply and demand. However, this kind of approach uses Goldmann’s studies on genres7 instead of Goldmann’s earlier studies on semantic structures, on which I intend to base my analysis. To be faithful to the methods used in Le dieu caché, I will first study the semantic structure of Things Fall Apart and then propose a sociological interpretation of this structure.

I

The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart

From the first chapter of Things Fall Apart to the last lines of the novel, we are struck by the opposition between horizontality and verticality, an opposition which refers to space but also, and primarily, to human relations and values. That was many years ago, twenty years or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan. He was tall and huge, and his bushy eyebrows and wide nose gave him a very severe look. He breathed heavily, and it was said that, when he slept, his wives and children in their out-houses could hear him breathe. When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists. He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with his father.8

Okonkwo’s gait shows that he is attracted by the sky and that he rejects the horizontal earthly dimension of life. Verticality is linked to human relations as Okonkwo’s springing gait is to his habit of pouncing on people. He is compared to a bush-fire, which connects him to heat and puts him in contradiction to the cold of the dry season, the harmattan. He is obviously a hot-

7

Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Médiation, 1964). Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1968): 4. Further page references are the main text. 8

58

MICHEL NAUMANN



tempered person. Heat is connected to the sun, the sky, and daylight, cold to the earth and night. Okonkwo’s stammer is also related to this opposition between verticality and horizontality: a beautiful discourse evokes palaver and the village assemblies of free men. Achebe’s hero uses his fists instead of his tongue, which shows that he dislikes democratic values and good fellowship between equals. Success in life, which means socially vertical growth, is revered by Okonkwo, whereas he scorns unsuccessful effeminate men like his father who has been unable to rise socially and who loves the cold harmattan. Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, is attracted by the earth: although he is tall, his stooping body seems to reject the sky and bend towards the earth. He likes the cold season when people sit to listen to music: He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute. He was very good on his flute, and his happiest moments were the two or three moons after the harvest when the village musicians brought down their instruments, hung above the fireplace. Unoka would play with them, his face beaming with blessedness and peace. Sometimes another village would ask Unoka’s band and their dancing egwugwu to come and stay with them and teach them their tunes. They would go to such hosts for as long as three or four markets, making music and feasting. Unoka loved the good fare and the good fellowship, and he loved this season of the year, when the rains had stopped and the sun rose every morning with dazzling beauty. And it was not too hot either, because the cold and dry harmattan wind was blowing down from the north. (4)

Whereas Okonkwo’s change of position in society is vertical, Unoka’s is horizontal as he moves from one village to another. He also relates to others horizontally, and not vertically, as he is interested in good fellowship and sharing good music, whereas Okonkwo prefers standing and fighting and is obsessed by people’s position in the social hierarchy. This contrast between horizontality and verticality is thus also a moral stance and even a religious one, as Okonkwo’s growth upward in wealth and status is connected to his strong chi, his heavenly soul, and Unoka’s values are connected to his earthly body. Heavenly forces refer to the sky God, Chukwu, and earthly forces to the Goddess of the Earth, Ala or Ani. Igbo culture is not represented fully by Okonkwo, nor by Unoka, as the text clearly shows when introducing Okoye:



The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart

59

Okoye was also a musician. He played on the ogene. But he was not a failure like Unoka. He had a large barn full of yams and he had three wives. And now he was going to take the Idemili title, the third highest in the land. It was a very expensive ceremony and he was gathering all his resources altogether. (6)

Okoye is an artist like Unoka, a man of the cold season and of horizontal achievements, as well as a successful farmer and a highly titled man like Okonkwo. Igbo culture combines earthly and heavenly values, which sometimes requires negotiating between the two sets of values and forces. This dialectical vision of life and values is evoked in the author’s name: Chi (the God of the sky); nua (to propose); A (Ala or Ani, the Earth Goddess); chebe (to decide). It has deep historical roots with, on the one hand, the Nri priests who dominated the Igbo Commonwealth from the ninth to the sixteenth century and served the Earth Goddess; and, on the other, the Aro priests of Chukwu, the Sky God, who dominated the Igbo world from the seventeenth century to the time of the British conquest. Obviously, such a dialogue between the two poles of Igbo culture (verticality versus horizontality) is beyond Okonkwo’s abilities. Achebe’s hero constantly offends Ala’s earthly values: he breaks her week of peace, kills a fellow citizen, and refuses to accept the decision of the assembly of equals when the issue of war against the colonizers is rejected. He therefore breaks the unity of the clan against the invaders, which weakens his people and goes against his aggressive stance towards the colonizers. Okonkwo’s failure comes from all these contradictions and the disastrous consequences of his authoritarian attitudes. He then takes his own life by hanging himself. This death confirms his rejection of the earth, as his body is left dangling in the air. Suicide is also classified as a female crime and an offence to Ala: “It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offence against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it” (186). The irony of Okonkwo’s tragic end is that his efforts to escape from the earth make him a pariah in his clan, a worthless man whose body will not be buried normally or touched by his people, like his father’s body. Okonkwo’s suicide and Unoka’s sickness are both an abomination to the Earth: Unoka was an ill-fated man. He had a bad chi or personal god, and evil fortune followed him to the grave, or rather to his death, for he had no grave. He died of the swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess. When a man was afflicted with swelling in the stomach and the limbs he was not

60

MICHEL NAUMANN



allowed to die in the house. He was carried to the Evil Forest and left there to die. There was the story of a very stubborn man who staggered back to his house and had to be carried again to the forest and tied to a tree. The sickness was an abomination to the earth, and so the victim could not be buried in her bowels. He died and rotted away above the earth, and was not given the first or the second burial. Such was Unoka’s fate. When they carried him away, he took with him his flute. (17)

Unoka’s contemptible death is therefore very similar to Okonkwo’s cruel end, which is ironical for a man who seemed to be cut out for a glorious destiny. We can thus conclude that the characters of Things Fall Apart relate to the established values of the Igbo world in four different ways: — Most Igbo people refer to the two poles of forces and values which organize their life. Earthly values, connected to the Goddess Ala (or Ani), stand for the body, desire, femininity, art, flexibility, justice, peace, democracy, ability to negotiate; whereas, Heavenly values connected to the chi, the solar individual soul, stand for strong selfdefinition, manhood, war, rigidity, hierarchy, authority. G.D. Killam’s early work, The Novels of Chinua Achebe, has clearly identified this very important feature of Things Fall Apart9 and Chinua Achebe has constantly reminded his critics of this ambivalence in his world-view.10 Therefore the art of life for each individual person consists in successful negotiation between these contradictory forces. Unoka, the hero’s father, is obviously unable to reach such a balance. He is a lazy farmer and a musician deprived of ambition, he runs up debts, and he is described as an effeminate man, an efulefu. Ezinma, the hero’s daughter, seems to combine the two sets of forces and values in a fascinating and harmonious personality. Her beauty and achievements as a young woman match her ability to make clear-cut decisions in life. — The intruders, foreigners, missionaries, soldiers, and some Igbo people who back them for social or psychological reasons represent the second group. They are the destroyers of the duality of values. They impose on the first group an oppressive, alienating, exploit9

G.D. Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe (London: Heinemann, 1969). Chinua Achebe, “ ‘ Chi’ in Igbo Cosmology” (1972), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975): 93–103. 10



The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart

61

ative, and colonial order. The colonizers appear for the first time in chapter fifteen with the ruthless destruction of the Abame clan. Foreign domination tends to turn the once free and proud Igbo people into efulefus, worthless effeminate men. — Some members of the first group then start a long-term movement of resistance, inspired mainly by the earthly values of their culture: they compose satirical songs against the oppressors, they argue about everything, they drag their feet when they are obliged to yield and obey, they retain some old values, sometimes adjust to new ones, and try to analyze the process of change imposed on them. I would postulate that they represent the very beginning of what will one day become an open national movement of emancipation. — The hero, Okonkwo, chooses a different strategy based exclusively on the heavenly and male set of values: he wants to launch a war against the mighty foreigners, he is impatient, and when he understands that his countrymen are not ready to follow him he kills a kotma, a court messenger of the colonial administration. The protest which had started among the colonized is upset and disorganized by Okonkwo’s mad, violent, and awkward move, turning into a humiliating defeat: “They had broken into tumult instead of action” (184). Actually, he is too rigid to negotiate with his community, unable to make them understand his point of view, too proud to bend when necessary or when the community criticizes him; abandoned by his countrymen, he finally commits suicide, which is classified as a female crime. Therefore we can conceptualize the logic of relations between the characters of Things Fall Apart as ‘ironic’ because the hero achieves exactly the opposite of what he intended: his manly revolt brings the (temporary) emasculation of his community and his heavenly, male temper prompts him to commit a female crime (suicide) and, as a consequence, to be thrown, unburied, in the wild bush. The rigid male values which Okonkwo wanted to impose make his clan yield like efulefus. This structure is often backed by similar microstructures deriving from sub-plots or tales inlaid in the main story. Tortoise, in the tale told by one of Okonkwo’s wives, wants to impose his will and gets the birds he intends to cheat to call him “All of you.” Then he asks their hosts in the sky who is to

62

MICHEL NAUMANN



eat the feast that is offered. Of course, the hosts answer that “it is for all of you,” and Tortoise eats everybody’s share, which finally brings resentment and his fall from Heaven (90). Okonkwo’s fate is very similar, as he feels betrayed by his countrymen’s refusal to accept his will to go to war against the colonizers. He therefore commits suicide and when his body is thrown in the bush he falls, like Tortoise, from the heavenly world he wanted to reach as a consequence of his will to be “All of you” and stand for the whole community. Another tale repeats the same warning sent by female storytellers to the male hero: the vulture that brings water to the world can’t help tearing the bag of rain that he carries, causing disastrous floods. The passage refers to the drought, a consequence of an excess of heavenly solar fire (21). Similarly, Okonkwo’s violently authoritarian attitude shreds the values of the community he wants to help. The microstructures can also appear in proverbs and metaphors. Okonkwo, for instance, shivers at the sight of dead ashes that, for him, symbolize the coming end of his community (140). The metaphor of destruction is ironical, because ashes are actually used as drugs in some parts of Africa; they are mixed with water and drunk to cool fever or put on an open wound to reduce the burning pain. Obviously the passage means that the hero, as a man possessed by a shining heavenly soul and often compared to “a bush fire” (3), cannot understand that he shouldn’t let his life be burned by his hot authoritarian temper. Thus the semantic structure enlightens our reading of the many gems that make Things Fall Apart a wonderful literary work.

II

A Sociological Interpretation of Things Fall Apart

I would argue that the ironic structure of Things Fall Apart relates to the social and political situation of Nigeria in the late 1950s, when independence was in view. But George Padmore, the pan-African leader and mentor of most nationalist leaders in English-speaking Africa, had already said that he was worried because of the threat of betrayal of the ideals of the struggle for independence. In his theoretical work published before his death in 1959, Panafricanism or Communism?,11 he had praised Kwame Nkrumah’s courageously radical and uncompromising political stance in Ghana, and criticized Nnamdi Azikiwe’s agreements with feudal forces in Nigeria. Padmore had 11

George Padmore, Panafricanism or Communism? (1956; Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000).



The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart

63

thought that Azikiwe, the leader of the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (N C N C ), the first Nigerian party clearly working for independence, would be dedicated to the achievement of a real independence, but he had just realized that it was not the case. The South African sociologist Ruth First explains how the political process in Nigeria was geared, by Great Britain, in favour of the feudal north, thus forcing Azikiwe to accept a conservative, neocolonial independence: From 1951 to 1958 Britain had allowed the Northern demand for half the seats in the Federal House. The 1958 Constitutional Conference rocked this pre-independence balance of control between South and North. With Nigeria about to be launched towards independence, the old British pledge to ‘protect’ the North – and use it as ballast for conservatism in the old state – had to be honoured. The Federal Parliament, it was laid down, would be elected on the basis of the population figures. The North, with over half of Nigeria’s population, was thus guaranteed cast-iron political domination of the country. Thus, at the time of independence, two heirs shared the estate, but they were unequally treated in the will. The favoured child was the traditional ruling oligarchy of the North; the less favoured, the Southern business-political class. The constitutional allocation of power, as Skar has pointed out, weighted political control in favour of the numerically preponderant, more backward North; in favour of the rural, tied peasantry, as against the urban wage earners. The region that had achieved self-government last, and had even tried to hold back the date of independence, emerged as the controlling force of the most popular independent state in Africa.12

The British strategy of divide and rule, by opposing south against north (a commercially competitive class against an agrarian oligarchy), was extremely dangerous, as it had the potential of creating a civil war, but it was also a clever trap set for the Nationalists. Ruth First shows that the choice left to them was very narrow: From 1958, when the North’s electoral dominance was written into the Federal constitution, economic power also swung from the regions to the central government. Buoyant market prices had built regional prosperity; but falling prices for exports, and the rapacity of the political class, began to drain regional reserves and force the regions themselves to turn for aid to the centre. A new banking act gave the Federal government control over

12

Ruth First, A Barrel of a Gun (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 148.

64

MICHEL NAUMANN



the operation of the regional marketing boards, and through them, the financial policies of the regional governments.13

The N C N C was not ready to go through a long period of struggle against the feudal forces of the north. Most bourgeois politicians wanted a share in the new dispensation, even though such a strategy involved incompatible coalitions. Azikiwe accepted the nomination to become the first President of Nigeria, which meant that he was ready to accept the conservative and neocolonial rule of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, dominated by the northern allies of the former colonizers. Radical Unionists, leaders of the Youth movement of the N C N C and students, pan-African circles and Marxists were not likely to accept this betrayal, but the expectations raised by independence among Nigerian people made it very difficult for them to explain that the benefits of the long national struggle were threatened. In the north, the left-wing leader Aminu Kano, when he argued for a progressive and united Nigeria, found his party suddenly divorced from many northerners, who were afraid of the modern elite of Igbo and Yorùbá graduates and businessmen in the south. The leftwing jargon of many true nationalists also contributed to alienating them from the northern as well as the nouthern commoners. The radicals failed to relate to the mass of Nigerian people and they were very often marginalized as traitors to the national hero, Azikiwe. An open letter to the would-be President, A Letter to Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe,14 expressed all these worries, but such protests also showed that the radicals didn’t really know how to speak to Nigerian people. It was easy for the moderate politicians to present them as alienated intellectuals and enemies of the people. Their stance was counterproductive. The more they spoke against the coming independence and Azikiwe, the more they strengthened conservative forces and disrupted progressive forces. This very bitter experience is expressed by the structure which we defined as ‘irony’: like the radicals of the late 1950s in Nigeria, Okonkwo is too authoritarian and divorced from his people’s culture to rally them, and his actions serve his opponents more than his countrymen. Like them, he finds that his action produces results that are in complete contradiction to his ideals. Like them, he ends in solitude. This irony is very close to what Fanon describes in his chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness in The 13

First, A Barrel of a Gun, 149. Mokwugo Okoye, A Letter to Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe: A Dissent Remembered (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1979). 14



The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart

65

Wretched of the Earth. The same vision was expressed, some ten years after Things Fall Apart, by Amilcar Cabral, the nationalist and socialist thinker and freedom fighter from Cabo Verde and Guinea–Bissau. He saw it as a social and cultural break between westernized radicals and the people. His research led him to the theory of the necessary suicide of petty-bourgeois radicals as a class to become true intellectuals of the people. Chinua Achebe has used Cabral’s theory in his homage to Aminu Kano: Aminu Kano had the imagination and the intelligence to foresee the danger that our unjust social order poses for the society and renounced the privileges of his class and identified completely through struggle with the fate of the downtrodden.15

Achebe has also often used as a key concept Frantz Fanon’s cultural “zone of occult instability,” meaning a people’s subversive cultural trend opposed to rigid and formal customs.16 His structure of ‘irony’, if we refer to the tales instanced above in the discussion of the microstructures of Things Fall Apart, comes from an African sense of humour displayed in tales and even in legends about the hubris of a hero, and it is produced through a clever use of Igbo heavenly and earthly ambivalence. Thus, it does come from such a “zone of occult instability.” Goldmann’s theories and methodology bring even more to the study of Things Fall Apart than a better understanding of the novel. They show that the two poles of Igbo values were reliable cultural tools with which to feel, analyze, and express the political situation of the mid-twentieth century in Nigeria in particular and Africa generally. This deep and pessimistic understanding of the issues of the late 1950s by the traditional Igbo world-view is also a prophetic anticipation of the tragic failure of national construction in the independent nations of Africa: it shows that the seeds of independence could not produce a balanced and successful crop. Nevertheless, this pessimistic vision also reveals that only African cultures would revive and fulfil the hopes of the time of independence. Achebe has been able to relate African culture to the issues of the modern world. He has shown its flexibility and modernity.

15

Chinua Achebe, The Trouble With Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1984): 30. Bernth Lindfors, “Interview with Chinua Achebe,” in Palaver (Austin T X : African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972): 5–12. 16

66

MICHEL NAUMANN



Using Goldmann’s methods, I was able not only to relate Things Fall Apart to its immediate historical and sociological background but also to suggest that the structure of ‘irony’, which is crucial to our understanding of Achebe’s first novel, is a lasting feature of all his works as a weapon with which to criticize imperialism, corrupt leaders, ruling classes, and the debased attitudes of civil society and as an homage to the long and courageous struggle of Africa’s peoples against oppression.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “ ‘ Chi’ in Igbo Cosmology” (1972), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975): 93–103. ——. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975). ——. “The Novelist as a Teacher,” in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G.D. Killam (London: Heinemann, 1973): 3–6. Originally published in the New Statesman (29 January 1965): 161–62. ——. The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1984). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). First, Ruth. A Barrel of a Gun (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Goldmann, Lucien. Le dieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). ——. Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Médiation, 1964). Innes, C.L. “Language, Poetry and Doctrine in Things Fall Apart,” in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (London, Heinemann: 1979): 111–25. Killam, Gordon D. The Novels of Chinua Achebe (London: Heinemann, 1969). Lindfors, Bernth. “Interview with Chinua Achebe,” in Palaver (Austin T X : African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972): 5–12. Okoye, Mokwugo. A Letter to Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe: A Dissent Remembered (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1979). Padmore, George. Panafricanism or Communism? (1956; Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000). Palmer, Eustace. The Growth of the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1979).



4 ————

I

The Politics of Form Uche Okeke’s Illustrations for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

C HIKA O KEKE –A GULU

N E W A R K M USEUM in June 2006, Chinua Achebe and his fellow Nigerian, the artist Uche Okeke, commented on their first open collaboration in 1963 when Okeke illustrated the second edition of Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s inaugural and best-known novel. Okeke’s description of Achebe’s response upon seeing the drawings he had made for the book sets the ground for the problem I address in this essay. According to Okeke, N THE COURSE OF A PUBLIC CONVERSATION AT THE

He came, and I showed him the drawings. He looked at the drawings and the only thing he said was – I quote him – “That is how it should be,” and left. That was it. “That is how it should be.” So what do I say to that? That is why when somebody asks me how many times I sat with Chinua and we discussed whatever, I tell them we didn’t meet. We already knew what we wanted. It is as simple as that.1

As this essay will make obvious, Okeke’s recollection of his association with Achebe on this project is a bit more complicated than his 2006 statement suggests. Nevertheless, Achebe’s response to the drawings (“That is how it should be”) is crucial for the arguments I will be making. While there is no 1

Christa Clarke, “Uche Okeke and Chinua Achebe: Artist and Author in Conversation,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 1 (July 2007): 154. (My emphasis.)

68

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



doubt that it was his own way of expressing satisfaction with the illustrations, the “it” in his statement signified something more fundamental, beyond the specific formal qualities of the drawings; for if his comment was limited to the drawings’ function as illustration for his novel, a “they” would have more logically made this connection. My contention is that this was not an arbitrary word-choice. I suggest, and this is the crux of the argument in this essay, that in this brief statement Achebe declared his approval of Okeke’s emphatic position-taking in a discursive context where important voices of their generation of writers and artists competed for critical legitimacy. I want to propose that he saw the drawings as the work of a co-traveller, a kindred spirit who had successfully developed a potent and appropriate artistic form that would serve as a vehicle for what Appadurai has called the “work of imagination” in the postcolony.2 The question, then, is: What might be the basis for this reading of Achebe’s statement? What, indeed, is the nature of Okeke’s achievement in the Things Fall Apart illustrations, and how might the formal conditions and ideological tenor of the drawings constitute equivalents of Achebe’s own seminal contribution to postcolonial literary modernism for which Things Fall Apart was the inaugural gesture? One of the often-repeated anecdotes Achebe tells about his early encounter with the scope of the challenge facing the writer in late-colonial Nigeria is about the question of form. According to him, his English teacher at University College, Ibadan, declared, upon reading his work, that his writing lacked form. Yet, unable to explain what she meant by form, the teacher eventually disavowed her earlier assessment of Achebe’s work. That experience compelled Achebe to examine, on the level of technique and language, the relationship between form and politics. As he stated, “it became clear to me that I had to teach myself what I needed to learn in order to write the kind of novels I wanted to write.”3 This encounter demonstrates critical awareness on the part of Achebe that form was not only subjective but, more importantly, also ideological, and that to control the power inherent in language and writing one must necessarily claim the right to determine the conditions of this form and, ultimately, how it is deployed. It is clear that he came to the conclusion that form, usually an important element of style and aesthetics in the written text, constituted a space in which the contestation for meaning occurs – in 2

See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 15. 3 Clarke, “Uche Okeke and Chinua Achebe,” 150.



The Politics of Form

69

other words, that there is a different order of meaning inherent in the manner in which form is developed and manipulated. The extent to which Achebe succeeded in inventing a formal style suitable for the ideological work his postcolonial sensibility called for has been the subject of sustained analysis by literary scholars. Whether it is his manner of colouring the English language to reflect an African verbal style, or his reshaping English prose to acquire the rhythmic quality of Igbo oral traditions,4 or the synthesis of African narrative proverbs and modern literary form,5 or even the organic injection of Igbo words into the English language novel,6 the reconstitution and re-invention of English prose through a synthesis of linguistic and literary devices and elements drawn from Igbo and English in Things Fall Apart was Achebe’s declaration of his position on the question of language and form in postcolonial African literature. As is well known, the crucial problem confronted by the 1962 Makerere Conference of African Writers had to do with language and African literature, specifically the relevance of colonial languages, on the one hand, and, on the other, indigenous African languages in the continent’s new literatures. In his influential critique of the Makerere deliberation, Obiajunwa Wali characterized African literature in English, French or Portuguese as a “dead end” – which indicates the discursive minefield at the heart of this literature once it entered the crucial postcolonial phase.7 However, many commentators, including critics and writers, have countenanced the conditions for the possibility of a truly African literary imagination expressed in and through colonial languages. In his important study of what he calls the “African imagination,” Abiola Irele argues that oral literature “represents the basic intertext of the African imagination,”8 which is to say that what differentiates African literature is not so much its reliance on indigenous languages for its expres-

4

B. Eugene McCarthy, “Rhythm and Narrative Method in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18.3 (Spring 1985): 243–56. 5 Emmanuel Obiechina, “Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel,” Research in African Literatures 24.4 (Winter 1993): 123–40. 6 Hugh R. Brown, “Igbo Words for the Non-Igbo: Achebe’s Artistry in Arrow of God,” Research in African Literatures 12.1 (Spring 1981): 69–85. 7 See Obiajunwa Wali, “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 10 (September 1963): 13–16. 8 Abiola Irele, “The African Imagination,” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (Spring 1990): 56.

70

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



sion as its dependence on thematic and, especially, formal attributes of native oral poetic, performance, and narrative traditions: The striking feature that gives interest to this literature is a noticeable preoccupation not only with the African experience as the central subject of their works, but also with the problem of a proper and adequate reflection of that experience, which involves, in formal terms, a reworking of their means of expression for that purpose.9

Although Irele describes oral literatures in indigenous African languages as the locus of the African imagination, he recognizes the very complex reality of literary production in Africa following the continent’s irreversible encounter with Islam and Arab cultures and, especially, European colonization. Thus, in his analysis of various forms of literary production in and about Africa expressed in European languages, he notes two aspects of this literature that are of relevance to this essay: literature by Europeans based on African subject-matter yet expressed through an eminently European perspective and narrative mode; and writing by Africans marked by recuperation through transposition of African material and forms in the standard form of the European language. To Irele, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart constitutes a foundational work in the transpositional mode, and this is precisely because Achebe successfully integrated “the distinctive rhetoric of African speech into the conventional Western novel,” and he also set his work in a formal relation “to two distinctive traditions, African and European, each representing an imaginative ethos corresponding to two different structures of life and expression that the novel holds together within its narrative movement and referential bounds.”10 I shall return to Irele’s characterization of literature on Africa by Europeans, but for the moment it is worth noting that his description of Achebe’s achievement in Things Fall Apart is congruent with the novelist’s argument, years before, about the inevitability of European languages in the development of national literatures in Africa. In the wake of Wali’s dark prediction on the fate of African literatures in European languages, Achebe insisted that the African writer’s challenge is not so much whether to write in the English language as what she does with the language; in other words, the extent to which the African writer domesticates the English language to the point that it is “able to carry the weight of [her] African experience.” This 9

Irele, “The African Imagination,” 60. “The African Imagination,” 62.

10



The Politics of Form

71

literary language, he concludes, “will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”11 Achebe, as many scholars have demonstrated, succeeds, especially in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, in inventing a new form of English, recognizable to metropolitan anglophones yet compellingly familiar to readers versed in Igbo language, culture, and thought, and it is because of the latter that his work veritably instantiates Irele’s notion of the African literary imagination. Let me, then, suggest that it is their mutual participation in this production of the African imagination in literature and art in the late 1950s and early 1960s that explains Achebe and Okeke’s identification with and attraction to each other’s work. For, while Achebe was developing his literature in a new English, Okeke was beginning to experiment with an inventive, unprecedented visual vocabulary based on an idea he called Natural Synthesis. As a student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, Okeke became the leader of the Art Society (1958–61), the now legendary group of young artists that championed the cause of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria in the 1960s. His association with other artists such as Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, and Simon Okeke while at Zaria helped him refine his ideas about contemporary art in the hands of Nigerian artists at the dawn of political independence. Before Zaria, Okeke had taken correspondence art courses with Akinola Lasekan (1916–74), one of the most influential artists of the pioneer generation. Lasekan had attained national renown for his political cartoons in Nnamdi Azikiwe’s nationalist newspaper West African Pilot,12 but as a painter he advocated a kind of illustrative naturalism for depicting aspects of Nigerian history as well as contemporary genre subjects. I shall return to Lasekan’s work to demonstrate the extent of Okeke’s radical departure from an imagistic tradition, one that I want to call colonial modernism, established by Lasekan and, before him, Aina Onabolu (1882–1964). For now, it is crucial to note that, beyond Lasekan’s mentorship, Okeke pursued an independent project that signalled his understanding of the artistic enterprise as political engagement not so much on the level of content as in the question of constituting formal procedures that clearly demonstrate the artist’s 11

Chinua Achebe, “English and the African Writer,” Transition 18 (1965): 30. See Tejumola Olaniyan, “Cartooning Nigerian Anticolonial Nationalism,” in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul S. Landau & Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: U of California P , 2002): 124–40. 12

72

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



ownership of the visual language, which in turn is based on his belief in the symbolic power and ideological valency of modes of visuality as such. Okeke’s art training in Zaria exposed him to the usual studio curriculum designed in London, and mandated for accredited colonial-era schools in British territories. The programme combined rigorous studio work and some Western art-history lessons, with no acknowledgment of the artistic value or relevance to the students of indigenous arts and cultures. Given that, at this stage in Nigeria’s political history, the nationalist movement had reached its crescendo, with firm discussions taking place in Lagos and London about setting the date for the end of colonial rule, this absence of Nigerian or African artistic heritage in the Zaria curriculum must have seemed remarkably antiprogressive and incompatible with the spirit of the times. But the Art Society’s failure to force the school to introduce African content into the curriculum – they campaigned unsuccessfully against Zaria’s affiliation with Goldsmiths School of Art (University of London) in 1959 – compelled them to seek alternative means of familiarizing themselves with the indigenous arts and cultures of Nigeria as a first step in the necessary process of re-imagining their work as contemporary Nigerian artists. As Okeke and some of his Art Society colleagues understood it, progressive work at that particular historical moment meant, as it did for Achebe, developing an artistic form that at once derived from their familiarity with the modernist disposition to formal experimentation and rigorous study of the Igbo artistic and cultural archive. Before he attended Zaria, Okeke set himself the task of collecting Igbo tales, as a means to understanding the specific ways in which oral literary forms constitute a crucial part of the Igbo archive of knowledge. His next challenge, met during his early years in Zaria, was how to develop a visual form with which to illustrate the tales. Through a systematic process of selecting and isolating design and decorative patterns from indigenous Nigerian and African sculptures in the collection of the Jos Museum, and by developing abstract motifs and designs from local flora and familiar objects, he amassed an impressive range of motifs that became compositional elements for a suite of pen-and-ink work, Igbo Folk Tale Drawings (1958–59). Devoid of mimetic representation, these drawings suggested new ways in which a specific visual language, constituted by careful juxtaposition of patterns, marks, shapes, and lines, can invoke the fantastic, meta-real world of spirits, animals, and humans. Clearly, Okeke was convinced that the imaginary – that is to say, unreal – plots in which animals and metaphysical beings assume human characters and perform incredible feats in defiance of the laws of nature and empirical



The Politics of Form

73

knowledge demanded an equally enigmatic, non-realistic formal style. Given that, up until this period, modern Nigerian art – in the hands of its major exponents – was pervasively invested in various forms of realistic representation, Okeke’s Igbo Folk Tale Drawings announced the arrival of a new radical formal sensibility on the modern art scene. To be sure, the lesson of the folktale drawings for Okeke must have been the value of rethinking his relationship with received artistic conventions, especially since these conventions failed to satisfy his desire for a language that simultaneously reflected his compound consciousness and multiple heritages as a modern Igbo, Nigerian, African, and postcolonial artist. This is the background to the idea of Natural Synthesis he outlined in 1960 as a theoretical basis of new work by the Art Society but also by other contemporary Nigerian artists who, he hoped, must contend with the reality and artistic implications of newly won political independence. In a key passage of his presidential address delivered to the Art Society in October 1960, Okeke drew on his own poetry to illuminate his idea of Natural Synthesis: Okolobia’s sons shall learn to live from father’s failing; blending diverse culture types, the cream of native kind adaptable alien type; the dawn of an age – the season of salvation13

Against an essentialist understanding of tradition and modernity, of Western and indigenous cultures, as mutually exclusive domains – a dichotomization that fuelled the then prevalent notion of existential and metaphysical chasms and alienation in the colonized mind – Okeke’s idea of cultural affirmation drew on the liberatory politics of Negritude, pan-Africanism, and African Personality. Specifically, they acknowledged the ineluctable fact of modernity and indigenous cultural heritages as crucial elements for the re-imagination of a progressive African world beyond colonialism. For the contemporary artist, the implication of this critical position was the rejection, on the one hand, of

13

See Uche Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” in Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo: Documentation Center, Asele Institute & Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982): 2.

74

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



the neotraditionalism championed by Kenneth Murray and other progressive colonial educators; and, on the other, the wholesale adoption of European academic and modernist art in favour of a deliberate, systematic appropriation of elements from specific Nigerian cultures as well as European art forms and technical procedures. Natural Synthesis was an argument for recognition of the values of indigenous and Western sources in the making of a postcolonial visual language. Okeke’s artistic response to the challenge of Natural Synthesis was the decision to commence research, more focused than that which led to the folk-tale drawings, on Igbo Uli body drawing and mural painting. By 1962, shortly before he travelled to Germany on a studio residency in Munich, he began experimenting with design possibilities for this art form, and soon realized that it contained the outline of a new visual language that had the formal rigour and cultural specificity his modernist and postcolonial sensibility demanded. In the earliest of these experimental drawings, he isolated specific Uli motifs, and organized them in different permutations to create purely abstract compositions in which the drawn motifs and the negative spaces around them received equal attention as design elements. From these initial abstractions, he began work on the Oja Suite, in which he introduced a range of subjectmatter, including depictions of human torsos and full figures, forest scenes, and characters drawn from Igbo religion and folklore. This is not the place to analyze fully Okeke’s seminal Uli-inspired work; it should suffice to note that this work, mostly pen and charcoal drawings, is characterized by repeated use of a few Uli motifs, particularly the spiral – which in the Uli lexicon is called agwọlagwọ, but which also refers to the coiled sacred python – and a triangular motif called isinwaọji, to describe floral and vegetal forms and anatomical parts, depending on the composition.14 The agwọlagwọ motif in particular became, in Okeke’s hands, not only an organizing pictorial element but also a polysemic icon that could stand for eye, hair, mouth, or even floral tendrils, each meaning depending on the motif’s specific spatial context. Another important decision Okeke made was to repurpose his drawn lines to approximate the lyrical sensuality of Uli line. The drawings also show the use of space as an active compositional element; in other words, as in traditional Uli art, Okeke is as conscious of what he does with the drawn motifs as he is 14

See Elizabeth W. Willis, “A Lexikon of Igbo Uli Motifs,” Nsukka Journal of the Humanities 1 (1987): 91–120, and “Uli Painting and the Igbo World View,” African Arts 23.1 (1989): 62–67, 104.



The Politics of Form

75

sensitive to how he organizes the ample negative spaces in which the linear forms seem to float. This visual dialogue between form and space, in addition to the use of very purposeful, deliberate, and elegant line to describe abstract motifs and descriptive forms, is indeed an aspect of Okeke’s drawing that anchors it to the Igbo Uli visual archive. The drawings for Things Fall Apart, as we shall see shortly, are thus characterized, first, by organic, gesticulating lines reminiscent of trails left by a dancer in the sand. Secondly, they evoke the crispness and directional certitude that is a hallmark of Uli draftsmanship. Thirdly, they provide just enough essential information about the subject, leaving details to the viewer’s imagination. In other words, the drawings make evident the crucial transformations that occurred in Okeke’s work in the Oja Suite drawings in early 1962, a moment when he finally arrived at a cohesive, formally articulate style grounded in a rigorous experimentation with an Igbo art form. On 13 April 1962, barely a year after graduating from Zaria, Okeke met with Achebe in Lagos to discuss the writer’s future books and the possibility of illustrating them.15 This followed earlier direct contacts during which they exchanged ideas about the challenges and direction of contemporary Nigerian and African art and literature. As Achebe recently stated, referring to his understanding of Okeke and his Art Society colleague Demas Nwoko’s work during this period, They were wondering, ‘what do you do with the arts?’ And people like me were wondering, ‘what do you do with literature?’ It was really a question of language. What language would be appropriate to describe what is going on in our midst?16

Quite clearly, Achebe and Okeke – judging by the number of times they met to discuss not just literature but also the writer’s works-in-progress – shared a similar vision on the question of the formal conditions of postcolonial literature and art, and the larger ideological implications of this work. Put differently, they concurred on the vital role of indigenous literary and artistic forms in the work of their generation of artists and writers. And I want to suggest that Achebe’s conviction that Okeke’s Uli-inspired work constituted a 15

I rely on Okeke’s diary entries for specific details of his biography, including, as here the meetings he had with Achebe during this period. I am grateful to Uche Okeke for giving me unfettered access to his diaries. 16 Clarke, “Uche Okeke and Chinua Achebe,” 149.

