CHINUA ACHEBE-THE NOVELIST AS ATEACHER

CHINUA ACHEBE-THE NOVELIST AS ATEACHER

Things Fall Apart has come to be regarded as more than simply a classic; it is now seen as the archetypal African novel. The situation which the novel itself describes—the coming of the white man and the initial disintegration of traditional African society as a consequence of that—is typical of the breakdown all African societies have experienced at one time or another as a result of their exposure to the West. And, moreover, individual Africans all over the continent may identify with the situation Achebe has portrayed. (p. 28)

Although Arrow of God is in some ways probably artistically superior to Things Fall Apart, it is fated to run a second place in popularity to Achebe's first work. [Things Fall Apart] may also be regarded as archetypal because of Achebe's reshaping of a traditional Western literary genre into something distinctly African in form and pattern. (p. 29)

Achebe's dialogue in Things Fall Apart is extremely sparse. Okonkwo [the protagonist] says very little at all; not of any one place in the novel may it be said that he has an extended speech or even a very lengthy conversation with another character. And as for authorial presentations of his thoughts, they are limited to two or three very brief passages. Indeed, Achebe relies for the development of his story usually on exposition rather than the dramatic rendering of scene, much as if he were telling an extended oral tale or epic in conventional narrative fashion—almost always making use of the preterit. Again and again the reader is told something about Okonkwo, but he rarely sees these events in action. (pp. 40-1)

I have … noted the strong aversion that many Western critics have toward the anthropological overtones present in African fiction, except for the anthropologist, of course, who is looking for this kind of thing. This aversion of the literary critics, however, is no doubt due to their equation of the anthropological with the local colorists at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. However, in a work such as Things Fall Apart, where we are not presented with a novel of character, the anthropological is indeed important. Without it there would be no story. The only way in which Achebe can depict a society's falling apart is first by creating an anthropological overview of that culture, and it should be clear that it is not going to Okonkwo's story that Achebe is chronicling as much as the tragedy of a clan. It is the village of Umuofia, which has been sketched in so carefully, which he will now show as falling apart, crumbling from its exposure to Western civilization.

The concluding chapter of Things Fall Apart is one of the highlights of contemporary African fiction. In less than three pages, Achebe weaves together the various themes and patterns he has been working with throughout much of his novel. Technically, the most significant aspect of this final chapter is Achebe's sudden shifts in point of view.

The shifting point of view back and forth between an African and a Western viewpoint symbolizes the final breakup of the clan, for Things Fall Apart, in spite of the subtitle on the first American edition, The Story of a Strong Man, is only in part Okonkwo's story, and, as we have noted, as the book progresses, the story becomes increasingly that of a village, a clan. Achebe clearly indicates this in the final paragraph of his novel where he reduces Okonkwo's story to nothing more than a paragraph in a history book, for history is facts and not individuals, and the history of the coming of the white man to Africa is not the story of the pacification of individuals but of entire tribes of people and even beyond that…. Achebe has moved throughout his book away from the individual (Okonkwo) to the communal (Umuofia) and beyond that to the clan. And in the last paragraph, the extension is even further beyond the Ibo of Southeast Nigeria to that of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, ergo, the entire African continent.

The conclusion to Things Fall Apart has often been considered over-written, anti-climactic, unnecessarily didactic…. Certainly it can be argued that Achebe takes pains to make his message clear, but I feel that the shift to the District Commissioner's point of view strengthens rather than weakens the conclusion. It seems impossibile for any one to read Achebe's last chapter without being noticeably moved, and if it is didactic in the sense of tying things up a little too nicely, then I would have to insist that this was Achebe's intention from the beginning and not merely an accident because of his background of oral tradition…. Achebe has written … [that] the novelist in an emergent nation cannot afford to pass up a chance to educate his fellow countrymen…. [Furthermore], contemporary African literature and other forms of African art have inherited a cultural inclination toward the didactic which in regard to African tradition may be called functionalism.

