2nd April, 2013
By Akin Adesokan
He sits there in the front row, looking baffled by the effusion of encomiums falling all around him like snow, a little overshadowed in the serene placidity of a wise old man that he is. Once in a while, as the person reading on stage hits on a funny note, and the audience comes to life with muffled guffaws, he too shakes a bit from the effort of laughing. Chinua Achebe, Africa’s most famous novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, a classic of 20th century fiction, will be 70 in two weeks, but there is an early start to the celebration, this weekend of November 3-4.
That was in 2000, more than twelve years ago, when Bard College, the school in upstate New York that Achebe had made his home following his tragic accident in 1990, decides to honor this path-breaking man of letters, bringing an unprecedented number of writers and scholars together in Annandale, a tiny university town on the bank of the Hudson River. For me, it is the largest gathering of writers of African descent and intellectuals and scholars and business people with a stake in African arts and letters around a single moment, that is, since May 1988 when an international symposium took place in Lagos to celebrate Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize for Literature, earned two years before. Speaker after speaker, from Nelson Mandela (who sends a message from South Africa) through Toni Morrison to Ali Mazrui and John Edgar Wideman tells the house what encountering Achebe’s masterpiece means to them.
The F.W. Olin Language Center is packed on every occasion. It doesn’t make sense to start listing names, so I won’t even try. It should suffice to say that everyone who is aware, or is invited, or is able to make it, is present. This gathering of the merchants of African literary culture is an autograph-hunter’s dream. All the hotel rooms in Kingston, the closest midscale town to Annandale-Upon-Hudson, Bard’s location, are sold out. Reporters come from as far afield as Lagos and Frankfurt. There are functionaries of the United Nations in the audience. In one single row sit Nuruddin Farah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Anthony Appiah, listening to a speech by the political scientist Richard Sklar, who has taken the floor after Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. The ongoing performance on stage is also a tribute, although an oblique one, as it turns out.
It is also my first close encounter with Achebe, a writer that I had met in print since upper elementary school when I read but half-understood the story of a man named Obi who has a girlfriend named Clara whom he really cannot marry, but he has to go to jail for taking a bribe. And there was also the encounter from a distance, in 1989 or so, when he stepped out of a Jeep in front of Trenchard Hall at the University of Ibadan, waving a feathered fan at a band of dancers and drummers serenading this guest arriving to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater. I would read the other books later, out of duty (A Man of the People; Girls at War) or curiosity (Arrow of God; Things Fall Apart; Anthills of the Savannah), and for someone trying to read his way toward an idea of how to make his own books, those novels became part of my growing imaginative world.
Not so their author, or not at first. Achebe the man came to me first through controversy—his startling statement in 1987 that the national burial accorded to the recently deceased Chief Obafemi Awolowo was a “national swindle.” Unlike Soyinka who first came into my consciousness in Civics quizzes as “the person who suggested Swahili,” there was no comparable context for identifying Achebe. “Who wrote Things Fall Apart?” is a joke trusting in the sophistication of Wit, elder sister of Humor. But although I took notice of the statement regarding Awolowo, it did not at the time play any role in my growing appreciation of Achebe’s work or person.
That—forming an opinion of the writers’ work or person through events happening outside the books—would come later, when my reading matured enough to nudge itself in the direction of the essays. In the stories, it was one thing to indulge in the proverbs and the idioms of the so-called “tribal life,” but quite another to be confronted by the phrase “Okonkwo almost choked on his anger,” or the incredible imagery of a finger of sweat crawling down Captain Winterbottom’s back, like an insect. These were gems to make one want to write, but I also realized, quite intuitively, that his limpid prose was not to my temperament. It was not so much that I disliked it as that it taught me that he was not my kind of writer. For me, Arrow of God is the best-achieved of Achebe’s novels, the one I am likely to be caught re-reading, as the author himself once revealed.
