Name: Vishva Gajjar
Roll no.: 31
Paper: The African Literature
Submit to: English Department (MKBU)
Remembering Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe was born in
Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the
first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate
of University College, Ibadan.
Chinua Achebe wrote more than 20 books - novels, short stories, essays
and collections of poetry - including Things Fall Apart (1958),
which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into
more than 50 languages; Arrow of God (1964); Beware,
Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971), winner of the Commonwealth
Poetry Prize; Anthills of the Savannah (1987), which was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; Hopes and Impediments:
Selected Essays (1988); and Home and Exile (2000).
Chinua Achebe received
numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honorary doctorates from more
than 30 colleges and universities. He was also the recipient of Nigeria's
highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award.
In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize. He died on 22nd March
2013.
Achebe
is not just a hero in his native land, that is, Nigeria, not just well-known
throughout the world as a major writer of political, social and historical
conscience but he is one among those few writers who reach out far beyond the
imaginable and attempts to address life at its widest and of course, best
possible manner. All his works, be it, his novels, his essays, his stories and
poems, the same holds good. It is Achebe's profound thinking on the role of the
writer in Africa that earned him the titles of 'the founding father of modern
African literature' and 'the progenitor of the modern African novel.'
The
humaneness of Achebe is revealed when he admits that his beginnings are clearly
influenced by religion. In fact, his whole artistic career is probably sparked
off by this tension between the Christian religion of his parents, which they
followed in their home, and the retreating, older religion of his ancestors. It
seems he is still in a state of uncertainty, as we hear him saying that he is
not worried anymore and that he is not looking for the answers, because he
believes that it is never known. He firmly believes that what one has to do is
to make one's passage through life as meaningful and as useful as possible, and
one's contribution to the creation of the world is much more important.
A
keen observer of history Achebe does not think that there is any time in our
history when things were perfect. He does not expect such times in the future
either. But he thinks every generation has to examine what needs to be done,
what belongs to its peace and proceed. And so what needs to be done will change
with time depending on the conditions, whatever the conditions happen to be.
And they will not be the same for generation after generation. Every generation
must find its mission and fulfill it. So it is not something that one can write
up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to
discover what it needs to do.
In
his essay "The Truth of Fiction", Achebe draws our attention to the
difference between fiction and what he names beneficent fiction. In doing so,
it seems he equalizes fiction with superstition and keeps for literary fiction
the term beneficent. According to him, the notion of beneficent fiction is
simply one of defining storytelling as a creative component of human
experience, human life, as something we have always done which has positive
purpose and use. Achebe feels that the story of the world is complex and one
should not try to put everything into one neat definition or into a box. As
such he attempts to include as much as possible in his work and declares that
his purpose is not to exclude.
Much
has been written about his “Things Fall Apart”. In one of his interviews Achebe
narrates how it came to write the novel, how he had studied the books that were
part of his education, he had encountered many stories told about himself by
Europeans. At first he did not realize that these rather unpleasant characters
he was reading about were supposed to be him. And as he grew older and becoming
more aware, he began to see the vision that was being projected into the world,
by some of these stories about the civilized world and about the savage, about
the white man and others. He then began to realize that the world was not as
straightforward as he had assumed as a child. When he became aware that the
stories had been used to set one people against another, and that the depiction
of himself and his color and his people and his race has been less than just,
he then realized that he had a task. Not necessarily to confront other people,
but to save hin1self because he was aware that there was a story, that there
was another story about him this was not being told. And so all he was doing
really was to bring that other story that was not being told, bring it into
being, put it among the stories and let it interact. That's it, nothing more.
The rest is history. It is considered that Achebe's novel is the benchmark.
Everybody who wants to know anything about African literature has to read it.
But Achebe has his feet firmly on ground as he says that he is proud that it is
his book that did that. But he would not feel that no other book will come and
replace it.
Achebe
admits that the huge reception of the novel astonished him. It was not actually
clear to him at that time what he was doing. He was simply putting down his
story. He realizes that it is not just colonized people whose stories have been
suppressed or unheard, but a whole range of people across the globe who has not
spoken. It is not because they do not have something to say, it simply has to
do with the division of power, because storytelling has to do with power. Those
who win tell the story; those who are defeated are not heard. But it needs to
change. It is in the interest of all, even the winners, to know that there is
another story. If we know only one side of the story, we have no understanding
at all.
Achebe
thinks not just Nigeria but the whole of Africa and for that matter the whole
of the world has to turn back to the rural areas and that is where the majority
of the citizens are and that is where the engine of development has to be
found. Also because it is right and just. Development resources and energy
should be directed where the people live. He comes close to Mahatma Gandhi in
this regard.
Speaking
on the role of women Achebe feels women are extremely important in our culture,
whenever things really got out of control, when things are damaged beyond
repair, the culture seems to call on the women to move in and repair the
damage. Historically, this has had happened a number of times in African history.
Women come in when things seem to be completely hopeless. Somehow in our idea
of creation, women are very close to the creator. It is very important to them
that our world continues. And so they have this last resort responsibility. It
may well be that today; we do not want women to be in the background until things
get out of control. It may well be that they should be in the action all the
time so that things do not get out of control.
In his work Home and Exile Achebe
dreams of the idea of universal civilization. He says that what the universal
civilization he dreams about will be, he really does not know, but he knows for
sure what it is not. It is not what is being presented today, which is clearly
just European and American. A universal civilization is something that we will
create. If we accept the thesis that it is desirable to do, then we will go and
work on it and talk about it. And when it appears, he thinks we will know,
because it will be different from anything we have as of now.
Perhaps the following lines culminate the
philosophy of Achebe: "Imaginative literature ... does not enslave; it
liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of orthodoxy or the
irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in
self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience." Achebe received
numerous awards and more than thirty honorary doctorates, but among the
tributes he may have valued most was Nelson Mandela's: "There was a writer
named Chinua Achebe", Mandela wrote, "in whose company the prison
walls fell down".
We are often disappointed expecting to
find simple answers in Achebe's work, it is so because he is a writer who
embraces honesty and ambiguity and who complicates every situation. It may be
worth mentioned here that one of the characters of his own novel says,
"Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches." In fact,
Achebe disturbs us like anything and perhaps it is his quality that makes him
unforgettable.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. "The Truth of Fiction."
n.d. squarespace.com. Web. 5 3 2020.
<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51734e04e4b08db710716119/t/53f0d531e4b086379f97bf79/1408292145745/The+Truth+of+Fiction+Achebe.pdf>.
—. Things Fall Apart. n.d. Web. 5 3 2020.
<http://online.fliphtml5.com/kdji/bjgk/#p=1>.
Franklin, Ruth. "After Empire Chinua Achebe and
the great African novel." 19 5 2008. newyorker.com. Web. 5 3 2020.
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/26/after-empire>.
Garner, Dwight. "Chinua Achebe's Encounters With
Many Heart of Darkness." 15 12 2009. nytimes.com. Web. 5 3 2020.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/books/16book.html>.
Guthrie, Abigail K. "Language and Identity in
Postcolonial African Literature: A Case Study of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall
Apart." 1 4 2011. core.ac.uk. Web. 5 3 2020.
<https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/58825051.pdf>.
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