The ending of Things Fall Apart also illustrates the dichotomy of interpretations which cultural backgrounds impose upon a reader. Most Western readers of Achebe's novel seem to interpret the story of Okonkwo's fall as tragic if not close to pure tragedy in classical terms. They cite Okonkwo's pride, his going against the will of the gods (for instance, breaking the Week of Peace, and killing Ikemefuna), and interpret the ending as tragic and inevitable, citing, usually, a parallel to Oedipus. Achebe's own feelings about Okonkwo and the conclusion to the novel, however, would tend to indicate a rather different interpretation. The most obvious clue is Achebe's title, Things Fall Apart, taken from William Butler Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming." Although Yeats's title may be applied ironically to Achebe's story, the indications are that Achebe views the new dispensation as something inevitable, perhaps even desirable. His criticism is clearly of the old way of life which is unsatisfactory now that the West has arrived. This interpretation is supported by several comments Achebe has made about his novel…. Lack of adaptability … is what Achebe implies led to the collapse of traditional Ibo society.

Of the three major divisions of the book, only the trajectory of Parts II and III resembles the traditional Western well-made novel with conflict—obstacles to be overcome by the protagonist. Part I is especially loose, incorporating as it does section after section of anthropological background. The effect is, of course, to re-create the entire world of day-to-day existence in traditional Ibo society, and Achebe takes pains to make certain that the major stages of life are included: birth, marriage, and death. In the symbiosis which results, Umuofia, rather than Okonkwo, becomes the main character of Things Fall Apart, and the transformation it undergoes is archetypal of the entire breakdown of traditional African cultures under exposure to the West.

The novel itself, as I stated at the beginning, must also be regarded as archetypical for the form and patterns Achebe has given it. If we compare the novel very briefly with Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson it is readily evident that Things Fall Apart is not a story about a character as is Cary's novel and as I feel we tend to regard Western novels as being. For example, Achebe could never have called his novel Okonkwo, though it could have been given the name of Okonkwo's village if Achebe had thought that the situation did not extend beyond that one locale within Nigeria. Okonkwo himself does not alter at all throughout the novel. He is the same at the ending as he is at the beginning of the story. Thus, Things Fall Apart, because of its emphasis on community rather than individuality, is a novel of situation rather than of character, and this is undoubtedly its major difference from the traditional Western genre, which in the twentieth century, at least, has emphasized the psychological depiction of character. (pp. 62-3)

Let it simply be noted here that the situational plot is indeed the most typical narrative form one encounters in contemporary African fiction. The reason for this is that by and large the major theme of African writing to date has been the conflict of Africa with the West, whether this is shown in its initial stages, as in Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or at any one of several different later stages. All four of Achebe's novels are examples of the situational plot, for what happens is ultimately more significant for the group than for the individual whom Achebe uses to focus the situation. The significance, then, is felt by the village, the clan, the tribe, or the nation.

Things Fall Apart does not necessarily give the impression that the story is "plotless" in spite of the fragmentary nature of many of the substories or tales…. Achebe's use of the proverb can act as a serious counterpart for the more continuous surface progression of the story…. The other unities which he relies on to give form and pattern to the story are the traditional oral tale or tale within a tale—a device no longer in favor with contemporary Western novelists, yet a convention at least as old as the "Man in the Hill" episode in Fielding's Tom Jones. The use of the leitmotif and its associations with stagnancy in Umuofia, masculinity, land, and yam also act as connective links throughout the narrative. It is because of these unities and others, which are vestiges of his own traditional culture, that Achebe's Things Fall Apart deserves its position in the forefront of contemporary African writing. Achebe has widened our perspective of the novel and illustrated how a typically Western genre may be given a healthy injection of new blood once it is reshaped and formed by the artist whose vision of life and art is different from our own.

Almost all—if not all—of Achebe's characters in A Man of the People are stereotypes, because with this novel Achebe moved into a new area: satire. In many ways the novel is his weakest so far, and I am convinced that its popularity with the African reading audience bears little correlation to its literary merits; however, the novel accomplishes exactly what it set out to do—satirize life in Nigeria in the mid-1960's. Many of the situations satirized can only be appreciated by someone who lived in Nigeria during those years: political corruption, the increasing bureaucracy, the postal strike, the census, the means of communication, the daily news media.