76

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



visual art equivalent of the literary inventions and political subtext in his first novel made the artist an ideal collaborator. Okeke made four pen-and-ink drawings that, I argue, did not correspond to the standard illustrative realism preferred by contemporary publishers.17 Unlike the drawings by the British artist David Carabine in the earlier African Writers Series edition of 1962, Okeke’s discountenanced mass and volume, depending instead on the power of the gestural line to suggest human and floral forms without fully describing them, thereby making it clear that he was not so much illustrating passages in the novel as using the latter as an opportunity for continuing the formal experiments he had begun in early 1962 with Igbo Uli. The radicalism of Okeke’s new, culturally grounded visual language and, beyond that, his deployment of this language to participate, as Achebe did in Things Fall Apart, in the critique of imperial ideology might be appreciated by returning to the drawings of Carabine (see Figures 1 to 4, next two pages). Carabine’s four drawings focus exclusively on the actions of Okonkwo. In the frontispiece, Okonkwo looms from the left foreground, brandishing the machete with which he would cut down a frightened Ikemefuna, who is already cornered by two other assailants in the background (Figure 1); in the second, we see the wrestling match with Okonkwo and Amalinze The Cat in a tight hold in the middle of a large arena. Three drummers in the foreground engage in a muscular drumming session while a crowd, including a chiefly figure seated under a large ceremonial umbrella, is set against a background of huts and tropical flora (Figure 2). The ordinariness of this supposedly African landscape, in the way it deliberately includes the usual motifs, seems to draw on visual tropes one might associate with colonial travel accounts. The third drawing shows a barrel-chested Okonkwo clobbering a hapless Nwoye after he was spied attending the newly established Christian church (Figure 3). And, finally, the fourth drawing depicts a gigantic, gesticulating figure of Okonkwo speaking to a large crowd, summoning them to violent resistance against the encroaching alien European government and culture (Figure 4).18 17

The inclusion of illustrations in the African Writers Series is reminiscent of the practice in Western juvenile fiction. This, found only in the earliest titles following Things Fall Apart as the inaugural work in the series, may be due to the publisher’s assumption that, despite the fact that the series was designed for an adult readership, the literacy level of this readership was perceived as developmentally juvenile. 18 This figure might also be Okika, Umuofia’s orator.



The Politics of Form

F I G U R E 1: Dennis Carabine, The killing of Ikemefuna, in Achebe, Things Fall Apart (African Writers Series 1; Heinemann, 1962): frontispiece.

F I G U R E 2: Dennis Carabine, The great wrestling match, in Achebe, Things Fall Apart (African Writers Series 1; Heinemann, 1962): facing page 1.

77

78

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



F I G U R E 3: Dennis Carabine, Okonkwo punishing his son Ikemefuna, in Achebe,

Things Fall Apart (African Writers Series 1; Heinemann, 1962): facing page 115.

F I G U R E 4: Dennis Carabine, Okika addressing the people of Umuofia, in Achebe,

Things Fall Apart (African Writers Series 1, Heinemann, 1962): facing page 153.



The Politics of Form

79

The style of Carabine’s drawings is quite unremarkable, yet unquestionably legible, in the sense that the viewer is presented with substantially familiar visual data with which to understand the drama unfolding in a given scene. Bodies are described as solid forms in space with such fidelity as to make them too rigid, almost clichéd, as if taken from figural templates. Even so, there are moments in the Carabine illustrations in which the figures are awkwardly drawn, such as the Okonkwo figure beating Nwoye. Certainly, the use of stylization in book illustration is not unusual; however, when, as here, the drawing unconfidently hesitates between pictorial realism (evident in Okonkwo’s face and right arm) and schematic rendering (as in the unnatural rendering of the folds of both Okonkwo and Nwoye’s wrappers), the overall effect is visually disconcerting. Further, as with the genre, Carabine’s drawings are obsessively illustrative – hence effective as illustrations – which means that considerations of compositional integrity and handling of medium are somewhat compromised. In other words, while his images do their work as visual aids, they are not necessarily successful as autonomous drawings – as works of art. One way to look at Carabine’s visual language in the context of Achebe’s novel is to return to Irele’s argument about literature set in Africa but written by European writers. Locating what he calls “the basic intertext of the African literary imagination” in indigenous modes of expression, specifically in the oral tradition, Irele argues that the hallmark of European writing about Africa is the “absence of imaginative sympathy with the continent or its people considered as bearers of culture.”19 Moreover, Irele insists, referring to this literature, “it is easy to understand why it is unable, by its very nature, to strike a relation to an African imagination defined by any kind of formal affiliations with indigenous modes of expression.”20 One could very easily transpose Irele’s argument not just to Carabine’s Things Fall Apart illustrations, but also to the work of European expatriate and settler artists whose works have, to varying extents, focused on African subject-matter and themes.21 Although 19

Irele, “The African Imagination,” 59. “The African Imagination,” 59. 21 A possible exception here might be the work of the South African artist Cecil Skotnes, who, with his colleagues in the Amadlozi Group in the late 1950s, sought to ground their art in black African cultural and spiritual imagination. But even then, it is debatable whether he succeeded in developing the kind of formal language that reflects what Irele calls an African imagination. 20

80

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



Carabine was illustrating an African story, his formal language rests completely in the Western artistic tradition that goes back to the Italian Renaissance; it is devoid of any inspiration from indigenous African artistic traditions, and thus fails to participate in the ideological and literary journey Achebe embarked on in his novel. Despite the observations I make about the formal aspects of the Carabine drawings, the choice he made of which particular episodes of the novel to illustrate is quite significant and calls for some commentary. In presenting portraits of Okonkwo as murderer, wrestler, child abuser, and warmonger as the signal moments in the narrative, Carabine seems to have read Things Fall Apart primarily as a biography of an immoral, fatally misguided, and vicious native whose inability to recognize the inexorability of European colonial order constituted his most tragic failing. Achebe’s novel, as Carabine’s visual translation suggests, is thus a story not of a people but of one man whose life had fallen apart out of his own making, rather than a fictional account of the unmaking of a people’s life-ways at the moment they confronted the realities of European imperial incursion.22 Further, because he focuses only on the actions of Okonkwo, Carabine does not acknowledge any of the equally poignant moments in the novel – in which Okonkwo did not figure prominently, if at all – that are as narratively dramatic and potentially compelling visually as any of the illustrated scenes. These observations on the formal and thematic dimensions of Carabine’s illustrations are made all the more necessary precisely because they stand in sharp contrast to those of Okeke. The subject of Okeke’s first drawing (see overleaf) is the same wrestling scene Carabine illustrated, except that in Okeke’s the picture plane is populated by a crowd of spectators and a phalanx of drummers at the far end (Figure 5). Absent are the two wrestlers that in Carabine’s are the centre of communal attention. Okeke’s visual account of the wrestling episode lays emphasis on the essence of the match, which he understands, I want to believe, as an important event meant to solidify and reify communal ties, aspirations,

22

This view of Things Fall Apart as the story of one flawed man seems to have been inspired by the title of the first American edition of the novel, Things Fall Apart: The Story of a Strong Man (New York: Obolensky, 1959). By the second edition, the second part of the title had been dropped. It is not clear to me whose decision it was, the author’s or the publisher’s, to append the descriptive subtitle in the first instance.



The Politics of Form

F I G U R E 5: Uche Okeke, The great wrestling event, in Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1962, repr. 1989): facing W.B. Yeats epigraph.

F I G U R E 6: Uche Okeke, Egwugwu in judgment; in Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1962, repr. 1989): facing page 3.

81

82

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU

F I G U R E 7: Uche Okeke, The coming of the white men; in Achebe,

Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1962, repr. 1989): facing page 91.

F I G U R E 8: Uche Okeke, The confrontation; in Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1962, repr. 1989): facing page 121.





The Politics of Form

83

and the individual’s responsibility to the group. The empty arena in the drawing thus functions as a collective space in which communal energies –accelerated and amplified by the charged orchestral music – are concentrated for the vitalization of the bond between the living and the dead, the gods and the ancestors. The second drawing depicts the scene in which the great masked egwugwu delivered judgment on the matter of the dispute between the Uzowulu and Odukwe families (Figure 6 above). In the left foreground, a smouldering Ajofia and other masks sit in judgment as a balding representative of one of the disputants stands with a slightly bowed head, while an enraptured crowd in the background observes the proceedings. In the third drawing, Okeke shows the missionary in plaid suit and pith helmet, and his interpreter in white, surrounded by the people of Mbanta engaged in a negotiation that would lead to the establishment of the first church in the clan (Figure 7 above). By placing the bodies of the alien messengers of empire within the communal space earlier inhabited by the egwugwu-in-judgment, we are confronted with the incipient displacement of one political order (embodied by the egwugwu) by another (the colonizer). Despite the fact that the pose of the European – note especially his clasped hands and slightly bowed head – is far from threatening, the very presence of his body at the centre of the sacred, communal space marks the onset of the process of the society’s ‘falling apart’ and the loosening of the dynamic bonds that held it together until the coming of the white man. The fourth drawing represents the climactic scene of destruction of the church in Umuofia (Figure 8 above). Here, a crowd led by three egwugwu confronts Reverend Smith and his interpreter in front of the church, moments before it is set ablaze in retaliation for the unmasking of the egwugwu by the Christian zealot, Enoch. Okeke dispenses with the circular composition and its implication of communality, and instead reorganizes the picture plane by aggregating the crowd of people led by masks into a triangle projecting into the tight Christian space demarcated by the church compound, the overwhelmed pastor (who has lost his ‘power’ helmet), and his catechist. It is noteworthy that the active subject in Okeke’s drawings is the community of people and spirits, rather than one particular individual. This is emphasized by the circular composition he adopts for all but the last drawing, which shows the moment this community confronts the alien destabilizing force embodied by the missionary and the church. In the first three drawings, the communal space gets progressively smaller, and in the third drawing it is invaded by the bodies of the missionary and his assistant. By the fourth drawing, this space is completely banished, suggesting a breakdown of the cohe-

84

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



sive forces that had for long sustained the Umuofia community. In other words, Okeke reads Things Fall Apart as the story of a people, rather than of one man, and thus comes very close to the critical subtext of Achebe’s literary endeavour. What is more, by depicting the wrestling scene as an occasion for communal renewal rather than for the display of individual prowess; by illustrating the episode of the egwugwu’s stunning resolution of a difficult family and land dispute; in showing the moment of acceptance of the European presence in Mbanta; and by concluding with the razing of the Umuofia church, Okeke’s decision on what constituted the key moments in the novel lays bare his understanding of the novel as a critique of European political and cultural imperialism. Where Carabine was captivated by the drama of an individual’s life, Okeke was less interested in such, and instead read the novel as a work deeply entangled with the politics of early colonization and popular resistance to it. His drawings thus make a vital connection between the historical context of Things Fall Apart and contemporary (that is, in historical time, outside the fictional temporality of the novel) guerrilla warfare and mass anticolonial resistance to European incursion into Eastern Nigeria during the latenineteenth and early-twentieth century, a subject thoroughly examined in Don C. Ohadike’s influential social history work on the western Igbo.23 I have earlier discussed the stylistic context of Okeke’s illustrations, specifically his experimentation with Igbo Uli, which formed the basis of his drawings from 1962 onwards. However, compared to his other drawings of the period, the Things Fall Apart illustrations visibly shed the more radical aspects of the Uli-inspired work, particularly the near-absence of the recurrent Uli motifs that formed the backbone of his pictorial design. Nevertheless, the strident linearity of his drawing, the total abrogation of form/ space boundaries, and the reduction of figural and floral forms to highly simplified, almost abstract gestures secure the connections between these and Okeke’s other work. In rendering his drawings in this rather difficult mode – difficult in the sense that they do not yield their subject-matter with the same ease as Carabine’s – it seems to me that Okeke was not only providing an alternative visual language to the conventional one operative in the British artist’s illustration; he was also announcing a fundamental break with the tradition of modern Nigerian illustration championed by Akinola Lasekan, his former mentor. Motivated by the need to demonstrate his mastery of pictorial realism 23

Don C. Ohadike, The Ekumeku Movement: Western Igbo Resistance to the British Conquest of Nigeria, 1883–1914 (Athens: Ohio U P , 1991).



The Politics of Form

85

– a task made all the more necessary by colonial European disavowal of African people’s artistic sophistication – Lasekan was one of the exponents of what I earlier described as colonial modernism, which is characterized by appropriation of the realistic mode to simultaneously discountenance Western perception of African artists’ technical inferiority and to represent individual and collective African subjectivities at a time when the struggle for political independence was well under way. For Okeke and his generation of modernists, it was no longer enough, or even justifiable, to simply master the language of European academic and modernist art at a time when the crucial task facing the postcolonial artist was that of inventing a visual style that would reflect an African imagination through its formal relationship with specific African art forms. He also clearly understood, as the drawings demonstrate, that the task of the postcolonial modernist artist lay not only in developing a new visual language but also in deploying this new form for the critical examination of the postcolonial condition. This, we are compelled to conclude, explains Achebe’s statement upon seeing the drawings: “that is how it should be.”

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “English and the African Writer,” Transition 18 (1965): 27–30. ——. Things Fall Apart, ill. Dennis Carabine (London: Heinemann, 1962). ——. Things Fall Apart, ill. Uche Okeke (London: Heinemann, 1964). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Brown, Hugh R. “Igbo Words for the Non-Igbo: Achebe’s Artistry in Arrow of God,” Research in African Literatures 12.1 (Spring 1981): 69–85. Clarke, Christa. “Uche Okeke and Chinua Achebe: Artist and Author in Conversation,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 1 (July 2007): 147–58. Irele, Abiola. “The African Imagination,” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (Spring 1990): 49–67. McCarthy, B. Eugene. “Rhythm and Narrative Method in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18.3 (Spring 1985): 243–56. Obiechina, Emmanuel. “Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel,” Research in African Literatures 24.4 (Winter 1993): 123–40. Ohadike, Don C. The Ekumeku Movement: Western Igbo Resistance to the British Conquest of Nigeria, 1883–1914 (Athens: Ohio U P , 1991).

86

CHIKA OKEKE–AGULU



Okeke, Uche. Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo: Documentation Center, Asele Institute & Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982). Olaniyan, Tejumola. “Cartooning Nigerian Anticolonial Nationalism,” in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul S. Landau & Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: U of California P , 2002): 124–40. Wali, Obiajunwa. “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 10 (September 1963): 13–16. Willis, Elizabeth W. “A Lexikon of Igbo Uli Motifs,” Nsukka Journal of the Humanities 1 (1987): 91–120. Willis, Liz. “Uli Painting and the Igbo World View,” African Arts 23.1 (1989): 62–67, 104.



III T HINGS F ALL A PART AND ITS L ITERARY H ERITAGE

5

Daughters of Sentiment, Genealogies, and Conversations Between Things Fall Apart and Purple Hibiscus

————

C HRISTOPHER E.W. O UMA

Things Fall Apart: Genealogical Legacies

W

we usually refer to family histories, to bloodlines, and to epochal connections within family trees. In this sense, the act of tracing genealogies is similar to tracing traditions and their continual historical development. If genealogies relate to developments, then it means that they can also, as Jeffery Minson says, “debunk cherished values by demonstrating their contingency and ignoble origins.”1 Minson seems to imply that the exercise of ‘genealogizing’ is also about contingency, synchronicity, and even diachronicity. Genealogies make visible trajectories of influence that can be mapped across family histories. Family trees in African cultures are most often patrilineal, and the figure of the father is central – down the ancestral line from the ‘forefather’, to the ‘great-grandfather’, the ‘grandfather’, and the ‘father’ in a linear and sequential order. Therefore, the idea of inheritance of the family line is a priori the son’s responsibility, while the daughter remains a “tem-

1

HEN WE CONSIDER THE NOTION OF GENEALOGIES,

Jeffery Minson, “Genealogical Histories,” in Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics (London: Macmillan 1985): 7.

90

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



porary sojourner,”2 whose identity within the familial line mutates in relation to her role of maintaining the family line by delivering a son at childbirth. Like the family, the modern African novel has developed genealogically, since its inception in the 1950s and 1960s during the struggle for independence. There are traceable patterns of influence from ‘foundational’ moments in its history, with one seminal moment being the publication of Things Fall Apart. While Simon Gikandi has argued that it is not entirely valid to point to the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958 as the moment of the ‘birth’ of the African novel,3 its serialization as the first book in the Heinemann African Writers Series and Chinua Achebe’s pioneering role as editor of this series makes it a foundational text in many ways. We can now regard the creation of the African Writers Series as also the setting-up of a genealogy of the modern African novel.4 Things Fall Apart became foundational not only as a volume in the Heinemann African Writers Series but also in the corpus of modern African literature and criticism.5 Chinua Achebe’s work as a writer, critic, and literary theorist spawned a discourse and over the years became a reference-point and a ‘critical memory’6 for modern African literature.7 Achebe embodies the title ‘Odeluora’, 2

Lynda Boose, “Introduction” to Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda Boose & Betty Flowers (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1989): 1–4. 3 Simon Gikandi, “Nation Formation and the Novel,” in Reading Chinua Achebe (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991): 1–23. 4 James Currey’s Africa Writes Back (Oxford: James Currey, 2008) is a testimony to the systematic inception of the African novel, the foundational role of Chinua Achebe and the genealogical development of this genre in Africa. 5 Extensive historiographies of the modern African novel have been undertaken by critics such as Keith Booker (Oxford: James Currey, 1998); Simon Gikandi (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991), and Emmanuel Ngara (London: Heinemann, 1985), all of them privileging Things Fall Apart as foundational in the history of the African novel. Elsewhere, Achebe’s independent biographer Ezenwa–Ohaeto has stated: “it was a fruitful decade for Heinemann Educational Books but taxing for Chinua Achebe, who continued to roll back the frontiers of African Literature, until soon he had a reputation – at the age of 32 – of a father figure in African literature” (Oxford: James Currey, 1997): 92. 6 I use the term ‘critical memory’ in the light of Houston Baker’s view in Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2001) where he argues that literary works of significance continue in present time as a critical memory of social anomie. Baker looks



Daughters of Sentiment

91

which, translated from Igbo, means ‘one who writes for the community’, a man of letters. From a Lacanian perspective, Achebe is a father figure, symbolic of the ‘the law’ and its letters. In the world of Things Fall Apart, the laws of the community are affirmed and validated according to the decrees of the forefathers. It is logical, then, that Things Fall Apart should have provided the standard of reference on African literature and particularly the African novel. Innes and Lindfors prophetically say: Both as a creative writer and as a critic, Achebe has had a great influence, particularly on younger African writers. His novels have made an especially powerful impression upon young Ibo writers who first became acquainted with his works as high school or university students.8

Half a century on, Things Fall Apart remains influential, establishing a genealogy in the family of African literature across the continent and particularly in the literary imagination of Nigeria’s long and turbulent history. This essay seeks to (re-)establish the currency of Things Fall Apart, and its continued influence in contemporary Nigerian fiction, through an examination of the dialogue between Achebe’s novel and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. This dialogue takes the literary template of a father–daughter relationship. In this relationship it is the possibility of an androgynous genealogyin-the-making, in which the fictional daughter embodies a patrilineal heritage, thereby problematizing her placement in the genealogically patrilineal familial line. The daughter creatively exploits that “sentiment” which Lynda Zwinger ascribes to a patriarchal framework of relations between father and daughter, in which the daughter’s acquiescence and self-abnegation are

back at the civil rights period in America, and the critical imagination that came out during that period, using the metaphor of ‘black fathers and sons’ to illustrate his point. 7 Gikandi, however, insists that this idea, as developed by many critics, is not the definitive marker of Things Fall Apart as a ‘foundational text’. In fact, for him, a celebration of Achebe in this light is reductive and to question it is to constructively refocus “African literary history away from chronology, from some outdated assumptions that the growth of African literature was the natural product of our recent history, that writing and historical development necessarily go hand in hand” (“Nation Formation and the Novel,” 2). 8 C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors, “Introduction” to Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. Innes & Lindfors (London: Heinemann, 1978): 5.

92

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



supposedly the protraction of the heterosexual relationship between her father and mother.9

Achebe’s Footsteps in the ‘Third Generation’ The dawn of a third republic in Nigeria in 1998 ushered in the twenty-first century and the advent of a post-military dispensation in Nigeria. I use the term ‘post-military’ primarily as a temporal marker.10 This period is also concurrent with fifty years of the modern literary imagination in Nigeria, one that has been defined in recent times by the emergence of “Nigeria’s Third Generation” of writers.11 This imagination has been embodied by a new generation of writers who, in the words of Abdoulrahman Waberi, have been described as “Children of the Postcolony.”12 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been included at the forefront of this group, as the most successful African writer of her generation, in terms both of her critical and her popular acclaim.13 It is quite propitious, then, that Adichie can be said to have “walked in the footsteps” of Achebe, in terms of her own background, culture, and literary development. Having lived, coincidentally, in the house in which Achebe once lived at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Adichie abandoned medical studies (as Achebe has done earlier), providing for us a specific historical connection between these two writers. Her relationship with Achebe is both his-

9

Lynda Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1991). 10 To speak of a ‘post-military’, while being careful not to imply distinctness of a period, might also imply a reconstruction of fragmented temporalities caused by the series of military regimes in Nigeria’s political history. 11 Pius Adesanmi & Chris Dunton, “Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations,” English in Africa 32.1 (2005): 7–19; and Brenda Cooper, A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2008). 12 Ali Abdourahman Waberi, “Les enfants de la postcolonie: Esquisse d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains francophones d’Afrique noire,” Notre Librairie 135 (1998): 8–15. 13 Classified in this group are writers who have mostly been published in the twentyfirst century, including Chris Abani, Helen Oyeyemi, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Jude Dibia, Chika Unigwe, Okey Ndibe, Uzodinma Iweala, Segun Afolabi, Ike Oguine and Akin Adesokan, among others.



Daughters of Sentiment

93

torical and literary. This is reflected in Adichie’s imagination of the father figure, which represents a conscious source of inspiration, affirmation, history, and identity. The presence of father figures, within either her familial, national, or imaginative space, gives rise to an imaginary informed by a complex sense of the ambivalence that accompanies the father–daughter relationship. Despite her being a “temporary sojourner,” the daughter entertains a relationship with her father that is sentimental, with a potential for love and hate, fear and awe. Lynda Zwinger explores the sentimental relationship of the father and daughter as it is portrayed in fiction, in its equivocated nature in relation to sonhood and fatherhood. Zwinger examines the fictional daughter’s relationship with her father as an alternative form of possession by her father through the idea of ‘sentiment’.14 Indeed, as Ato Quayson says, “The depiction of the relationship between fathers and their daughters in literary writing is as fraught as it is beautiful.”15 Adichie has stated that “As a child I thought my father invincible, I also thought him remote,”16 while in her essay “The Writing Life” she has described her encounter with, and her experience of writing at the altar of, her father – on his desk, in his study.17 Beyond her implicit assertions of the need for affirmation from her predecessor, the narrative conjunctures and disjunctures between Things Fall Apart and Purple Hibiscus enunciate conversations between a literary father and a daughter, one whom Achebe describes in incisively flattering terms:

14

Zwinger, “Introduction,” 3–10. Ato Quayson, “Introduction” to Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration, ed. Ato Quayson (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2008): 1. 16 Adichie, “As a child, I thought my father invincible. I also thought him remote,” The Observer (15 June 2008). 17 See “The Writing Life.” In many of her interviews and particularly her nonfictional essays, elaborate tribute is paid to the father figures of her life, Chinua Achebe and her biological father James Adichie – essays here include “The Writing Life,” “The exemplary chronicler of an African tragedy,” and “Truth and Lies.” The influence of Achebe on her imaginative work is particularly strong, and after the publication of her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, she points out in an interview that this novel is meant to “provoke conversation,” something quite evident in her continued attempts to create dialogue between her works and Achebe’s. See Adichie’s official website, http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/ (accessed 5 September 2008) and http://www.halfofayellowsun.com (accessed 5 September 2008). 15

94

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it […] Adichie came almost fully made.18

Indeed, the relationship between the writers is made explicit in the opening line of Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, when Kambili, the teenage girlnarrator, says: Things started to fall apart at home when my brother Jaja did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère. (1; emphasis mine)

The first words of Adichie’s novel immediately draw the astute reader into a conversation with Things Fall Apart and prompt an intertextual reading of Purple Hibiscus. Given the relationship between the two writers described above, it will be worthwhile to begin this critique with an examination of the dialogue Adichie creates with Things Fall Apart around the figure of the father and his relationship with the son before moving to discuss the father– daughter relationship in the novel. In the depiction of these relationships is a dialogue informed by the need to affirm critical sources of memory and father figures who embody not only the idea of identity (through genealogy, canon, and tradition) but also violence, ultra-patriarchy, and ultra-masculinity.

The Fathers: Of Critical Memories and Predetermined Legacies Okonkwo and Papa Eugene share a similar life-history, having both risen from humble origins to become elite members of their societies. On one level we are invited to read Okonkwo’s motive for becoming a successful farmer, wrestler, and ndichie as a reflection of Umuofia’s ideals. However, what actually inspires him is acutely paternal. Okonkwo, having built his own legacy, is also inspired by a deeply rooted psychological aversion to the improvidence, weakness, and idleness of his father Unoka, as the narrator makes clear: “He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had no patience with his father” (4). Okonkwo fears the replication of his father’s cowardice in his life: “unlike his father, he could stand the look of blood” (10); “it was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father” (13); “and indeed

18

See www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum (accessed 22 September 2008).



Daughters of Sentiment

95

he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death” (17). Like the archetypal son, Okonkwo seeks independence from his father, albeit inspired by his father’s failure and not by the desire to forge his own individual success and obtain approval from his father. But as the narrator says: “Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father” (7). Papa Eugene in Purple Hibiscus is equally venerated in his Abba community; he is an omelora: “one who does for the community,” a titled and magnanimous man of God, who, as Kambili says, is mentioned alongside the Catholic Pope and Jesus in the Trinity (4). Living a century apart, Okonkwo and Papa Eugene occupy wholly different temporal dispensations. Nonetheless, cultural forces are central to their quest for self-determination and the antagonistic relationship with their fathers is diacritical to these quests. Papa Eugene despises his father Papa Nnukwu, refers to him as a heathen, and forbids his children contact with their grandfather. When they go to visit him, they are allowed just fifteen minutes: “Kambili and Jaja you will go this afternoon to your grandfather’s house and greet him. Kevin will take you. Remember, don’t touch any food, don’t drink anything. And as usual, you will stay not longer than fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes.” (61)

Clearly, like Okonkwo, Eugene has no patience for his ‘heathen’ father and rejects the part of his cultural heritage that he represents. When we meet Unoka, the narrator says: “He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute” (4). Unoka lived in penury, something of his own creation, but he had a sharp sense of humour, as we witness in his dealings with Okoye, who he is in debt to. Like Unoka, Papa Nnukwu lives in indigence, as Kambili describes when we first meet him in his compound: Two goats and a few chickens sauntered around, nibbling and pecking at drying stems of grass. The house that stood in the middle of the compound was small, compact like dice, and it was hard to imagine Papa and Aunty Ifeoma growing up there. (63)

Similar to the narrator’s description of Unoka’s physique, Papa Nnukwu is described by Kambili thus: “Although he was stooped with age, it was easy to see how tall he once had been” (64). The poverty of Papa Nnukwu is immediately contrasted to his son’s wealth, as Kambili compares her father’s house

96

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



to that of her grandfather: “The compound was barely a quarter of the size of our backyard in Enugu” (63). Papa Nnukwu’s son is an upper-middle-class citizen in postcolonial Nigeria and yet, as Kambili says, his son Papa Eugene “sent him slim wads of naira through Kevin or through one of our umunna members, slimmer wads than he gave Kevin as a Christmas bonus” (62). Papa Eugene treats his father like a leper, which immediately draws parallels with Unoka’s ultimate fate in Things Fall Apart, where he dies as “an abomination to the earth goddess” (13). Papa Nnukwu’s heathenism is an abomination to his son, who avoids all contact with his father, although Papa Eugene is not beyond bribery when he promises to build his father a new house if he agrees to convert to Christianity. Therefore, Okonkwo and Papa Eugene, to use the narrator’s words in Things Fall Apart, “did not have the start in life which many young men had” (17). Both inherited nothing material from their fathers and sought to fashion their own legacies. As Gikandi says of Okonkwo, they both reject paternity and seek ‘self-invention’. However, as Gikandi observes, Okonkwo’s self-representation as a self-made man is an illusion. He claims that he has invented himself from ground zero, that he has rejected his paternity as a precondition for this self-invention; but his consciousness will still continue to be dominated by Unoka because he can only define himself against the negative forces represented by his dead father. So the unconscious links Okonkwo to Unoka in ways he would hate to contemplate; the laws that structure the son’s conscious acts have been predetermined by the father.19

The ‘unconscious’, for Okonkwo, is reified in the memory of being the laughing-stock of his playmates: Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was an agbala. (13)

This memory, predetermined by his paternity, can be understood as the ‘female principle’, for Umuofia, in the eyes of Okonkwo, is defined by masculine and feminine ideals, principles that Okonkwo always fails to moderate. This lack of moderation ultimately leads to his tragic hubris. Gikandi argues that Okonkwo never understood the dual-faced nature of Igbo values and never understood the Igbo proverb ‘wherever something stands, something 19

Simon Gikandi, “Writing, Culture and Domination,” in Reading Chinua Achebe (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991): 40.



Daughters of Sentiment

97

else will stand beside it’.20 This dictum, according to Suzanne Scafe, is the “principle of duality and difference” which is a “necessary condition of existence” in Igbo society.21 Papa Eugene’s idea of ‘self-invention,’ on the other hand, is expressed through a story he often tells Kambili: He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have us let other children come first. Nobody had spent money on his own schooling, especially not his Godless father, our Papa-Nnukwu, yet he had always come first (39).

Like Okonkwo, Papa Eugene is driven by his rejection of the legacy of his paternity. In a bid to build an ultra-paternal legacy, he enacts an ultra-masculinity that mirrors Okonkwo’s obsessive pursuit of masculine ideals. His mission education instils such rigid ideals of fatherhood in him that he begins to see himself as a kind of a deity, a god-like authority figure. In his paternal excesses, he fails to understand his daughter’s periods, corporally punishing her and the rest of the family when he finds her eating before a Eucharist mass because of period cramps. In another instance, when his pregnant wife refuses to visit the priest after Sunday mass, because of bouts of nausea, he beats her till she miscarries (30–33). Papa Eugene’s understanding of masculinity reflects a missionary upbringing which has supplanted human understanding with a spiritual one, rendering him irredeemably ‘manichaean’ – seeing the world as black and white, good and evil. Okonkwo’s own biased view of the world, seen through a framework of masculine and feminine principles, draws similar parallels.

The Daughters of Sentiment: Androgynous Genealogies Okonkwo’s and Papa Eugene’s relationships with their daughters reveal a different and complex story of their personalities. New genealogies are created that differ from the orthodox father–son genealogies which informed and inspired the male protagonists’ imaginations, fears, ambitions, and goals in life. 20

Gikandi, “Writing, Culture and Domination,” 40. Suzanne Scafe, “Wherever Something Stands, Something Else Will Stand Beside It: Ambivalence in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God,” Changing English 9.2 (October 2002): 119. 21

98

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



Ezinma, Okonkwo’s favourite daughter, stands out because of her egalitarian relationship with her mother Ekwefi. Born an ogbanje (spirit child), she straddles the physical and spiritual realms in Igbo cosmology. Her relationship with Okonkwo is a sentimental one, and Okonkwo expresses his fondness for her through a sanitizing framework of gender, all the time saying: “‘she should have been a boy’” (58). Yet Ezinma’s role is particularly important because she is able to bring out what Okonkwo suppresses – a gentleness, kindness, and fondness that he associates with femininity and, above all, his father. Ezinma’s demeanour reveals a different side of Okonkwo, in a manner that should allow Okonkwo to confront a more ‘feminine’ aspect of his personality, but instead he chooses to banish it. Ezinma also exposes Okonkwo’s rare existential moments of reflection: “she should have been a boy, Okonkwo said to himself again. His mind went back to Ikemefuna and he shivered” (58). Inspired by the encounter with Ezinma, he confronts the ‘feminine principle’ and chooses to supplant it with the revered ‘masculine principles’ of war and chivalry: “When did you become a shivering old woman”, Okonkwo asked himself, “you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valour in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.” (59).

Because of Ezinma, Okonkwo can allow himself a rare measure of sentimentality, a form of emotion that he would usually regard as being low in the hierarchy of individual values for titled men such as himself. Okonkwo projects his feminine sensibilities in his relationship with his daughter. It is a secret genealogy-in-the-making in Okonkwo’s mind, now that his son Nwoye, the ‘ash’ begotten by his fire, has become a ‘critical memory’ of his paternity, and the “ill-fated lad” Ikemefuna has died by Okonkwo’s own hand. Ezinma reveals Okonkwo in a different light; she functions as a form of conscience and reveals an ambivalent dimension to Okonkwo, while probing his fear of effeminacy and gentleness. She is the daughter of sentiment who arouses in the father a “romance predicated upon the figure of the sentimentalized, desirable daughter and shadowed by the figure of the defeated son.”22 Ezinma, as Zwinger describes her, is “a dutiful acolyte to her father, with a loving heart, an innocent mind.”23 It is Ezinma, during Okonkwo’s exile to his 22 23

Zwinger, “Introduction,” 9. Zwinger, “Introduction,” 5.



Daughters of Sentiment

99

motherland in Mbanta, who sustains Okonkwo’s pride after Nwoye has converted to Christianity. Gikandi reminds us not only that the role of Ezinma represents the “female principle without which his (Okonkwo’s) community cannot thrive” but also that Ezinma’s daughterhood represents a repressed ‘matrilineality’ that “will continuously haunt the narrative of identity.”24 Like Ezinma, Kambili’s relationship to Papa Eugene is situated in the ambivalence of possession and retention, love and hate, fear and awe. Kambili’s identity is ensconced in the discourse of her father. Her attachment and sentimental disposition towards a father who regularly and brutally beats her presents a dilemma that replicates that of the feminized Nwoye in Things Fall Apart. Living in perpetual fear of a god-like father who is mentioned in the same spiritual hierarchy as the Pope and Jesus,25 she consciously lives for him. As Nwoye “feigned that he no longer cared for women’s stories […] that his father was pleased and no longer rebuked him” (38), Kambili constantly feigned actions to please her father: And I would sit with my knees pressed together, next to Jaja, trying hard to keep my face blank, to keep the pride from showing, because Papa said modesty was very important. (5) I reached out quickly for my glass and took a sip […] I wanted to seem eager; may be if I talked about how good it tasted, Papa might forget that he had not yet punished Jaja. (12) I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have the spirit of discernment. (94).

Kambili’s sentiment towards her father is fearful, for he, like Okonkwo, rules his family with a heavy hand. A regimen of discipline and perfection is enforced by corporal punishment. Papa Eugene expects perfect scores at school and strict adherence to Catholic ritual. Yet Kambili actually loves her father and, through the violent encounters with him, she brings out those ‘grey’ areas and probes the ‘weaknesses’ at the heart of Papa Eugene’s personality; those that provide insight into his problematical paternal legacy and chasms within his masculine persona: 24

Simon Gikandi, “A Voyage Around my Daughter,” in Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration, ed. Ato Quayson (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2008): 70. 25 Even as Kambili describes this deity-like persona of her father, one can sense a critical distance – indeed, a sliverof irony – similar to Nwoye’s perception of the “mad logic” of the Trinity (134).

