BEATING THE WHITE MAN AT HIS OWN GAME: THE
GENIUS OF ACHEBE.
If Chinua
Achebe had been living in Dickens’ time, he might have succeeded in selling
“Things Fall Apart” as a serial the way the great English novelist had done,
keeping a growing audience hanging on each last word, savouring it until the
next episode appeared. Because the story-telling in every chapter is so highly
skilled that it is complete in itself.
The world
mourns the passing of a great writer though he had lived more than his biblical
four-score and ten and his best work was well behind him. Africa was his life,
his being, the subject of his writing, the object of his fascination. Not just
Nigeria but Africa because he came of age at a time when there were men with
Pan-African visions like Nyerere, Nkrumah, Senghor, Kaunda and Mandela. They
knew that the boundaries drawn on the map did not represent their reality.
Without denying their own place and time, they had a sense of what linked them
historically and geographically. Like Ngugi wa Thiongo Achebe was forced to
live outside his beloved home country but anyway, the writer needs distance. He
can see things up close all right but it is those things that are further away
in space and time that exile gives him in abundance along with melancholy,
nostalgia and long-term memory.
Some have
criticised Achebe for romanticising pre-colonial times but this is a
misunderstanding. If there is nostalgia it is for a time when the society he
knew proceeded according to agreed sets of rules rather than the free-for-all
we know now. Personal preferences didn’t count. The book’s hero Okonkwo is
specially fond of his daughter Ezinma who “looked very much like her mother who
was once the village beauty. But his fondness showed on very rare occasions.”
Can she
bring him a chair to watch the wrestling? “No, that is a boy’s job.” There is
no bending of the rules. Everyone knows that.
Writers of
all races have been forced or have chosen to live elsewhere. Samuel Beckett not
only chose Paris but decided to write in French in order to deliberately “impoverish”
himself – not a negative concept but a way of stripping language to its barest
bones. But Africans were not best known for their novels. The world knew them
as oral storytellers. If there were Shakespeares buried in Timbuktu’s sands we
didn’t know about them. What Achebe did was to lift that art into a written
form and beat the white man at his own game. Soon there would come a time when
the best writing in English no longer came from “that sceptred isle” and Achebe was one of the first in that class.
We still have
so much to learn from him, most of all, in my view, from Things Fall Apart.
Ngugi may have berated him long ago for writing in the language of the
oppressor but by now there are so many “Englishes” that the criticism no longer
holds water. Achebe turned the
oppressor’s language into his own; he moulded it in such a way that it could
speak with Igbo proverbial overtones and at the same time mock the colonialist. Take the last chapter: Okonkwo has on the
spur of the moment killed an enemy messenger. Achebe doesn’t judge him; the man
was filled with rage and had been provoked beyond endurance. It’s what he had
to do at that moment. He has, like Oedipus and Agamemnon before him, shown
hubris and the author knows his Greek tragedies. Fate has its own punishment. The
next chapter begins with a visit from the District Commissioner who is looking
for Okwonkwo. The men of the village are uncharacteristically helpful.
“We can
take you where he is and perhaps your men will help us.”
The DC is
puzzled.
“One of the
most infuriating habits of these people was their love of superfluous words, he
thought.”
Of course
this is deeply ironic; Achebe knows that the art of the novel lies in multiple ironies:
from the individual sentence to the chapter to the entire edifice. It is the colonialist
whose words are superfluous. As he approaches the small crowd of weary men
looking for Okonkwo it is he who utters needless threats. “Unless they produced
Okonkwo forthwith he would lock them all up.” Had he been able to read the
scene and the mood he would have kept quiet.
Led by the
hand we arrive with the band at Okonkwo’s body hanging from a tree. (Remember
that we don’t see Oedipus gouging out his eyes at the discovery that the oracle
was right.) This is why the men have been so obliging: their custom doesn’t
allow them to bury a man who has taken 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. That is why we ask
your people to bring him down, because you are strangers.”
Strangers
to each other and themselves. The poor DC can’t cope: nothing in his education
has prepared him for such a moment. His way out is to reassure himself that
this is a mere “undignified detail” and his mind escapes to the book he will write about these
wretched people. Unlike Okonkwo’s lifelong friend Obierika who is filled with
rage, he feels nothing. He can only come up with abstract thoughts. This
episode in the life of a micro- civilisation “would make interesting reading.
One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but
a reasonable paragraph at any rate.” It is a magnificent irony given that the
entire trilogy let alone this book centres on Okonkwo! One can almost hear the
author chuckling quietly to himself. “One must be firm in cutting out details.”
A man who cannot feel can never produce a work of art. “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of
the Lower Niger” – the DC’s pompous title - form the last words of the book. There is no
need to say who is primitive.
Achebe was
equally adept at essay writing, adopting an easy conversational style which
took the reader into his confidence. His breadth of reading is formidable but
he never loses a sense of humility. In “Thoughts on the African Novel” (Hopes
and Impediments - Selected Essays 1965-87) he writes:
“What I am
saying really boils down to a simple plea for the African novel. Don’t fence me
in.”
Rejecting
the idea that the African novel is an impossibility because the genre was born
in England he continues:
“I have no
doubt at all about the existence of the African novel. This form of fiction has
seized the imagination of many African writers and they will use it according
to their different abilities, sensibilities and visions without seeking
anyone’s permission. I believe it will grow and prosper. I believe it has a
great future.”
His own
work is the proof of that.