It probably is not fair to criticize Achebe's cardboard characters in A Man of the People, since satire rarely is built on believable characters. Even the fact that the story is told in the first person results in no great insight into Achebe's narrator, Odili Samalu, or any of the other characters. The thin story thread is more reminiscent of the novels of Cyprian Ekwensi than of Achebe's earlier works…. When the story line gets out of control, Achebe conveniently draws his political morality to an end by having the nation succumb to a military coup. In spite of the de-emphasis on character development, there is certainly more dialogue than Achebe has ever used before, especially in dialects such as Pidgin English, as a means of characterization. The conversation at times is witty, but the whole affair—Odili's entering politics because he has lost his girl—is unconvincing and rather overdrawn. Everybody gets satirized, however, educated and uneducated Africans, the British and the Americans, even the Peace Corps…. A Man of the People should be acknowledged for exactly what it is: an entertainment, written for Africans. Achebe no longer tries to explain the way it is, to apologize for the way things are, because this is exactly the point: this is the way things are. The characters are ineffectual, and Achebe's satire itself will be short-lived. The story and the characters have none of the magnitude or the nobility of those in Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God.

That Chinua Achebe is essentially a pessimistic writer is apparent both in terms of plot and theme. Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God portray the disruption caused by imperialism. In the first novel, Okonkwo, the protagonist, commits suicide; in the latter, Ezuelu's mind gives way under strain. No Longer at Ease, a study of deterioration under stress and temptation, ends with Okonkwo's grandson, Obiajulu, being found guilty of accepting bribes. A Man of the People, a criticism of political corruption, ends with Odili, the narrator through whom we follow the story, rejecting all public involvement and, disillusioned, going into voluntary exile.

Achebe's major awareness is of a heroic past and a debilitated present. (p. 95)

Achebe's sense of history is sophisticated, for he shows not only that the modern character is weak, but why it is weak. To appreciate his analysis fully, one must read all the novels and see them whole. Then, though the direct causes are personal, peculiar to the individual, be he an Odili or an Obiajulu, the indirect causes are more remote, impersonal, and historic. Achebe is more concerned [with presenting] the value of what was destroyed than [with dwelling] on who or what caused that destruction, but when we come to the historic factors, Achebe makes a criticism of colonialism, not so much one of economic exploitation and political suppression—Achebe avoids slogans and easy emotionalism—but of the destruction of social structure and cohesion. As a creative artist, Achebe is more concerned with the individual, so the destruction is shown as it works itself out in individual life and experience. By placing Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God in the background, we understand better No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People; by taking the measure of Okonkwo and Ezuelu, we can arrive at a fuller and more sympathetic understanding of Obi and Odili.

Achebe's protagonists are of two types. The heroes are past their prime, courageous, but [end] in defeat that is not only personal but marks the end of much of what they had known and loved. The anti-heroes are the successors, younger and weaker. They are sensitive, initially good intentioned, but being weak, end in failure. Though failing, they survive, disillusioned and damaged: the heroic mold has been shattered, the glory is past.

COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE

This colonialism is what the anarchy is the above quote is referring to. The falcon represents the young generation of the clan; the falconer represents the elders. This is a story of how things really do fall apart. The story is centered around Okonkwo, a great wrestler and elder of the clan. He is the son of an indolent man, who was constantly in debt. Okonkwo's father was often referred to as a woman, which was a great insult. Growing up, Okonkwo develops a phobia of becoming his father, and does everything is his power not to. With this phobia came an abominable stubbornness. His first step in becoming a "real man" (opposed to his father) was to prove his strength, in doing so he became the great wrestler of his clan. Doing so earned him a lot of accolades and honours. He earned a lot of land, and married three different wives. However, with all of his fame and fortune, he was unable to escape his internal conflicts due to his stubbornness and his becoming frustrated easily. One example of this was when a young male warrior and a young virgin girl were sent to Okonkwo's village in exchange (as a sacrifice) for a heinous crime committed against his clan. This was a crime that otherwise would have resulted in an all out war; a war which Okonkwo's clan and village would have earned an easy victory. The young boy is sent to live with Okonkwo and his family for quite some time. During this time Okonkwo becomes very attached to him, so attached that it seems as if the boy is one of his own. However, when the time comes for the sacrifice of the boy to be made, the other elders excuse Okonkwo from the "hunting trip." Yet, because of Okonkwo's hubris and fear of looking like a woman, he is determined to go on the mission. Okonkwo's determination wouldn't have been so bad, but he worsened the situation by making the first strike on his "son" and then proceeded to watch the other elders brutally massacre the little body. Achebe does this to let the reader know of the significance of the gender roles among the Ibo people, and to alert the reader to the types of sacrifices and the types of cultures that are experienced among the Ibo people.