100

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



Papa crushed Jaja and me to his body. “Did the belt hurt you? Did it break your skin?” he asked, examining our faces […] Papa shook his head when he talked about liking sin, as if something weighed him down, something he could not throw off (102). He lowered the kettle into the tub, tilted it toward my feet. He poured the hot water on my feet, slowly, as if he were conducting an experiment and wanted to see what would happen. He was crying now, tears streaming down his face (194).

These very troubling scenes are also ironically definitive moments of connection for Kambili with her father – moments of self-abnegation for the sake of understanding him. This connection at a juncture of violence reveals equivocations in Papa Eugene’s character that, like the regrets of Okonkwo, tell a story different from the rationale of his actions. While, through his relationship with Ezinma, Okonkwo allows himself a measure of sentiment quite unlike his normal self, Papa Eugene’s relationship with Kambili builds a deeper sentiment in these acts of violence. These violent moments assumee a sadistic form of love bond between father and daughter. They are perhaps the only moments of ‘gentleness’ usually associated with femininity that Kambili can take advantage of to domesticate her father, to articulate resistance, and to expose the chasms in his fraught and frangible sense of identity, one that is illusively running away from its “paternal predetermination.”26 The final horrifically violent encounter between father and daughter arises when a painting of Papa Nnukwu is given to Kambili by her cousin Amaka. Kambili has at this point established a wilful and personal connection with her grandfather, something that Papa Eugene has proscribed in his household. In this instance, Papa Eugene yields to a fit of rage, one that re-enacts Okonkwo’s desperation and blind rage at giving up his son to the ‘effeminate’ Christian religion. Papa Eugene, in dementia-like fury, actually enacts his weakness and fractures the sentiment established by his daughter. Kambili exposes the epicentre of her father’s problematical identity, and thus confronts her father with a concrete image of what he has denied himself all his lifetime, his own father’s legacy: “Get up!” Papa said again. I still did not move. He started to kick me. The metal buckles on his slippers stung like bites from giant mosquitoes. He talked non-stop, out of control, in a mix of Igbo and English, like soft meat 26

Gikandi, “Writing, Culture and Domination,” 40.



Daughters of Sentiment

101

and thorny bones. Godlessness. Heathen worship. Hellfire. The kicking increased in tempo, and I thought of Amaka’s music, her culturally conscious music that sometimes started off with a calm saxophone and then whirled into lusty singing. I curled around myself tighter, around the pieces of the painting; they were soft, feathery. They still had the metallic smell of Amaka’s paint palette. The stinging was raw now, even more like bites, because the metal landed on open skin on my side, my back, my legs. Kicking. Kicking. Kicking. Perhaps it was the belt now because the metal buckle seemed too heavy. Because I could hear a swoosh in the air […] More stings. More slaps. A salty wetness warmed my mouth. I closed my eyes and slipped away into quiet (210–11).

Kambili re-inscribes, much to her father’s chagrin, a grand-paternal identification through the painting of her grandfather. Kambili’s weapon, her sentimental disposition towards her father (and now with her grandfather), allows her to link up with a paternal line of identity. She ironically acts as a seam between the frayed edges of an orthodox genealogical line, while at the same time creating a new one in which the daughter embodies a heritage, through ownership of the painted image of her paternal grandfather. The ‘feminized’ Nwoye in Things Fall Apart, as the narrator states, was not impressed by the “mad logic of the Trinity” but by “the poetry of the new religion” (103). These artistic sensibilities are an inheritance from his humorous and boisterous grandfather Unoka, who was full of life and had an appreciation of music and poetry. Similarly, Kambili’s eventual identification with her ‘heathen’ grandfather is not centred as much on his practice of traditional religion as on his gentleness and humorous logic. In a memory that Kambili quotes in detail, Papa Nnukwu not only expresses his amazement at the “mad logic” of the Trinity but also the same “mad logic’s” destruction of his relationship with his son: “I remember the first one that came to Abba, the one they called Fada John. His face was red like palm oil; they say our type of sun does not shine in the white man’s land. He had a helper, a man from Nimo called Jude. In the afternoon they gathered the children under the ukwa tree in the mission and taught them their religion. I did not join them, kpa, but I went sometimes to see what they were doing. One day I said to them, Where is this god you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is this person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew the white man was mad. The father and the son

102

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



are equal? Tufia! Do you not see? That is why Eugene can disregard me, because he thinks we are equal.” (84).

Papa-Nnukwu’s logic of the Trinity ironically reflects his son’s stature and status in the church: “father Benedict usually referred to the pope, Papa and Jesus – in that order” (4). This deification of Papa Eugene is made clear in another passage where he is personified as Jesus himself: He led the way out of the hall, smiling and waving at the many hands that reached out to grasp his white tunic as if touching him would heal them of an illness. (90–91)

Crucially, though, Kambili narrates these instances with a sense of irony and distance. Like Okonkwo’s wives and children, who recognize the masquerade with a ‘spring’ in his walk, Kambili apprehends the reality behind the godly status of her father: a wife-beater and a sadistic father who seemingly loves his wife and children yet genuinely believes in his violent actions. And yet, when her father dies, poisoned by her mother, Kambili eulogizes him: “I had never considered the possibility that Papa would die […] He had seemed immortal” (287).

Conclusion The daughters here occupy a subversive position in the familial line – they problematize the linearity of genealogy as well as its gendered formation in history. Using the sentimental disposition found in their relationships with their fathers, they blur the masculine–feminine dyad and complicate the image of the fathers as represented in the texts. While the image of the father in Umuofian society, as Achebe represents it, is relatively canonical, traditional, and genealogical, the image of the father in Kambili’s postcolonial world is, from the onset, problematized – its stability and legitimacy is threatened more closely by the cultural complexity of the postcolonial world that has made vulnerable institutions of socialization like the family. Bearing in mind the spatio-temporal specificities in both texts, the father–daughter nexus is a point of critical dialogue and sentiment for the two texts. This dialogue underwrites the foundational significance of Things Fall Apart but at the same time allows for the problematization of masculine/ paternal genealogies. Adichie grapples with the daughter’s sentimentality and the figure of the father, complicating it further by giving the daughter a more prominent role –



Daughters of Sentiment

103

allowing her to (re-)create a non-patriarchal genealogy by inflecting it with her presence as she grapples with the figure of the father on a highly psychological level. Ezinma, Okonkwo’s ogbanje (spirit-child) and his daughter of sentiment, has an androgynous appeal to Okonkwo. Yet, again, she is not an ordinary child, because of her ogbanje status. Like Ezinma, Kambili has a psychological superiority over her father, especially when he becomes violent. She is precocious and observant, dealing with her father on a highly psychological plane, reading the contortions of his face, the sighs, the tears, and the rashes as markers of deeper historico-identity problems (6, 15, 207-208, 212). Kambili harnesses the ‘critical memory’ embodied in her grandfather Papa-Nnukwu to establish and legitimize a genealogy with the patrilineal, albeit by problematizing the normative of masculinity essential to this same genealogy. Much as Papa Eugene can be considered a modern-day Okonkwo, the cultural forces have been reversed. While Okonkwo was battling with the forces of Christianity, Papa Eugene is battling with a ‘secularity’ he considers non-Christian, at the centre of which is his father’s belief in traditional religion, something that Okonkwo gave his life to protect. With Okonkwo and Papa Eugene on the point of death, there is a deafening silence, of knowledge, of hubris. As father figures, they have acted in the shadow of a critical paternal memory and legacy. In public life they projected a strong impression of masculinity that they believed reflected the ideals of their society. But their relationship with their daughters tells a subtle, nuanced, and feminine story. Their daughters become heirs of a new genealogy, in the shadows of ‘feminized’ and ‘failed’ sons and fathers. Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus converses with its half-a-century-old predecessor with the precocious intention of creating a genealogy of a literary father and daughter – an androgynous genealogy. It is an androgynous sense of literary tradition hereby engendered by a sentimental relationship existing between the two writers. The representation of the father–daughter relationship becomes a template for extending and problematizing historical constructions of literary genealogies in the family of modern African literature. Adichie acknowledges, and is influenced by, a patriarchal tradition and genealogy which she problematizes, allowing her to strike out along an androgynous path of influence that finds its literary capital by representing the complex affect of a father–daughter relationship. Adichie, in Purple Hibiscus, does this by going back to ‘the source’, acknowledging, affirming, re-creating a conversation that makes an instructive statement: Things Fall Apart remains germane and

104

CHRISTOPHER E.W. OUMA



foundational in influencing the imagination of these “children of the postcolony” who are Nigeria’s ‘Third Generation’ of writers.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Adesanmi, Pius, & Chris Dunton. “Everything Good is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation,” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): v–xii. ——. “Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations,” English in Africa 32.1 (2005): 7–19. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “As a child, I thought my father invincible. I also thought him remote,” The Observer (15 June 2008). ——. Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). ——. Purple Hibiscus (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 2003). Baker, Houston, Jr. Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2001). Boose, Lynda, & Betty Flowers. “Introduction” to Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda Boose & Betty Flowers (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1989): 1–4. Cooper, Brenda. A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2008). Currey, James. Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2008). Ezenwa–Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe (Oxford: James Currey, 1997). Gikandi, Simon. “Culture & Domination,” in Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991): 24–50. ——. “Nation Formation and the Novel,” in Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991): 1–23. ——. “A Voyage around my Daughter,” in Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration, ed. Ato Quayson (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2008): 46–70. Innes, C.L. Chinua Achebe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990). ——, & Bernth Lindfors, ed. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (London: Heinemann, 1978). Keith, Booker. The African Novel in English: An Introduction (Oxford: James Currey, 1998). Minson, Jeffrey. Genealogies of Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1985). Ngara, Emmanuel. Art and Ideology in the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1985). Okpewho, Isidore, ed. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). Quayson, Ato. Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2008).



105

Daughters of Sentiment

Scafe, Suzanne, “Wherever Something Stands, Something Else Will Stand Beside It: Ambivalence in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God,” Changing English 9.2 (October 2002): 119–31. Waberi, Ali Abdourahman. “Les enfants de la postcolonie: Esquisse d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains francophones d’Afrique noire,” Notre Librairie 135 (1998): 8–15. Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1991).



6

The Novelist as Teacher Things Fall Apart and the Hauntology of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

————

A

D AVID W HITTAKER

LTHOUGH IT WASN’T EVIDENT AT THE TIME OF PUBLICATION,

Things Fall Apart is now generally regarded as the first incarnation of an influential African literary aesthetic that was expressed by Chinua Achebe in his theoretical writings and later fiction. At the heart of this aesthetic is Achebe’s assertion that African writers have a crucial function to play in the processes of nationalist renewal and decolonization, based on a pivotal socio-political role and a didactic literary programme of recuperation and (re-)education. In this essay, I argue that the remarkable success of the diasporic Nigerian novel since the turn of the new millennium has problematized Achebe’s vision of the role of the African writer in a number of important ways, with a younger generation of writers often displaying very different literary sensibilities and perspectives. However, I also postulate that there is also compelling evidence of the enduring influence of Achebe’s radical literary agenda, which I elucidate in an analysis of the influence of Things Fall Apart, together with Achebe’s literary manifesto, on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s critically and popularly acclaimed novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart proved to be an immensely influential work for African writers, becoming the progenitor of a whole movement of fiction, drama, and poetry which focused on the revaluation of Africa’s history and cultures, and on representations of the culture conflicts that had their genesis

108

DAVID WHITTAKER



in the colonial era. However, it has not only been Achebe’s fiction that has influenced the development of African literature, for throughout his career he has been a prolific essayist who has written a number of important and influential theoretical works that explaine and define his views on the role and responsibilities of the African writer. His early essays “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (1962), “Africa and her Writers” (1963), “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), and “Colonialist Criticism” (1975);1 as well his more recent essays “My Home Under Imperial Fire” (2001) and “The Empire Fights Back” (2001),2 have all proved to be incisive interventions in debates on the nature, analysis, and orientation of African literature. In his renowned early essay “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), the first major question that Achebe addresses is the relationship between African writers and their readership. After caricaturing the contemporary European writer as a beatnik outsider in revolt against society, he argues that the African writer and the society that he writes about “live in the same place.”3 This notion of the African writer as an integral part of a community and culture – which are also the principal subject of that writer’s work – is an important one for Achebe. He rejects the assumption that African writers were writing for a European and American readership, pointing to the fact that the sales of the cheap paperback editions of his first two novels were twenty times higher in Nigeria than in Britain in the previous year. Unlike the European literary outsider, Achebe argues that the African writer must seek to maintain an important social position and responsibility within his own society, one that he defines as being akin to a ‘teacher’. Achebe goes on to define his literary agenda in terms of a broader postcolonial project: Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse – to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word. Here, I think my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet.4 1

These four essays were collected in Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann Educational, 1975). 2 These two essays were collected in Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003). 3 Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann Educational, 1975): 42. 4 Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” 44.



The Novelist as Teacher

109

Achebe may have been understating the case somewhat when he describes his aims as “an adequate revolution for me to espouse,” yet it is clear that there are three chief aspects to his undoubtedly radical literary vision: education, historical and cultural recuperation, and the social role of the writer. In the same essay, Achebe also famously pronounced: I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that the past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind. And I don’t see that the two need be mutually exclusive.5

In this pivotal essay, Achebe’s insistence on the social role of the writer, and his programme of cultural (re-)education, become the cornerstones of a literary manifesto calling for a radical applied literature in Africa. In an even earlier essay, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation” (1964), published only four years after Nigerian independence in 1960, Achebe explicitly argues that the contemporary African writer has a crucial role to play in the process of decolonization in the former colonies. In order to counter the manichaean discourse of European imperialism, Achebe asserts that the African writer “cannot escape the conclusion that the past needs to be recreated not only for the enlightenment of our detractors but even more for our own education.”6 The implication is that African literature could take its place in the vanguard of the decolonization movement by rehabilitating African historicity, which had effectively been disavowed in the discourse of colonialism. The question, for Achebe, becomes one of method. In this essay, his vision of African literature as an ‘applied art’ in the service of decolonization is explicitly affiliated with one of the central claims of classic realism: the desire for clarity, transparency, integrity, and truthful representation.7 The confidence that Achebe expresses in an African form of literary realism, however vaguely defined, may have been out of step with much contemporary Western literature in the 1950s and 1960s but it was certainly aligned with, and reflective of, the wider contemporary ideological emphasis on empiricism 5

Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” 45. Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation” (1964), in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G.D. Killam (London: Heinemann, 1973): 9. 7 Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” 9. 6

110

DAVID WHITTAKER



and rationality that was evident in the political ideology of the nationalist movement in Nigeria before the civil war.8 Achebe was not the only voice championing a form of literary realism and social engagement for African literature, but he was certainly the most highly profiled and committed proponent of what was to become one of the dominant forms of literary production in West African fiction from the 1950s through to the end of the 1970s. For those of us with an interest in sub-Saharan African literature, the period after 1980 was often a frustrating time, in terms of the quality and quantity of literature being published. Interesting and important works were occasionally being produced but, on the whole, the immense promise that had attended the explosion of African literary production in the decades after the Second World War had largely dissipated. This view has persisted in some quarters, and as recently as 2006 Charles E. Nnolim still felt prompted to observe: As we know, literature is judged always in relation to its social function; the better the function is fulfilled the better the literature. A spiritual vacuum seems to have crept in toward the end of the 20th century, among African writers; an ashen paralysis that has not spared our most celebrated writers of that epoch.9

Taking the example of contemporary writing and publishing in Nigeria as a paradigm of the perceived malaise in African literature, he goes on to declare that “African literature in the twentieth century seemed to have reached a point of exhaustion.”10 Leaving aside, for the moment, Nnolim’s assessment of the state of contemporary African literature, what is of note is how he reiterates the view that the ‘best African literature’ is that which can be judged to have succeeded the most in its social function, a critical position akin to that first propounded over forty years earlier by Achebe.

8

For further discussion of why Achebe’s choice of a realist mode of fiction was conditioned by its historical context, see Mick Jardine’s essay “Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, and the Politics of Magic” (24n37 above). 9 Charles E. Nnolim, “African Literature in the 21st Century: Challenges for Writers & Critics,” in New Directions in African Literature, ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu (Oxford: James Currey, 2006): 2. 10 Nnolim, “African Literature in the 21st Century,” 2.



The Novelist as Teacher

111

What is more curious, however, is that Nnolim appears to have been unaware of the groundswell of publications in the first years of the new century, which heralded a palpable renaissance in African literature, and Nigerian literature in particular. Prior to Nnolim’s publishing his pessimistic views in 2006, important and ground-breaking works of fiction by a new generation of young Nigerian writers had already appeared – such writers as Biyi Bandele, Helen Oyeyemi, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Segun Afolabi, Uzodinma Iweala, Chris Abani, Okey Ndibe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to name but a few. What may account for Nnolim’s blindness to these developments is that there are a number of crucial differences between this new generation of Nigerian writers and their literary forebears. The first, and most notable, difference is that, although these young authors were all born in Nigeria, they all live and work, to a significant extent in most cases, in either Britain or America. A large number have also attended universities in Britain or America and they have often been actively involved in creative-writing courses. The experience of living in the West also exposes them to literary and cultural influences, particularly contemporary trends in literary and cultural theory. Another significant difference is that all of this younger generation of writers were born after the nationalist struggle achieved independence from colonial rule in 1960. Cultural and political nationalism often defined and informed the work of the earlier generation of African writers, but it has been replaced by other concerns in that of the younger generation of writers, who often depict the corruption and breakdowns in the political systems of African nations. The result of these differences, I believe, are sometimes profound, in that this young generation of Nigerian authors are now often writing from distinctly diasporic perspectives that inevitably deeply influence the work they are producing. The other major difference for this new generation is the way they publish their work, and their readerships, intended or otherwise, which are very different from that of the earlier generation of writers. Most of them have had their work brought out by multinational British or American publishers. Achebe’s notion that the African writer should “live in the same place” as the society he writes about, and for, is no longer a tenable one for these younger writers, who are now part of the African diaspora and successfully writing for a global audience. Given all the changes I have outlined, what is interesting is the continuing influence of Chinua Achebe’s literary aesthetic on a number of these younger writers. The contemporary Nigerian writer who has been most obviously marked by Achebe is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She has been described as

112

DAVID WHITTAKER



the most exciting literary talent to emerge from Nigeria since Achebe, and her work has garnered unprecedented critical and popular acclaim for a young African writer. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus,was published in 2003 and was immediately recognized as the work of a talented new voice in African literature. With the publication of her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, in 2006 came even more plaudits. All of this is all the more surprising if one considers that Half of a Yellow Sun is set against the backdrop of the Nigerian civil war of 1967–70, when the self-proclaimed state of Biafra attempted to secede from the Nigerian republic. The novel begins in the early 1960s, and examines the gradual decline from the optimistic era of Nigerian independence in 1960 through to the years of the devastating civil war, a conflict that became globally synonymous with war by starvation. This most traumatic period in modern Nigerian history was extensively documented in the country’s fiction in the years following the conflict but has rapidly faded from the collective consciousness, both in Nigeria and in the wider world. Determined to ensure that this seminal period in Nigerian history is not forgotten, Adichie gives the conflict a human dimension by focusing on the war’s impact on civilian life in Biafra, as well as the trauma suffered by conscripted boy soldiers and the brutalization of their Nigerian opponents. This focus on the human aspect of the war is given a personal significance by Adichie’s poignant dedication of the book to her two grandfathers, who did not survive the conflict. We are left with no illusions as to where Adichie’s loyalties lie in her depiction of the conflict, the title of the novel describing the Biafran flag. Adichie has always been quick to profess her admiration for the work of her fellow Igbo Achebe, and her acknowledgment of the influence of his work on this novel is no exception. The epigraph for the novel comes from a poem about the war by Achebe, from his collection Biafra and Other Poems. In an unusual strategy for a work of fiction, Adichie provides a bibliography-cumrecommended reading list of some thirty works of fiction and non-fiction at the end of the novel, a list that also includes Achebe’s collection of short stories Girls at War. Achebe, of course, had also played a prominent role in the Biafran government during the war, travelling the world as an ambassador tirelessly promoting the struggle for independence. But it is the legacy of Achebe’s literary aesthetic that is clearly evident in the opening lines from an essay Adichie published in the Guardian at the time her novel was published: The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an emphatic human quality, or “emotional truth”. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognize it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more



The Novelist as Teacher

113

resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows. When I started my second novel Half of a Yellow Sun [...] I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait.11

Adichie goes on to devote much of the essay to examine how Achebe’s stories in Girls at War embody the quality of “emotional truth” that she most admires and herself aspires to. What is more surprising is that the influence of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart on Adichie’s novels has not been more widely acknowledged. In Purple Hibiscus, there are clear antecedents for the figure of the tyrannical Papa Eugene and his relationship with his daughter Kambili in Things Fall Apart’s Okonkwo and his relationship with his daughter Ezinma. Similarly, one can see a strong resemblance between Okonkwo’s fraught relationship with his father Unoka and Papa Eugene’s fractured one with his father PapaNnukwu in Purple Hibiscus. The principal thematic concerns of the novel involve inter-generational conflict and the pressures faced by traditional African cultures and religions when Christianity is introduced, themes familiar to anyone who has encountered Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the main protagonists is Odenigbo, a radical mathematics lecturer at the University of Nsukka, in what was to become the secessionist state of Biafra. In a number of ways he can be understood as a modern reincarnation of Okonkwo, the tragic hero of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Like Okonkwo, Odenigbo is a highly esteemed and successful member of Igbo society who becomes a radical nationalist. Where Okonkwo becomes a champion of Umuofian autonomy against European colonialism, so Odenigbo becomes a fervent supporter of Biafra’s aspirations for independence from Nigeria, which leads to his friends’ giving him the half-in-jest nickname of “the revolutionary freedom fighter.” Like Okonkwo, Odenigbo also has his personal flaws: he has a strong sense of individualism and a fiery personality, is quick to anger and slow to forgive. We are immediately alerted to Odenigbo’s filiation with the physical presence and heroic attributes of Okonkwo in the first pages of the novel, when the young village boy Ugwu is sent to become his servant, and describes his new employer: “He was not tall. His walk was brisk, energetic, and he looked like Ezeagu, the man who held the wrestling record in

11

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Truth and lies,” The Guardian (16 September

2006).

114

DAVID WHITTAKER



Ugwu’s village.”12 This identification with the tragic figure of Okonkwo is made clear towards the end of the novel, when the demoralized and halfstarved Odenigbo is despondently contemplating the imminent defeat of his beloved Biafra by Nigerian forces and their supporters in the West. He suggests to his wife Olanna that he should join the army in order to support a doomed last-ditch stand against the Nigerian forces, which elicits this response from her: “‘You might as well find a sturdy tree and a rope, Odenigbo, because that’s an easier way to commit suicide’” (331). The influence of Things Fall Apart on Adichie’s novel is more significant and extensive than the reincarnation of the ‘revolutionary freedom fighter’ Okonkwo in her modern-day character Odenigbo, however. Just as Achebe looked back to a pivotal moment in Nigerian history to examine the farreaching effects of the colonial encounter, so Adichie looks back to the most traumatic event in Nigeria’s history since independence to highlight contemporary conflicts in the country. She achieves this by having the novel narrated by four of its principal characters: Olanna, the partner of Odenigbo; her twin sister Kainene; Richard, an Englishman drawn to the Biafran cause by his interest in Igbo art and his love of Kainene; and, finally, Ugwu, Odenigbo’s young servant. Adichie deftly explores the complexity of modern Nigeria by describing, often through a series of cinematic flashbacks, the intricacies of the social, economic, and ethnic differences in the country. In one resonant section of the novel, we see Olanna, an Igbo, with her ex-boyfriend from the north, the Hausa Muslim Mohammed, and the lengths he goes to protect and support her, despite the putative differences between the two ethnic groups that have spiralled into bloody conflict. The scenes in which Olanna witnesses the slaughter of her Igbo relatives in the north by their former friends and neighbours, an example of what is now euphemistically termed ‘ethnic cleansing’, are particularly harrowing. She barely escapes the bloody interethnic violence, and is traumatized by the events she witnesses. Adichie is often at her best in the novel in the way she describes how the ethnic tensions in the country gradually and insidiously erode and poison relationships between friends, colleagues, and previously peacefully coexisting neighbours from different ethnic groups and religions. The major political conflict at the heart of the novel is the desire for the Igbo-dominated state of Biafra to exist autonomously from the control of the 12

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (London: HarperCollins,

2006): 6. Further page references are in the main text.



The Novelist as Teacher

115

Nigerian republic. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe describes the Igbo heartland as traditionally a very egalitarian and democratic society, one that historically had no rulers with autocratic powers, either centrally or locally. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie describes how this long-maintained tradition of egalitarian democracy again comes into conflict, not with an invading colonial power, but with the postcolonial nation-state. While the conflict is characterized as being one between a newly independent nation-state and the secessionist claims of one regional part of the population, Adichie also describes the war in terms of neocolonialism. It is British-supplied planes that terrorize starving Biafran civilians with an indiscriminate bombing campaign. And it is with an Achebe-like sense of grim irony that Adichie also describes how the deadly malnutrition that afflicts the Biafran children, kwashiorkor, is popularly dubbed ‘Harold Wilson Syndrome’ after the former colonial power’s Prime Minister and his country’s complicity in the war. Things Fall Apart has been criticized for the way in which Achebe excised and marginalized subaltern voices, particularly female ones, from a culture that revered a powerful ‘female principle’ in the metaphysical, ontological, and cosmological systems that govern it. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun can be understood as a direct response to this perceived failing: her decision to make two of the main narrators of the novel, the female twins Olanna and Kainene, becomes doubly significant. They represent the silenced and marginalized female voices that are absent from Things Fall Apart, as well as representing the ghostly voices of the twins that are left to die in Umuofia’s forests. The other narrative voices in the novel are similarly significant. The young village boy Ugwu is an Ikemefuna-like presence in the narrative – Odenigbo immediately recognizes the qualities of the boy and takes him under his wing, treating him like a son and protégé. The other narrative voice in the novel is that of Richard, an Englishman drawn to Nigeria by his interest in Igbo pottery, who plans to write a book about his journey and discoveries but ends up becoming an eyewitness reporter on the conflict for the outside world. He is gradually drawn into the conflict through his relationship with Kainene, and is eventually proud to call himself a Biafran. In an interesting postmodern intertextual twist on one of the central ironies in Things Fall Apart, Adichie inserts into her novel passages from a purportedly historical analysis of the history and antecedents of the Biafran conflict, titled “The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died.” The mystery of who has written the book incorporated as a historical metatext in Half of a Yellow Sun, together with its status and provenance, is only revealed at the end of the

116

DAVID WHITTAKER



novel. This metatextual device can be understood as a reference to the end of Things Fall Apart, where the District Commissioner muses about the book he is contemplating writing about his part in the colonial conflict, which he has speculatively titled “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.” Instead of a speculative historical account written by the uncomprehending victor in the conflict, as in Things Fall Apart, “The Book” signifies a veracious text which records the reality of the historical encounter, only this time written from the perspective of the defeated and traumatized side. What Adichie does in Half of a Yellow Sun, on one level, is to create an inverted mirror image, a subverted double of Things Fall Apart, by narrating the story from the positions elided in Achebe’s fictional hierarchy of voices. Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel haunted, in a Derridean sense, by the ghost of Okonkwo and the marginalized and voiceless spectres of Things Fall Apart. Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is certainly one of the most important African novels to have been written in the last twenty years. Not only because of the popular and critical acclaim that it has garnered around the world, but because it represents a contemporary reworking of Achebe’s literary aesthetic and radical vision of African literature as a means of recuperation and (re-)education. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a novel that looked back elegiacally at a precolonial culture and to the epochal changes wrought by British colonialism, yet it is also a text that looked forward to the future, inscribed with both the idealism and the anxieties of the decade in which it was written. It is this sense of Achebe’s Janus-like ‘double vision’ that made Things Fall Apart such a uniquely prescient work in 1958. In a similar way, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is Janus-faced, for, in looking back to recall and memorialize the ideals of the Biafrans and the conflicts that triggered the disastrous Nigerian civil war, along with its enormous human cost in death and trauma, it also compels us to confront and understand the reality of conflicts in contemporary Nigeria and around the world, whether in Bosnia, Rwanda, or Darfur.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975): 42–45. ——. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G.D. Killam (London: Heinemann, 1973): 7–13. Originally in Nigerian Libraries 1.3 (1964): 113–19, and Nigeria Magazine 81 (1964): 157–60.



117

The Novelist as Teacher

——. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). ——. Purple Hibiscus (London: Fourth Estate, 2004). ——. “Truth and lies,” The Guardian (16 September 2006). Nnolim, Charles E. “African Literature in the 21st Century: Challenges for Writers & Critics,” in New Directions in African Literature, ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu (Oxford: James Currey, 2006): 1–9.



7

Re-Inventing Africa

————

M ALIKA R EBAI M AAMRI

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Assia Djebar’s L’ Amour, la fantasia

If the definition of the Self needs the confrontation with the Other to mark its own borders, it is undoubtedly [colonialism] as the most intensive conflict between cultures, which effects the strongest motivation for the shaping of the cultural self-image.1

Q

S E L F A N D T H E O T H E R A R E A T T H E R O O T of many crucial issues in European thought. If Aristotle viewed the Other as a reflection of the soul necessary to complete individual flourishing within a pattern of civic friendship in the polis, for Hobbes, the Other carried the threat of domination and annihilation.2 In the context of the dominant and dominated, which characterizes the discourse of colonialism, the dominant group sets the pattern for what is ‘normal’ in societies directly or indirectly controlled by them. It has become, then, ‘normal’ to subjugate and eradicate the colonized peoples’ cultures, and to erase their histories. By “deny[ing] the [colonized] person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In

1

UESTIONS OF THE

Gabriela Hima, “War as Conflict and Contact,” in Postcolonialism and Fiction in English, ed. Anu Shukla (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2004): 120. 2 Quoted by Chris Tiffin & Alan Lawson, De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994): 64.

120

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



reality, who am I?’.”3 One of the main forms of opposition to cultural imperialism has therefore been the quest of the Self for its moorings and the restoration of cultural identity. Postcolonial writers are “writing back”4 to the centre, debunking clichés produced by the masters, hence paving the way for a deep questioning of the nature of Otherness and an increasing interest in the formation of postcolonial national identities. This essay attempts to chart the transformations of a constant identity-crisis with reference to the Other in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), by the francophone Algerian writer Assia Djebar, and to consider these novels as instances of a broader manifestation of cultural expression in the African world.

I

Hyphenated Identities

Although Hegel never visited Africa proper, he laid down a stunning criticism of the continent and its people upon which some future Western readings eventually followed. According for Hegel, Africa proper, as far as History goes back [...] exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state [...] there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in that type of character.5

Ostensibly, the determining factors that set African people on the margins were their so-called irrationality, their ‘deficiency’ in reasoning, and their ‘excessive’ emotional behaviour. A false perception of their societies and ways of life helped perpetuate their image as primitive peoples. This lack of knowledge about the native culture together with pseudo-scientific claims helped reinforce the white man’s belief in his superiority. This so-called cultural superiority served as evidence for the imperialists to promote themselves as the saviours of a world weighed down by an inferior civilization, and to legitimize the takeover of ‘primitive’ peoples on the grounds that ad3

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967): 200 (“Colonial War and Mental Disorders”). 4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). 5 Quoted in Lyn Innes, The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1990): 10. (Emphasis mine).



Re-Inventing Africa

121

vanced societies like theirs should have first claim on the global environment. This gave them the right to trespass against the laws of humanity and morality as shown by the peculiar experiences of Algeria and Nigeria. The historical processes initiated under French rule in Algeria find parallels in Nigeria under British colonization. Because of the barbarism of the war of conquest and the extent of the destructuring of Algerian and Nigerian societies, colonization resulted in the fossilization of these cultures. In their new-found sense of mission, the colonizer tried diligently to alter the very nature of the natives’ life by displacing old values and initiating a cultural invasion of both the Algerian / Nigerian territories and their people’s minds. The idea of the civilizing mission was certainly the bulwark justifying colonialism/imperialism. In their endeavour to civilize the natives, the British and French colonizers created for them a state of perpetual Otherness. They destructured then restructured them, and in the process depersonalized them. The distinctiveness of the Igbo and Algerian cultures, along with their individuality, had been effaced through the colonizing agents of education, religion, and language. This inevitably resulted in a sense of profound cultural dislocation and loss of identity – hence the colonized peoples’ anticolonial struggle through the revival of a culture that attempted to assert difference from the colonizer. Writing thus became an expression of the native’s cultural (dis)location and concomitant relocation from what Homi Bhabha terms the in-between space, a space of liminality,6 an absolutely necessary stage in the struggle for cultural self-definition. As members of societies victimized by systemic and persistent imperial violence and colonial domination, Achebe and Djebar sought to free themselves from a eurocentric discourse that had subverted historical narratives, and in so doing to re-establish the legitimacy of indigenous culture. Things Fall Apart and L’Amour, la fantasia are landmark works in anglophone and francophone fiction respectively, both in their inside depiction of the historic dislocation wrought by colonialism on Nigerian and Algerian people and their cultures, and in their bold attempt to redefine that past to help determine the future.

6

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture: Discussing Post-Colonial Culture (London: Routledge, 1996): 86.

122

II

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



Challenging Hierarchies

Achebe was among the first African writers to take up history in the construction of a postcolonial identity. Igbo culture, he observes, “lays a great deal of emphasis on differences, on dualities, on otherness.”7 He thus regarded his first book to be an “act of atonement with [his] past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son.”8 Confronted by the overwhelming hegemony of colonialist rhetoric on Africa, the Nigerian writer attempted to re-establish his society’s values and beauty by re-creating the Igbo past, as crystallized in the tale of Umuofia and its inhabitants. Achebe portrays Umuofia, in the first thirteen chapters, as a proud and stable society, vibrant with music, dance, and festivities. By rescuing the precolonial past and constructing the ritualistic human ties of Umuofian society, Achebe fashions a cultural matrix to show its disintegration when the British arrived in the first decades of the twentieth century. His use of communal rituals, local deities, proverbial wisdom, and the land itself reinforce the existence of a once powerful traditional society. Such rituals are intended to provide a cultural background to the characters, and underline the fact that they should not be regarded as merely exotic quirks.9 This depiction also points to a radical deflection from the image provided by the colonial text, which marked off Africans as people without history and Africa as “a landscape without figures, an Africa without Africans,” to use David Carroll’s words.10 In the lively, self-assured, and civilized society that Achebe recreates in Things Fall Apart, the will of the community remains supreme. It is worth noting that the African writer has been nurtured in a society where the sense of community is very strong. Hence, the popular sentiment among the Igbos, as found among other Africans, is ‘I am because we are and since we are, therefore I am’.11 In ideological terms, the circle formed by the community has a dual function: it allows Umuofia to evoke its identity, but it also 7

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989): 58. 8 Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, 193. 9 Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (Oxford: James Currey, 1991): 33. 10 David Carroll, Chinua Achebe: Novelist, Poet and Critic (London: Macmillan, 1980): 27. 11 Quoted in Understanding “Things Fall Apart”: Selected Essays and Criticism, ed. Solomon Iyasere (New York: Whitston, 1998): 108–109.



