"There is that great proverb -- that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter..."

"Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian," he said.

"It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail -- the bravery, even, of the lions."

Chinua Achebe has died at 82.

It's hard to overstate what Achebe meant to the literature of the world and of Africa in particular, I think.  For much of the Western world, Achebe basically was African literature.  In that way, I think his influence and his importance outstrip the quality of his books.  If that sounds backhanded, I don't mean it that way--Things Fall Apart is a good novel, but its legacy will always be greater than its literary value.  Very few authors did more to share the "bravery... of the lions" of the world.  RIP.

Achebe on 50BP:

Things Fall Apart (Brooke)

Things Fall Apart (Christopher)

No Longer At Ease (Christopher)

No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe

Once before he went to England, Obi heard his father talk with deep feeling about the mystery of the written word to an illiterate kinsman:

"Our women made black patterns on their bodies with the juice of the uli tree.  It was beautiful, but it soon faded.  If it lasted two market weeks it lasted a long time.  But sometimes our elders spoke about uli that never faded, although no one had ever seen it.  We see it today in the writing of the white man.  If you go to the native court and look at the books which clerks wrote twenty years ago or more, they are still as they wrote them.  They do not say one thing today and another tomorrow, or one thing this year and another next year.  Okoye in the book today cannot become Okonkwo tomorrow.  In the Bible Pilate said: 'What is written is written.'  It is uli that never fades.

The passage above, from Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease, struck me immediately as a kind of self-justification.  Achebe's decision to write in English has opened him up to criticism from other African authors, like Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but writing a novel--and perhaps, this passage suggests, even writing in general--is a practice imported from European colonizers, no matter what language the novel is written in.  To write an African novel in English is to navigate the competing demands of two conflicting cultures, and to admit that banishing one in favor of the other is impossible.

Like Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease is a story of an African who tries and fails to navigate those demands.  In the former it was Okonkwo, the Ibo villager whose fierce pride cannot overcome the advent of white missionaries; here it is Okonkwo's grandson, Obi Okonkwo, who returns from being educated in England to take a civil service position in his native Nigeria.  The demands on Obi are largely financial: he has been educated at the expense of his tribe, who expect him to pay back the money they have spent on him, but also to show the generosity of a privileged son.  His peers expect him to maintain a certain lifestyle as well, as if this were an Edith Wharton novel.  Because the novel opens as Obi is on trial for accepting a bribe, we know how this particular aspect of the tragedy plays out.

But the Western and traditional worlds pull at Obi in other ways: He has fallen in love with an Ibo girl named Clara, whom he cannot marry because she is an osu, a member of the Ibo's "untouchable" cast.  He rails indignantly against this tradition, but even his father Isaac--Things Fall Apart's Nwoye, who rebels against Okonkwo by converting to Christianity--insists that it is a tradition that cannot be dismissed.  The syncretism of Christianity and traditional Ibo religion is one of the book's more interesting aspects:

Everybody stood up and he said a short prayer.  Then he presented three kola nuts to the meeting.  The oldest man present broke one of them, saying another kind of prayer while he did it.  "He that brings kola nuts brings life," he said.  "We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck."  The congregation answered Amen.  "We are strangers in this land.  If good comes to it may we have our share."  Amen.  "But if bad comes let it go to the owners of the land who know what gods should be appeased."  Amen.

This kola nut ritual appears unchanged from Things Fall Apart, except it is now punctuated by "Amen."  The word sits uncomfortably amid the traditional prayer, and there is a tragic uncertainty in that last line, which suggests that those caught between multiple cultures and religions are less able to make sense of misfortunes when they occur.  Like the title, pulled from an Eliot poem (as Things Fall Apart is from Yeats), these are people "no longer at ease" in their own country.

I read No Longer At Ease because I wanted to read something else about sub-Saharan Africa after Henderson the Rain King, which as I wrote in my review, is really terrific but not intended to be a realistic picture of Africa.  Achebe's warts-and-all approach is just the opposite, but ultimately I thought the book was too slight to be effective.  The character of Clara in particular is so underwritten that Obi's devotion to her never lands, which complicates our perspective on the tragedy as a whole.  Do you guys have any "Africa" books you've enjoyed?

Other perspectives:

The Brothers Judd
Friends of African Village Libraries
Geosi Reads

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms...