 

Later on in the story Okonkwo really pays for his stubbornness. During a large gathering in the center of Umuofia (Okonkwo's village), he shoots his gun off into the air. The action had a very tragic reaction. In reaction, the stray bullet fell down from the sky and struck an innocent bystander. This was an accident of fatal consequences. The bullet ended up killing the unsuspecting civilian. This incident resulted in the exile of Okonkwo and his family to his motherland for seven years. Things took a drastic turn for the worse while Okonkwo was absent from his village, resulting in a return to a place he barely knew.

 

During part one of the story, Achebe takes the reader through the daily lives of the Ibo people. It is not until part two that the reader is introduced to the European missionaries. The purpose of Achebe's waiting until part two to introduce that missionaries was to wait and immerse the reader into the everyday life of the Ibo people, so he or she could feel as though he or she was a part of the clan, then the author shifts the momentum of the story. Part two displays the affect the societal changes have on the members of the Ibo clan. The author concentrates the attention on the conflict between the people of Umuofia (Okonkwo's village) and the Christian missionaries. The missionaries succeed in taking over Umuofia and transforming the once Ibo tribe in a Christian one. As a result, Okonkwo is so distraught with the result of his village he ends up committing suicide.

ENGLISH AND LITERATURE

The uniqueness of Nigerian English notwithstanding, Achebe’s assertion that the National language of Nigerian literature was English, issued only five years after Nigeria declared its independence from Britain, has continued to spark ideological debate regarding what ought to characterize and constitute Nigerian literature(s) in the post-colonial era.   Differing points of view have emerged over the decades, as scholars within the Nigerian and pan-African community at large have debated the role of former colonial languages in National literatures.  The Nigerian context of this debate thus must be considered within the larger, black-African context of academics, authors, and scholars, who, historically, have simultaneously staged the language debate in both national and continental arenas. 

          In Achebe’s touchstone article, excerpted above, he makes a clear distinction between ethnic literatures and what he envisions as National Nigerian literature.  “I hope,” he says, “that there always will be men, like the late Chief Fagunwa, who will choose to write in their native tongue and ensure that our ethnic literatures will flourish side by side with the national ones” (18).  For Achebe, ethnic and national literatures can coexist, occupying different ideological niches, respectively.  It is, however, undoubtedly English that must serve as a unifying, national language of literature, despite its primarily colonial inception in Nigeria, a historical fact that Achebe does not hesitate to acknowledge:

          [w]hat are the factors which have conspired to place English in the position of national

language in many parts of African?  Quite simply the reason is that these nations were created in the first place by the intervention of the British” (28).

While Achebe here acknowledges the imperial implications of English language use, he cannot ignore its function and status as a national Nigerian—and largely pan-African—lingua franca:

[…] there are scores of languages I would want to learn if it were possible.  Where am I to find the time to learn the half-a-dozen or so Nigerian languages each of which can sustain a literature?  […].  These languages will just have to develop as tributaries to feed the one central language enjoying nation-wide currency.  Today, for good or ill, that language is English.  Tomorrow it may be something else, although I very much doubt it (28).

Achebe here recognises English’s function as an effective link-language in the rich linguistic economy of Nigeria, described above.  It is notable that while Achebe imbues English with the capability of sustaining and nourishing a truly national language of literature, a language of “mutual communication” between African writers and the reading populace at large, Achebe is also careful not to attribute to English any inherent ideological value.  While he acknowledges its colonial, imperial past, Achebe asserts that at his present historical moment, English has primarily utilitarian purposes; it is a useful “world language.”  Achebe, moreover, even goes so far to assert that the African writer should not attempt to write English as a native speaker might; it is “neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so” (18).  The English language, and not the African writer, should be the one to bend, asserts Achebe, and made to serve the unique needs of the African author—but without sacrificing the language’s mutual intelligibility.  While English provides many possible modes of artistic expression and is a language medium that Achebe feels capable of holding the “weight of [his] African experience,” English remains a tool, a relatively apolitical artistic medium, nonetheless.

