CHINUA ACHEBE-ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

CHINUA ACHEBE-ENGLISH LANGUAGE 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”.  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”. 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. 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” .  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”. (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.

    Wole Soyinka, one of Nigeria’s most renowned authors and playwrights, was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, in Western Nigeria, and was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1986.  Soyinka, arguably because of his widely recognised talents, is one of the authors critiqued in Obiajunwa Wali’s invective for not writing his literature in Yoruba.  These critiques notwithstanding, many scholars have discussed the linguistic diversity present in many of Wole Soyinka’s fictional works.  For instance, his highly anthologized play, The Trials of Brother Jero (published 1963), not only exemplifies Soyinka’s linguistic and dialectical heterogeneity, but, moreover, provides several instances of the author’s deployment of code-switching, the moving back and forth between English and another language, or dialect.  Soyinka’s fiction is said to use a wide “spectrum of linguistic varieties such as English, Yoruba, West African pidgin English, [and] non-standard English” which, James OMole argues, reflects Nigeria’s diverse linguistic society, and arguably reveals Soyinka’s linguistic realism (OMole).  However, discussions of Soyinka’s aesthetics are rarely left unpoliticized, and in The Trials of Brother Jero, speech, and more specifically, the use of acrolectal versus basilectal forms of Nigerian English, have more pointed functions.  The deployment of various forms of English is overtly linked to one’s social status, wealth, and alacrity in the play.  For instance, Jero, the prophet-confidence man who orchestrates much of the farcical action of The Trials of Brother Jero, speaks what is primarily a form of acrolectal Nigerian English.  Much like African Esu-Elegbara, the trickster figure written of by Henry Louis Gates[1][4] and others, Jero’s utterances are always doubled, forked, imbued with additional meanings; in this way Soyinka’s fiction may be read in a deconstructionist light, a critical approach that has been applied to other Nigerian literatures written in English. 

     Chume, Jero’s hapless assistant in the play, in contrast to Jero, speaks a mix of NSE and NPE.  Soyinka marks the contrast between Jero’s and Chume’s linguistic statuses in a scene of pointed code-switching between the two in Act 3, where Jero’s acrolectal “Apostate. Have I not told you the will of god” is contrasted with Chumes’ basilectal ” “I n’go beat am too hard.  Jus’ once small small”.  James OMole, in his discussion of Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters (1965), observes regarding Soyinka’s characters who approximate acrolectal pronunciation: “if performance in a second language is as perfect as or very close to that of […] native speakers of that second language, such a person becomes culturally suspicious in his society. In this vein, Jero, an expert at approximating acrolectal linguistic codes, can perhaps read as Soyinka’s satirical response to the palpable relationship between prestigious language acquisition and class aspiration in modern Nigeria.  As such, despite the earlier chastisement of Soyinka by critics such as Wali, Soyinka’s actual deployment of language is rather complex.  While Standard English is his primary medium, Soyinka simultaneously undermines the assumed coherence of this language through its deployment. Soyinka and Achebe represent a small, but fairly representative, example of critical approaches to Nigerian fiction.  In recent years Nigerian criticism has increasingly enmeshed the deployment of English in a text with an assumed political mandate of the work or the author.  From these critical approaches, larger issues of translatability arise: that is, how do Nigerian and other African writers approach the problem of how to convey idiom, folklore, and even the cadences of African languages into English prose?  Edmund Epstein’s volume, The Languages of African Literature (1998), is one of many works that continues to examine the significance of English morphology within African literature.  Herbert Igboanusi’s article, “Varieties of Nigerian English:  Igbo English in Nigerian Literature,” also examines the ways in which what he calls “Igbo” English—English influenced by Igbo patterns of speech—affect the Nigerian writer’s “environment,” “source of creativity,” “speech habits,” and, “linguistic processes of transfer and translation”.  Igboanusi, who states that Igbo English is deployed through the use of borrowings, coinages, loan-blends, translation equivalents, and semantic extension, states that while there may be semantical difficulty encountered by non-native readers of works written in Igbo English, this alienation is, to some degree, necessary, as it underscores the difficulties present in “cross cultural understanding”, and translation on the whole.  For Igboanusi, literature, such as that written in Igbo English, ultimately reflects its cultural site of production.  A good example of literature written in Nigerian English that still shows evidence of its cultural, and specifically Yoruban origins, is found in Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard.  As OMole notes, the phrase “whereabouts my palmwine tapster was,” is used in the novel instead of the expected “the whereabouts of my palmwine tapster” (qtd in OMole 387).  OMole cites this as an example of almost literal translation of Yoruba into English as the English, as

Wherabouts      my     palmwine tapster    was in Yoruba is

                                       Ibiti                    Mi         elemu                wa.

 The result of this transliteration is both an example of what OMole dubs Nigerian “linguistic realism,” and a prose writing that is subtly alienating to the English reader without prior knowledge of Yoruba.  This example drawn from Tutuola’s prose neatly encapsulates Igboanusi’s critical view, in which cultural distinctiveness is presumed to characterize the language of most, if not all, Nigerian prose fiction to some degree.  Many recent critics have hailed this Africanizing of traditionally Standard English genres, such as the novel, as a productive and politicized act.