It was in the essays, in these works of cultural and political analysis, that I began to form an opinion that was specific, complex, and yet incomplete. In the essays—Morning Yet on Creation Day, Hopes and Impediments, Home and Exile, The Trouble with Nigeria, The Education of a British Protected Child—Achebe brings to life a particular literary and political attitude which could be appreciated apart from the novel, in a way that one cannot say for a writer like Gabriel García Marquez or Jorge Amado, two contemporaries with whom he was sometimes compared. I might say that the essays help in clarifying for me what the deeper aims of his fictional works are. And if there is one essay that encapsulates these aims—assuming that there could be such a thing as a representative essay in Achebe’s prose work—it will have to be “The Novelist as Teacher.” It is here that he declares, in his evergreen and inimitable voice that “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach their readers that their past—with all its imperfection—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”
The person reading on the stage has stopped, and applause is ceasing. He offers his reason for reading that particular excerpt about a small-town mock-warrior who wanted to take on Adolf Hitler: “This is just to show that we have our own fighters, our people of courage. It’s a tribute to Achebe, to the courage that Achebe’s life has given us. He has shown the beauty and importance of Christian life and family. We hope some of us will be around to attend your 80th birthday.” With those words Wole Soyinka, the performer, walks across the stage, hugs Ike Achebe along the way, and goes on to embrace the pensive figure sitting in a wheel-chair, recording a truly emotional moment in those two days of many emotional moments.
There are three other such instances. The first occurs soon after this fraternal act. Sonia Sanchez, the African-American poet and performer, reads a long poem that links Okonkwo’s act of resistance to the spirit of rebellion, the sense of historical duty which informs the creative choices of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Sanchez is a prominent figure of this movement, and her poetry, like the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Haki Madhubuti, is marked by formal experimentation and spiritual rousing. When she is done with the first poem, such is the depth of emotion she has whipped up by intense chants and daring stage acts, and so complete her own exhaustion, that the audience simply rises at once, and goes on clapping and calling for more.
Later in the day, Achebe and Toni Morrison hold a Conversation. Leo Botstein, president of Bard College, moderates this session. The responses from the two authors are very uneven. Morrison tends to see the questions as linked to the dialectics of the creative process and her role as a user of language and metaphor in a “race-inflected milieu,” while Achebe gives straight and pungent answers with a simple sophistication that readers of his essays will find familiar. Then Botstein asks a fan question, something like, What’s your favorite novel?
Achebe answers: “Mine will be Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This is because Morrison is the only writer who is probing what James Baldwin calls ‘the African conundrum’. What happens when someone does the kind of thing that that woman does, by killing her own child? What happens when this happens, when you try to avoid abomination by committing another abomination? Because that child will come back to haunt you.” In this fascinating, deceptively simple way, Achebe links the problem of guilt and powerlessness that haunts Africans and African-Americans over the historical fact of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
A therapeutic sigh rises from the audience. Toni Morrison seems to be crying. Her voice quavers when Botstein turns to her. Achebe quips: “Well, it doesn’t have to be a novel of mine”, and everyone laughs. She gives an honest but ambiguous answer that I’ve heard her give before: that her favorite novel is the one she likes to read, and because it does not exist, she has to write it.
Achebe’s great theme was anti-colonialism, and in this he was not alone. The late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene was like that, to some degree. Achebe was an Nkrumahist, a cultural figure who views the ideas and maybe the methods of the great Ghanaian leader as indispensable to forming a sense of self-awareness and dignity by Africans. But in his works, and especially in the early novels, he expressed this theme from the perspective of Igbo culture. The crisis faced by that culture, best exemplified by the civil war fought between the Nigerian government and the secessionist southeastern Republic of Biafra, affected Achebe’s literary productivity. He did not produce another novel until 1987 when he published the middling Anthills of the Savannah, twenty-one years after A Man of the People. He filled the hiatus with the essays, the books of stories and poem, the pamphlet The Trouble with Nigeria, and his tenure as a professor in Nigeria and American universities.
The theme of anti-colonialism is a complex and necessary one for writers and artists speaking for and about previously misrepresented communities to embrace. It is one to appreciate in this manner: to Soyinka’s famous quip about the tiger not needing to proclaim his “tigritude,” we have Leopold Senghor’s rejoinder that the tiger had to proclaim his being because it had been conclusively called into question in the past. One of the satisfying things about this kind of position-taking, to my way of looking at things, is that I don’t have to worry about them or choose between them as I try to make my way in the world. Why choose between Karl Marx’s “Thesis on Feuerbach” and Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”? Does one not complement the other? Colonialism has left its indelible scars on the lives of the people it dominated (Achebe calls this “the wound in the soul”), and it has been the definitive experience for most modern African intellectuals. But there were colonialisms on the continent before the European one and there remain varieties of that phenomenon, in other guises. Every writer has to tell stories that suit his or her taste and temperament—that is the point of Morrison’s response to the fan question.
However, the civil war quickly gave Achebe another theme, and a cause—the championing of the Igbo in the uneasy contraption called Nigeria. This is why he had to write the divisive There Was A Country, and why it took him so long to do so.