          In a conference on Commonwealth Literature held in Leeds in September of 1964, just after the initial publication of Achebe’s famous article, which first appeared in Spear: Nigeria’s National Magazine, and Moderna Sprak  in 1964, before its 1965 publication in the journal Transition, J.O. Ekpenyong enthusiastically—arguably even more so than Achebe—opined that “the introduction of English as the Official language is one of the greatest benefits of colonialism in Nigeria” (144).  Ekpenyong explicitly cites Achebe’s recently published article and argues that to

level-headed people, English does not seem to have a stiff competition with any indigenous language for election into chair of official language, for strictly speaking, it is not a foreign language in Nigeria.  By the peculiar circumstance of her birth, Nigeria was born into English as the mother tongue (149).

English as an African “Dead End”

          In 1964, Achebe was in fact directly responding to those like Obiajunwa Wali, who, in his article “The Dead End of African Literature,” which appeared in Transition magazine in 1963, argued that “African languages will face inevitable extinction if they do not embody some kind of intelligent literature” (335).  He lamented that the student of African languages, such as Yoruba, had “no play available to him in that language, for Wole Soyinka, the most gifted Nigerian playwright at the moment, does not consider Yoruba suitable” (335).  One of Wali’s chief anxieties in this article was the fear that, because African writers were increasingly writing in the English language, their creative endeavours were being collectively understood only as a “minor appendance in the mainstream of European literature” (332).  Wali continues to assert that

[b]oth [African] creative writers and literary critics read and devour European literature and critical methods.  The new drama of J.P. Clark[1][2] is seen in terms not only of the classical past of Aristotle and the Greeks, but of the current Tennessee Williams and the Absurdists […].  In this kind of literary analysis, one just parrots Aristotle and the current clichés of the American new Critics.

          The consequence of this kind of literature is that it lacks any blood and stamina, and has no means of self-enrichment. […] The overwhelming majority of the local audience, with little or no education in the conventional European manner, has no chance of participating in this kind of literature.  Less than one percent of the Nigerian population have the ability to understand Wole Soyinka’s Dance of the Forest.  Yet this play was staged to celebrate their national independence (332).

For Wali, a literature that is truly African simply cannot be written in English; he views this as an irreconcilable contradiction.  Wali, moreover, suggests reforms in the Nigerian and black-African educational system in which young people are, he feels, not taught to “devote their tremendous gifts and abilities to their own languages” (334). 

Literature and Colonial Education

          Other scholars, such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who is from Kenya in East Africa, have also vociferously argued that English is absolutely antithetical to the indigenous writer’s expression of imperial resistance.  Sentiments such as these are, of course, based upon the assumption that writing for the African scholar or author of serious literature is always already a political act.  While Achebe does not ignore the political ramifications of writing in English vs. traditionally indigenous languages, such as Hausa or Yoruba, he is heavily invested in a politics of aesthetics, which informs his claim that English is a language that can and must be used as a form of primarily artistic national expression.  Notably, however, arguments for and against the use of English in Nigerian and black-African literature have not always followed a clear historical trajectory; rather, both sides have been engaged in an ongoing dialectical debate over the past several decades.  Ngũgĩ , writing two decades after Wali’s charged Transition article, argues in his book, Decolonising the mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), that there are (still) two forces at play in contemporary Africa: the imperialist tradition, on the one hand, and resistance to this tradition, on the other.  The act of writing for the African writer for Ngũgĩ cannot be divorced from a deeply rooted imperialistic and colonially based tradition of education, in which English “became more than a language, it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference” (172).  Ngũgĩ describes the system of education in Kenya during the colonial period, and recalls the literary education course that was necessary for young school boys to take in order to enter university in the 1950’s:

          Literary education was now determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing that dominance.  Orature (oral literature) in Kenyan languages stopped.  In primary school I now read simplified Dickens and Stevenson alongside Rider Haggard.  Jim Hawkins, Oliver Twist, Tom Brown – not Hare, Leopold and Lion – were now my daily companions in the world of imagination.  In secondary school, Scott and G.B. Shaw viewd with more Rider Haggard, John Buchan, Alan Paton […].  At Makerere I read English: from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot with a touch of Graham Greene (173).