CHINUA ACHEBE-AN IMAGE OF AFRICA

A Nigerian-born professor tears apart Joseph Conrad's revered, classic novella and accuses Conrad of being a "'thoroughgoing racist."' It's pretty rare for an academic to make such a blunt, even offensive, statement about a VIA (very important author). If this were a boxing match, let's just say there'd be a lot of blood on the ground and it wouldn't be Achebe's. (Of course, Conrad's already long gone, so it's not exactly the fairest fight either.) If Conrad's use of Africa "'as setting and backdrop"' is part of what makes him a "'racist"' in Achebe's mind, then is it ever possible for a Western writer to create a story about a foreign land and have it not be racist?  Achebe does point out that since Conrad's story is pretty complex—with a story within a story and a narrator behind a narrator and all—that maybe people could view the "'racist"' attitudes as the character Marlow's view and not Conrad's. But Achebe's not totally buying that idea. Is he being too harsh on Conrad, especially since Conrad's book came out before the twentieth century (and all the PC movements that came with it) even began?

CHINUA ACHEBE-COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE

This excerpt is almost a summary of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Things Fall Apart is a novel about nineteenth century Nigeria, before colonialism and the granting of independence. It is a story of a great wrestler and elder of a Nigerian clan comprised of several villages. It tells about his life from start to finish in great detail. Towards the end of the novel, the reader is introduced to colonialism. 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
Things Fall Apart is a novel displaying the effects colonialism plays on a region. It was published and released at the time when Nigeria was acquiring their independence. It serves as a reminder to the people of Nigeria of their heritage and of what once was. It is an accurate display of how society deals with change; the affect change has on individuals, and the harm a resistance to inevitable change plays on a village. If only the falcon could have heard the falconer, maybe things would not have fallen apart. absent from his village, resulting in a return to a place he barely knew.

CHINUA ACHEBE-THE NOVELIST AS A TEACHER

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was published in England in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence. The price of the book was fifteen shillings, which placed it out of reach for the average Nigerian whose annual income in those days did not exceed seventy-five dollars. Achebe's novel, however, had been written not for a Nigerian reading audience nor even for an African reading audience, but, to a large extent, for readers outside of Africa. However, in 1960, when Nigeria became independent, the educational system began to reflect a sense of growing national pride; and in 1964,… Things Fall Apart became the first novel by an African writer to be included in the required syllabus for African secondary school students throughout the English-speaking portions of the continent. By 1965, Achebe was able to proclaim that his novel in a paper-backed reprint edition priced at a more moderate five shillings had the year before sold some 20,000 copies within Nigeria alone.  In the seven years during which this spectacular change had taken place, Chinua Achebe became recognized as the most original African novelist writing in English. He wrote and published three additional novels (No Longer at Ease, 1960; Arrow of God, 1964; and A Man of the People, 1966), and he became one of the first African writers to build up a reading audience among his fellow Africans. So famous and popular did he become within his own country, that by the time Achebe published his fourth novel it could no longer be said that he was writing for a non-African audience. Things Fall Apart during this time became recognized by African and non-African literary critics as the first "classic" in English from tropical Africa. So far did Achebe's influence extend that by the late 1960's his impact on a whole group of younger African novelists could also be demonstrated.

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.

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.  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 piling up of ethnological background, I suggest, is often the equivalent of atmospheric conditioning in Western fiction. Achebe's anthropological passages are what Hardy's descriptive passages are for him—equivalent to Hardy's evocation of atmosphere and mood. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to find a passage of pure description of a natural setting anywhere in Anglophone African writing of the first generation. There is very little that can be related to "landscape painting" in English fiction except for the anthropological.

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.

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.

Achebe has increased the importance of dialogue in [Arrow of God]—especially dialogue which makes use of materials drawn from traditional oral literature such as the proverb. Hardly a page of his story passes without the presence of a proverb or two; sometimes there will be as many as half-a-dozen, piled one upon another…. The use of these oral examples is a primary means of characterization, and it is the adults in Achebe's novel who make the greatest use of these materials—giving the impression of great wisdom. The majority of the proverbs in Arrow of God are spoken as dialogue rather than as a part of authorial commentary. The unique aspect of Achebe's characterization, then, is his use of oral literary materials—far more frequently than almost all other African writers.

Achebe's European characters in Arrow of God are generally a little less convincing than they could be, for, in truth, they are examined only from the outside, are stereotyped and one-dimensional, efficient little machines meant to do a job in the British Foreign Service, and, necessarily, I suppose, are in too many ways typical of the men who were in the colonial service. 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 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.

In Things Fall Apart (as in Arrow of God) frequent reference is made to the effeminacy of the younger generation. The passing of strength and courage is associated with, if not attributed to, Christianity, since, as preached in the colonies, it stressed meekness and the seeking of justice in a time other than the present and in a place other than this world: "To abandon the gods of one's father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination"…. Christianity was also a divisive force, breaking up the unity of the clan, and making military and political conquest easier…. Obiajulu in No Longer at Ease sees death as release rather than tragedy. Conrad's Kurtz succumbs to the heart of darkness; ironically, Obi succumbs to "the incipient dawn"…. It is post-independence, deep disillusionment: the old home being broken was abandoned, and the new is but a mockery of hopes and expectations. The tragedy seems not only of individuals or of a particular society caught up in historic events, but of universal and permanent significance.

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