A phone call from Lagos woke me to the rumor of Achebe’s death early in the morning of March 22. The caller, journalist and author Kunle Ajibade, was not sure, and he wanted me to call Nigerian friends to confirm or dismiss the news. I left several voice messages, and the one person who picked my call said something very significant, moments after we had come to terms with the news. Chika Okeke-Agulu, an artist and art historian said, after listening to my view of the writer’s personal account of the war, that Biafra, not literature, was the defining ideal for Achebe. That is a point of supreme importance. With it as a point of reference, it would not be difficult to understand why a writer of Achebe’s status continued to use the expression, “my people the Igbo,” and why he would describe Awolowo as a politician fighting for “his Yoruba people.” It stands to reason.
Now but for his international stature as the author of Things Fall Apart it would have been difficult or impossible to argue forcefully for these two themes at once. He lost faith in Nigeria, the country with great but repeatedly undermined potentials, but he kept faith with Biafra, the country that is no more. While the controversy around There Was A Country raged, I opted to read Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, published in the same month as Achebe’s work. Rushdie’s memoir is another account of a writer’s encounter with his deeply held values, one for which he was close to paying the supreme price. It is true that Rushdie has no dream of being the martyr of any cause—he is too ironical and sensuous for that. But he gives an unvarnished, remarkably honest, and frequently funny account of his experience in those nine difficult years. He does not spare himself. How many writers would confess that one of his best friends slept with his wife, and that he turned to this same friend later to publish his next book? How many will reveal directly that his son briefly engaged in pilfering? His account of his brief embrace of Islam during the ordeal is an admirable piece of self-criticism. On the contrary, reviewers of Achebe’s book have pointed to the author’s refusal to present a detailed account of his own involvement at the highest level of decision-making in Biafra as one of the unforgivable flaws of the book.
This also stands to reason: during the fatwa episode, a Nigerian academic, Theo Vincent, met Rushdie at a PEN event in Europe and during small-talk, Vincent asked Rushdie how he managed to write a novel as monumental as The Moor’s Last Sigh under those conditions. The writer’s response was that writing was his business, the one thing he had to do no matter what. Achebe was confronted with a similar question, but in reverse: how come he had not produced another novel in years? His response was that under the circumstances of and following the war, novel writing would be a frivolous exercise.
Yet Achebe invested in writing in other areas, especially during that long spell of drought. While he lectured and taught and wrote essays, he also initiated the founding of the Association of Nigerian Authors, co-founded Nwamife Publishers, a literature imprint, and Okike, a journal of new writing. During the Second Republic, he joined the left-leaning People’s Redemption Party, and served as its Vice-President.
The third emotional moment occurs differently; it is perceptible throughout the two days. The gathering of virtually everyone interested in African literature, within and outside academia, from the US, Nigeria, South Africa, England, Australia, to celebrate the birthday of one of Africa’s illustrious sons is itself a matter to sigh and ponder, or dance and laugh over. In Soyinka’s excerpt from Aké and embrace of Achebe, in Sanchez’s evocative poem, in Achebe’s profound reading of Beloved, the community to which every self-aware writer caters, and which is located inside a room, in a country or in the entire universe, that community is enacted with memorable camaraderie. This is what I find at Bard College.
On the way to the birthday celebration, I read Achebe’s new book of essays, Home and Exile, texts of three lectures he gave at Harvard University in December 1998. It was forty years after the publication of Things Fall Apart. The book chronicles the mental conditioning that gave rise to the novel—more of the same indignation at colonial novels of Africa by Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad that one will find in Achebe’s previous essays. It also assesses the novel’s fortune for literatures from Africa and other previously colonized societies, and calls for a balance of stories in the world. There’s a straight-faced critique of trends in contemporary fiction, and the threat of cultural homogenization posed by the usual suspect—the “Western culture”. The blurb says: “Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other.”
I take just two issues with the fine book. The first is a minor error of fact that puts Tai Solarin’s period of sojourn in England at the 1950s (the late headmaster returned to Nigeria in 1951, after ten years abroad). The second is more substantial. Achebe misunderstands the dynamics of power between the hunter and the lion, as contained in a Masai proverb which goes thus: Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter. He rejects the lion as a messenger of truth because it is also a powerful animal. The lion is truly powerful, but there is no balance in the exercise of power between this animal and the hunter. Unlike the lion, the hunter has a gun. I insist on this because dismissing the lion amounts to discounting the humanity of the weaker counterpart, and placing the burden of history on only the hunter. What is missing in the contest is the balance, not the potential, of power. That is why Achebe could contest Cary’s story.
•Akin Adesokan is the author of Roots in the Sky and Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics.