Palm oil with which words are eaten: The unforgettable Chinua Achebe

by Subhankar Bhattacharya I first encountered Chinua Achebe, who died last week, as a literature undergrad at St. Stephen’s College. He was the first author we were introduced to, in a paper called Contemporary Literature. There were other African writers like Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa thiong’o represented on the course. We also read Ben Okri and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie on our own. But Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, his all-too-brief and controlled first novel, remains the one that made the strongest and most lasting impression. Reading it for the first time remains a vivid memory. The novel had been  published 50 years before, and the book was unlike any I had ever read, not merely because it dealt with a country and people I admittedly knew very little about, but also because it described them in a language that was at once resonant, lucid and accessible. It was liberating to be able to make complete sense of a text on my own, without resorting to supplementary aids and crutches. [caption id=“attachment_673816” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Chinua Achebe. AP.[/caption] Things Fall Apart (1958) is the first of Achebe’s African trilogy, followed by No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), the latter considered by many critics as his finest achievement. He followed it up with his 1966 novel A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah, in 1987, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize. But Achebe, though best known for the African trilogy, wrote more than novels. He produced shorter fiction, essays, poetry, and stories for children which retrace many of the broad themes found in his longer prose fiction for adults. He started publishing his poetry from the early 1970s and dedicated an anthology published later in the decade to his close friend Christopher Okigbo. In non-fiction, his most influential anthology is Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-1987, which includes his controversial attack on Joseph Conrad in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.  Achebe accused Conrad of being a “thoroughgoing racist” and for setting up Africa as a “foil to Europe” and as its antithesis. Achebe saw Conrad as choosing the role of “purveyor of comforting myths” and perpetuating damaging stereotypes about black people. In October last year, Penguin Books released what was to be his last book, on the Nigerian Civil War, called There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. Achebe had been a staunch supporter of the Republic of Biafra which had seceded from Nigeria in 1967, till the Republic’s military surrender in early 1970. His family had had close brushes with death during the war; his house had been bombed and his friend Christopher Okigbo died fighting in battle. What strikes one on reading his novels is how indebted Achebe was to the European masters of prose fiction he had read, while studying English literature at the University of Ibadan. Achebe’s narrative owes as much to folk tale as to a Western writer like Kipling whose Just So Stories often investigate the causes of animal appearance, which reappear in Achebe’s writing for children, like “How the Leopard got his Claws”. The Bible, the Hymn Book and the Book of Common Prayer were read to him as he was growing up, and their incantatory rhythms work their way into his style. Yet despite drawing from so many parallel literary registers, his novels succeed because they never lose that texture of authenticity where every minute incident rings true. His formal and structural debts are predominantly to the European novel but his achievement lies in moulding that form to suit his local canvas in an idiom resonant of folk tale, Igbo oral narrative and the native wisdom of proverbs. In simple and supple language he was able to indigenize English proverbs and adapt them to Igbo parlance. For example, we know of news spreading like wildfire. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe says Okonkwo’s fame “had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan”. Or in a statement that reveals as much about the Igbo way of life as it does about the way Achebe himself uses language in the novel, the narrator says “Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” The elisions and distortions in the representation of Africa that Achebe encountered in European novels prompted him to take up writing in the first place, and crucially informed his decision to write in English. He has spoken of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, John Buchan’s Prester John, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in particular. Yet Achebe’s output was not merely a redressal of the wrongs he encountered in the European literary representation of Africa. His writing is imbued with a distinct unique character. In his lifetime, Achebe remained the best-known African writer. Nadine Gordimer called him “the father of modern African literature.” But his fierce critique of Western imperialism and racism did not endear him to many critics and he was never awarded the Nobel Prize, which he richly deserved. Wole Soyinka who was awarded the Nobel in 1986, spoke reverentially of the “social vision” of a writer, his sense of responsibility to his community. In his persistent focusing on the dynamics of the colonial encounter that irreversibly changed his Igbo society, Achebe’s unflinching sense of moral responsibility to his people and social conscience is never in doubt. Nelson Mandela once called Achebe the writer is whose company the prison walls fell down. The man who brought down those walls for Mandela, also brought down the walls around Africa and introduced generations of readers around the world to his society “explored from the inside”, warts and all.