Re-Inventing Africa

123

permits the narrator to display the elements of alienation and disjunction. In this sense, the community may be viewed as a protagonist struggling against Western intruders to maintain its cultural practices. Achebe’s vision of community life is also symbolically embedded in the ceremony of the kola nut, a sacramental ritual that binds the community together and provides a context in which human exchange occurs. We are told that “he who brings kola brings life.”12 Hence, what an Igbo person cherishes most is to live a good and worthy life here on earth, then to die and receive full and proper burial rites. This could only be achieved within a proper moral order. This assertion about Igbo life-style makes their society come alive as a vibrant and vital human community, a picture also dramatized in the drum scene in chapter five. As a musical instrument, the drum is highly significant in African culture, as Achebe underlines when he states that “their frantic rhythm is the very heartbeat of the people” (43). Similarly, the rituals of the marketplace are important in Igbo culture. In Things Fall Apart, the market is shown not only as a microcosm of the community but as also serving as a place of wealth, one in which the spirits of the ancestors express “all the threads of which the social fabric is composed” (62). Wealth here is a mark of dominance and presence in a culture. The references to wealth also denote the transition from one period to another, from the precolonial to the colonial era. Wealth embodied in the number of yams owned is a symbol of a culture’s productive forces, and colonization in the novel is predicated on the usurping of this form of wealth. Further instances such as the dance of the ancestral spirits, their gestures, and even formal greetings are in no sense mere ornamentation, but are intended to furnish a cultural background to the characters and to indicate the values that govern Umuofian society. It is also a way for Achebe to stress the foreignness of the Europeans and the differences in cultural aesthetics and to show that what is revered by one group represents to the alien Other unspeakable rituals. Such beliefs as the sacred symbol of the python, for instance, appear to the Christians as ‘fetishistic’. That a culture clash is looming becomes evident when one of the new converts is reported to have killed and eaten the sacred python (138). A discussion of Igbo philosophy must also involve consideration of traditional Igbo religion.

12

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958): 3. Further references are in the main text.

124

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



African traditional understanding of the world and reality as a whole is religious and holistic. Odinani is the name given to Igbo traditional religious beliefs and practices, and is polytheistic, with Chukwu as the supreme god; but there are numerous other lesser deities in their pantheon. Linguistically speaking, the name Chukwu is a portmanteau of the Igbo words chi (spiritual being) and ukwu (great in size). The Igbo believe that every person has an ineffable guiding spirit called chi, assigned to him/her at birth, and that their success in life is determined by this spirit. The concept of chi is discussed at various points in Things Fall Apart and is important for our understanding of Okonkwo as a tragic hero. Okonkwo’s chi allows him to become one of the most successful men of his generation before his downfall. In Igbo cosmology, moreover, man’s success does not depend solely on his personal prowess, but must obtain the blessing of the spirit-world of the gods; the will of the deities is sought before any major decision is taken. Likewise, the village meetings, with the arrival of the masked spirits of the egwugwu and the awe with which the traditional rituals are observed in their minutest details, give the reader an insight into tribal laws and customs, the very cement of Igbo community. In addition, every great issue and every war waged in Umuofia requires the consent of Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves. Achebe explains that the Feast of the New Yam is held yearly before the start of the harvest “to honour the earth goddess and the ancestral spirits of the clan” (31). The deities’ commands have to be strictly obeyed or terrible punishment will be meted out. Okonkwo is made to understand this when he beats his wife during the Week of Peace and is determined not to stop it “half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess” (25). Consequently, he is castigated for negating the basic laws that govern social relationships in his community. To further buttress his argument that the indigenous culture is as praiseworthy as the colonizer’s, Achebe underlines not only that the Igbos have a well-developed system of religion which works as effectively as Christianity but also that both religions operate along similar lines to support morality. Although Mr Brown, the white missionary, cannot see the Igbos’ religious beliefs as equal in worth to those he holds to be true, he nonetheless tries to learn about Umuofian religious tenets from Akunna, a titled man. Mr Brown’s successor, the Reverend James Smith, however, condemns this policy of compromise, as the narrator ironically observes: he saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light [the Europeans], were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness [the Africans]. (158)



Re-Inventing Africa

125

Accordingly, he cannot see the Africans as anything other than mere savages. We should recall that it is on these grounds that the missionaries undertook a razing of Igbo culture, attempting, as it were, to reshape the Igbos’ faith and world-view, creating discord in the family and thus undermining the whole structure of Igbo society. The priestess of Agbala in Umuofia spitefully calls the Christians “the excrement of the clan [and] the new faith [...] a mad dog that had come to eat it up” (101). The process of conversion urged by the missionaries, moreover, is important because it questions the old hierarchy of values and re-centres those who have been marginalized. Achebe gives the reader the first Igbo description of the impact of that encounter between Igbo traditional religion and Christianity when Obierika laments the breakup of his clan’s harmonious existence: “How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us. The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” (152)

The above words articulate the sentiments expressed by an Igbo elder after realizing how the new religion had gone in terms of winning converts and dividing the members of the clan. The Igbos’ despair is revealed through one of the listeners, who asks the missionary: “‘If we leave our gods and follow your god, who will protect us from the anger of our neglected gods and ancestors?’” (126). In response, the missionary nastily replies: “‘Your gods are not alive [...] They are pieces of wood and stone’” (126–27).13 The Christian missionary in Mbanta also objects to the Igbo gods, on the grounds that they tell the Igbos to kill each other (132). From the British perspective, indeed, war is a marker of African identity. The British missionaries believe that the Africans are always fighting one another because they are primitive people, thus they require a civil European presence to restore peace. But Achebe refutes this argument – the Igbos fight as a matter of survival, and besides, the Europeans kill far more than the Igbos. The narrator cites the example of the

13

It is worth recalling that the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Romans all indulged in idolatrous worship. And Stonehenge in Southern England is lithic evidence of Druidism, which was the heathen worship of the early inhabitants of the British Isles. Human sacrifice was a part of Druid worship and was abolished only in the Roman period.

126

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



British who wiped out the village of Abame in retaliation for the death of one white man (119). In contrast, Achebe shows Igbo religion as providing for its people a viable system of morality. In addition to revealing that Igbo religion is not inferior to Christianity, Achebe demonstrates that the Igbos have a well-established system of justice which the British have replaced with their system of commissioners and court messengers. Achebe delineates the importance of the egwugwu, the greatest masked spirits of the clan, as the upholders of the laws of the land. The strength and stability of Igbo social structure is highlighted indirectly through the respect given to the cult: One of the greatest crimes a man could commit was to unmask an egwugwu in public, or to say or do anything which might reduce its immortal prestige in the eyes of the uninitiated. And this is what Enoch did. (160)

Enoch’s crime threw Umuofia into confusion. Desecrating an egwugwu is construed as the murder of the spirit of the ancestors, a crime even greater than manslaughter. Achebe also shows the steps taken to maintain the anonymity of the judges, thereby ensuring probity and impartiality, and avoiding corruption; at the same time, he subtly points to the corruption endemic in the imposition of the colonial system of justice through such instances as the white man who allocated a piece of disputed land to Nnama’s family because she bribed the white man’s messenger, and the reference to the fine of two hundred bags of cowries that the district Officer levied as a penalty (167). Achebe thus attempts a corrective view of Igbo cultural traditions to remind the outside world, as well as his own people, that Africa “was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them,”14 insisting that it had contained much of value before the coming of the white man. Recovering the past is also a tool Assia Djebar uses in order to counter the myopic view of Africa displayed in colonial texts and to re-invent an Algerian world. Taking her lead from Achebe, Djebar has written about the havoc wrought upon her country during French colonialism, and examines postcolonial issues of place, fragmented identity, marginalized voices, and the language of rupture. The re-writing of history is indeed a common step in the project of nationalism, but most often the revised history of a colonized nation 14

Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1975): 45.



Re-Inventing Africa

127

has been androcentric. Like many feminist theorists of nationalism, Djebar thus contends that nationalism must work to incorporate a gender-aware imperative if it is to be rethought in a fully liberatory and transformative way.

III

Guarding Against Absence

Djebar affords insights into the representation of women throughout the history of Algeria and provides a link to the silencing, or false representation, of the colonized explored in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, but her chief focus is the double heritage of colonial and patriarchal oppression. L’Amour, la fantasia, the first novel in a quartet, deals explicitly with the double colonization of women by dominant colonial powers and by their male counterparts. Djebar engages in a contrapuntal reading to bring new interpretations to the history of colonial Algeria by including the previously occulted participation of Algerian women in their own national history. For her, the reconstruction of Algeria revolves around the role of women as well. Thus she chooses the female perspective to explore the problems involved in the emancipation of her nation from its former oppressor and parallels it with Algerian women’s struggle for equal rights with the male population. Djebar recovers the historical and cultural discourse of the French on the conquest of Algeria, giving it a sexualized cast15 to highlight the violation and sequestration of the colonizer, showing that the conquest of Algeria by France is akin to the rape of woman by the male. Sexuality in the novel is interpreted as essentially an encounter with the forbidden Other, but instead of an erotic adventure, the sense of estrangement related to the motif of the body (sexuality) goes hand in hand with the writer’s feeling of not belonging in her own land. The theme of alienation and displacement that haunts Achebe’s novel culminates in Djebar’s novel in an opposition between open liberating space and confined enclosures. In L’Amour, la fantasia, metaphors of the female suppressed, repressed, and cloistered emphasize the physical sequestration that traditionally defines an Algerian woman’s existence. This confinement robs her of her body, of her mind, hence of her identity. The narrator describes women as “white walking wraiths, shrouded figures buried upright [...] to prevent them from uttering such a constant howl: such a wild, barbaric 15

Djebar’s preoccupation with sexual matters was condemned by myopic Algerian revolutionaries as indecent and irrelevant, particularly at a time when Algeria was being torn apart amidst bombings and torture.

128

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



sound, macabre residue of a former century!”16 The white ghosts and buried forms refer to the veiled women. Traditionally, the haik or veil was white and covered the body, and a triangular scrap of cloth covered the face, except the eyes, but the wearing of the veil differed from one region to another. The outside universe being reserved for men, if a woman had to leave the domestic space she could do so only when veiled so as to make herself invisible when she passed through masculine space. The dominant gaze and sole voice permissible are masculine. The Algerian writer, moreover, places in counterpoint to the infamous fumigations in the Dahra caves several oral narratives of Algerian women who participated in the Algerian War and sheds light on the often ignored sufferings of women. The writer juxtaposes these literal and epistemic acts of colonial violence with the patriarchal violence of Algerian society, described in terms of women’s burial and asphyxia, by linking the space of the cave to that of the harem. Although this specific enclosure, the harem, no longer exists as a physical reality, Djebar reminds her readers that its psychological walls are still present in Algerian society. The cave therefore stands for women’s exclusion from the outside world and for their ‘disintegration,’ so to speak. The experience of asphyxia, specific to the historical trauma, is used here in conjunction with the idea of haunting to configure the writer’s ambivalent position in relation both to the French “intercessors” and to the women she interviews. Because women are not allowed to be outside, they can only become ghostly, suffocated. Womanhood, as in Achebe’s novel, clearly stands for the dominated, subjugated, repressed, and shunned. The Nigerian writer wrote Things Fall Apart to redeem the Igbos from the dark image of colonial distortion, for, as he claimed, his duty as a writer was to restore dignity to his own people. However, it seems that, for him, women were not part of the community; in his attempt to restore dignity and self-respect to his people, Achebe left out half the Nigerian population. Achebe does not shy away from representing colonial relations in gendered terms by inscribing Okonkwo as an excessively masculine Igbo man. What Things Fall Apart does is to draw the reader’s attention to the constant opposition between the masculine and feminine. Throughout this novel, the attitude of Igbo men 16

“fantômes blancs, formes ensevelies à la verticale, justement pour ne pas hurler ainsi continûment: son de barbare, son de sauvage, résidu macabre d’un autre siècle.” Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Julliard, 1985): 164. Translation mine. All future references to this text will be placed in brackets within the essay.



Re-Inventing Africa

129

towards Igbo women is often depicted as highly repressive (18). The heavy hand of tradition is mostly visible in the marital institution. Achebe presents his protagonist’s wives as accepting ungrudgingly whatever humiliation and mistreatment befalls them at the hands of their husband. The shadowy female figures in Djebar’s narrative also mutely fulfil their traditionally ordained roles as compliant wives, daughters, mothers, childbearers, and helpmates for their husbands. Okonkwo, says Achebe, “ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear” (9). And so does the narrator’s father in L’Amour. The ambiguous position of the father, a schoolteacher in colonial Algeria, is all too evident. On the one hand, he assumes the role of progressive educator, a catalyst for social change; on the other, he remains shackled to the Arab / Berber patriarchal order. He insists on controlling the girl’s space and environment by continually evoking the idea of family. His daughters feel compelled to obey him, partly out of fear, partly out of reverence for the idea of family, and partly out of limited opportunity in Algerian society. When the father enters a room, the girls fall silent. The father’s relationship with his wife also acts as a mirror of Algerian society. She lives in her husband’s shadow, defers to him, and gives way to him in everyday routine, like Okonkwo’s wives. Like her foremothers, moreover, she never utters her husband’s name but refers to him in the third person; such discourse is characteristic of traditional Algerian women. The mother’s quiet and non-confrontational manner in dealing with her husband provides the basis for Djebar’s subtle critique of patriarchy, and induces her to escape the painful and violent events of the past that have plagued her entire life as a woman through her dreams and writing. But how to narrate what is not narratable, the silenced voices? The aporia, a central metaphor in Djebar’s work, is, as its ancient Greek root suggests, both impasse and perplexity. Writing remains the hand extended by her father, one that liberates her and allows her to reconstitute the past. In crossing borders of language and strict gender limits, Djebar crosses prohibited demarcations. The inheritance usually bestowed on males allows her to transgress the forbidden by writing an autobiography in the language of the Other in order to convey her project of reconstruction. To write, for Djebar, is a way of denouncing African culture’s sexism, and a way out of the prison in which women have been confined for years. In this sense, L’Amour can be viewed as a blunt response to the silencing of women in Things Fall Apart, an act of defiance.

130

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



The ‘explosion’ of the voice in Djebar’s novel is demonstrated in the opening chapter of part three, entitled ‘Voices’, in which the narrator mingles her own voice with those of the forgotten participants in the Algerian war. The woman writer offers an alternative vision, a revisionist picture of the attitudes of traditional women to their status in North African society, one committed to challenging Achebe’s. She renders the distinction between silence and invisibility, on the one hand, and voice and visibility, on the other, when she describes the culturally specific experiences of Algerian women. The power of the voice is revealed in the way it can liberate the Self (164). Paradoxically, this coming to voice is made possible through the French language, the colonizer’s imposed tongue, which becomes the perfect ‘veil’ that allows Djebar to break stealthily into the outside world. But how does one write the Self in the language of the colonizer? How to effect the purgation of colonialism when, as a legacy of colonial acculturation, both Achebe and Djebar continue to write in the language of their erstwhile masters to express their own African identities? How, then, may language mediate a form of collective identity in the language of violence and aggression?

IV

Decolonizing the Language

The literary enterprise has indeed been a source of anxiety in itself, for one of the paradoxes that confronts the nationalist writer is the language s / he uses to express that very culture. Like many postcolonial writers, Achebe and Djebar adopted English or French as a matter of necessity defined by colonial rule. Although some critics argue that, by choosing the language of the colonizer as the lingua franca in their writings, native writers sacrifice their cultural soul and identity and that all efforts to express their innermost feelings in a language other than the mother tongue can end only in approximations, the adoption of the colonizer’s language has been the very weapon used by both Achebe and Djebar to fight off the enemy, to denounce the colonialists’ projects. In Achebe’s own words, if colonialism deprived the African of “a song,” it gave them “a tongue for singing.”17 Metaphorically, the song stands

17

Achebe, “The English Language and the African Writer,” Insight (October–December 1966): 20, quoted in Gareth Griffiths, “Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe” (1971), in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978): 69. Achebe even em-



Re-Inventing Africa

131

for the native language and the tongue is the language of the European colonial ruler. But, Achebe insists, “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”18 Djebar, too, aims at doing unheard things with the French language. The colonial language helps her chart her own life-story and recover her oral tradition, as Achebe had before her. The Nigerian writer opens his novel with a fight partly to draw the reader’s attention to the impending cultural struggle in the realm of the word, a linguistic battle between English as the dominant language and the subject Igbo language. Presented in Igbo-inflected English, Things Fall Apart can be seen as an example of this process of linguistic hybridization. Achebe explains that, as an African writer may wish to utilize English, but not necessarily in the same way as an Englishman, he should develop a local style of African English.19 The English he uses in his novel is indeed “still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”20 Achebe exploits oral speech patterns to express the African ethos and pathos. The language used by the narrator and the Igbo characters is permeated with Igbo words, proverbs, and idioms emphasizing Igbo identity and the existence of a rich and living tradition. The presence of such Igbo patterns has a dual effect. On the one hand, they remind the non-native reader that Igbo people have their own language and that their culture is expressed through it; on the other, they make the language more hospitable for a native speaker of Igbo. By placing these words in his English text, Achebe also provides concrete reminders of the historically violent process he is narrating. phasizes the merits of English as one of the main media of communication in a multilingual nation such as Nigeria. 18 Chinua Achebe, “Colonialist Criticism,” Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1975): 7. 19 Commenting on how Achebe alters English to reflect native Nigerian realities, Eustace Palmer argues that, “without seriously distorting the nature of the English, Achebe introduces the rhythms and speech patterns, idioms and other verbal nuances of Igbo [... thus] while everyone who knows English will be able to understand the work [...] the reader has also the sense of Black Africans speaking and living in a genuinely Black African rural situation.” See Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1979): 60. 20 Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1975): 62.

132

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



Significantly, Achebe’s novel both begins and ends with the polar attitudes of the Igbo and the English in regard to the use of language. The novel opens with a statement of Igbo linguistic aesthetics, “Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,”21 and ends with the counterbalancing linguistic perspective of Mr Brown, the white missionary: “One of the most infuriating habits of these people was their love of superfluous words” (177). According to the missionary, “the leaders of the land in the future would be the men and women who have learned to read and write” (156), hence pointing to the demise of an exclusively oral culture. This clash between divergent cultures finds expression in the person of Okonkwo, a perfect embodiment of that linguistic breakdown. At the start of the novel, the protagonist is depicted as the greatest man in Umuofia, hence as the receptacle of the village’s doctrines, and paradoxically also as a displaced person. The most obvious indications of this displacement from his culture are his linguistic slips of the tongue. In a community in which the art of conversation is highly regarded, Okonkwo’s stammer appears as a tragic flaw. Although he resorts to proverbial speech to indicate his determination to break the white man’s “wing” (15), his power both as warrior and leader of the clan is doomed to failure by his incapacity to speak coherently. Okonkwo’s endeavours to stir his kinsmen’s hearts with speeches at the tribal council ultimately fail, and he is left unable to utter a word, and in the end there is only complete silence. This is made conspicuous in the scene when Okonkwo and his elders are arrested after the burning of Mr Smith’s church, “the six men remained sullen and silent [...] they found no words to speak to one another” (167). At the close of Part Two of the novel, one of the elders of the tribe laments the loss of this great tradition of orality: “I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong the bond of kinship is. You do not know what it is to speak with one[’s] voice [...] I fear for you; I fear for the clan.” (150)

At the end of the novel, the Igbos see their language displaced; it does not suit the new dispensation under colonial rule. Thus the English have triumphed and the Igbos have become prisoners of the English language. This is powerfully reflected towards the close of the 21

Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 4. In West Africa, palm oil is the dominant ingredient in all kinds of dishes. Its coloration makes the dish attractive.



Re-Inventing Africa

133

novel in the narrator’s contention that “even now they have not found the mouth with which to tell of their suffering” (145), an important issue highlighted in Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”22 The closing paragraph of the novel stresses not only the replacement of Igbo culture by English culture, but also that of the Igbo language by the English language, hence the displacement of the oral tradition and of legend by the written word. Language is thus the arena in which the cultural struggle between the folkways of the Igbos and the supposedly high culture of the British colonizers is ultimately fought. L’Amour, la fantasia also foregrounds that link between language and identity, and elaborates on the divisive effect of the French language, running parallel to patriarchy, which posits educated women as men’s rivals. Djebar explores the process of readjustment, accommodation, and acculturation, the quest for identity displaced by colonialism in the Algerian context, one she is forced to express in the colonizer’s language, as Achebe had before her. Yet, for female writers, the question of writing in the language of the enemy foregrounded in anglophone Africa is often seen as “a double betrayal, both of the national language and of a nationalist ideology in which women are viewed only as allegories of the nation.”23 It is not surprising, therefore, that Djebar approaches the French language with ambivalence. Clearly, to use a language known to her nation as the language of those who abused her is, she acknowledges, a kind of betrayal of her compatriots’ sufferings, and it leaves her vulnerable to misunderstanding and condemnation. In L’Amour, Djebar writes both of the power and the danger of the very act of writing in French. Trapped between the two discourses, French and patriarchal, she is reduced to a being whose identity remains based on two linguistic and cultural domains, a being belonging fully to neither; and she must broach that sense of cultural dispossession, that foreignness. The writer further draws attention to the struggle between the two languages: The French tongue, with its body and voice, has been forcefully established within me, while the mother-tongue, all oral tradition, all rags and tatters, resists and attacks between two breathing spaces. With the rhythm of the 22

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), repr. in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 66–111. 23 Anne Donadey, “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest,” World Literature Today 74.1 (Winter 2000): 27.

134

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



rebato spurring me on, I am both the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to die, in the illusory effervescence of the spoken and written word.24

At this juncture, the struggle between what Djebar calls the ‘stepmother’ tongue and the mother tongue testifies to the cultural dilemma produced by colonialism. This psycho-cultural dislocation and alienation of the female subject is made conspicuous from the very first page through the narrator’s objective perspective. The first chapter of Part One is preceded by an introductory scene which sets out the experience of learning to write and that of sequestration. The language of the Other has enveloped her since childhood with Nessus’s tunic (302). The reference to Nessus is significant, for the story tells how Hercules slew the centaur Nessus, who attempted to rape his wife, Deianira. The dying Nessus gave her a potion mixed with his blood, pretending that it was a love potion. Later, Deianira, attempting to reclaim Hercules’s affection, gave him a cloak soaked with Nessus’s potion. The cloak started to burn him and gave him such agony that he caused himself to be immolated. In a similar vein, the language of the conqueror the narrator/ writer has received as a gift from her father constitutes a rape in itself. It is a poisonous “potion.” But if the French language carries the weight of repression for the Algerian nation subjected to a hundred and thirty-two years of French colonial rule, it has allowed the writer’s liberation as well. The appropriation of the language of the adversary has helped her not only to inscribe the suffering and injustice inflicted on the Algerians by the colonial conquest, but also to recuperate the maternal world and forge her personal links to it. The French language, as Djebar points out, has literally “lent her eyes” (256) to allow her to gaze back both at her former colonizer and at the patriarchal society that has stifled her. The blinded thus becomes the seer; the ‘veiled’ unveils. Writing in the enemy’s language has allowed the writer to free herself from the shackles of 24

“La langue française, corps et voix, s’installe en moi comme un orgueilleux préside, tandis que la langue maternelle, toute en oralité, en hardes dépenaillées, résiste et attaque, entre deux essoufflements. Le rythme du ‘rebato’ en moi s’éperonnant, je suis à la fois l’assiégé étranger et l’autochtone partant à la mort par bravade, illusoire effervescence du dire et de l’écrit” (L’Amour, 299). Djebar likens that space lying between the enemy’s language and hers to the rebato of the Spanish occupiers of Algeria in earlier times, a term used to refer to an isolated spot, a no-man’s-land lying between aggressors and aggressed, from which the former sallied forth to attack and to which he withdrew in search of asylum.



Re-Inventing Africa

135

her male-dominated society, and break the taboos of her culture. It has given her a space from which to speak. But the French language is altered to suit the African locale. Djebar uses Achebe’s strategy of displacing the language of the oppressor through what Loreto Todd calls “relexification,”25 a mixture of the European target language and the indigenous language, which in both Djebar’s and Achebe’s novels functions as an “interlanguage,”26 a new register of communication, creating what Anne Donadey calls a bilingual “palimpsest.”27 This technique allows for a recovery of Arab / Igbo identity while making the texts more accessible to the arabophone/ Igbo speaking readers. This bilingualism, moreover, both reflects the process of violent colonization of Algeria/ Nigeria and subverts it linguistically. The use of Arabic/ Igbo words and phrases in texts otherwise in French or English does not impede the reader’s understanding, but it turns the Western reader, in particular, into the Other by a process of defamiliarization. As Djebar’s and Achebe’s writings become palimpsests of different languages, they achieve what Abdelkebir Khatibi calls “the extraordinary”28 – to write with two hands, with two languages, in narratives that are constant transliterations. By interweaving fragments of Arabic with French, Igbo with English, Djebar and Achebe write as the “ex-centric,” which Linda Hutcheon defines as being “on the border or margin, inside yet outside, [having] a different perspective [...] since it has no centering force,”29 thus making indistinct the borderline between the spoken and the written. Caught between their mother tongues and the imposed language, Achebe and Djebar adjust the language of the Other to serve as a vehicle for conveying the potency of Igbo and Algerian words and phrases. They employ this piquant

25

Loreto Todd, “English in West Africa,” in English as a World Language, ed. Richard Bailey & Manfred Görlach (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1982): 303. In Todd’s understanding of the word, the emphasis is both on lexis (the original speech, word or phrase) and on lexicon with reference to the vocabulary and morphemes of the language, and, by extension, on word-formation. 26 Donadey, “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature,” 34. 27 “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature,” 34. 28 Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983): 205. 29 Quoted in Soheila Ghaussy, “A Stepmother Tongue: ‘Feminine Writing’ in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade,” World Literature Today 68.3 (Summer 1994): 2.

136

MALIKA REBAI MAAMRI



style of expression not only as spice and colouring, but above all to convey the values of their respective cultures. Indeed, both writers sought to re-invent Africa, an authentic reality located outside colonialist clichés. The overarching consideration that links Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia is that of the challenge to pre-existing hierarchies, the most conspicuous of these being that of imperial hegemony, the heritage of colonialism that permeates postcolonial societies and their literatures. But there are other hierarchies, of course. Djebar’s novel is also concerned with women’s issues and with challenging traditional patriarchy as represented in Achebe’s oeuvre. As already indicated, L’Amour may, indeed, be viewed as a meditation on the absence of women in Things Fall Apart. Djebar has redefined the role of Algerian women in a patriarchal society, and has attempted to release them from the obscurity of being exclusively the ‘angel of the house’. By moving women from the margin to the forefront of her re-created history, Djebar documents women’s historic role as revolutionaries and makes the case that they deserve the status of full citizens in the new nation they helped to build. Her focus on women’s alienation is also a reminder to male African writers, such as Achebe, that in Africa it is not only men, but also women, who have been disoriented and destabilized by the ambivalent effects of colonialism.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1975): 55–62. Originally in Moderna Språk 58 (1964): 438–46, and Transition 4/18 (1965): 27–30. ——. “Colonialist Criticism,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1975): 3–18. ——. “The English Language and the African Writer,” Insight (October–December 1966): 19–20. ——. “The Novelist as Teacher,” in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1975): 42–45. Originally in Commonwealth Literature, ed. John Press (London: Heinemann, 1965): 201–205. ——. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture: Discussing Post-Colonial Culture (London: Routledge, 1996).



137

Re-Inventing Africa

Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe: Novelist, Poet and Critic (London: Macmillan, 1980). Djebar, Assia. L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Julliard, 1985). Donadey, Anne. “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest,” World Literature Today 74.1 (Winter 2000): 27–36. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Ghaussy, Soheila. “A Stepmother Tongue: ‘Feminine Writing’ in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade,” World Literature Today 68.3 (Summer 1994): 457–62. Gikandi, Simon. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (Oxford: James Currey, 1991). Griffiths, Gareth. “Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe,” in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978): 67–83. Originally in African Literature Today 5 (1971): 88–105. Hima, Gabriela. “War as Conflict and Contact,” in Postcolonialism and Fiction in English, ed. Anu Shukla (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2004): 119–30. Innes, Lyn. The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1990). ——, & Bernth Lindfors, ed. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1978). Iyasere, Solomon, ed. Understanding Things Fall Apart: Selected Essays and Criticism (New York: Whitston, 1998). Khatibi, Abdelkebir. Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983). Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989). Palmer, Eustace. The Growth of the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1979). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 66–111. Originally in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988): 271–313. Tiffin, Chris, & Alan Lawson. De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994). Todd, Loreto. “English in West Africa,” in English as a World Language, ed. Richard Bailey & Manfred Görlach (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1982): 281–305.



IV T HINGS F ALL A PART IN O THER C ONTEXTS

8

Teaching Things Fall Apart in Texas

————

A

B ERNTH L INDFORS

M ODERN L ANGUAGE A SSOCIATION invited me to edit a collection of essays on Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for their Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. This I was happy to agree to do, for I was curious to know how others handled this novel in the classroom. My job was to solicit contributions from members of the M L A as well as from teachers who did not belong to that organization but who might have something interesting to say about how they chose to present this text to students. The purpose of the collection was to bring together an array of diverse pedagogical strategies that might prove helpful to anyone faced with the challenge of teaching Things Fall Apart for the first or the fortieth time. It was meant to be a handbook created by many different hands – new hands as well as old hands – so I cast my net far and wide, encouraging colleagues in a variety of educational settings and circumstances to describe practices that they had found effective in dealing with this particular African masterwork. The response was gratifying. In fact, so much material arrived that I was forced to make a judicious selection from the heap, picking only those essays that stood out from the rest because they were strikingly original in orientation or methodology. The book was divided into three parts; the first five essays on background to the novel featured biographical and historical approaches; ten contributions foregrounded a range of critical and theoretical concerns; and, finally, there was a brief survey of the deployment of the text in special contexts – for instance, in a humanities core course or a criticism course. The middle section was by far BOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO THE

142

BERNTH LINDFORS



the largest, with mythologists, structuralists, deconstructionists, postcolonialists, feminists, Marxists, comparativists, and other interested specialists weighing in with suggestions on how to assist students to look at the novel by squinting at it through a distinctive interpretative lens. I did not take part in this festival of pragmatic pedagogical hermeneutics. I wrote an introduction to the volume and prepared a bibliography of relevant source material, but I felt I should not usurp any of the remaining space by inserting an essay of my own, even though my approach to teaching Things Fall Apart differed from all the others described in the book. Today I feel less reticent about sharing with you how I taught this novel during the thirty-three years I was employed at the University of Texas at Austin, for I regard it as a way of paying back in small measure the large debt I owe to an influential work of art that created an entirely new field of study in which I could teach and write. I believe I owe my career to this book. But before telling you how I taught it, I should say something about students at the University of Texas. The undergraduates I met there, like those at most other American universities, knew very little about Africa, and much of the little that they did know was wrong. Few had had any experience on the ground anywhere in Africa, so their notions of that continent and the peoples who inhabited it were shaped to a large degree by media images, too many of which were extremely negative, even latently, if not positively, racist. The graduate students were better, far better. The doctoral dissertations I directed were written by mature individuals from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, South Africa, Germany, Canada, Gibraltar, and various parts of the U S A . They at least knew where in the world Africa was and what had been happening there since its encounter with Europe. Most of the younger undergraduates I taught were taking their first course on anything African, so in sophomore-level classes on African literature I began with a slide show that was meant to introduce them to Africa’s diversity – a collage of contrasting landscapes, living conditions, religions, cultural practices, artistic traditions, clothing styles. I then brought out a large map of Africa, but before unrolling it and hanging it on a wall, I handed out copies of a blank political map of Africa and asked the students to fill in as many country names as they could. This exercise usually took no more than a minute, because most of them were stumped after identifying only Egypt and South Africa. But at least they were made painfully aware of their limited knowledge of the terrain we were about to explore. At the next class meeting I followed this up with a brief survey of the geography and history of Africa,



Teaching Things Fall Apart in Texas

143

covering in seventy-five minutes the major physical features of the continent and the five hundred or so years of African experience since the Portuguese navigations. I also went over the reading list of the ten or twelve texts we would be studying during the semester, placing them where and when the events recounted in each were represented as having taken place. The readings were organized chronologically, in line with the historical sketch I had just given them. First we would look at Africa before the coming of Europe, then at early and late stages of the colonial period, next at the rise of nationalism and the struggle for independence, and finally at the postcolonial era. The book selected to give a sense of precolonial African experience was Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, always a favourite among students for the intriguing ambiguity of its portrait of an ambitious African leader. Was Chaka exercising free will when making decisions, or was he being manipulated by a clever medicine man to choose a course that would ultimately destroy him? Was he responsible for his own fate? A whole class period would be devoted to debating this issue. It was the ice-breaker that got the students talking. From there we would go on to Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which is also set in an entirely African universe but in a non-historical imaginative realm that is described in a language quite unlike anything the students had ever read before in a literature class. This unusual narrative served as a way of illustrating the influence of oral tales on written literature and the emergence of English-language fiction in West Africa. The third text in this sequence was invariably Things Fall Apart, which was meant to move us to the colonial era. But how does one explain a period in history to students who have had no direct experience of it? The method I chose was to expose them first to ideas about Africa that were in circulation in the West in the nineteenth century, ideas founded on a bedrock assumption of racial inequality. This was quite clear in the scientific writings of the day. An excellent example was the crude taxonomy of races formulated by France’s leading naturalist, Baron Georges Cuvier, in the first volume of his comprehensive study of The Animal Kingdom (1817): The Caucasian, to which we ourselves belong, is chiefly distinguished by the beautiful form of the head, which approximates to a perfect oval. It is also remarkable for variations in the shade of the complexion, and colour of the hair. From this variety have sprung the most civilized nations, and such as have most generally exercised dominion over the rest of mankind. The Mongolian variety is recognized by prominent cheek-bones, flat visage, narrow and oblique eyes, hair straight and black, scanty beard, and

144

BERNTH LINDFORS



olive complexion. This race has formed mighty empires in China and Japan, and occasionally extended its conquests on this side of the Great Desert, but its civilization has long appeared stationary. The negro race is confined to the south of Mount Atlas. Its characters are, black complexion, woolly hair, compressed cranium, and flattish nose. In the prominence of the lower part of the face, and the thickness of the lips, it manifestly approaches to the monkey tribe. The hordes of which this variety is composed have always remained in a state of complete barbarism.1

This kind of racial chauvinism could also be found in Sir William Lawrence’s Lectures on the Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1819) in which the intellectual and ethical characteristics of whites and blacks were contrasted with devastating clarity: The distinction of colour between the white and black races is not more striking than the pre-eminence of the former in moral feelings and in mental endowments. The latter, it is true, exhibit generally a great acuteness of the external senses, which in some instances is heightened by exercise to a degree nearly incredible. Yet they indulge, almost universally, in disgusting debauchery and sensuality, and display gross selfishness, indifference to the pains and pleasures of others, insensibility to beauty of form, order, and harmony, and an almost entire want of what we comprehend altogether under the expression of elevated sentiments, manly virtues, and moral feelings.2

My favourite examples of this kind of wholesale racial reductionism, however, came from a book published as late as 1912 by a liberal white Southern scholar – a Texan, in fact – named on the cover as W.D. Weatherford, Ph.D. Seeking to demonstrate how far African Americans had advanced by the beginning of the twentieth century, he called his book Present Forces in Negro Progress3 and filled it with upbeat chapters on “Race Leadership and the 1

Quoted in Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–

1850 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1964): 231. 2

Quoted in Curtin, The Image of Africa, 232. W.D. Weatherford, Present Forces in Negro Progress (New York & London: Association Press, 1912): 16. All of the following quotations are taken from this source. I may be doing Weatherford a disservice by quoting his remarks out of their wider context. In his time and place, he was a pioneer in promoting better race relations and improving the lot of the less advantaged, particularly African Americans but also poor whites in the Appalachians. For a more balanced appraisal of his life and works, see the biography by Wilma Dykeman, Prophet of Plenty: The First Ninety Years of W.D. Weatherford (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P , 1966). 3



Teaching Things Fall Apart in Texas

145

Growth of Race Pride,” “The New Type of Negro Farmer,” “Improvement in the Rural Schools,” “What the White Churches are Now Doing for the Negro,” “What the Associations are Doing,” etc. This was a patently pro-black book, but in an effort to be frank and fair, Weatherford prefaced it with a chapter on “Traits of Negro Character” in which he presented “a brief inventory of [the Negro’s] weaknesses and his strength.” What is striking about this catalogue of inborn characteristics is how many of the defects of Negro character are traced back to Africa. For instance: Perhaps the characteristic in which the Negro differs most radically from the white man is in lack of self-control […] the Negro, as a race, has not so far developed what psychologists call the power of inhibition. He cannot forego the pleasure of present gratification in order that he may reap an increased, but a far-off, reward […] Some reasons for this lack of self-control are not far to seek, when one looks into tropical environment. One of its commonest manifestations is what we, in common parlance, call laziness. The future reward is not vivid enough to induce a man to lay aside his present ease that he may attain a larger good in the future. This habit of self-indulgence would be greatly accentuated in a tropical climate, where the abundant hand of nature supplies most of the actual necessities of food and clothing. Furthermore, in such a climate hard labor frequently is punished by death. Those who are over-industrious are eliminated and there is bred by natural selection a race of listless people. (16-17)

This was a neat perversion of Darwinian theory, an argument that in the African tropics harsh environmental circumstances led to survival of the least fit. But that was not all: Furthermore, the abundance of food at one season and its paucity at another […] foster a disposition to gorge during the time of plenty in order not to suffer in the leaner days. But here again is a form of indulgence which breaks down the power of self-control. (18)

Weatherford also believed that this propensity to over-indulge explained the Negro’s exaggerated sexual appetite and antisocial behaviour. Here he cited the scholarship of a Professor Dowd, an authority on “Negroes of the Banana Zone”: Their wills are inundated and paralyzed by the surging of every passion and impulse towards immediate gratification. The riotous clamor of their passions explains their ungovernable temper, propensity to murder, steal, lie, deceive, or to overindulge their sexual appetite, their love for liquor, tobacco or anything that may momentarily strike their fancy. (19)

146

BERNTH LINDFORS



Weatherford then went on to note that Negroes were not only passionate but also profoundly superstitious: It is unnecessary here more than to refer to the dark superstition of practically all of the African tribes. They live in constant fear of angry spirits, of the power of the fetish, of the witchdoctor and what not. Much of this has become so deeply ingrained in the nature of the Negro that the slaves and their descendants have never been able to shake themselves free from its terrible hold. (20–21)

Next on the list was Negro cruelty: “Undoubtedly this cruelty is a survival of the old savagery, where the hand of every man was set against his neighbor” (22). In this xenophobic nightmare scenario, Africans were pictured as having no system of law and order, no social cohesion; they were too busy pummelling their next-door neighbours. The rest of the Negro’s deeply ingrained faults were largely matters of style. They were said to be “naturally vain, conceited, verbose, pompous, [and] lacking in power of initiative” (24). Weatherford concluded his list of negative racial traits with the hope that “white and colored alike may see the weaknesses of the Negro and unite in an effort to save him from himself” (25). The positive side of Weatherford’s ledger was equally racist and tinged with an unconscious master/ servant mind-set. Negroes were said to exhibit fidelity, gratitude, generosity, kindliness, and good humour. Moreover, they were essentially religious and wonderfully musical. Weatherford summed up these characteristics in a stirring peroration: What a catalogue of splendid qualities is this: Fidelity amid trying circumstances; gratitude where blessings have been bestowed; forgiving in spirit even when grossly wronged; patient in the face of sore trial; generous in spite of bitter poverty; always seeing the humor of a situation, thus saving many a tragic scene; deeply and intensely religious, even though their religion is often perverted; with souls responsive to the truest of musical rhythm; and, one might truly add, cheerful in the midst of privations; sympathetic to the point of suffering; intensely curious and eager to know. What if the race is not the most brilliantly intellectual? What if they are lacking in self-mastery? What if there is often a lack of industry and thrift? – here is a catalogue of race traits enough to make any race happy, virtuous, useful, and even great. (31)

Such remarks remind us that if you have friends like W.D. Weatherford, PhD, you don’t really need enemies. Friends like this do more damage than good by repeating and thereby perpetuating age-old racial stereotypes.