          Ngũgĩ’s particular focus upon the institutional instruction of the English language and British literature underline the relationship between colonial linguistic instruction and the institutional cultivation of literary, aesthetic sensibilities, also rooted in colonial power structures.  The acts of both reading and writing in English cannot be divorced from colonial power in this view, and the production of aesthetic value can never be separated from the inculcation of imperial value systems.   Acts of literary resistance for Ngũgĩ must, therefore, be staged in indigenous languages; writing in English should not and cannot be classified as an act of effective imperial resistance.  Ngũgĩ, like other African writers weighing in on the language and literature debate, returns to Achebe, to whom he (perhaps unfairly) imputes a sense of gratitude to the English, and asserts that “those of us [and Achebe is certainly one of the Africans that must be counted here for Ngũgĩ] who have abandoned our mother-tongues” embody the fulfilment of the “final triumph of a system of [colonial] domination when the dominated start singing its virtues” (176).  In this view, through the act of writing, the African author or intellectual is invariably positioned on one or the other side of an ideological, imperial binary.  Writing is always an act of political intervention, and the political is inseparable from the aesthetic.  In this standpoint, the modern African writer is, arguably, construed much like his or her historical antecedents, such as Olaudah Equiano, for whom the act of writing was invariably politically charged.

Achebe Revisited and Deconstructed – a Post-Structuralist Approach to Colonial Linguistic Critique

While Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind marks his self proclaimed “farewell to English as a vehicle for any of [his] writings” (177), other African writers and academics have not so readily relinquished English as a medium of communication and debate.  The feasibility of the English boycotts suggested by Wali, Ngũgĩ and others has been questioned and re-questioned as other pan-African scholars weigh in on this debate.  The reality of English’s lingua franca status, its imperial origins notwithstanding, has sparked many to revisit and reassess the proclamations initially made by Achebe in 1964. 

Gaurav Desei, in “English as an African Language” (1993) for instance, reconsiders the fraught question of whether the language used by an African writer for textual composition ought to affect the work’s status for eligibility into the African canon of literature.  While he carefully considers the views of those, such as Ngũgĩ and Wali, who argue that literature written in a European language cannot, by definition, be African literature, ultimately Desei argues, in the vein of Achebe and South African writer, Ezekiel Mphahlele[2][3], that English is “not a purely Western language” (Desei 6).  In this view, English is, therefore, capable of being appropriated and successfully Africanised.  Desei adopts a deconstructionist approach to language systems on the whole, and accordingly debunks the possibility of “pure” languages that contain coherent meaning.   Desei overtly invokes theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who suggests that despite the fact that “the world in language is half someone else’s” (qtd in Desei 6), an utterance may become “one’s own” (Bakhtin qtd. in Desei 6) when one “populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (Bakhtin qtd. in Desei 6). 

Desei goes on to cite examples of primarily Nigerian literature and Nigerian authors whose writing embodies this deconstructionist view of language.  Amos Tutuola, the Nigerian author of The Palm Wine Drinkard, is cited as an author who employs what Desei calls “African English” (6), for instance.  Desei argues that Tutuola’s writing is heavily influenced by the Yoruba oral tradition, in that his plots are similar to “traditional folk narratives [and] his English is a Yorubised language” (6).  Desei’s article considers yet another Nigerian author, Gabriel Okara.   Desei cites literary critic, Oladele Taiwo, who also argues that Okara’s language is essentially hybrid, it belongs “by its grammatical (syntactic) compositional markers, to a single speaker, but […] actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantical and axiological belief systems” (7).   This described hybrid, Africanised English, which is implicitly lauded by both Desei and Oladele, in many ways rearticulates Achebe’s argument for an English that is both “universal” and “peculiar” using deconstructionist vocabulary.  Desei ultimately claims that “essentialist” arguments that reject English as not sufficiently African are both “romanticised treatises” and, in many cases, a-historical ones.  In this view, the particularized use of the English language deployed by Nigerian authors such as Soyinka, Achebe, and Okara, exemplifies the Bakhtinian claim that destabilizing “centrifugal forces” (Desei 10) are always at play within all seemingly unitary languages. 

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