Teaching Things Fall Apart in Texas

147

My lecture on pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference did not end there. I also focused on contributions made to the denigration of Africa by former colonial officers, missionaries, and serious novelists like Conrad and Joyce Cary, as well as by influential purveyors of popular culture such as P.T. Barnum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even relatively recent films like King Solomon’s Mines, The African Queen, The Endless Summer, Out of Africa, and Zulu were brought in to emphasize the point that Africa and Africans continue to be portrayed in a negative light. Through all of this I said not a word about Things Fall Apart. I concentrated entirely on what the scientists, officials, and creative artists had expressed about Africa. It was such thinking that defined the West’s attitude toward Africa and rationalized its intervention there. Faulty racial theorizing served as a justification for European colonialism. It was assumed that Africans needed to be saved from themselves. Students came to understand this through their reading of Things Fall Apart. We spent the next class period discussing differences between Western stereotypes of Africans and the people they saw in Achebe’s novel. How did Igbo society and Igbo individuals differ from those imagined by Cuvier, Lawrence, Weatherford, and a host of other foreign image makers? The students were quick to recognize that Igbo society was well-organized, hierarchically structured, yet democratically administered, egalitarian, and peaceful. There was a strict system of law and order and a profound respect for religious authority, both of which placed firm constraints on what even the richest and most powerful members of the community could do. If someone violated an established code of conduct, he was punished, regardless of the position he had attained in society. Clearly this was not the heart of darkness. There wasn’t a savage anywhere in sight. The Igbo also worked very hard. Laziness was considered disgraceful, but the industrious son of a lazy man could win respect for what he was able to accomplish on his own. This was an upwardly mobile society, one in which prestige was earned, not inherited. But the social set up had some unappealing features, too. The killing of twins seemed brutal, the unequal position of women in village life appeared unenlightened, and among some men there was an unhealthy emphasis on proving one’s manliness. So this was not a perfect society by any means. It had its blemishes, its weaknesses. Ironically, one of these weaknesses, the one that led to its eventual collapse, derived from its own strong sense of morality. In this peace-loving society, one could not raise one’s hand against a kinsman, so it proved impossible to chase away those villagers who converted to Christianity or collaborated with white authority.

148

BERNTH LINDFORS



Things fell apart because the bonds of kinship were too tight to be completely severed. Traditional Igbo society was too humane, too pacific, to survive intact. The importance of such insights was that they were coming not from me or from Cliffs Notes on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart but from the students themselves. These undergraduates were articulating what they had discovered about African village life by reading the novel and contrasting what they saw represented there with what Western commentators had said about Africans. They had gained a more accurate conception of African society and could now appreciate that Africans had a distinctive civilization and culture of their own before the intrusion of Europeans into their midst. I would call this an inductive method of teaching. Provide the relevant data and let the students draw their own conclusions from it. Give them a basis for comparison and let them work out the significance of the differences they discover. Don’t preach. Let them learn the truth independently. Get out of the way, and let Things Fall Apart be their teacher. W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Chua, John, & Suzanne Pavlos. Cliffs Notes on Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (New York: Wiley, 2001). Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1964). Cuvier, Georges. Le règne animal (Paris: Deterville, 1817). Lawrence, William. Lectures on the Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London: Smith, 1819). Lindfors, Bernth. Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991). Mofolo, Thomas. Chaka (1925; London: Heinemann, 1981). Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm Tapster in the Deads’ Town (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). Weatherford, W.D. Present Forces in Negro Progress (New York & London: Association Press, 1912).



9

First and Second Glances Scottish Working-Class Readers and Things Fall Apart

————

H

A NDREW S MITH

K A R L M A R X I N T H E I N T R I G U I N G N O T E appended to the introduction of his Grundrisse, that Greek art forms “still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model?”1 His answer, in that context, is that whatever we find pleasing or compelling in the cultural products of earlier social formations arises from something like nostalgia, tied up with the knowledge that the world which made such art possible cannot be revisited. We may well agree with Pierre Macherey that there is something rather too easy about this answer,2 although when Marx talks about a sense of “joy in the child’s naïveté,” we should perhaps recognize this as being of a piece with his rejection of any conservative hankering after old certainties: “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”3 In a sense, this has nothing to do with what I am concerned with in what follows, which is the question of the cross-cultural reception of fiction in the contemporary world. 1

OW IS IT, ASKS

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. & foreword by Martin Nicolaus (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie; 1939; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 111. 2 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (Pour une théorie de la production littéraire; 1966; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978): 70–71. 3 Marx, Grundrisse, 111.

150

ANDREW SMITH



Greek art faces us, at least so Marx believed, across a definitive historical break which separates distinct modes of production. Yet his framing of the puzzle is useful, especially for anyone who shares his assumption that the products of imaginative or creative labours are, in some respects, determinate: that they are shaped in significant ways by the historical and social conjunctions in which that labour took place. And that, therefore, for other readers, in other contexts, the products of such labour can often contain something which is disconcerting, not immediately knowable, threatening even. This essay, then, reflects on the responses provided to Things Fall Apart by readers who read the novel as part of community-education courses in which I was involved for six years, and which ran in primarily working-class areas of Glasgow and the west of Scotland: Govan, Easterhouse, the Gorbals, Stranraer, Dumfries, and Dalbeattie. The courses in which I took part did not involve formal assessment, but students were asked to provide a written response to Achebe’s novel, and it is those responses that I am drawing on here, with the permission of those involved.4 Those responses, as I will endeavour to demonstrate, reveal a minor version of that puzzle which Marx describes. These are readers in the modern world reading a text from that world, to be sure; there is no question here of treating Achebe’s novel as a product of a context which is earlier, let alone childish. Nevertheless, the responses of these readers, by and large, did involve a troubled initial sense that here was a story whose meaning was in some respects out of reach: that it had something about it which was, in Marx’s word, unattainable. What I want to take from Marx, then, at the outset, is the recognition that between readers, in their historical and cultural specificity, and texts as products of a context no less specific, there can be a kind of crisis of understanding. Moreover, although in some respects the historical self-confidence that marks his answer is jarring, it does imply an insistence on the conditionality of reading. A recognition, in other words, that readers read from where they are, having no other choice. What-

4

Background information about participants was provided by a short questionnaire. This essay discusses some material, as well as developing an argument, which was first made in an earlier publication, written while the research was in progress. For a more detailed discussion of some of the methodological questions involved in this work, please see that earlier essay. My thanks to Terry Barringer, editor of African Research and Documentation, for allowing me to revisit this material here. See Andrew Smith, “Imaginative Knowledge: Scottish Readers and Nigerian Fictions,” African Research and Documentation 83 (2000): 23–36.



First and Second Glances

151

ever solutions can be found to that crisis of understanding posed by writings that are shaped by other kinds of social context, readers are required to find such solutions in and on the grounds of their own social and historical experiences. For many of the Scottish readers that I worked with, then, first impressions of Things Fall Apart were defined by feelings of befuddlement and frustration. One reader, for example, described their “sinking feeling” on encountering the novel, others their resentful sense that this book had been chosen for them against their own instincts: “Wandering around a bookshop or library, I would never have looked at, or chosen a book with a title Things Fall Apart.” To some extent, perhaps, such responses re-assert something of the student’s autonomy in a pedagogical situation. As one essay put it, “Things Fall Apart is not a book I would have read had it not been selected for me.” Other readers, clearly, felt disengaged by the fact that this was a novel by an African, about African experiences: “It may sound insular, but I am not interested in Africa,” is the confessional note with which one reader began their essay. Not all respondents were quite so antagonistic, but a significant number did talk about finding the novel “difficult to get into,” “hard to crack” or “hard going.” The encounter with Things Fall Apart for these readers, in short, began with an estrangement in the most literal sense, the sense of being made to feel like a stranger. There has been some critical discussion, of course, about the degree to which Achebe may or may not have gone out of his way to translate the terms and idioms of Igbo culture for non-Igbo readers, and therefore about his intended readership. Very few of the readers I worked with, however, felt that the book was addressed to them, implicitly or otherwise. On the one hand, they felt themselves estranged in that they were faced with a fictional world where even the usual handles by which sense is made of a story seemed absent: “the places and characters were so strange”; “it was difficult to grasp the characters and details even after rereading.” But more than this they described a sense of being somehow snubbed or ignored by the author. “It was like sitting in on someone telling [the story] to someone else,” is how one respondent tellingly put it. One could argue, no doubt, that the frustration and bewilderment that typified these first responses makes clear, by a kind of negative example, the degree to which Western readers tend to assume themselves to be the necessary implied readers of any given text. In that respect, the comment from one reader that Achebe’s descriptions of Umuofia seemed to reveal “a life so

152

ANDREW SMITH



totally strange […] that it seems far removed from reality,” could be read as meaning just what it says: that for Western readers that which is real, or at least really significant, is precisely that which falls within the charmed circle of already given Western experience. Comparative research carried out in Nigeria, using the Scottish novel Consider the Lilies as a basis for discussion among groups of Nigerian readers, revealed a noteworthy difference in this respect. This secondary research had a more limited sample, and tended to involve readers who were better-educated than those that I worked with in Scotland. All the same, the initial response of Nigerian readers to Iain Crichton Smith’s story of the highland clearances was very different from that of their Scottish counterparts. Here the typical reaction described not estrangement but, rather, a sense of surprised familiarity: “When I first of all read the book Consider the Lilies I started thinking that are we really in Nigeria because it has a perception of things Nigerians have”; “I’d like to add that actually when I read the novel my first impression about the setting was it’s Africa”; “When I came to consider the setting it’s really Africa […] it’s actually Nigerian.”5 This apparent difference in the initial responses of Scottish and Nigerian readers to texts from a different cultural context does suggest something of what Gayatri Spivak has called the “sanctioned inattention” which characterizes much of the European and American engagement with the wider world.6 An inattention which is at once an assertion of power and a kind of wilful ignorance. For reasons that will become clearer in what follows, it seems to me that such an interpretation should be qualified in some respects. Nevertheless, what was clear was that for many of the working-class Scottish readers Achebe’s novel was felt to present a significant challenge: that it was something which made unusual and disconcerting demands of them. One could argue, of course, that this was a response to the strictly literary qualities of Achebe’s writing. Thus, we could interpret the complaint of one reader, that “the detailed thread of the story gets misplaced” in Things Fall Apart, as a response to the fact that the early chapters of the book involve a kind of orature which is focused on collective experience rather than that of a single individual, and which is cyclical or swirling in its construction rather than straightforwardly linear. In these formal respects, perhaps, the book upset 5

The quotations used here are drawn from the transcripts of reading group discussion and are presented as such. 6 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1999): 164.



First and Second Glances

153

prevailing expectations among these readers about the shape and structure of novels as such. But there is, of course, no simple divide between literary form and the social context of literary production. That Achebe wrote a book predicated, at least in part, on aspects of an oral tradition is itself inseparable from the cultural politics of his place of writing and, indeed, from the wider politics of which cultural debates of one sort or another are a part. Achebe has always been clear about the political and historical context in which his work was entailed and to be thrown by his formal strangeness is to be thrown by something that is more than just a matter of form.7 It is, in other words, precisely because Achebe’s novel could not have been any novel (which is not the same as saying that it was fated to take the form it has); it was because its production was socially and historically shaped, that it has the power to disrupt the assumptions of readers who meet it elsewhere. In describing the ways in which these men and women responded to their sense of readerly displacement, I will limit myself to saying two things. The first is that the way in which they went about making sense of the novel was entirely at odds with what is considered proper practice in the conventions of our academic literary studies. Most of these readers had no education beyond secondary-school level. Many were retired from manual or semi-skilled work, or were younger, and looking to return to formal education after periods of employment or unemployment, parenting, or recovery from drug or alcohol dependency. They had no interest in reflecting abstractly on the novel as a construction, nor did they have a theoretical language that would have allowed them to do so. They were, in this respect, stubbornly resistant to the kind of critical distance which I, as the eager young tutor, tried to propose in class. Their method for overcoming what most of them already experienced as a sense of detachment from the novel was not to step back further but, rather, to bring it closer. One way in which they went about this was through a series of small-scale acts of cultural translation in which the seemingly foreign was made explicable in terms of the familiar and the known. Hence, for example, the essayist who talked about realizing that the court of the masked spirits described by Achebe “seems similar to our own justice system,” or the reader who described the sale of produce in Umuofia as operating according to a “Super Market principle.” Hence, also, the reader who began 7

Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann,

1975): chapters two and five; Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988): ch. five and thirteen.

154

ANDREW SMITH



by saying that the book was “difficult to follow” because it had been “written from the local point of view,” but who found a way of following it precisely by drawing up a whole itinerary of correspondences from her own particular local point of view: the customs celebrated included the Feast of the New Yam […] We too celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving […]. There were other similarities between the tribal way of life and our own such as the breaking of the kola nut when visitors arrive which is similar to us giving visitors a cup of tea or coffee […]. marriage brings the whole clan together which is similar to our own wedding celebrations.

The ethnographic accuracy of these correlations is not terribly important. What they reveal, rather, is the possibility of a reading strategy premised on the assumption that what mattered about the novel was not its formal or literary construction, but the human story that it contained. A story which demanded not distance, but something that we might call critical closeness: the attempt to construct, at no small intellectual and emotional effort, a sense of empathetic location within, or in response to, the events Achebe describes. There were, for example, a significant number of essays that involved a more or less direct, if summarized, retelling of Achebe’s original. Such retellings often included mistakes, judged from the point of view of a conventional literary analysis. Yet the alterations that such retellings involved were very often alterations which were absolutely appropriate to the emotional structure of the original. Hence one reader, for example, claimed that it was Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, who killed the village’s sacred python, an act which sets in train the events leading to the novel’s terrible finale. In fact, in the original, the killing of the python in Mbanta is reported as the act of an osu who has become one of the most zealous converts to the new church. Yet it makes more than just good dramatic sense to retell the story in this way, it also serves to make Okonkwo’s final actions more explicable, more humanly understandable: this retelling aligns itself explicitly with the ethical and political dilemma of the central character. Similarly, another reader rewrote the final confrontation of the novel as follows: “The five court messengers come, one of them was the head messenger who had degraded [the villagers when they were in the colonial jail].” It is implied in the novel that this might be the case, but it is not explicit. By retelling the story so as to clarify this ambiguity the reader very effectively underscores the political tensions of that final scene, and simplifies the moral quandary facing Okonkwo at the end of the



First and Second Glances

155

book in a way that further justifies his desire to resist, and his heartbreak at the community’s refusal to do so. There is nothing arbitrary or misunderstood about these small but consequential imaginative reworkings of the plot details, and they reveal something important about how these readers went about their reading. On the one hand, they clearly operated with something like the assumptions which characterize oral traditions. That is to say, the assumption that story is as an inescapably social product, collectively owned, and therefore open to the appropriations and remakings of all who lay claim to it. In this respect, these readers quite explicitly made Achebe’s story their own. On the other hand, the fact that they did so does not suggest some desire for proprietorial authority over the story on the part of these readers but, rather, a profound sense of investment in the story itself. What they displayed was a willingness to bring the dilemma of the villagers of Umuofia closer to the dilemmas of their own lives, and a desire to clarify and respond to those dilemmas through acts of retelling. In short, these readers allowed themselves, as it were, to be owned by the story. A second variety of these retellings revolved around speculation about the life of the characters beyond the story, speculation by which the readers made clear something about where they wanted the story to go, as well as a critical assessment of where it had failed to go. Here it is necessary to settle for a single set of examples: Okonkwo’s second wife, Ekwefi, seemed to be a bit of a rebel or maybe, feminist. I’m sure her daughter Ezinma, who had remained with him to the end and who he had always wished had been born a son, maybe, she would perpetuate the memory of [that] proud African warrior.

This is representative of a number of responses to the story by women readers which subtly reinstated Ezinma as a central character, as the possible heir to Okonkwo’s rebellion, and which made the incident in which Ezinma is taken into the caves by Chielo absolutely pivotal to the whole novel because, after this, as one reader put it “she just seems to do domestic duties.” Another reader brought this moment together with the recognition that there is no notable mother figure in Okonkwo’s past. She tied both of these facts to the particular gender-coding that marks the events of the night after the egwugwu has been unmasked: Achebe starts when Okonkwo was 18 years old no mention of any devoted mother nurturing him before this […]. When Chielo the priestess of Agbala came to take their precious daughter Ezinma away in the middle of the night

156

ANDREW SMITH



[…] this was the only infant to survive from ten children and you can comprehend the mothers instinct to protect the child […] after Enoch killed an ancestral spirit that night the mother of the spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan weeping for her murdered son.

What is achieved here is a kind of critical bricolage. These related fragments, in which a mother–child relationship is mentioned, are picked loose from the original novel and knotted together so that they stand in distinct contrast to what this reader elsewhere describes: the fear that determines so many of Okonkwo’s precipitous decisions, and the patriarchal tradition in which social worth can only be calibrated through “solid personal achievements.” There is here, it seems to me, an implicit criticism of an absence in Achebe’s novel, and of the almost total disappearance of women characters as the novel progresses. All the same, this criticism is not provided in the abstract but is worked out at close quarters, through a process of remaking the story in such a way that this absence is thrown into relief. Postcolonial studies have very much celebrated the idea that flows of culture and people across the world in late modernity will introduce a new kind of detachment from our familiar places and ideas of identity, and from familiar stories about such things and about ourselves. That we should see this as an unambiguous good is something that Chinua Achebe has contested, quietly but trenchantly, in Home and Exile and elsewhere.8 It seems wholly appropriate, in this respect, that we should find here readers of his great novel whose critical insights are based, not on their detachment from it, nor on an interpretative free-for-all, but precisely on their determination to bring that story into their own lives, to respond to it on the basis of their own social and historical experience, and to make it their own, remaking it as they do so. The second thing which was striking about the responses of these readers was that there was an apparent correlation between readers’ class and educational positions, broadly put, and the openness with which they responded to the novel, as well as what they allowed the novel to do in terms of their presuppositions about Africa, and about the history of European imperialism. As with all such findings, this is, of course, hazy around the edges, nor do I have the space to substantiate my claim in detail. Nevertheless, there was a distinct pattern here and it was confirmed in large part by the findings of comparative research I carried out subsequently with middle-class readings groups elsewhere. 8

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 91–105.



First and Second Glances

157

To be clear: almost all of the readers from whom I received responses claimed in the end that they had enjoyed the novel. One of the few exceptions to this was offered by a retired doctor whose father had been a colonial officer, and whose response fragmented into a series of furious rhetorical questions: “Why read it? Indeed I ask myself why […]. Who is the story written for? Heaven only knows! I don’t […]. Whose story gets lost in the novel? Answer. Everyone’s.” About this little more can be said than that it means what it says: if Things Fall Apart tells a story without a subject this is because, for this reader, Africans are not capable of being subjects in their own right. Generally, however, there was little of such racism in the response of readers, regardless of background or generation. What was notable, however, was that middle-class readers, older middle-class readers in particular, often came to Achebe’s novel with a much stronger existing sense of what British colonial history was and of its symbolic importance for them and their sense of self. As a result, their readings frequently featured an odd kind of doublespeak. For example: “Achebe tells the story well and manages to give us an insight into the life of the primitive Nigerian” or “his book […] will I believe alter our perceptions of the colonial history of the dark continent.” Both these statements obviously re-inscribe the very perceptions which they claim that the book has challenged. As, indeed, does the claim that “the novel just shows that we were civilized just a little before them.” Here certain underlying conceptual categories – “we” and “them,” “civilized” and “primitive” – resurface even as they are apparently contested. By contrast, it was working-class readers who tended to offer the most innovative but also the most self-interrogating responses to the novel, such as the night guard who used the novel to return to a dictionary definition of colonialism as “economic exploitation of weak or backward peoples,” before noting that “this still arrogantly supposes the subjects to be weak or backward by comparison.” Or, as a second example, the reader who concluded that if she had read Achebe’s novel earlier “I would also of learnt about different customs, religions and traditions instead of skimming over them, thinking them to be fillings and little in-betweens the real story.” Most readers’ responses, however, did not reflect on the lessons of the story from the outside, as it were, but simply on the story itself, on the fate of the characters and the situations they faced. And it was in doing this that some of the most striking interpretations were offered. For example:

158

ANDREW SMITH



Okonkwo is fearful and violently resistant to the new religion because it has the potential of undermining the life long work of the clan trying to please the gods of its ancestors. If he accepted the new religion then his sacrifices, like the killing of Ikemefuna, who Okonkwo loved as a son, would have been in vain.

This account, which connects Okonkwo’s fatal last actions back to the death of Ikemefuna on a psychological level, and which therefore credits him with depth, which sees him as a character beset by doubts about his own choices, and about the rightness of tradition, seems to me to be genuinely insightful. At the very least it is suggestive of a real effort to think through the events of the novel from Okonkwo’s point of view. The fact that Okonkwo is the central figure in those events does nothing to make such a sympathetic response intuitive or automatic, as is made clear by the absolutely contrasting reading given by a retired businessman for whom the “first reaction” was to “worry about the role of the missionaries,” and who read Okonkwo, not as a character with psychological complexity, but as a symbolic representation of Africa as such: “Huge, strong, lumbering, ambitious, cruel to the weak and imperfect but with a promise of greatness and wealth.” A final reading perhaps deserves consideration in a little more detail: Perhaps Okonkwo was not rash when he killed the messenger, but the other messengers were allowed to escape. It may have been better for the clan for this to happen as we know of […] the suffering already experienced by the leaders of Umuofia, and that Abame had been obliterated. By taking his own life Okonkwo saved his people from this. […] He knew what a suicide entailed; this for him would have been the ultimate sacrifice, knowing what his burial would have been like. We are told that ‘the story of Ikemefuna is still told in Umuofia unto this day’ and so the clan continues. Perhaps Okonkwo’s sacrifice was not in vain.

What this essayist brings together are three discrete incidents from the novel. First, the story of the colonial regime’s revenge against Abame after a white missionary was killed there; secondly, the briefest of lines suggesting the continuity of the village into the present; thirdly, the concluding suicide. From these is woven an interpretation of Okonkwo’s self-destruction as something both calculated and heroic. And, moreover, an act which is successful in preserving the long-term existence of his village. We do no justice at all to readers if we underplay the pressures that impel one interpretation over another. This effort to redeem Okonkwo’s death as something positive was



First and Second Glances

159

asserted against all of the more traditional perspectives offered in the classes themselves, which followed the critical consensus in reading the novel as a form of tragedy. It was produced, also, against the grain of established national histories and against the general media portrayal of Africa as a place still primitive and irredeemably violent. This is not just a cussedly original reading, then, it is one fired by sympathy with Okonkwo’s position, and dependent on a concerted imaginative effort to dismantle the categories ‘we’ and ‘them’. In an interview from 1977, Pierre Macherey returned to that comment from Marx with which I began this essay. In essence, Macherey claims, Marx is having an ironic chuckle at those who still treat Greek culture as an easily transposable model, assuming somehow that the meanings and forms of creative works drift above changing social circumstances, maintaining themselves in some kind of ahistorical purity. What Marx is thus pointing us towards, Macherey argues, is the degree to which Literary works are not only produced, they are constantly reproduced under different conditions – and so they themselves become very different. […] Texts are constantly rewritten, their effects are constantly altered. It is essential to study this material history of texts.9

It is exactly a series of reproductions of Achebe’s novel, in Macherey’s sense, that are discussed here. Precisely because texts can be reproduced, they can be encountered outside of that context in which they were originally produced. They are, in this respect, both reproduced in each new reading and are also possessed of a singularity, a distinctiveness, that is born of the fact that they are a product of creative human labour conducted under particular social and historical conditions. This singularity confronts the distant reader as a challenge or a puzzle, a crisis requiring work. How such a crisis is resolved, as these last examples suggest, is related in important ways to what readers bring to their readings and how, as they go about trying to overcome an initial sense of displacement, they seek to reclaim a story in terms of their own local experiences. For some of the readers that I worked with, especially those who had a stronger personal sense of investment in the image of Britain as a great historical power, Things Fall Apart was intriguing but exotic and was met, in the end, with a re-assertion of old, familiar certainties; certainties about the course 9

Pierre Macherey, “Interview,” Red Letters 5 (1977): 6–7.

160

ANDREW SMITH



and cause of British imperialism, and about the categories of identity with which it operated. For others, by contrast, Achebe’s novel was strikingly immediate. Readers in places like Easterhouse, or the dilapidated estates outside of Dumfries, can map the story that Achebe tells onto their own local and personal histories with a remarkably close fit. The falling-apart that the novel describes has plenty of analogies in Britain’s recent domestic history and those analogies prepared the ground for these readers, in their various ways, to make that story their own. Hence, one reader, a man from Govan, the onetime heart of the Clyde’s ship-building industry, explained in his essay how he had looked up the seven villages of Umuofia in an atlas and failed to find them, a fact that he took as proof of their ultimate disappearance. Govan, too, seems to have disappeared from the map of places that matter, so it is hardly surprising that readers there, and in places like it, should find a poignancy and urgency in Achebe’s novel which leads them to read it, to retell it even, in intimate and deeply provocative ways.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). ——. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988). ——. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975). ——. Things Fall Apart (Oxford: Heinemann, 1958). Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (Pour une théorie de la production littéraire; 1966, tr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). ——. “Interview,” Red Letters 5 (1977): 3–9. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. & foreword by Martin Nicolaus (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie; 1939; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Smith, Andrew. “Imaginative Knowledge: Scottish Readers and Nigerian Fictions,” African Research and Documentation 83 (2000): 23–36. Smith, Iain Crichton. Consider the Lilies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1999).



Things Fall Apart Culture, Anthropology, and Literature1 ————

T

R USSELL M C D OUGALL

N I G E R I A N C H I N U A A C H E B E I S U N D O U B T E D L Y A F R I C A ’ S bestknown and most widely studied author. His publishers estimate that his first novel, Things Fall Apart, has sold more than eight million copies. This official estimate obviously excludes the many pirate copies that have circulated in Africa (and probably elsewhere). Time magazine lists the novel among the top 100 best English-language novels of all time.2 Elaine Showalter, one of the judges of the Man Booker Prize, postulates that Things Fall Apart inaugurated the modern African novel, and showed “the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies.”3 Small wonder, then, that Achebe has been lauded as one of the “Makers of the Twentieth Century.”4 Certainly he illuminated the path forward for African writers. Without Things Fall Apart, African literature, 1

HE

This is a revised and extended version of a paper delivered at the 30th African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (A F S A A P ) conference, “Africans in Australia and outsiders in Africa,” Australian National University, Canberra, 2008, and published in the Australasian Review of African Studies, 30.1 (2009). 2 “Time’s 100 Best Novels,” http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete _list.html (accessed 10 June 2008). 3 Elaine Showalter, quoted in “Chinua Achebe wins 2007 Man Booker International Prize,” http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/release/1059 (accessed 10 June 2008). 4 1000 Makers of the Twentieth Century (London: Random House, 1997).

162

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



particularly West African literature, would probably not have achieved the quality and renown that it has today. I want to consider here, in the fiftieth anniversary year of its publication, the history of the novel’s reception; and I shall do so initially by reference in particular to the entangled history of two academic disciplines, literary studies, on the one hand, and anthropology, on the other. In the 1970s, when there was still an object of study known as the ‘new literatures’, or otherwise in the case of anglophone cultures as ‘Commonwealth Literature’, the discourses of literary criticism and anthropology were sometimes mutually sustaining. The original terms of critical approval, for example, of Things Fall Apart often included the fact that it conveyed an accurate anthropological insight into a culture previously trivialized by British and European fictions of Africa. Anthropology, although like literature contributing substantially to the ‘worlding’ of Africa as ‘Other’, nonetheless then seemed capable of providing a counter-discourse to the colonialist perspective. As Phyllis Taoua argues,5 the emergence of the experimental genre in francophone African fiction begins with the dialogue that African philosophers took up in the 1960s and 1970s in response to French theories of the dissolution of the ‘sovereign self’, a Western identity no longer centred or cohering in rationality; and it is no accident that this articulation occurs precisely at the time of France’s loss of empire. At the same time, anglophone critics found much to admire in Achebe’s fictional ethnographies of the Igbo peoples of Nigeria, his resurrecting of an African identity. Not surprisingly, in this context, anthropology’s relation to Africa has historically been ambiguous. Many African theorists, desiring to dismantle the logic of empire, inevitably turned their decolonizing gaze to the Western discourse that most of all had influenced perceptions of African identity, anthropology; but rather than seeking to refine or revise its primary methods or assumptions, they sought to dismantle the entire project of anthropology. Eventually, of course, anthropology came under attack from almost all sides; and by the 1990s literary critics in the West prided themselves on performing a heuristic function across the multi-disciplines of cultural studies, using literature to reveal to anthropology the nature and origin of its own biases. Thus, in his 1994 book Masks of Difference David Richards examined anthropological discourse as it had been applied in the past to so-called 5

Phyllis Taoua, “Performing Identity: Nations, Cultures and African Experimental Novels,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 14.2 (December 2001): 193–219.



Culture, Anthropology, and Literature

163

‘savage’ peoples as a textual practice that operated in literature and in art, purporting to hold a mirror to nature but inevitably betraying the biases of its own subject-position.6 By the end of the decade, Eleni Coundouriotis, in her 1998 study titled Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel, was able to argue that literature provides a stronger – indeed, a more truthful – version of ethnography than anthropology.7 Why? Because the anthropological method and textual practice of ethnography, born of the colonial encounter, hence shaped by a peculiar myopia of power, keeps ethnographers constantly fascinated by their own discoveries, so that they are unable to read them as historical events. In other words, anthropology has made it impossible for ethnography to overcome its lack of historicity; whereas, in the imagined space of literature, Coundouriotis implies, the two sides of the colonial encounter are able to occupy the same historical time. Postcolonial studies, according to this view, seemed to offer a substitute ethnography, even a more ‘correct’ ethnography. This is a particularly interesting historical statement when one considers that Things Fall Apart is now perhaps almost as widely set as required reading for students in African anthropology courses as in African literature courses. At Bates College in Maine (a liberal arts college that proclaims itself “dedicated to the principle of active engagement”), students read Achebe’s fiction as a means of exploring the idea that “the reality we inhabit is socially or culturally constructed”8 – and that idea is presented as a fundamental insight of anthropology. In the Kent school system in the U S A , anthropology students learn to “analyze an Interdependent World through Patterns of Continuity and Change,”9 reading no fewer than three novels by Achebe, alongside Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and Robert Braidwood’s The Emergence of Man. Analyzing patterns of culture in fiction thus becomes a means to promote citizenship, to appreciate diversity, and to increase understanding of an interdependent global system of relations. 6

David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). 7 Eleni Coundouriotis, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (New York: Columbia U P , 1998). 8 Social Anthropology 101 (Bates College, Lewiston, Maine). http://abacus.bates .edu/Faculty/Anthropology/Anthro101/Anthro101.html (accessed 10 June 2008). 9 Kent School District Social Studies, Anthropology Grades 10, 11, 12. http://www .kent.k12.wa.us/KSD/IS/SLO/SS/SS-Anth.html (accessed 10 June 2008).

164

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



In North America, Things Fall Apart often appears in ‘World Literature’ courses. While the idea of Weltliteratur was conceived by Goethe in the early nineteenth century, it is worth noting the use of the term by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto not long afterwards, to describe the ‘cosmopolitan character’ of bourgeois literary production.10 The term has that sense still for David Damrosch, author of What is World Literature?, the first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature. Damrosch defines world literature as a both mode of circulation and of reading: in short, literature that gains in translation. Such literature, he suggests, when effectively presented, moves into an elliptical space somewhere between the source culture and the receiving culture, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither.11 Simon Fraser University in British Columbia markets its World Literature programme in the Bachelor of Arts as a mode of tourism, an alternative way to see the world. World Literature there is “writing that has traveled” – “that has moved beyond its author’s culture.”12 Texts that travel beg big questions – for example, about cultural exchange (or, in Damrosch’s terms, translation). But the S F U website says also “World Literature is a hall of mirrors,” which must mean that reading it will set you begging the question of your own identity – while at the same time you are gaining skills “that will prepare you for global and multicultural professions in the 21st century.”13 You will “be initiated in the cross-cultural understanding and empathy central 10

Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, tr. Gisela C. O’Brien (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964): 94; Friedrich Engels & Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1888; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002): 223: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. [...] In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And,as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” 11 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Translation/Transnation) (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2003). 12 Simon Fraser University, “World Literature,” http://www.students.surrey.sfu.ca /arts/wl (accessed 30 August 2009). 13 Simon Fraser University, “World Literature.”



Culture, Anthropology, and Literature

165

to being a global and multicultural citizen.” You will learn how to read – which is to travel – not only across cultures, but across time, and in translation.14 Things Fall Apart appears here in an elective first-year unit entitled “Experiencing Society,” alongside Margaret Atwood’s dystopian futurist fiction The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sophocles’ Antigone. The thematic parallels are clear: Things Fall Apart in this context enables exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state or, in broader terms: how the individual experiences his or her social reality. World literature is a much rarer category in Australia. Beginning in November 2009, S F U students can take a double degree if they choose through Monash University in Australia, but the award that will complement their S F U degree in World Literature is a BA in Global Studies. Similarly, at the University of Sydney, Things Fall Apart is recommended reading in the foundational unit of a Bachelor of Global Studies degree. The outline of that unit states that it draws on a broad range of disciplines, ten in all, including anthropology, but specifically not literary studies – although perhaps that is subsumed under the rubric of cultural studies. The Global Studies degree is arranged according to four themes, the first of which is the making of a global world, reaching back well beyond the contemporary phenomenon of globalization; and Things Fall Apart is clearly positioned to represent one of the key historical moments of that process. It is, of course, the colonial moment, which the unit indicates as follows: “We will consider how different nations, peoples and cultures have interacted and highlight the ways in which power relations have shaped their mutual influence.”15 But this description seems to me to run the risk of emptying the colonial moment of its political significance, certainly in terms of African history, or African studies. And one might argue also that Things Fall Apart, resituated intellectually in terms of globalization, is also stripped of its historical and literary power, as well as the context in which it was written and produced. Instead, the novel is made to

14

Simon Fraser University, “WL 100. Introduction to World Literature” http://www .students.surrey.sfu.ca/files/docs/worldlit/fall2009outlines/WL%20100%20Course% 20Outline%201097%20Burnaby%20-%20web.pdf (accessed 30 August 2009). 15 University of Sydney, GBST1001 Global Studies: Themes and Approaches. http: //www.arts.usyd.edu.au/degrees/globalstudies/Attachments/2007%20Syllabus.rtf (accessed 30 August 2009).

166

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



function toward producing “ideas and theories about social justice and different understandings of equality.”16 The social justice perspective is a key determinant of how Things Fall Apart is now read and situated in the globalized academy. The University of Minnesota lists on its website a bibliography of titles compiled and recommended for their usefulness in teaching human rights.17 The list has been updated and edited at least twice since its original compilation, but its original author in the late 1980s was the then curriculum coordinator of Amnesty International in the U S A . And there again, on that list, is Things Fall Apart. At Tulane University in New Orleans, Things Fall Apart contributes to a gateway course introducing both Western and non-Western literatures. “Literature 202: Global Texts and Traditions” threads cultural encounter as a theme with revolution. Things Fall Apart is set alongside Ursula LeGuin’s science-fiction fantasy The Dispossessed and the Riverside edition of American captivity narratives, among others.18 Cultural encounter here is as much about the imagining of alternative and emergent communities as about existing or disappearing ones. It is a both a salvage operation on the past and a projection into the future. Graham Huggan observes how a recent edition of Things Fall Apart “features a formidable battery of prefatory notes including a glossary and a short essay on Ibo culture and history,” from which he concludes that the publisher is clearly inviting the novel to be read anthropologically – “a smart marketing move when one considers the novel’s prevalence as high school introduction to a ‘foreign culture’.”19 In fact, however, in Australia at least, the process of de-africanizing the text begins in high school. In New South Wales, the Higher School Certificate syllabus for the Advanced English subject, “Representation and Text,” includes an elective entitled “Powerplay”; only one novel is set there as the basis for study, and that is George Orwell’s 1984. But the 16

University of Sydney, GBST1001 Global Studies: Themes and Approaches. “Fictional Literature: Literature for Teaching Human Rights – An Annotated Bibliography,” compiled by Nancy Flowers, Curriculum Coordinator Amnesty International U S A (1989). Updated and edited by Lory Schwedes (1999), Mollie Smith (2002), and Alexis Howe (2005). http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/bibliog/literature .htm (accessed 12 June 2008). 18 http://www.tulane.edu/~litr/syllabi/litr202.html (accessed 12 June 2008). 19 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 41. 17



Culture, Anthropology, and Literature

167

author of the study materials on Orwell considers it advisable that students should know that 1984 appeared previously on the syllabus of a different H S C elective, entitled “Utopias and Anti-Utopias”; he lists the texts with which it was set there as providing “interesting insights” into “power and the language that it uses.”20 Here again is Things Fall Apart, where we might never have expected it, in an abandoned course on anti-/utopian writing, which has evolved now into a unit instead where students are asked to analyze “portrayals of the powerful,” and to consider “how the depiction of particular relationships provides insight into the nature of politics generally.”21 Things Fall Apart has dropped out of the new course, yet is recommended still for the light it might throw on Orwell’s political satire, and on the three other texts set for the study of “Powerplay”: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the Australian Hannie Rayson’s play Life After George, and, most interestingly perhaps, the documentary film directed by John Hughes, After Mabo. This reminds me of the review in the Australian Law Society Journal of Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s polemical “Essay on Chinua Achebe,” entitled African Literature in Defence of History (2001), which the reviewer judged as “stimulating but not satisfying.”22 Yet he recommended the book as especially challenging in Australia for its raising of issues parallel to our “stumbling attempts at reconciliation and restitution.”23 The point again is how Achebe’s novel has been recontextualized – this time in a multi-media framework of dehistoricized power-relations, where parallels seemingly can be drawn just as easily with African history and Roman tragedy (albeit of an English Renaissance flavour) as with debate “surrounding the concept of native title in Australia.”24 Or with the pessimistic post-World War Two political philo-

20

Bruce Pattinson, “Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell,” New South Wales

H S C Online: English (Advanced. Module C. Representation and Text. Elective 2:

Powerplay) http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/english/advanced/representation/powerplay /1984/title.html (accessed 12 June 2008). 21 New South Wales H S C Online: English (Advanced. Module C. Representation and Text. Elective 2: Powerplay) http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/english/advanced/repre sentation/powerplay/powerplay_intro/intro.html (accessed 12 June 2008). 22 Stephen Booth, “Windows onto Africa,” Law Society Journal 42 (November 2004): 91. 23 Booth, “Windows onto Africa,” 91. 24 Jenny McDonald, “After Mabo, by John Hughes,” New South Wales H S C Online: English (Advanced. Module C. Representation and Text. Elective 2: Powerplay)

168

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



sophy of Orwell’s 1984, futuristic in its setting, but written in the wake of the defeat of Nazism and the apparent loss of individual identity under Communism in Russia and China. Or even with the university politics of Hannie Rayson’s take on liberal education, the rise of managerialism, and the corporate university. There are many ways in which such intertextual readings can be interesting and productive. For example, Rayson’s exploration of Australia’s alleged “cultural resistance to passion: our self-consciousness about the passionate gesture, the passionate expression,”25 might be read revealingly against the tragic passion of Achebe’s anti-hero, Okonkwo. But the postmodern trend in anthropology, the idea of anthropology as literature, comes at a time when professionalized literary study is so bogged down in identity-politics that many are doom-saying the death of the discipline. The central irony of the situation is this: anthropology, in order to acknowledge and compensate for its alleged bias and lack of historicity, has taken a literary turn – just at the moment when literary criticism has turned away from anthropology and, indeed, from literature as a category of writing. Still, there is something that the disciplines share nonetheless: the sense of crisis. The English Association in the U K was set to celebrate its centenary with a conference in September 2006 called “The Health of the Tribe: the State of English Studies Today.” It was to be held at Wadham College, Oxford; it had its keynote speakers all organized and advertised, and its key question ready for the call for papers. The question was this: “Does ‘English’ still have a coherent identity and an imaginable future in the academy, or will it transform itself into a range of separate disciplines and activities?”26 But then suddenly the conference was cancelled. The organizers made the mistake of defining ‘English’ (and, by extension, literary study generally) in terms of a discarded anthropology, by their adopting the taboo discourse of tribalism, which had been one of the key categories of exclusion and inclusion in colonialist anthropology. The proposed central trope of the conference, tribal http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/english/advanced/representation/powerplay/2918/After_Ma bo.html (accessed 12 June 2008). 25 Hannie Rayson, quoted in “By George - she’s got ‘It’,” Artbeat (April 2001), http: //archive.dcita.gov.au/2001/04/artbeat_april_2001/by_george_shes_got_it (accessed 12 June 2008). 26 “C A N C E L L E D . The Health of the Tribe. The State of English Today. Higher Education Conference, Wadham College, Oxford, Saturday 2 September 2006,” http: //www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/conferences/20069.html (accessed 12 June 2008).



Culture, Anthropology, and Literature

169

health, was assumed to depend on a “coherent” identity, which would then imply an “imaginable future” for English;27 the inversion of the trope, which would then imply the death of the subject English, suggests that the dispersal of identity must be a disease, causing fragmentation. So much for the lessons learned from Things Fall Apart; and this at a time when diaspora studies are clearly dominant in literary studies, or at least in its postcolonial sub-domain. Nothing could better illustrate the point that postcolonial criticism itself has been making for the past twenty years: that the consolidation of the sovereign ego of Englishness depended on the othering of its subjects, in a whole variety of ways. The organizers, setting the theme of this apparently doomed conference, state specifically: “English studies, like the English language itself, have had an impact in countries and communities outside England.”28 The question they ask – “Does ‘English’ still have a coherent identity?” – raises the spectre of the dystopian future as they fear it, a trans-disciplinary migration of literary studies into an academy itself conceived as a global diaspora. Yet, in a way, this horror vision is a repeat performance, the Death of the Subject, with which, of course, literary scholars are only too familiar. This cuts to the heart of another question: what kind of story, in a globalized academy of transdisciplinary studies, does Things Fall Apart continue to tell? What does it tell us about the past and how does it help us imagine the future? For the New York Times in March 2006, the headline “Things Fall Apart” raised a warning against the Nigerian President’s efforts to change the nation’s constitution so that he might have a third term of office, and the story of the future that it predicted was civil war in Nigeria and the consequent destabilization of Liberia, Togo, Ivory Coast, and the Congo.29 In January 2007, the Brookings Institute translated “Things Fall Apart” to the Middle East to warn against Iraq sliding into abyss of civil war.30 There are twenty-five different songs listed in iTunes called “Things Fall Apart” and a further thirteen titles that contain those words. There is a crazed guitar band called 27

“C A N C E L L E D . The Health of the Tribe.” “C A N C E L L E D . The Health of the Tribe.” 29 Editorial, “In Nigeria, Things Fall Apart,” New York Times (26 March 2006). 30 Brookings issued a Saban Center Analysis Paper authored by Daniel L. Byman & Kenneth M. Pollack and titled “Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War” on 1 January 2007. http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/01iraq _byman.aspx (accessed 12 June 2008). The book of the same title and by the same authors was published by Brookings Institution Press six months later. 28

170

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



Things Fall Apart. There is a hip-hop / rap album called “Things Fall Apart,” and a country album of the same title.31 “Things Fall Apart” is now an unsourced catch-cry, a logo, a free-floating branding device of sorts. In Australia, a book called Things Fall Apart tells the story of the financial collapse of the State Bank in South Australia, which the author alleges was caused by the bank’s “turning its back on its community roots.”32 The New South Wales union movement chose “Things Fall Apart” as the title for its 2005 policy conference to discuss the impact of the government’s Work Choices policy in the community: the story there is of the fragmentation of families and of society by increasing workloads, and the struggle to connect workers’ rights with family values.33 In still another context, “Things Fall Apart” tells the story of the death of centre politics, the implosion of the Australian Democrat Party, and the erosion of objective debate to determine the public interest.34 Finally, it has been used to tell the story of the implosion of the university itself, as an ideal of the rational community of scholars, its traditional disciplines now in disarray and defenceless against the new market-driven economies of knowledge.35 One thing is certain: many more students coming to university from high school now have read Things Fall Apart than have read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the novel with which it is most often paired in university English courses. There is thus a strangeness about the pairing, an unspoken false assumption of familiarity with a largely decentred canon, perhaps expressive of a nostalgia for the time before the death of the subject. Of course, it might be said that the miscellany of hijacks that I was describing a moment ago is no more than what Achebe himself did in 1958, when he took the title Things

31

The artists, respectively, are The Roots and Lonesome Bob. Greg McCarthy, Things Fall Apart: A History of the State Bank of South Australia (Kew, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002). 33 Note also Marion Baird, “Things Fall Apart”, an issues paper written following the conference, http://www.NewSouthWalesnurses.asn.au/documents/3497/extract /index.html 34 Tim Colebatch, “Things fall apart when centre cannot hold,” The Age (5 September 2006). 35 Anthony Welch, “Things Fall Apart: Disintegration, Universities and the Decline of Discipline(s),” in Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft: Herausforderung, Vermittlung, Praxis, ed. Christoph Kodron et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997): 182–91. 32



Culture, Anthropology, and Literature

171

Fall Apart from a line in Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” (1919).36 But that was neither a branding nor a marketing ploy, nor a de-historicizing, and of course the debt was acknowledged by the epigraph. This, in fact, was a clear and deliberate re-contextualizing, a re-historicizing, in full awareness of the phrase’s European origins, and of course it was highly successful in locating Africa in world literature. What has happened since is unfortunate. The novel continues to thrive in the marketplace, and in market-driven universities, but seemingly it has little effect now in focusing African studies; it assists the pedagogies of decentred disciplines of anthropology, sociology, global studies, and interdisciplinary studies in social justice; and it contributes to literature courses where, in Australia by and large, it will always be the only African novel. In Australia’s corporatized universities, lacking both the population and the politics of the African-American diaspora, Things Fall Apart is in danger of being finally co-opted by capitalism as a logo to ‘sell’ identity-politics, not unlike the way that the Gold Coast Yoga Centre uses it to ‘promote’ alternative psychotherapies.37 The title has become a kind of Orwellian double-speak. Australian students respond very positively to the novel, particularly when it is paired with Heart of Darkness, or perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s film (based on Conrad’s novella) Apocalypse Now. But they show little ongoing interest in the issues Achebe raises as they relate specifically to an African problematic; they are much more interested in the implications for postcolonial discourse analysis as it might apply to classical English texts, and if they progress along these lines they become capable of producing the same predictably correct readings over and over. So, what value has Things Fall Apart now in Australia? Random House, which markets the Anchor mass market paperback in Australia, provides the following note to teachers on its website:

36

It might, of course, be argued that these diverse texts refer more directly to Yeats’ poem than to Achebe’s novel. But what I am suggesting here is that, while it may be a measure of the novel’s cultural impact that the phrase ‘things fall apart’ now floats free of its originary contexts, its new readers will close the loop from these other contexts when reading either the novel or the poem, bringing new intertextual understandings to bear (diachronically, as it were) upon the ‘original’. 37 Gold Coast Centre, http://www.goldcoastyogacentre.com/welcome/page84.php (accessed 12 June 2008). The title “Things Fall Apart” here refers to Pema Chodron’s classic interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Boston M A : Shambhala, 1996).

172

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



[Things Fall Apart] offers far more than access to pre-colonial Nigeria and the cataclysmic changes brought about by the British. It also can be a window into the story of the Aborigines in Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and the First Nations of North, Central, and South America in the “falling apart” of the indigenous cultures of these and other places whose centers could not hold.38

The value of the novel in literature courses seems to be mainly to develop interracial understanding, or as an introduction to postcolonial discourse analysis. But it appears to have been stripped of its ability to interest students in the history, past or future, of the culture it specifically portrays. Somehow the novel serves now more as a mirror than as a window, a usefully distorting mirror to be sure, that reveals the biases and the limitations or ‘our’ own value system, but does not kindle the multicultural interest in root cultures that one finds in the U S A , and so does not generate any great interest in Africa, or in Australia’s relationship with Africa. This is particularly unfortunate at a time when Australia has been gradually increasing its intake of migrants and refugees from African countries, and as many Australians, lacking familiarity with African peoples, seem ill-equipped to respond to the dominant media imagery of Africans as either helpless and starving or pre-programmed for violence.39 Alan Wolfe, a sociologist at Boston College, bemoans: “Everyone’s read Things Fall Apart, but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”40 Certainly the novel is not always welcome. It may have inspired Nelson Mandela through years of political imprisonment; but to the arch-conservative former prime minister of Australia, John Howard, who has almost certainly never read it, Things Fall Apart is a symbol of the ‘dumbing down’ of the English syllabus in Australian high schools by “the so-called postmodernism” (as he calls it), and the subsuming of quality in literature to political correctness. There is no attempt to define postmodernism, let alone differentiate it from postcolonialism, in the conservatives’ war on secondary38

http://www.randomhouse.com/anchor/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385474

542&view=tg (accessed 13 June 2008). 39

Note Margaret Walker’s discussion of the media profiling of Africans, in “Imaginary Links between Africa and Australia,” unpublished paper, A F S A A P Conference, Canberra, 2008. 40 Alan Wolfe, “The fall and rise of the Yale Classics department,” Yale Herald 45.2 (25 January 2008).



Culture, Anthropology, and Literature

173

school English education. But Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler, in their keynote address to the New South Wales English Teachers’ Association Conference (“Licence to Thrill”) in Sydney, December 2007, attempted to unravel what ‘postmodernism’ means to its detractors; and they found five key misunderstandings or fallacies: Postmodernism holds there to be no such thing as truth; Postmodernism equals moral relativism; Postmodernism is leftist; Postmodernism is anti-liberal; Postmodernism holds there to be no such thing as history.41

It is fascinating that Things Fall Apart should be identified as ‘postmodern’ in these terms, hence vilified for its contribution to the ‘dumbing down’ of English education. The reason, I believe, relates in part to what Howard famously called the “black armband view of Australian history,” to which he frequently referred when rationalizing his belief that the Australian government should not issue an apology to the Stolen Generations. That is, to those generations of Indigenous Australians who were removed as children from their families by government agencies and church missions under the cloak of parliamentary law, and whose world as a result did indeed fall apart. The removals occurred for approximately a hundred years, from 1870 to 1970. Things Fall Apart is a book that refuses to deal in stereotypes that question official histories and dominant discourses but balances blame without denying truth. It considers carefully the psychological damage of colonialism, as well as its material effects. Australia has now said sorry to its Indigenous people; and the then Labor Prime Minister who made the apology, Kevin Rudd, alluding to Howard’s precipitation of the poisonous polarization of historical opinion that characterized the recent history and culture wars, did call upon Australians to ‘‘embrace a balanced, reflective but positive view” of the past42 – something like that of Things Fall Apart. Clearly this is a morally subversive, anti-liberal Leftist plot; but I suspect that Achebe’s novel has lessons for us yet.

41

Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler, “The War on English: An Answer to the Question, What is Postmodernism?” Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture 16 (2008). http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_16/article_01.shtml (accessed 30 August 2009). 42 Phillip Coorey, “Rudd squirmishes with Howard over the history wars,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 August 2009).

174

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL



W O R K S C I TE D Booth, Stephen. “Windows onto Africa,” Law Society Journal 42 (November 2004): 91–95. Colebatch, Tim. “Things fall apart when centre cannot hold,” The Age (5 September 2006). Coorey, Phillip. “Rudd squirmishes with Howard over the history wars,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 August 2009). Coundouriotis, Eleni. Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (New York: Columbia U P , 1998). Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? (Translation/Transnation) (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2003). Eckermann, Johann Peter. Conversations with Goethe, tr. Gisela C. O’Brien (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964). Flowers, Nancy. ed., “Fictional Literature: Literature for Teaching Human Rights – An Annotated Bibliography” (1989). Updated and edited by Lory Schwedes (1999), Mollie Smith (2002), and Alexis Howe (2005). http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts /bibliog/literature.htm. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Lucy, Niall, & Steve Mickler, “The War on English: An Answer to the Question, What is Postmodernism?” Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture 16 (2008). http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_16/article_01.shtml. McCarthy, Greg. Things Fall Apart: A History of the State Bank of South Australia (Kew, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002). New York Times, “Editorial” (26 March 2006). Richards, David. Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). Smith, Godfrey, ed. 1000 Makers of the Twentieth Century (London: Random House, 1997). Taoua, Phyllis. “Performing Identity: Nations, Cultures and African Experimental Novels,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 14.2 (December 2001): 193–219. Welch, Anthony. “Things Fall Apart: Disintegration, Universities and the Decline of Discipline(s)” in Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft: Herausforderung, Vermittlung, Praxis, ed. Christoph Kodron et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997): 182–91. Wolfe, Alan. “The fall and rise of the Yale Classics department,” Yale Herald 45.2 (25 January 2008).



V T HINGS F ALL A PART IN T RANSLATION

11 ————

C

Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

W ALTRAUD K OLB

A C H E B E W A S A W A R D E D T H E P E A C E P R I Z E of the German Book Market in 2002, the most prestigious prize for writers in German-speaking countries. In the more than fifty profiles of Achebe and /or reviews of his work in German-language newspapers and magazines that honoured the occasion, Chinua Achebe was praised as the founder of modern African literature, and Things Fall Apart singled out as the book that introduced modern African writing to the world. In fact, Achebe was one of the first African writers to be translated into German, with Things Fall Apart being translated for the first time in 1959, and with a second translation appearing in 1983. To this day, it is one of the very few African books of which we have more than one German version. This essay discusses the two German translations of Things Fall Apart and, in particular, examines the radically different strategies adopted by the translators to re-write or re-create Achebe’s Igbo proverbs and metaphors. HINUA

Re-Writing and Translation Any translation may be described as an attempt to re-create a work of literature in another language, to make the literary achievements of particular writers accessible to readers who are unable to read their works in the original language, or to provide a text for those who simply derive more pleasure from reading in their mother tongue. The very notion of what we now describe as international or world literature would be unthinkable without translation.

178

WALTRAUD KOLB



Even works written in the widely spoken anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and lusophone languages need to be translated into other languages to become truly international. Translations may also be described as ‘re-writings’, and I will use this term throughout this essay for two reasons. First, I want to stress that the translation of a literary work is always a process of ‘recreation’, the creative production of a new text. In order to produce new literary texts, translators need to use their language creatively in much the same way as writers do. Secondly, and this is particularly important in our context, I want to draw attention to the fact that literary translators have a more powerful role in the creation of a text than may be generally assumed by the reading public. By shaping their translations in a particular way, they have the power to define and direct their readers’ experience of a literary text and the culture which produced it. The term ‘re-writing’ is more easily associated with the two important notions of creativity and power than the term ‘translation’ traditionally is. In the field of translation studies, it has been applied by André Lefevere to various forms of texts based on works of literature, such as translations, anthologies, literary histories, and literary criticism.1 All of these forms of writing have a powerful influence on the way members of one culture construct representations of other cultures. In their re-writings, the translators of Things Fall Apart re-created representations of the culture described by Chinua Achebe (through proverbs and metaphors, among other things) and thereby constructed a particular image of Igbo society for German readers. 2 Susan Bassnett, another translation scholar who has written extensively about the power of translators and the role of literary translation in constructing cultures, compares translators with map-makers and travel writers, all of whom, she says, are not “innocent producers of text. The works they create are part of a process of manipulation that shapes and conditions our attitudes to other

1

André Lefevere, Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), and Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London & New York: Routledge, 1992). Unlike Lefevere, I use the term in its hyphenated form to emphasize the two components of the term: i.e. the reference back to another work of literature or an existing original (‘re-’) and the act of writing. 2 The term ‘German’, as in German readers, the German book-market, etc., refers to all German-speaking countries: i.e. Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

179

cultures while purporting to be something else.”3 For “something else,” of course, we may read ‘the same as the original, or a true copy of the original, just in another language’. A translation, as I will try to show, is never ‘the same as the original’ but, rather, a new text that sometimes has its own agenda. In examining the two German re-writings of Things Fall Apart, I will discuss the ways in which the German translators made use of their creativity and potential power as producers of new texts. My focus will be on the different strategies adopted by translators in their re-writing of one of the crucial features of Achebe’s work, his extensive use of Igbo proverbs and metaphors. As Umberto Eco pointed out, in their role as mediators between two literatures and cultures, translators do not usually work in a vacuum, but need to ‘negotiate’ their strategies and translations with the other parties involved: on the one hand, the author, the source text, and the source culture; on the other, the publisher of the target text, the literary critics, the target audience, and the target culture.4

The Publication of Things Fall Apart in German When the first translation of Things Fall Apart was published in 1959, it was one of the first African novels to be translated into German. At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, there was an early wave of interest in the Germanspeaking countries for the literature of the newly or soon to be independent African countries. As early as 1954, the first of a number of anthologies of African verse had been translated from English and French, and in 1955 a German translation of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard5 had been published. Translations of books by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Okot p’Bitek were then published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Interestingly, many of these translations appeared in East Germany, as it was at the time. In the case of Things Fall Apart, though, both translations originated in West Germany. The first translation, by Richard Moering, was published in 1959 as a hardback edition by Henry Goverts, a small but respected publish3

Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 1993): 99. 4 Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). 5 Amos Tutuola, Der Palmweintrinker: Ein Märchen von der Goldküste, tr. Walter Hilsbecher (The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952; Heidelberg: Rothe, 1955).

180

WALTRAUD KOLB



ing house in Stuttgart. Goverts’ list at the time included non-fiction and fiction, mainly German fiction and some translations of English-language fiction, such as works by William Faulkner. In 1976, Moering’s translation was re-edited as a paperback in East Germany by Aufbau-Verlag. One focus of this latter publishing house in the 1960s and 1970s was on twentiethcentury international literature, with a particular interest in the literatures of African countries. The multi-coloured cover of the new edition hints at the exotic and unfamiliar story to be expected by German readers (Figure 1, p.182 below). As I have been unable to secure a copy of the Goverts hardback edition with the original dust jacket still in place, it must suffice here to say that it was bound in dark-green linen. The translator, Richard Moering, was a close friend of Henry Goverts. He was born in 1894 in Hamburg, and died there in 1974. In 1938, he moved to Paris, then Spain, and returned to Germany in 1958. He was a poet and writer of short prose and essays under his pen-name Peter Gan, as well as a translator of English and French literature under his own name, notably the work of Herman Melville, Henry James, Carson McCullers, Albert Camus, and Jean Giraudoux. He also worked as a reader and editor for Goverts, mainly on foreign titles.6 Things Fall Apart appears to have been his only translation of an African book. The second translation was brought out in 1983 by one of the largest German publishers, Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. As I will argue later, this fact may have played a major role in shaping the translation. It is volume number 1138 of a long-established and well-known series of Suhrkamp’s high quality paperbacks (edition suhrkamp), which includes fiction and non-fiction, originals and translations, with all books in the series having the same cover design, with only the colour of the cover varying (Figure 2 below). It was the result of the teamwork of two translators, Dagmar Heusler and Evelin Petzold. Dagmar Heusler was also the general editor of the African literature subsection of the edition suhrkamp series. As part of the series, she edited the translation of Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger and co-translated a col-

6

Peter Gan, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997): 468–69. Johannes Pfeiffer, “Gan, Peter,” in Neues Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1945, ed. Dietz–Rüdiger Moser (Munich: dtv, 1993): 380–82.



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

181

lection of stories by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.7 For Evelin Petzold, though, this appears to have been a one-off project, as no other translations are attributed to her. As a rule, and unless there are weighty reasons against it, new German translations take over the title of the first translation, presumably so as not to confuse readers. This is also the case with Things Fall Apart, the title of both translations being Okonkwo oder Das Alte stürzt. In the German title (a literal back-translation reads ‘Okonkwo, or The Old Crumbles’), Okonkwo’s name is added to the quotation from the W.B. Yeats poem which provided the title of the novel, and Okonkwo is thereby foregrounded as the main character of the book. And, equally, the ‘old’ is foregrounded by being specifically referred to, while the original title refers to things in general and thus implies several levels of conflict.8 The phrase “Das Alte stürzt” is contained in both German translations of the four-line extract from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” which provides the epigraph for the book, even though all other lines of the poem are rendered differently in each translation.9 More important, however, is the fact that the phrase is also a well-known quotation from Friedrich von Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (I V .ii).10 As book titles play an important role in attracting the attention of potential readers, one may assume that the reference to Schiller was deliberately chosen by Richard Moering or his publisher and was meant to resonate with the German target audience, even before any reader had a chance to see the quotation from Yeats in the book. 7

Dambudzo Marechera, Haus des Hungers, tr. Claus Peter Dressler & Curt Kaemmerer (House of Hunger, 1978; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Verborgene Schicksale: Erzählungen, tr. Dagmar Heusler & Ruth Krenn (Secret Lives and Other Stories, 1975; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1982). 8 See Shaban Mayanja, “Pthwoh! Geschichte, bleibe ein Zwerg, während ich wachse!”: Untersuchungen zum Problem der Übersetzung afrikanischer Literatur ins Deutsche (Hannover: Revonnah, 1999): 189. Mayanja erroneously assumes that the 1976 edition is the first edition of Moering’s translation and Moering an East German translator. 9 Except for the phrase “Das Alte stürzt,” the second translation follows a published translation of Yeats’s poem: William Butler Yeats, Werke, vol. 1, tr. Stefan Andres et al. (Neuwied & Berlin: Luchterhand, 1970): 149. To my knowledge, the first translation does not follow any published translation. See also Beatrix Aigner, “Kritische Betrachtungen der deutschen Übersetzung von Chinua Achebes Roman Things Fall Apart” (diploma thesis, University of Graz, Austria, 1994): 17–19. 10 Friedrich von Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (1804; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975): 83.

182

WALTRAUD KOLB



The reference to a well-known German classic seems highly consistent with the overall strategy of the second translation, as will become clear below, but, surprisingly, contradicts the first translation’s general approach.

Figure 1: 1976 edition

Figure 2: 1983 edition

African Literature and the German Book Market A few years ago, when asked about his vision of African literature in the twenty-first century, Chinua Achebe said that he feels the ground has been prepared for the future: We are one foot in the door, my hope is that the twenty-first century will bring us fully into the arena of world literature and that we will witness the real flourishing of African literature.11 11

Ernest N. Emenyonu, Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, vol. 1, ed. Emenyonu (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2004): xxi.



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

183

This description is also strikingly appropriate to the current situation of African literature in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Using the same image, we could say that the door was unlocked in the 1950s when the first translations began to appear, and has since been pushed open a bit further. Several events have served as ‘door openers’ for African books in the German-language market, starting with the early wave of translations in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1968, Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first African recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Market, and, in 1980, the Frankfurt Book Fair focused on the literatures of sub-Saharan Africa.12 Events like these naturally lead to a rise in translation activity, as did the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to Wole Soyinka in 1986, Nadine Gordimer in 1991, and J.M. Coetzee in 2003. Publishers in the German-speaking countries bring out an average of 20,000 new fiction titles per year (approximately 18,000 in 2007 and 25,000 in 2008), between a quarter and a third of these titles being translations (traditionally a much higher percentage than in English-speaking countries). The bulk of the translations, two thirds, are from English.13 Between thirty and forty titles per year are translations of African literature, including new editions of older translations of works by, for example, Gordimer or Coetzee. In mid-2009, 439 books by African authors in German translation were in print, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, folktales, anthologies, and multiple editions. 318 titles, not including multiple editions, were identifiable as translations from a particular language. As one might expect, English is again the dominant source language, accounting for two-thirds of the translations (218 titles), with sixty-seven titles being translations from French, twelve from Portuguese, six from Afrikaans, four from Swahili, one each from Arabic, Sesotho, and Zulu, plus two small Igbo poetry collections. These 318 titles represent the translated works of 164 African authors and were produced by sixty-four publishers.14

12

All numbers in the following section refer to sub-Saharan African countries. For details on the German book market, see the annual brochure published by the German Booksellers and Publishers Association, e.g., Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2009, ed. Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt: M V B , 2009) for 2008. 14 See the online bibliography of African titles in German translation at http://www .litprom.de, the website of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Literatur aus Afrika, 13

184

WALTRAUD KOLB



In general, it is only a handful of small publishing houses that publish African literature on a regular basis and, even more importantly, also translate books by new and unknown writers. Most African titles are not readily available in bookstores, but need to be ordered directly from the publishers. Even though this has become much easier with the internet, it still means that African literature tends to have a specialist audience, those already interested in African literature, readers who know where to look for new African books and who go to the trouble of ordering what they want to read. Of course, writers who do get published by one of the big German publishing houses, such as Chinua Achebe, Ken Saro–Wiwa, Ben Okri, Nuruddin Farah, and the South Africans Gordimer and Coetzee, have a better chance of entering the mainstream of world literature – with a better chance of then being available on the shelves of bookstores.15 The 1983 translation by Suhrkamp might be seen as an attempt to bring Things Fall Apart into the mainstream of international literature, and I will try to show how this might have had a palpable effect on the type and shape of the translation. So far, the two most successful books by Achebe on the German market have been Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The 1959 translation of Things Fall Apart was re-edited in 1976; the Suhrkamp translation of 1983 has gone through three more printings (1987, 1991, 1994) and, in 2007, was made into an audio-book. The translation of Arrow of God (1965) was also published several times by four different publishers (1965, 1975, 1994, 2002, 2003), but the book has never been re-translated. No Longer at Ease was translated twice, but there have been no reprints or new editions after the translations came out in 1963 and 2002, respectively. While Goverts and Aufbau have not published any other work by Chinua Achebe, Suhrkamp’s list also includes the translations of No Longer at Ease (2002) and Anthills of the Savannah (1991, 2002), both translated by Susanne Koehler. All in all, German translations of Achebe’s works have been put on the market by ten publishing houses, the translations being the work of ten translators. In mid2009, the German translations of six books by Chinua Achebe were in print

Asien und Lateinamerika (Society for the Promotion of African, Asian, and Latin American Literature). 15 Waltraud Kolb, “ ‘ Noch nicht unter zu vielen Geschichten begraben’: Englischsprachige Literatur aus Afrika auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 29.2 (2004): 131.



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

185

(Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer At Ease, Anthills of the Savannah, a volume of essays, and a selection of poems from Beware Soul Brother).16

Re-Writing Things Fall Apart: 1959 Literary scholars and critics generally agree that the Igbo proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, songs, and folktales incorporated by Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart are of paramount importance for portraying individual characters in the novel as well as Igbo society and culture as a whole, together with its values and traditions. Bernth Lindfors describes Achebe’s proverbs as “a grammar of values” (a phrase he borrowed from Melville J. Herskovits), as they provide a key to interpreting and understanding his works.17 At the same time, the use of Igbo orality also defines the narrative voice of the novel and, as C.L. Innes says, emphasizes “the identity of the narrator as spokesman for the Igbo community.”18 The incorporation of Igbo oral traditions was also a creative device that Achebe used (among others) to ensure that his language and literature, as he calls it, “carry the weight of my African experience.”19 Chantal Zabus, for example, describes europhone texts exhibiting the traces of an African writer’s native language and culture as ‘palimpsests’.20 Shaban Mayanja has introduced the term ‘third text’ to designate the unwritten African text which in many cases underlies the European-language text.21 In this essay, I will use the more general term ‘subtext’ to describe the African cultural layer beneath the surface English-language text. Compared to some of Achebe’s other works, Things Fall Apart contains a relatively small number of proverbs, twenty-three according to Ode Ogede’s count, as against 139 in Arrow of God, for example. However, as Ogede 16

Bibliographical details for all translations are included in the Works Cited. Bernth Lindfors, “The Palm-Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten” (1968), in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (London: Heinemann, 1979): 50. 18 C.L. Innes, Chinua Achebe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990): 32–33. 19 Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1975): 62. 20 Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (Cross / Cultures 4; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1991). 21 Mayanja, “Pthwoh! Geschichte, bleibe ein Zwerg, während ich wachse!”, 30. 17

186

WALTRAUD KOLB



points out, they usually mark key moments in the narrative.22 The issue of language is also explicitly dealt with in the novel. In the very beginning of the book, Achebe introduces his readers to the importance of rhetoric in Igbo oral culture and tells them that “proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten” (7), while towards the very end the district commissioner reflects that one of “the most infuriating habits of these people was their love for superfluous words” (206).23 By incorporating Igbo proverbs and rhetorical practices in such a crucial way, Achebe shows us, as C.L. Innes says, a world in which “the tension between word and referent, the awareness of metaphor as such, is alive and vibrant.”24 The two German translations have adopted radically different approaches to deal with the proverbs. Richard Moering, the first translator, made it a rule to translate the proverbs literally into German, much in the way Achebe translated them into English. He retained the original’s images in all but two instances, in which he used a slightly different imagery. Like Achebe, Moering sometimes used quotation marks. The following examples serve to illustrate his general strategy (literal back-translations of relevant German passages in brackets below German version): Ex. 1 As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. (8) Wie die Altvorderen sagten: “Ein Kind, das seine Hände wäscht, kann mit Königen essen.” (14)25 (A child who washes its hands can eat with kings.) Ex. 2 Everybody laughed heartily except Okonkwo, who laughed uneasily because as the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb. (21)

22

Ode Ogede, Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2007): 27. 23 All page numbers refer to the following edition: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958; Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1994). 24 Innes, Chinua Achebe, 36. 25 All page numbers refer to the following edition of the first translation: Chinua Achebe, Okwonkwo oder Das Alte stürzt, tr. Richard Moering (Things Fall Apart, 1958, tr. 1959; Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1976).



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

187

Alle lachten schallend; nur Okonkwo war verlegen, denn – wie das Sprichwort sagt – “eine alte Frau wird verlegen, wenn von dürren Knochen die Rede ist.” (26) (an old woman is embarrassed when dry bones are talked about.) Ex. 3 As our people say, “When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth.” (70–71) “Frißt die Kuh, sieht’s Kälblein zu,” wie die Leute sagen. (73) (When the cow eats, the little calf watches.) Ex. 4 A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk. (166) Ein Kind kann die Milch seiner Mutter nicht zurückzahlen. (168) (A child cannot pay back its mother’s milk.) Ex. 5 The oldest man present said sternly that those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble. (26) Der älteste Teilnehmer sagte streng, dass diejenigen, deren Palmkerne ein hilfreicher Geist aufgeknackt habe, nicht alle Demut vergessen sollten. (31) (those whose palm-kernels were cracked open by a helpful spirit should not forget all humility)

In 1976, this translation was re-published in East Germany. Both publishers, Goverts in 1959 and Aufbau in 1976, as well as the translator himself, seem to have been interested not just in the new themes and subjects introduced into literature by African writers, but also in how these new subjects were dealt with, how this unfamiliar culture was presented. They seem to have been aware that there was another layer beneath the English surface, and wanted, so it seems, to preserve this African subtext in the translation. By re-writing the proverbs in German using the original’s imagery and, in fact, Achebe’s own strategy, the translator was able to re-create this subtext in his version. In general, Moering paid close attention to Achebe’s metaphoric language throughout the text, so that the narrative voices in the two texts are closely related. There is no way of knowing from today’s perspective whether this was because Moering, as a writer and poet himself, was particularly aware of stylistic devices and the poetic quality of proverbs and metaphors, or because he tried to be painstakingly loyal to a fellow writer’s linguistic and cultural

188

WALTRAUD KOLB



strategies. A few examples will illustrate his approach: His translation of “I cannot find yet a mouth with which to tell the story” (48) retains the mouth metaphor and reads “mein Mund weigert sich immer noch, die Geschichte zu erzählen” (52) (‘my mouth still refuses to tell the story’), and whenever the elders “whisper together” (73, 149) they do the same in German – “zusammen flüstern” (75, 151). For Achebe’s much-quoted phrase “proverbs are the palmoil with which words are eaten” (7), Moering used a slightly weaker metaphor, “das Palmöl, mit dem das Gespräch gewürzt ist” (13) (‘the palm-oil with which the conversation is seasoned’). When Moering developed or, to use Umberto Eco’s terminology, negotiated his translation strategy, he had to take into account several important determinants: on the one hand, there was the source text, or what he thought was important in the source text; the source culture, or how he thought it should be represented; and the author, or what he assumed had been Achebe’s intentions. On the other hand, he had to consider the publisher who commissioned the translation, and, for all we know, it may even have been Henry Goverts who insisted on the overall strategy of the translation. And, of course, he had to take into account his potential readers and their culture. Richard Moering obviously thought that his readers would be able to contend with his translated text, much as many English-language readers of the original had, though they had no knowledge of Igbo culture. In doing so, he had to take for granted that there would be ‘gaps’ of understanding, that there would be similes and images German readers would have difficulty interpreting. But then, this is also true for most readers of the original. As Wolfgang Iser and other scholars interested in the way literature is read and received by its audience have shown, most literary texts do have gaps or so-called ‘indeterminacies’: words, phrases or passages the meaning of which is not readily understood. In the act of reading, readers fill in the gaps and thereby actively engage in constructing the meaning of the text.26 Moering resisted the temptation to make his translation more explicit, and less open for interpretation, than the original is. He expected his readers to participate in constructing the text’s meaning, and in the case of the proverbs and metaphors this meant that they would be required to pause occasionally to reflect on what they had just read in order to come up with a viable interpretation. The translator clearly did not have easy and fluent reading in mind. 26

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Der Akt des Lesens, 1976; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

189

Re-Writing Things Fall Apart: 1983 Moering’s translation of 1959 seems to have gone unnoticed by literary critics, although, in the early days of the German-speaking world’s interest in African literature, this should not be too much of a surprise. The second translation, however, was reviewed several times. This was probably due to the fact that it had been published by a well-known publisher as part of a longestablished series, but might also have been occasioned by a generally wider interest in African literature sparked by the Frankfurt Book Fair just three years before. All reviews were very favourable, though not all dealt with the translation. Klaus Kreimeier, writing for the Frankfurter Rundschau, did compare the new translation with the old one. He praised it explicitly for better understanding the function of African narrative elements, especially the numerous Igbo proverbs.27 While the first translation does indeed have a number of problems, such as omissions and errors, and a new translation was certainly called for, the critic did not compare any of these aspects, but based his judgment on the translation of the proverbs. New translations are rarely made without translators consulting earlier ones, and there is no good reason why they should not do so, even though translators might occasionally feel the same ‘anxiety of influence’ as writers often do vis-à-vis their precursors.28 The new translation of Things Fall Apart duplicated quite a number of passages of its precursor, either verbatim or in a slightly revised form, although it did correct most of Moering’s omissions and errors. Nevertheless, its general effect on the reader is dissimilar to that of the earlier translation, and the narrative voice we hear is a markedly different one. It is clear that the new translators’ priority was to re-write the book in a way that would make it easier to read and understand for a German-speaking readership. This general approach meant that any proverbs Heusler and Petzold considered difficult to understand, or too far removed from European patterns of thinking, were either replaced by German sayings or paraphrased. The original imagery was retained for less than half of the proverbs. “A chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the very day it hatches” (66), for example, 27

Klaus Kreimeier, “Ethnologie von innen: Chinua Achebes ‘Things Fall Apart’: ein zentrales Stück afrikanischer Literatur,” Frankfurter Rundschau (17 March 1984). 28 The concept of the writer’s anxiety of influence was propounded by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford U P , 1973). He did not apply it to translators.

190

WALTRAUD KOLB



was obviously judged to be explicit enough to be retained in the translation. As a rule, the translators italicized their proverbs so as to leave the reader in no doubt about the proverbial status of a phrase. The following examples illustrate how some of the original images were paraphrased or replaced by German sayings: Ex. 7 He who brings kola, brings life. (6) Kola bedeutet Leben. (12) (Kola means life.) Ex. 8 As our people say, “When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth.” (70–71) Wie der Vater, so der Sohn. (81) (Like father, like son.) Ex. 9 But as the dog said‚ “If I fall down for you and you fall down for me, it is play.” (73) Aber wie der eine zum anderen sagte: Senkst du den Preis, dann will auch ich mich nicht lumpen lassen, denn dann ist’s ein Spiel. (83) (But as one said to the other: If you lower the price, then I too will do myself proud, because then it is a game.)

In paraphrasing or replacinging the greater part of the proverbs, Heusler and Petzold backgrounded the African values and concepts contained therein, often replacing them with European concepts. This transposition can be clearly seen in their translation of “He always said that whenever he saw a dead man’s mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime” (4), where they introduced a reference to the value of gold in “Er pflegte immer zu sagen: ‘Genieße zu Lebzeiten, was du hast, denn wenn du tot bist, nützt dir alles Gold dieser Welt nichts mehr’” (10) (literally ‘enjoy what you have while you are alive, because when you are dead all the world’s gold will not be of any use to you’). The value of gold is clearly a concept inconsistent with the society described by Achebe, where the ability to grow yams is the measure of wealth. A similar cultural shift occurred when “A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk” (166) was rendered as “Ein Kind kann die Liebe seiner Eltern niemals vergelten“ (184) (literally ‘A child can never pay back its parents’ love’). Apart from the fact that the image and the metaphoric quality of the phrase are lost in the translation (just as in the example



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

191

quoted above), substituting the parents for the mother is highly problematical, given the role of Okonkwo’s maternal kinsmen during his seven years in exile.29 There are several cases in which the translators chose a German phrase which at first glance seems to have roughly the same meaning, but if examined more closely turns out to mean something else. For example, the German phrase “ein reifes Korn bleibt dem Auge nicht verborgen” (30) (literally ‘a ripe corn does not remain hidden to the eye’) means that a person with certain qualities will always, sooner or later, be noticed and, by implication, appreciated by others. The original proverb “you can tell a ripe corn by its look” (22) is applied by Nwakibie to explain why he is willing to give Okonkwo yams for his farm and how he is able to pass judgment on Okonkwo from looking at him: “I have learned to be stingy with my yams. But I can trust you. I know it as I look at you” (22). In a few instances, the translation introduces European-Christian concepts to describe Igbo culture in pre-missionary times. The ‘naming ceremony’ (77) is made into the Christian ritual act of ‘baptism’ (88), and in the following two examples, phrases are used which most German readers will, without much difficulty, identify as biblical: Ex. 10 If a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. (8) Jugend, die sich bewährt, wird auch vom Alter geehrt. (15) (Young people who prove their worth, are also honoured by the elders.) Ex. 11 Everybody laughed heartily except Okonkwo, who laughed uneasily because as the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb. (21) Alle lachten schallend, nur Okonkwo war nicht recht wohl beim Lachen, denn, wie es im Volksmund heißt: “Stets sieht man nur den Splitter im Auge des anderen.” (28) (You always only see the mote in the other person’s eye.)

Ex. 10 refers to Wisdom 8:10: “Mit ihr werde ich Ruhm beim Volke haben und trotz meiner Jugend vom Alter geehrt sein,” which in the King James Bible reads “For her sake I shall have estimation among the multitude, and 29

See Mayanja, “Pthwoh! Geschichte, bleibe ein Zwerg, während ich wachse!”,

203–204.

192

WALTRAUD KOLB



honour with the elders, though I be young.” Ex. 11 is taken from Matthew 7:3: “Warum siehst du den Splitter im Auge deines Bruders, aber den Balken in deinem Auge bemerkst du nicht?” – “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” in the King James version.30 In general, metaphors derived from Igbo life and culture tend to be suppressed and non-metaphoric language is used instead. For example, while in the first translation the elders ‘whisper together’ just like in the original, in the second translation they merely ‘hold counsel’, “miteinander beraten” (83, 166) in German. And the man in the song quoted by Achebe as having “ten and one wives” (53) has ‘a thousand wives’ (62) in this translation. Moering, by contrast, took over Achebe’s number in “zehn und noch eine Frau” (56). The same paraphrasing strategy was applied by Heusler and Petzold to the palm-oil metaphor, and their translation reads “Sprichwörter sind für eine Unterhaltung genauso unentbehrlich wie Palmöl für das Essen” (13) (literally ‘proverbs are as indispensable for a conversation as palm-oil is for a meal’). While the original then goes on to describe Okoye’s skilful use of words as “skirting around the subject and then hitting it finally” (7), in German Okoye just ‘talked for a long time and around the subject before he finally presented his actual request’, the translation reading “sprach lange und um das Thema herum, bis er endlich sein eigentliches Anliegen vorbrachte” (13). The two translators unmistakably aimed at producing a text that is easy to read – and with no possible irritations caused by unfamiliar images or foreign metaphors. Heusler and Petzold erased many traces of the African subtext and at the same time filled in any gaps they discovered. The available reviews clearly indicate that this translation strategy met with the critics’ approval. The reviewer of the renowned newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised the translation of the Nigerian proverbs and was glad to discover that they were in many cases reminiscent of figures of speech and patterns of thinking German readers are familiar with.31 One might assume, though, that most reviewers did not refer back to the original text but, rather, based their 30

For an interpretation of the proverb, see Mayanja, “Pthwoh! Geschichte, bleibe ein Zwerg, während ich wachse!”, 201; Ode Ogede, Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Reader’s Guide, 35–36. 31 Ursula Homann, “Mit verhaltener Wehmut: Chinua Achebes ‘Okwonkwo oder Das Alte stürzt’ in einer Neuausgabe,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (31 October 1983).



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

193

judgment on the easy readability of the German text and the welcome understanding that Nigerian culture, after all, was not so much different from their own. The second German re-writing of Things Fall Apart is no longer a multidimensional text, but may well be described as one-dimensional. The fact that the translators explain either within the text or in footnotes Igbo expressions, such as egwugwu does not give rise to multi-dimensionality, as these explanations function, rather, as a kind of metatext. The narrator’s voice has also shifted towards a more European voice, and has become less of a spokesman for the Igbo community. The loss is a cultural one, as pointed out by Shaban Mayanja, whose study of German translations of a number of African texts deals in particular with cultural aspects which are either distorted or lost in translation.32 As we have seen, a number of cultural shifts occurred and redefined the ‘grammar of values’, but at the same time the loss is also an aesthetic and literary one. The creative use of literary devices such as proverbs and metaphors helps to build the aesthetic and poetic effect of the text, but, clearly, Heusler and Petzold did not consider this dimension a priority. Possibly, it was the publisher who advocated this approach in an attempt to bring Things Fall Apart into the mainstream of international literature by making it easier to assimilate. However, given the fact that the translators agreed to the translation’s publication, it is safe to assume that they were not opposed to the chosen approach. The translation is still in print and the only German edition of Things Fall Apart readily available today.

Conclusion In an interview with Kalu Ogbaa in 1980, Chinua Achebe pointed out the dual character of proverbs. When asked by Ogbaa whether he was very conscious of the poetic qualities of proverbs or more interested in the traditional philosophy they convey, he rejected the separation of the two as a rather Western attitude to things:

32

Mayanja, “Pthwoh! Geschichte, bleibe ein Zwerg, während ich wachse!”. See also Aigner, “Kritische Betrachtungen der deutschen Übersetzung von Chinua Achebes Roman Things Fall Apart” for a discussion of other aspects of the Suhrkamp translation.

194

WALTRAUD KOLB



A proverb is both a functional means of communication and also a very elegant and artistic performance itself. I think that proverbs are both utilitarian and little vignettes of art. So when I use these forms in my novels, they both serve a utilitarian purpose, which is to re-enact the life of the people that I am describing, and also delight through elegance and aptness of imagery. This is what proverbs are supposed to do.33

The first translator of Things Fall Apart, Richard Moering, seems to have been aware of this duality. He followed the path laid out by Achebe and translated the proverbs directly into German. By this, and in general by preserving the original’s metaphoric use of language, Moering created a narrative voice which closely echoes the original one. What is more, his translation reflects Achebe’s design for the novel: i.e. to counter the colonial discourse that had disparaged African cultures, by consciously representing a complex precolonial African culture. By contrast, Dagmar Heusler and Eveline Petzold, consciously or not, thwarted the original’s design by re-writing the text in a completely different vein. By backgrounding the foreign and unfamiliar on the linguistic and cultural levels and replacing the original’s sophisticated representations of Igbo culture with European cultural concepts, they partly effaced the colonial subject’s culture and perpetuated a discourse rooted in cultural imperialism. Readers are rarely aware of the power, and responsibility, inherent in the role of translators as negotiators, re-writers of literary texts and re-creators of cultural representations.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1975): 55–62. Originally in Moderna Språk 58 (1964): 438–46, and Transition 18 (1965): 27–30. ——. Ein Bild von Afrika: Essays, tr. Thomas Brückner, Petra Schreyer & Wulf Teichmann (Berlin: Alexander, rev. ed. 2002). ——. Ein Bild von Afrika: Rassismus in Conrads “Herz der Finsternis”, tr. Thomas Brückner & Wulf Teichmann (Berlin: Alexander, 2000). ——. Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land, tr. Susanne Koehler (No Longer at Ease, 1960; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).

33

Kalu Ogbaa, “Interview with Chinua Achebe,” Research in African Literatures 12 (1981): 1–13; repr. in Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1997): 67.



Re-Writing Things Fall Apart in German

195

——. Obi, tr. Josef Tichy (No Longer at Ease, 1960; tr. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1963). ——. Okwonkwo oder Das Alte stürzt, tr. Richard Moering (Things Fall Apart, 1958; tr. Stuttgart: Henry Goverts, 1959; Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1976). ——. Okwonkwo oder Das Alte stürzt, tr. Dagmar Heusler & Eveline Petzold (Things Fall Apart, 1958; tr. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983, 1987, 1991, 1994; audio-book Schwäbisch Hall: Steinbach, 2007). ——. Der Pfeil Gottes, tr. M. von Schweinitz (Arrow of God, 1964; tr. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1965; Berlin: Volk & Welt, 1975; Wuppertal: Hammer, 1994, 2002, 2003; Munich: List, 2003). ——. Termitenhügel in der Savanne, tr. Susanne Koehler (Anthills of the Savannah, 1987; tr. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991, 2002). ——. Things Fall Apart (1958; Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor 1994). ——. Zwölf Gedichte, tr. Ulli Beier (extracts from Beware, Soul Brother, 1972; tr. Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1990; Bayreuth: Boomerang, 1990). Aigner, Beatrix. “Kritische Betrachtungen der deutschen Übersetzung von Chinua Achebes Roman Things Fall Apart” (diploma thesis, University of Graz, Austria, 1994). Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 1993). Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford U P , 1973). Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, ed. Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2009 (Frankfurt: M V B , 2009). Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). Emenyonu, Ernest N., ed. Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, vol. 1 (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2004). Gan, Peter. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997). Homann, Ursula. “Mit verhaltener Wehmut: Chinua Achebes ‘Okwonkwo oder Das Alte stürzt’ in einer Neuausgabe,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (31 October 1983). Innes, C.L. Chinua Achebe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990). Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Der Akt des Lesens, 1976; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Kolb, Waltraud. “ ‘ Noch nicht unter zu vielen Geschichten begraben’: Englischsprachige Literatur aus Afrika auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 29.2 (2004): 121–33. Kreimeier, Klaus. “Ethnologie von innen: Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart: Ein zentrales Stück afrikanischer Literatur,” Frankfurter Rundschau (17 March 1984).

196

WALTRAUD KOLB



Lefevere, André. Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992). ——. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London & New York: Routledge, 1992). Lindfors, Bernth. “The Palm-Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten,” in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, ed. C.L. Innes & Bernth Lindfors (London: Heinemann, 1979): 47–66. Originally in African Literature Today 1 (1968): 3– 18. Marechera, Dambudzo. Haus des Hungers, tr. Claus Peter Dressler & Curt Kaemmerer (House of Hunger, 1978; tr. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981). Mayanja, Shaban. “Pthwoh! Geschichte, bleibe ein Zwerg, während ich wachse!”: Untersuchungen zum Problem der Übersetzung afrikanischer Literatur ins Deutsche (Hannover: Revonnah, 1999). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Verborgene Schicksale: Erzählungen, tr. Dagmar Heusler & Ruth Krenn (Secret Lives and Other Stories, 1975; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). Ogbaa, Kalu. “Interview with Chinua Achebe,” Research in African Literatures 12 (1981): 1–13; repr. in Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1997): 64–75. Ogede, Ode. Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2007). Pfeiffer, Johannes. “Gan, Peter,” in Neues Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1945, ed. Dietz–Rüdiger Moser (Munich: dtv, 1993): 380–82. Schiller, Friedrich von. Wilhelm Tell (1804; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975). Tutuola, Amos. Der Palmweintrinker: Ein Märchen von der Goldküste, tr. Walter Hilsbecher (The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952; Heidelberg: Rothe, 1955). Yeats, William Butler. Werke, tr. Stefan Andres et al., vol. 1 (Neuwied & Berlin: Luchterhand, 1970). Zabus, Chantal. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (Cross / Cultures 4; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1991).



12 ————

Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart in Polish and the Task of Postcolonial Translation

D OROTA G OŁUCH

Mr. Smith said to his interpreter: “Tell them to go away from here. This is the house of God and I will not live to see it desecrated.” Okeke interpreted wisely to the spirits and leaders of Umuofia: “The white man says he is happy you have come to him with your grievances, like friends. He will be happy if you leave the matter in his hands.”1

O

A C H E B E . What makes his act of translation ‘wise’? Certainly not philological fidelity, requiring a meticulous substitution of linguistic equivalents; nor a functional equivalence, which permits the altering of the ‘form’ in order to preserve an intended communicative ‘meaning’, maintain the register, and convey the implications. In contemporary culturally oriented translation studies, it is generally held that translation is not an untroubled transfer of meaning via linguistic or functional equivalents, involving a source and a target language, but a transfer of meanings taking place between languages and entire cultures in situations of unequal power-relationships. As a famous dictum has it:

1

KEKE INTERPRETED WISELY, WRITES

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958; Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1994): 190–91. Further page references are in the main text.

198

DOROTA GOUCH



“Translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum.”2 In the light of such views, Okeke interpreted wisely because he was alert to the context of the utterance, which allowed him to recognize the power asymmetry, identify his loyalties, and attempt as faithful and diplomatic an interpretation as possible under the circumstances. The purpose of this essay is twofold. I seek to shed light on the presence and influence of Things Fall Apart in Poland, by discussing the ways of representing foreignness used in Polish translations of the novel, mainly the translation by Małgorzata Żbikowska from 1989. I also address the question of the relevance of domesticating and foreignizing strategies to the task of postcolonial translation. First, following Maria Tymoczko’s comparison of postcolonial writing and intercultural translation, I analyze Achebe’s novel as an act of translation, in order to compare his ‘strategies’ with those of his Polish translators. While Żbikowska generally follows Achebe’s translatorial choices, a close reading shows that on several occasions the translation domesticates, or polonizes, the original, and introduces an ethnographic tone in the explicatory parts. From a postcolonial perspective, domestication seems detrimental to the book’s message. Yet my argument is that, in order to speculate about the effects of domesticating strategies, one needs to read a translation in the context of the target culture’s norms and conventions. Indeed, such a contextual reading, based on Theo Hermans’s insights into sociological aspects of translating, reveals how the shifts in the 1989 translation might actually serve the foreign author by reconciling a postcolonial message with domestic expectations. I generally interrogate the common and not entirely unconvincing assumption that domestication perpetuates imperialist or discriminatory attitudes whereas foreignization fosters intercultural understanding and, as such, is the preferred strategy for the future. The question seems particularly relevant in the context of my material, as the 2009 Polish retranslation of Things Fall Apart turns out to be more foreignizing than its 1989 predecessor. To develop understanding and tolerance is among the primary goals of postcolonial translation: with this assumption in mind, I ask whether there is a correlation between particular strategies of representation, knowledge of foreign cultures, and genuine human understanding leading to tolerance. 2

Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi, “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 2.



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

199

Things Fall Apart: Achebe’s Translatorial Strategies In Things Fall Apart, translation operates simultaneously on two levels: not only does the book depict colonial encounters that require interpreting, as in the opening quotation,3 but it also performs an act of intercultural translation, portraying a precolonial Igbo reality in a contemporary form of the English language. Maria Tymoczko suggests that “interlingual literary translation provides an analogue for post-colonial writing.”4 She indicates that postcolonial writers, just like intercultural literary translators, translate from a culture for another culture, even if translators work on a given text while writers deal with “the metatext of culture itself.”5 And, like intercultural translators, postcolonial writers also face choices between foreignizing and domesticating strategies, which determine a number of further decisions. For example, should footnotes, forewords, and other explanatory material be included? What reading constituencies should the information-load be adjusted for? And should the language in which the novel is written be challenged to register foreignness? Tymoczko makes it clear that the long-standing tradition of writings on translation can provide useful paradigms for studying postcolonial literature. I employ thinking about postcolonial writing in terms of translation in order to study translations of postcolonial literature. Namely, by treating Things Fall Apart as an act of intercultural translation, I show how the Polish translators’ choices relate to those of Chinua Achebe. My focus remains the 1989 Świat się rozpada by Małgorzata Żbikowska, which was the only available translation at the time of writing the first version of this essay. However, I compare it briefly with a new translation by Jolanta Kozak, published in 2009. Although throughout the essay I use the translators’ names only, it is

3

For discussions of the role of translation in colonization and decolonization, see, for example, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (London & New York: Routledge, 1999); Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley & Oxford: U of California P , 1992); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988; Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1993). 4 Maria Tymoczko, “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 20 (emphasis in original). 5 Tymoczko, “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation,” 21.

200

DOROTA GOUCH



worth stressing that a final translation results from collaboration within a network of people, including editors, publishers, and consultants. The terms which often come to the forefront in debates on intercultural translation are ‘domestication’ and 'foreignization’, defined by Lawrence Venuti as, respectively, “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values” and “an ethno-deviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text.”6 Venuti, who writes from the U S A , generally denounces domestication as a dominant strategy for translations into English, which, in his view, provide uniform, fluent texts that satisfy complacent American readers and the perceived demands of that market. Foreignization emerges as an antidote, which, retaining differences in translation, can help to make a difference. Yet many scholars note that the impact that foreignization and domestication have on readers and cultures remains highly context-dependent. Therefore, the revealing but rather black-and-white evaluation of the two strategies must be revised in the light of, for instance, the power-relationships between the languages involved, the target readers’ education, social class, and interests, or the genre and purpose of the translation.7 In order to slightly complicate the dichotomy of domestication and foreignization, I envisage a continuum stretching between complete or ‘illusionistic’ domestication and radical or ‘estranging’ foreignization. The model, presented in Figure 1 overleaf, has been adapted from Piotr Kwieciński (2001). Illusionistic domestication works to conceal a shift towards the domestic – for instance, by cultural substitution or generalization (‘yam’ replaced with ‘potato’ or ‘food’). Estranging foreignization, by contrast, confronts readers with unmediated foreignness – for example, by means of untranslated italicized terms, as in the following example from Things Fall Apart: “their

6

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 20. 7 For polemical discussions of Venuti’s work, see, for example, Anthony Pym, “Venuti’s Visibility,” Target 8.1 (1996): 165–77; Douglas Robinson, What is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions (Kent O H & London: Kent State U P , 1997): 97–112; Outi Paloposki & Riitta Oittinen, “The Domesticated Foreign,” in Translation in Context, ed. Andrew Chesterman, Natividad Gallardo San Salvador & Yves Gambier (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 2000): 373–90.



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

201

dreaded agadi-nwayi” (12).8 If the target language is inflectional, like Polish, the estranging effect is likely to be stronger because an uninflected foreign term frustrates grammatical patterns. As far as glosses are concerned, not only a complete lack but also an excess of explications can estrange the reader. illusionistic domestication

non-illusionistic domestication

DOMESTICATION e.g., cultural substitution / omission




estranging foreignization

FOREIGNIZATION

in-text explication, footnotes, glossary (loan)

italicized importation excessive footnotes

Figure 1: A continuum of translatorial strategies, with sample procedures (adapted from Kwieciński 2001)

Excessive footnotes, rather than illuminating a subject, may render it utterly exotic and obscure. Moreover, an overly scholarly or ethnographic tone in explicatory material is likely to alienate readers of literature. To nuance the classification, ‘non-illusionistic domestication’ and ‘explicatory foreignization’ can be placed on the continuum. Non-illusionistic domestication occurs when domesticated terms are identifiable as such because their foreign origin is evident, even though they follow the conventional spelling, inflection, and pronunciation of the target language. For example, in the phrase “a big bowl of foo-foo” (73) Achebe uses a recognizably foreign name of a West African staple food but he integrates it into the text by avoiding italics, introducing an English spelling indicative of the pronunciation, and generally following the grammatical patterns for English non-count nouns. In the case of explicatory foreignization, the foreignness is mediated by domestic concepts. Achebe customarily includes a translation or explanation of the Igbo terms he uses – for example: “the medicine itself was called agadi-nwayi, or old woman” (11– 12) and “he had a bad chi or personal god” (18). It is worth noting that the distinction between untranslated importations and conventionalized loans, for 8

In fact, Achebe provides a translation of the term earlier, so in the context of the novel the phrase does not really exemplify estranging foreignization (see a following example).

202

DOROTA GOUCH



example, is only apparent if one views language from a synchronic perspective. Diachronically speaking, the words that still stand out as loans or calques today may have appeared completely estranging yesterday, and may blend into the language by tomorrow. In other words, translations do have a role in bringing languages and cultures into contact, and if, fifty years after Achebe’s book, the name ‘foo-foo’, for instance, sounds more like a familiar loan than a foreign importation, it may well be thanks to the writers and translators of the past. It is now widely acknowledged that by ‘africanizing’ standard English, Achebe managed to blur the distinction and interrogate the power-relationships between an indigenous and a metropolitan language. His interventions are generally restricted to the lexical and stylistic fields, while the grammar and syntax, as such, are not challenged. In comparison with some other postcolonial authors, who introduce non-standard grammar, phonetic transcription, or foreign vocabulary without explication, Achebe’s technique is seen as moderate and reconciliatory. Reconciliation and education are, indeed, values Chinua Achebe endorses, believing that art is a celebration of diverse experiences and “the acknowledgement of a presence.”9 In an essay, he recalls Mbari, a communal creative enterprise, which was a display of sculpture, and points out that after the colonizers made their presence felt, a space was sometimes secured, alongside depictions of Igbo deities and scenes from folklore or daily life, for the District Officer and his bicycle. To me, the coexistence of Igbo terms and their English explication on the pages of Things Fall Apart marks a similar desire to acknowledge a presence. Achebe’s ‘translational strategy’ could most aptly be characterized as that of explicatory foreignization: he makes his non-Igbo readers experience some foreignness (introducing italicized Igbo terms, formulaic patterns, African imagery and proverbs) but guides them in the discovery nonetheless (retaining standard grammar and spelling, providing English terms or definitions, and a body of essayistic writing with further clarifications). At the same time, there are numerous instances of non-illusionistic domestication. I have mentioned that Achebe uses the recognizably foreign name “foo-foo” (73) in a domesticated form. Other examples are the term “palm-wine” (72), which appears to

9

Chinua Achebe, “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” Kunapipi 12.2 (1990): 1–10, repr. in Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen & Anna Rutherford (Oxford & Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991): 3.



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

203

be a calque of the Igbo mmanya nkwü,10 or ‘beancake’ (49), which is a descriptive neologism for the West African dish akara.11 It is not clear why Achebe retains some foreign words but domesticates others: perhaps he only leaves in the original the terms peculiar to Igbo culture specifically, and/or bearing cultural significance within the story. Admittedly, attempts to trace examples of the translatorial strategies in the English ‘target text’ are, in the absence of a specific ‘source text’, doomed to remain speculation.

The 1989 Polish Translation: Domestication Detected The first Polish translation of Achebe’s novel was brought out by the Warsaw-based Iskry publishing house in 1989, shortly before the latter was privatized in the wake of the political and economic transformation. It was Małgorzata Żbikowska, an African-studies graduate, who convinced the publisher of the novel’s merit. Things Fall Apart was one of the first translations in her career. The book received moderate critical attention and has not been reprinted. Nor has the publisher decided to issue the following parts of the trilogy, or, indeed, other Achebe novels (only Arrow of God12 and Man of the People13 had been translated before 1989). That the series was not continued might have been a consequence of the privatization process: the previously state-subsidized publishing houses faced financial difficulties and felt under 10

I would like to thank Mrs Chibogu Anyaegbunam and Mr Frederick Anyaegbunam from Onitsha for all the Igbo translations. I follow the spellings in Michael J.C. Echeruo’s Igbo–English Dictionary (Lagos: Longman Nigeria, 2001). 11 None of the terms is listed in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (i.e. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 1884–1928). ‘Bean cake’, defined as a Chinese dish, and ‘foo-foo’, described as African food, appear in the 1933 Supplement, which was the most up-to-date edition at the time Achebe wrote his novel, while ‘palm-wine’ was first included in the 1989 second edition of the OED. However, in all the cases, the dictionaries cite occurrences much earlier than 1958: for example, ‘bean cake’ was used in 1887, ‘foo-foo’, also spelt ‘fufu’, in 1858 and 1924, and ‘palm-wine’ in 1613, 1836, and 1957. That means that the words might have been partly conventionalized by 1950s. Still, their foreign origin (etymology) remains evident: hence, the domestication is non-illusionistic. 12 Chinua Achebe, Boża strzała, tr. Maria Skibniewska (Arrow of God; London: Heinemann, 1964; tr. Warsaw: Pax, 1966). 13 Chinua Achebe, Czcigodny kacyk Nanga, tr. Zofia Kierszys (A Man of the People; London: Heinemann, 1966; tr. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1968).

204

DOROTA GOUCH



pressure to select best-selling titles. Today the book is less well-known and is absent from public debate or curricula in Poland. It was re-translated in 2009: whether the new edition will win Things Fall Apart the recognition it enjoys worldwide remains to be seen. Generally speaking, Żbikowska’s translation follows Achebe’s translatorial strategy. In most cases, she leaves italicized Igbo terms as they are and provides an explanation, translates Igbo proverbs literally, and follows syntactic and stylistic choices constitutive of Achebe’s style: i.e. uses paratactic sentences, repetitions, and occasional archaic or literary phrases. In other words, the dominant translatorial strategies in Świat się rozpada are explicatory foreignization and non-illusionistic domestication. Having said that, there are interesting shifts towards the ends of the scale: a slight move towards ethnographic estranging foreignization, which I briefly present first, and a shift in the direction of illusionistic domestication, with which I deal at length later. In this section of the essay, I ‘detect’ the changes, reading the translation against the original. It may seem as though I were critiquing them, in the name of a perfectly truthful translation that failed to materialize because of the ‘distortions’. However, since a perfectly equivalent translation is but a fantasy, in the next section of the essay I try to account for the changes and their possible effects, looking at the translation against the background of the domestic norms and conventions. I suggested that excessive glossing can be as estranging as an informational void. Even though the explications in Świat się rozpada are far from excessive and their effect is not really estranging, there is a slight tendency in that direction. In fact, the translator worked with an edition without the glossary,14 so her choices were not modelled on the original in this respect. The preference for footnotes, which are placed alongside the text, over a detached and more discreet glossary, can be a confrontational and thus, for readers of literature, potentially estranging move. In comparison with the explicatory materials added by Achebe’s publishers to later editions, the Polish explanations seem more abundant, detailed, and, occasionally, delivered in a more academic or ethnographic idiom. Compare, for example, a glossary note from the English original, “egwugwu: a masquerader who impersonates one of the ancestral spirits of the village” (211) and a Polish footnote, ‘egwugwu – a secret male community impersonating the dead, who appear during funeral 14

Personal communication with Małgorzata Żbikowska (telephone conversation, 6 October 2008).



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

205

ceremonies or for important domestic festivals; the men participating in the ceremonies put on masks and raffia clothes’ (8). The translation supplies more information than the original editions: it adds explanations within the text – e.g., “cowries” (7) becomes ‘cowry shells’, or “muszelki kauri” (8) – and indiscriminately footnotes unfamiliar terms: for instance, ‘iroko tree’, from the proverb “the lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did” (21), is footnoted as ‘a type of teak tree, which has hard and durable wood, used for producing furniture’ (22). On the second page there is a note in which the translator thanks Professor Stanisław Piłaszewicz, a prominent Warsaw Africanist, for his help in preparing the terminology. The note may reinforce an impression that the literary text draws on the authority of Africanist scholarship. On a close comparative reading, one can notice that the translator’s choices sometimes lean towards illusionistic domestication. My examples concern: first, representation of sexual and bodily matters; secondly, Igbo social life and power relationships; thirdly, Igbo metaphysics and beliefs; fourthly, Igbo sayings, idiomatic expressions, and names; and, finally, stylistic choices relevant for the construction of the narrative voice. I shall begin with the examples concerning corporeality. From Achebe’s depiction of preparations for the Feast of the New Yam in Okonkwo’s compound, readers of the original learn that the Igbo decorated the children, “especially their hair, which was shaved in beautiful patterns” (38). Polish readers learn that the Igbo take special care of the children’s hairstyles, or fryzury.15 There is also a rephrasing in the Polish translation of Ezeani’s reproach after Okonkwo beat his wife during the Week of Peace. In the original, the priest tells Okonkwo that his deed would be unforgivable even if he “found her lover on top of her” (30), while in Polish he says ‘found her with a lover’ (“zastał ją z kochankiem,” 29), with no specification as to the position of the adulterers. Another example of romanticizing or evading the topic of possible adultery can be found in the description of a full-moon night in Umuofia. On such a night, men typically go to visit their “friends and lovers” (196), where “lovers” becomes in Polish ‘beloved’ (“ukochane,” 162). Similarly, a euphemistic generalization occurs in a passage which mentions that the imprisoned elders of Umuofia 15

Chinua Achebe, Świat się rozpada, tr. Małgorzata Żbikowska (Things Fall Apart; London: Heinemann, 1958; tr. Warsaw: Iskry, 1989): 35. All subsequent references are to this edition. All back translations into English (in single quotation marks’) are mine.

206

DOROTA GOUCH



“could not go out to urinate or go into the bush when they were pressed” (195): the Polish text reads, in this place, ‘they could not go out to relieve themselves’ (“nie mogli też wyjść, by załatwić swoje potrzeby,” 161). As far as social organization is concerned, some shifts appear in the context of power-relationships within the family. It is my impression that the translation sometimes plays down references to polygamy and the hierarchical order of wives: Okonkwo’s “most senior wife” (14), for example, is introduced as ‘the first wife’ (“pierwsza żona,” 17). Even though it is absolutely clear that the first of many, and not an ex-wife, is referred to, ‘the first’ does not evoke the polygamous family structure and the power-relationships among the women as univocally as the stress on seniority would. Also, when Achebe calls the wife “the ruler of the womenfolk” (20), the translation reads ‘the first lady’ (“pierwsza dama,” 21). My other impression is that Achebe’s characters emerge slightly ‘tamed’ in the Polish version, as some references to violent actions appear a little less striking. For instance, when in the original Okonkwo beats one of his wives “very heavily” (29), the “very” is left out in the translation (29). Similarly, in the original Nwoye hears that twins are customarily “thrown away in the forest” (61–62). In Polish there is an expression ‘left in the forest’ (“pozostawiano [je] w lesie,” 55), which euphemistically evokes neglect rather than deliberate harm. It may also invite associations with fairy-tales, in which children are left in a forest but eventually all ends well, as in the Grimm brothers’ tale about Jaś i Małgosia (Hansel and Gretel). Other interesting shifts shed light on the relationships between individuals and society. As noted in many critical discussions, Achebe shows that in Igbo society an individual with a strong will can achieve success against the odds. He thus challenges the colonial stereotype that non-European peoples cherish communal values only. The translation occasionally erases traces of Igbo individualism or agency: for example, in place of the straightforward announcement of Okonkwo’s status, “he was already one of the greatest men of his time” (8), the translation introduces a passive construction, ‘he was counted among the greatest men of his time’ (“zaliczano go do największych ludzi jego czasów,” 12), as if to emphasize the decisive role of the perception of the community. Since the Polish uses a passive construction without a grammatical subject, nonexistent in English, it does not even say as much as ‘he was counted’ but implies that the judgement was somehow a property of an impersonal and unspecified communal body, which had ‘him’ in its power (also grammatically, as the verb requires the pronoun to appear in the accusative). Besides, the verb ‘to get’ sometimes replaces ‘to take’, thus diminishing the



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

207

agency of the subject. For example, “take the Idemili title” (6) and “Okonkwo took eight hundred seed-yams from Nwakibie” (23) become, respectively, ‘receive the idemili title’ (“otrzymać tytuł idemili,” 10, italics in the original) and ‘Okonkwo got from Nwakibie eight hundred seed-yams’ (“Okonkwo dostał od Nwakibiego osiemset bulw jamu,” 24). Despite the patriarchal system, some women do gain agency in the Igbo community, as depicted by Achebe. Ekwefi forces her chi to listen when she chooses personal happiness over communal duty and leaves her husband for Okonkwo. Achebe writes that she married another man because Okonkwo was too poor, but after two years “she could bear it no longer” (109) and ran away. In the same place, the Polish says that she could not ‘bear her husband’, “znieść męża” (94). As far as I understand, the original “it” refers to complying with customs at the cost of individual happiness and implies that Ekwefi takes her fate in her own hands, deciding to move. In Polish, the woman may come across as a victim of a lame or bad husband, driven to seek protection in another man’s arms. Women’s agency and resourcefulness are also obscured in the following Polish passage, ‘Each wife had a henhouse next to her hut’ (“Każda z żon miała przy swojej chacie kurnik,” 16), because the original emphasizes that each wife “built” one (14). Achebe has himself emphasized that his use of the English language aims at a particular effect and the linguistic and stylistic form should be “in character.”16 Needless to say, one of the main ways of ensuring stylistic consistency and integrity in Things Fall Apart is Igbo proverbs. Lyn Innes notes that proverbs function on different levels for the characters and for the (non-Igbo) reader. The former normally receive the proverbs as “prefabricated declaration[s]”17 which offer a ready-made interpretation of the world, while the latter, being fully exposed to their fresh metaphorics and powerful rhetoricity, may bear witness to the “creative possibilities of language.”18 I also believe that non-Igbo readers re-create the cognitive and interpretative ways of the Igbo community when they come across a proverb in the text. If, for the Igbo, many proverbs rest on dead metaphors (because, when using a proverb in a conversation, the speaker does not need to recall the empirical image or 16

Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994): 434 (emphasis in original). 17 C.L. Innes, Chinua Achebe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990): 39. 18 Innes, Chinua Achebe, 36.

208

DOROTA GOUCH



phenomenon originally employed as metaphoric vehicle), and if several basic metaphoric structures underlie much human cognition and language,19 then a new reader should comprehend a proverb by reviving and reliving the dead metaphors. The proverbs therefore provide epistemological insights, as well as an intimate initiation into the culture. Żbikowska translates most Igbo proverbs literally, which contributes greatly to the foreignizing and educational quality of the translation. The treatment of other expressions varies, depending on whether they are interpreted as culturally specific or as less salient formulaic phrases. For example, the ceremonial address to the egwugwu, “body” (90), is translated literally as “ciało” (82), whereas the response to sneezing “Life to you!” (104) becomes the customary “Na zdrowie!” (91), equivalent to ‘Bless you!’ The latter example offers insights into the sphere of domesticating and foreignizing impulses at work. On the one hand, anything different from ‘Na zdrowie!’ sounds awkward, uttered after a sneeze. On the other, Achebe does take this risk with English. Interestingly, since the Polish response means literally ‘for health’, or, indeed, ‘health to you’, one can imagine that, bypassing English, as it were, the Polish corresponds to the underlying Igbo phrase.20 The translator shows sensitivity to the Igbo ‘original’ when she adjusts the spelling of some proper names to ensure the same pronunciation as indicated by Achebe’s English transcriptions. ‘Chielo’, for example, becomes ‘Czielo’ (‘cz’ being pronounced as, approximately, /sR.( and ‘Ojiugo’, ‘Odżiugo’, where ‘dżi’ is pronounced /cYH.. Disparities between the English and Polish pronunciation occur mainly with respect to the letter ‘w’, which in Polish is pronounced /v/. The /w/ sound is in Polish marked by ‘ł’, peculiar to the language and perhaps therefore avoided by the translator. For example, since the protagonist’s name is transcribed as ‘Okonkwo’, and not ‘Okonkło’, it will be pronounced with /v/ at the end by a Polish reader.

19

In their seminal book Metaphors We Live By (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate the physical and experiential bases of some common metaphoric grids. For example, the grid ‘Up is good’ underlying many expressions, e.g., ‘an up-and-coming actor’ or ‘be on top form’, can originate in the fact that human beings grow vertically and that they are erect when in good health. Shared human experiences include, for instance, sensory and bodily functions, mothering, farming, art, and warfare. 20 ‘Life to you’ is a literal translation of the Igbo ndü ngї, which is said after a sneeze and which might be the origin of the phrase used by Achebe.



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

209

Representing Igbo beliefs and metaphysics, the translator occasionally introduces vocabulary that connotes Christianity. For example, ‘shrine’ is translated as ‘sanctuary’ (‘sanktuarium’), which, like most Polish terms related to the sacred, is invested with Catholic meanings. At the same time, terms which tend to be used in the context of non-Christian religions, such as ‘place of worship’ (‘miejsce kultu’), produce a distancing and objectifying effect, characteristic of colonial ethnographic discourse. At one point, an Igbo religious practice seems interestingly appropriated. Okonkwo prays to the ancestors “on behalf of” (14) his wives and children, whereas in Polish he prays ‘for (the well-being of) the wives and children (“w intencji” żon i dzieci,” 17). Even if, in the grand scheme of the novel, such a translation does not obscure the foreignness of the Igbo religion, it introduces the charged context of mass or prayer intentions, absent from the original. Sometimes a detail considerably alters the meaning of a passage. In the description of a ceremony with the egwugwu, the original indicative “Aru oyim de de de dei! filled the air as the spirits of the ancestors, just emerged from the earth, greeted themselves” (88) is replaced with the counterfactual ‘[…] sounded in the air as if the spirits of the ancestors have just emerged from the earth, greeting themselves’ (“[…] zabrzmiało w powietrzu, jak gdyby duchy przodków wynurzyły się w tym momencie z ziemi, pozdrawiając wzajemnie,” 77, emphasis mine). While the original narrator identifies with the Igbo and presents their beliefs as true-tolife, the Polish narrator at this point emerges as an outsider trying to impose some rational qualification on the foreign metaphysics. The ceremony may, in the eyes of the reader, turn into a mere festival, a make-believe, a masquerade. Achebe’s novel famously proves to its audiences that not only does Africa have its history, logic, and philosophy but it can also offer the world an alternative understanding of the very concepts. The simple style, partly inspired by oral literature, is seen as a vehicle of the text’s ‘Africanness’. Hence, to intervene with the syntax and style is to jeopardize an intricate network of meanings. Although, on the whole, the translator re-creates the signature style, sometimes she joins short sentences together, reduces the frequency of ‘and’, and inserts linking words, as if in an attempt to supply some ‘missing’ logic and produce a more fluent text. One can compare the English “A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string” (9) with the Polish ‘Then a snake was not called by its name because it could hear. That is why it was called a string’ (“Wtedy nawet węża nie nazywano jego własnym imieniem, bo mógłby usłyszeć. Dlatego mówiono o nim sznur,” 13, my emphasis). The translator rewrites expressions which are not

210

DOROTA GOUCH



necessarily intuitive for the Western reader – for example, “ten and one wives” (53) becomes ‘eleven’ (“jedenaście,” 47), and “not an old man” (10) simply ‘young’ (“młody,” 13). She also alters some repetitive patterns, either leaving them out or paraphrasing for a similar effect, as when translating “‘Umuofia kwenu!’ he bellowed again, and again and again” (202) as ‘[…] he bellowed for the second time and third, and fourth’ (“[…] krzyknął drugi raz i trzeci, i czwarty,” 167), or “he fell and fell and fell” (99) as ‘he fell and fell’ (“spadał i spadał,” 86). This is the last of my examples that show how, on the pages of the Polish translation, Achebe’s own strategy of explicatory foreignization coexists with instances of illusionistic domestication and traces of ethnographic discourse.

The 1989 Translation: Domestication Discussed Knowing how influential Achebe’s voice has become thanks to its specific features, one may be critical about the changes discussed above. If “ten and one” has already been calculated into the reckoning for readers, are they not deprived of the chance to face the foreign and make sense of it for themselves? And if the narrative voice sounds a little like a sympathetic but detached observer, is it not a move, ever so slight, towards the restricted point of view represented by the Commissioner? On the other hand, it would be a misconception uncritically to assume that a literal translation of “ten and one” or a mechanical imitation of Achebe’s conjunctions and sentence length will guarantee a positive influence on the target-language readership. What the international success of Things Fall Apart may indicate is that foreignness is palatable if the author serves it in doses, taking domestic tastes into account. To speculate further about the effects of the detected shifts, one should view the translation in the context of the target norms and conventions. Writing about translation as an interactive transaction, which involves “a network of social agents,”21 Theo Hermans points out that agents operate within such social realities as conventions and norms. Conventions, he explains, are social phenomena and patterns, “grow[ing] out of precedent and social habit,”22 which have a regulatory function. While both social conven21

Theo Hermans, “Norms and the Determination of Translation: A Theoretical Framework,” in Translation Power Subversion, ed. Román Álvarez & M. CarmenÁfrica Vidal (Clevedon, Bristol & Adelaide: Multilingual Matters, 1996): 26. 22 Hermans, “Norms and the Determination of Translation,” 29.



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

211

tions and norms presuppose common knowledge and some degree of consensus, norms differ from conventions in that they are more prescriptive and binding. Unlike rules, norms are not necessarily binding in an institutional sense. Yet, in some cases, breaking norms can result in mild sanctions being imposed.23 For example, according to Hermans, translators may resist widely accepted models of “good practice” or correctness, “but at the cost of a failure to integrate into the system.”24 Given that translations are bound to function in the domestic publishing and literary system, some insights into the norms and conventions prevalent in Poland around the time of the translation should help to account for the shifts discussed. All the examples presented so far indicate a certain tendency to ‘tame’ the content – as if the translator were trying to divert the readers’ attention away from polygamy, shaved heads, and the ghosts of deceased ancestors walking the earth. Rather than questioning the ‘truthfulness’ of the translation, I suggest that we view the changes as a possible preemptive move on the part of the translator, who is aware of the dominant representational conventions. The colonial stereotypes of black people as ‘savages’, wild or noble, were not absent from Poland at the time of the translation. Therefore, the translator might be careful with the passages that Polish readers could associate with the literary conventions of colonial adventure novels or travel writing. Even more generally, the appropriating gestures may be meant to cushion a possible culture-clash, prevent readers from activating stereotypes of ‘primitive pagans’, and establish more potential points of reference or self-identification for the Polish readership. A scholarly work which brilliantly demonstrates how domestication can serve the purpose of not only cultural conquest but also cultural preservation is Maria Tymoczko’s Translation in a Postcolonial Context, on English translations of the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. She analyzes nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translations which “tame”25 the “unliterary, raunchy and weird”26 heroic tale. However, removal of grotesque humour or sexual and scatological material, as well as an imposition of literary forms ‘appropriate’ to an epic, did serve Irish culture and the Irish cause. Without provoking prejudiced, conventional responses to the Irish (who, ac23

Hermans, “Norms and the Determination of Translation,” 29–34. “Norms and the Determination of Translation,” 37. 25 Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999): 68. 26 Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context, 66. 24

212

DOROTA GOUCH



cording to Tymoczko, were perceived “much the same way blacks have been”27), the translations contributed to the Irish cultural revival, challenged the dominant English representations of Irishness, and provided Irish nationalists with a militant yet dignified hero. Admitting that her aim was to promote African culture, particularly among general, non-specialized readers, the translator Małgorzata Żbikowska points out that some of the changes, here interpreted as ‘taming’ the content, were actually made for stylistic reasons. Some stylistic alterations, admittedly meant to make the text read better, would have been the editor’s suggestions.28 For instance, ‘with a lover’ (“z kochankiem”) is idiomatic in Polish and developing the phrase to include spatial details would make it sound clumsy. Similarly, frequent short sentences may sound rough or infantile. The practice of joining Achebe’s sentences together can therefore be viewed less as interfering with the distinctive style of the original than as reconciling the demands of the author’s voice with the norms of the domestic language and literature. To disregard the norms would be to risk a “failure to integrate into the system”29: an author who in translation sounds ‘abnormal’ may be badly received by a general readership, or not published at all. There have been cases when Polish literature and language were invigorated by linguistically innovative translations. Still, because Poland would share many of the Western judgments and prejudices, Polish readers could have been reluctant to grant an unknown African author, as Achebe was for Poles in 1989, the right to innovative (Polish) language. Rather than appreciating the distinctive style, they might have perceived short simple sentences stereotypically, as primitive storytelling. What may also shed some light on the linguistic shifts is the question of power-relationships between the languages. One can assume that Świat się rozpada is a translation from a ‘dominated’ culture and ‘africanized’ English, and that the foreign qualities of the text should be preserved. Nevertheless, one could argue that the original language remains the global language, English, and that the power-relationship is actually reversed. Given that English, as a rule, tends to use shorter sentences than Polish, the decision to honour the Polish preference for longer sentences may be treated less as an aggressive 27

Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context, 63. Personal communication with Małgorzata Żbikowska (email from 20 February 2010). 29 Hermans, “Norms and the Determination of Translation,” 37. 28



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

213

appropriation and more as a domestication in self-defence. Poland can be counted among the Eastern European nations that have relied on language as a carrier and symbol of identity and that, as Caryl Emerson writes, “name their streets and public squares […] after poets.”30 There is in Poland a long tradition of more or less formalized, and more or less successful, efforts to protect the language: against the influences of the older European linguae francae, Latin and French, then German and Russian imposed by political aggressors, communist newspeak, and now global English. For all the above reasons, the stylistic changes may be seen as a necessary editing – necessary to achieve the norm of ‘good Polish’ and to convince the publisher of the novel’s and the translation’s value. The question of whether exhaustive footnotes activate a more ethnographic reading than an austere glossary should also be addressed in the context of the publishing conventions of the time. According to various bibliographies, some twenty African novels and short story collections had been published in Poland before the translation of Things Fall Apart, mainly by two publishing houses: Iskry and Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (P I W ). Generally, most books published by Iskry include footnotes and, occasionally, a preface, while books by other publishers, as a rule, do not provide any additional material. Glossaries were absent from the African translations altogether. That suggests that Polish readers of non-European literature at the time were used to footnotes, particularly if they read African literature launched by Iskry regularly. Even though there was no rule at Iskry that footnotes should be included, the few people working on African literature, both as translators and as editors of one another’s translations, were likely to create and follow conventions which they thought suitable for their popularizing purpose and for the popular reader they were targeting. While the above discussion of relevant domestic norms and conventions is not exhaustive, it covers the main areas where the shifts are apparent. These are: the ‘taming’ of the content, possibly to avoid stereotyping; stylistic appropriation, perhaps conforming to and protecting the norms of ‘good’ Polish; and the slightly ethnographic form of explication, which to an extent accords with the conventions of the time.

30

Caryl Emerson, “Answering for Central and Eastern Europe,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2006): 203.

214

DOROTA GOUCH



The 2009 Retranslation: Different Strategies and the Task of Postcolonial Translation Twenty years after Świat się rozpada, P I W published a new translation by Jolanta Kozak, entitled Wszystko rozpada się (2009). Although a thorough analysis falls beyond the scope of this essay, a few points should be made. Already the title attracts attention, as it is a less rounded phrase than Świat się rozpada (‘The World Falls Apart’), owing to the inversion involved in moving the reflexive pronoun ‘się’ to an end position (‘All Falling Apart Is’). All the passages from Things Fall Apart discussed that in the 1989 version appear domesticated are rendered rather literally in the 2009 re-translation. To give a few examples: there is no linking word in ‘A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string’,31 “ten and one” (54) remains three words, children’s heads are ‘shaved’ (40), and Okonkwo is reminded that no husband would dare beat his wife even if he ‘found her under a lover’ (“zastał ją pod kochankiem,” 34). The new edition provides more explicatory material than the older one: a biographical note, maps, and drawings, as well as two translated essays: Simon Gikandi’s “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature” and Don C. Ohadike’s “Igbo Culture and History.” While the new edition, just like the previous one, draws on Africanist scholarship, the fact that the publisher selects essays by African scholars and Professor Ohadike is even introduced as an Igbo could be a sign of the times. The re-translation also includes footnotes, which seem generally comparable in scope and tone to those of the earlier translation, perhaps with the slight difference that some of the 2009 footnotes sound more conversational and casual. For example, when Achebe’s narrator says that the drought continued for eight market weeks (23), the 2009 translator introduces a side-narrative, as it were, explaining the specificities of the Igbo calendar in a footnote that begins: ‘It is worth explaining that in the traditional Igbo calendar a week is four days and a month seven weeks’ (“Warto wyjaśnić, że w tradycyjnym kalendarzu Ibów tydzień ma cztery dni, a miesiąc siedem tygodni],” 28). Clearly, this new translation is more literal and closer to Achebe’s strategy of explicatory foreignization. What might be the reasons for the difference in strategies? One answer is that the first translation, introducing foreignness filtered through domestic conventions, prepared the ground for a more confrontational version. How31

Chinua Achebe, Wszystko rozpada się, tr. Jolanta Kozak (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 2009): 15. All subsequent references are to this edition.



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

215

ever, it is doubtful that Świat się rozpada had such an impact as to educate a generation of readers. In fact, the first translation is not widely known and the marketing campaign of the second one makes no reference to it. The marketing campaign of the re-translation highlights the success of the original, though. The cover features Achebe as the Man Booker International Prizewinner, the blurb quotes Toni Morrison’s praise, and the biographical note mentions diverse proofs of the novel’s impact, from the high number of languages into which it has been translated to this very volume of essays.32 It may be the popularity of African and postcolonial literature that prompts publishers to challenge, and possibly change, the dominant norms and conventions. To establish whether the 2009 translation indeed represents a broader trend, more research needs to be done on the publishing of postcolonial literature in Poland over a period of time.33 If I were to speculate about the matter now, I would venture to say that there has been a slight change in the norms and conventions that were relevant to the publication of Achebe’s novel in 1989. The change is connected with Poland’s participation in the capitalist, commercialized, and globalized book market, of which the marketing strategies of the 2009 translation are an example. As far as linguistic literalism is concerned, I suppose that there is a tension between prescriptive tendencies and anglicizing influences. On the one hand, many publishers, teachers, and critics oppose what can be seen as ‘translationese’ and, generally, resist the flood of anglicisms. On the other hand, English is inescapably influential and many people learn it and engage with it through Western music, cinema, and products. Published translations from English can be quite literal. Both the numerous translations of popular appeal and varying quality, and the rarer translations of internationally acclaimed authors famous for their style, such as Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith, are often published by more high-brow publishing houses. The publisher is important, as sometimes the distinction between bad calquing and good literalism derives less from the text and more from the status of the publisher, translator, and author.

32

Before the new translation was available I had contacted the publisher asking for some information. The chief editor of P I W , Kamil Piwowarski, was, in turn, interested in the details of the conference and the publication. 33 Postcolonial literature in Poland (1970–2010) is the focus of my doctoral research, which also addresses questions of Polish, or Eastern European, postcoloniality.

216

DOROTA GOUCH



With regard to literal renditions of culturally sensitive passages, the fear of provoking negative stereotypical responses might have decreased, because Poland has opened for global informational, cultural, and economic exchanges, and Polish readers have been more exposed to various representations of Africans, as well as to the demands of political correctness. Translating postcolonial fiction was part of this development, even if it was not as widely influential as the importing of African-American music and film. Another important factor marking Poland’s participation in intercultural traffic is increased migration, notably the unprecedented wave of economic emigration after the country’s accession to the European Union. More experienced in contacts with other cultures, Poles might be more prepared and open to read about them in translated books. All in all, if there is nowadays a spectrum of norms and conventions, many of them still overlap with those discussed earlier as being influential twenty years ago (persisting stereotypes, stylistic purism). At the same time, it seems that, through intercultural exchanges, challenging of stereotypes, and the omnipresence of English, the strategies of cultural and linguistic literalism have become more conventional. Speculating about such developments, it is tempting to envisage a larger narrative, in which growing intercultural exchange enables and is enabled by increased foreignization (as a general strategy of representation), which, in turn, results in and is reinforced by greater tolerance. Could we see the difference between the two translations, published twenty years apart from each other, as a sign of progress? Much as I believe that literature and translation can teach tolerance, I would be careful with such conclusions. First, while it is always constructive to strive for improvement of whatever is the present condition, thinking in terms of progress, one can risk a certain dogmatic blind spot: for example, to prove that progress has come, one is likely to overlook some ‘good’ things about the past and ‘bad’ things about the present. Secondly, there might be a correlation between growing intercultural traffic and a conventionalization or normalization of foreignizing strategies, but that need not imply increased tolerance and understanding between people. Perhaps by reading about Igbo customs and world-views in the new, relatively literal translation, part of the Polish readership, who are obviously far from being a homogeneous and predictable constituency, will appreciate the informative and possibly formative experience. But others, finding it difficult to identify with the text, will be indifferent, while yet another group will dismiss or mock ‘primitive’ language and characters. While translated literature can offer more knowledge of the



Chinua Achebe Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe

217

foreign, this knowledge does not necessarily serve human understanding. In fact, it can be used for completely different purposes. For example, exoticism being one of the commodities advertised in book markets worldwide, consumers of literature may treat information about the foreign as merely a spicy flavouring. In more extreme cases, intelligence about other cultures could actually be used against them, in prejudiced jokes, hate campaigns, even wars. Having said that, I also believe that (translated) postcolonial literature can invite human understanding, particularly if a book itself offers a sympathetic and insightful image of the complex lives of others, and, even more importantly, if it participates in a much larger cultural project, movement or spirit that fosters understanding between peoples. Things Fall Apart is probably a good example of such a book, which was also written and read in the right place at the right time (if the decolonization and migration of the second half of the twentieth century can be seen as a broad movement for intercultural communication). The novel’s translations can fulfil a similar role, as long as they succeed in reconciling the foreign with the domestic under particular cultural and political circumstances. I believe that this can be achieved with the help of either of the strategies discussed, and that closeness to the original – in the sense of linguistic or cultural literalism, or even adoption of the author’s own foreignizing or domesticating tendency – does not necessarily need to be a yardstick of good postcolonial translation. I realize that such a conclusion does not provide much practical advice on how to translate postcolonial literature. Yet perhaps that vagueness is an advantage that any more prescriptive view would lack. It leaves translators with the challenge and the freedom to interpret wisely, like Okeke and Achebe himself.

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” Kunapipi 12.2 (1990): 1–10, repr. in Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen & Anna Rutherford (Oxford & Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1991): 1–10. ——. “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994): 428–34. Originally in Moderna Språk 58 (1964): 438–46, and Transition 4/18 (1965): 27–30. ——. Things Fall Apart (1958; Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1994). ——. Świat się rozpada, tr. Małgorzata Żbikowska (Things Fall Apart; London: Heinemann, 1958; tr. Warsaw: Iskry, 1989).

218

DOROTA GOUCH



Bassnett, Susan, & Harish Trivedi. “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 1–18. Echeruo, Michael J.C. Igbo–English Dictionary (Lagos: Longman Nigeria, 2001). Emerson, Caryl. “Answering for Central and Eastern Europe,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2006): 203–11. Hermans, Theo. “Norms and the Determination of Translation: A Theoretical Framework,” in Translation Power Subversion, ed. Román Álvarez & M. Carmen–África Vidal (Clevedon, Bristol & Adelaide: Multilingual Matters, 1996): 25–51. Innes, C.L. Chinua Achebe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990). Kwieciński, Piotr. Disturbing Strangeness: Foreignisation and Domestication in Translation Procedures in the Context of Cultural Asymmetry (Toruń: Edytor, 2001). Murray, J.A.H. et al., ed. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1884–1928). ——, Henry Bradley, W.A. Craigie & C.T. Onions, ed. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Introduction, Supplement and Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933). Simpson, J.A., & E.S.C. Weiner, ed. The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Tymoczko, Maria. “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 19–40. ——. Translation in a Postcolonial Context (Manchester: St Jerome, 1999). Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).



Notes on Contributors M I C K J A R D I N E is Head of the Department of English, Creative Writing and

American Studies at the University of Winchester, England. He has taught and published across a range of areas, including postcolonial fiction, early modern drama, and popular culture. He previously lectured at Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria. D O R O T A G O Ł U C H , graduate of the University of Kent and the Jagiellonian

University in Krakow, Poland, is currently a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at University College, London, researching Polish translations and the reception of anglophone postcolonial novels. She is a postgraduate representative of the British Comparative Literature Association and is a member the Polish academic society Collegium Invisibile. Her research interests include Caribbean women’s writing, postcolonial translation, and East European postcoloniality. She is the author of I Rather Dead: A Spivakian Reading of Indo-Caribbean Women’s Narratives (2011). W A L T R A U D K O L B is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Translation Studies

at the University of Vienna, and for many years lectured in the university’s Departments of Comparative Literature and African Studies. She has contributed essays and articles to journals, including Stichproben: Wiener Zeitschrift fur kritische Afrikastudien, and to the scholarly books on translation and interpretation Übersetzen im Literaturbetrieb: Übersetzungssoziologische Beiträge (2005), Im Brennpunkt: Literaturübersetzung (2008), and Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsibility (2009). She is also a freelance translator and court-certified interpreter. B E R N T H L I N D F O R S is professor emeritus of English and African Literatures

at the University of Texas at Austin and has written and edited a number of books on anglophone African literatures, the latest being Early Achebe (2009). R U S S E L L M C D O U G A L L has published over many years on the cultural

kinetics of West African writing, particularly on the novels of Achebe. His most recent publications are Writing, Travel, Empire (2007), co-edited with

220

CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008



Peter Hulme, and The Roth Family, Anthropology, and Colonial Administration (2008), co-edited with Iain Davidson. He teaches Australian literature, publishing, and editing at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. M A L I K A R E B A I M A A M R I is currently a senior lecturer in political science at the National School of Higher Education in Algiers. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including the International Journal of Arts and Sciences, the Journal of Melville Studies, Revue Annales de l’Université d’Alger, Conradiana, and the Journal of N T U Studies in Language and Literature, as well as in the book Hearts of Darkness: Melville and Conrad in the Space of World Culture (2010). She has been an associate editor for the International Journal of Learning. Her research interests include literature with a focus on cultural contact and the political community in Africa. She is a member of the Joseph Conrad Society in the U K . M I C H E L N A U M A N N spent his childhood in Congo–Brazzaville and in the

Cameroons. He worked for the Universities of Niamey, Niger, and Kano, Nigeria, and wrote his doctorate in African literature on Achebe’s critics. He now works for the University of Cergy–Pontoise, France. He has published a History of the Commonwealth (1999), a biography of M.N. Roy (2006), and a book of criticism on African literature entitled Rogue Literature (2000). C H I K A O K E K E – A G U L U is an assistant professor in the Department of Art

and Archaeology and Center for African American Studies, Princeton University. He was awarded his doctorate from Emory University, Atlanta. He has (co-)organized and written catalogue essays for several art exhibitions, including the 5th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2004); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2001); Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995); and the Nigerian Pavilion of the First Johannesburg Biennale (1995). His writings have appeared in several edited volumes and in the Glendora Review, African Arts, Art South Africa, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (of which he is an editor). C H R I S T O P H E R E . W . O U M A was born and raised in Kenya. He is currently

completing his doctorate on the representation of childhood in contemporary diasporic Nigerian fiction at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include childhood, memory, and diaspora in postcolonial studies and contemporary diasporic African fiction.



221

Notes on Contributors

R A S H N A B A T L I W A L A S I N G H was born and raised in India and is currently

a visiting professor at Colorado College and at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She was awarded her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Singh is the author of The Imperishable Empire: British Fiction on India (1988) and Goodly is Our Heritage: Children’s Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character (2004). She has contributed to Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (2002) and to the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora (2008). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles postcolonial literature, as well as on multicultural and pedagogical issues. A N D R E W S M I T H is a lecturer in the department of Sociology, Anthropology

and Applied Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the politics of culture, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts. He has recently published work on Nigerian e-mail scams in Cultural Studies. He is the author of C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture (2010). D A V I D W H I T T A K E R has been a lecturer at Birkbeck College and the Uni-

versity of Greenwich in London. He is the author, together with Mpalive Msiska, of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (2007). His research interests are in the field of postcolonial studies and in the areas of Nigerian and African literature and contemporary diasporic African literature.