I do not wish to dwell too long on the question of whether Heart of Darkness is a racist text. It is. Chinua Achebe is not right about everything, but the thrust of his argument I consider unassailable. Most critiques to Achebe amount to an insistence that it is Europe that is really being implicated in Conrad's novel, but saying that Europe is as bad as Africa is not exactly charitable to Africa. That is to say that intent is irrelevant--no matter what conclusions we are meant to draw, we are working from a particularly vile set of first principles that takes the horrific inscrutability of Africa and its people to be self-evident.

The question I find to be more interesting is what comparison is being made. The structure of Heart of Darkness is essentially metaphorical, but what is the object of that metaphor? In technical terms, Heart of Darkness provides us with a vehicle--Marlow's journey into the Congolese interior to retrieve the wayward station manager, Kurtz--but the tenor is somewhat less obvious. We would know instantly, if we could only see the images that visit Kurtz in his death-fever:

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath--

'"The horror! The horror!"

The interpretation I recall from reading it in high school was that the novel is really about the rapine colonization of Africa by European powers. Europe, this view suggests, is as rotten and repellent as Africa at its core. And that would indeed provide a neat comparison between the Congo River and the Thames, on which Marlow tells his tale to the unnamed narrator. But this interpretation seems woefully incomplete. Can it be that Kurtz, who even on his sickbed protects jealously his stockpile of ivory, has had such a change of heart?

A better answer, I think, is that the journey being traced is psychological. Examine this passage:

[Kurtz] had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policemen, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages of a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness.

Kurtz is a sort of ubermensch--a man whose capabilities exceed ours. He is rumored to be impassably intelligent and eloquent; his will overpowers. We are told that he outstrips his peers at the extraction of ivory by an absurd degree through these gifts; white men and natives alike are in thrall to him. Marlow sees him, mouth open, as having a "weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him." If anyone has the "innate strength" to bend the African landscape to his will, it is Kurtz, and to some extent he does. And yet, when Marlow retrieves him from his outpost station, he finds him enfeebled and terrified on the fringes of some phantasmagorical night-ceremony.

The utter silence of this land reduces a man to his barest self, Marlow tells us. Robbed of civilized company, Kurtz approaches himself, and discovers his own interiority. Despite his supernal qualities--or perhaps because of them, exacerbated by them--Kurtz is horrified by the journey he must make into his own psyche, his most primeval and basic elements: his "reptile" brain.

Less often quoted are the words that precede Kurtz's last:

It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?

Kurtz, it seems to Marlow, dies in the act of self-examination.

You might notice a certain circuitousness to it: The jungle, through its isolation, drives Kurtz's horror of the self, but it is also symbolic of it. The African tribesmen--conspicuously denied their own interiority--are both causes and expressions of this agony. The line between the self and the Other is constantly being blurred in Heart of Darkness, like some sort of photographic negative of Walt Whitman's democratic self. Or perhaps it is best expressed by Frost, talking about the same self-horror:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

As far as Conrad's Africa resembles an alien world, this Frost may have considered Heart of Darkness something of a facile enterprise.

Achebe would have us throw the whole thing on the scrap heap where we keep minstrel shows and our tapes of Amos 'n' Andy. But Heart of Darkness endures because it has complexities and subtleties that Achebe's work lacks, and a thin ripple of irony that allows us to put Conrad at some distance from his narrators--though Achebe has a tin ear for it. It deserves both the praise of critics and Achebe's scorn, and if we can't abide by that sort of contradiction we are poor readers indeed.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

--W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"


Things Fall Apart has been likened to a Greek tragedy. Its hero, Okonkwo, is an honorable man with a fatal flaw: a kind of hypermasculinity that feeds on anger and violence, seeing only weakness in others. Okonkwo lives in a time and place that match his character, an Ibo village in nineteenth-century Nigeria, but even in the midst of a clan that values tradition and war he is dangerously unbending. And as in all Greek tragedies, it is this flaw which proves his undoing, and smaller undoings along the way. Early in the book, when his adopted son Ikemefuna is put to death by the decree of the article, he refuses the advice of the village elders and helps to murder him, to show others--and himself--that he is not weak. When his pistol explodes at a funeral, killing a boy and sending Okonkwo into exile, it isn't his fault, but it is symbolic of the lightness of his own personal trigger--or perhaps is the result of his affront to gods regarding Ikemefuna's death. When white missionaries descend upon the Ibo, Okonkwo's righteous anger is aroused and his fate sealed.

And yet I am uncomfortable drawing too strong of a parallel between Okonkwo and Agamemnon or Oedipus because the Greek tragedy is a fundamentally Western tradition and Things Fall Apart is ultimately a rejection of Westernism. As the Ibo culture values community over the individual, so the real story in Things Fall Apart is the unraveling of a local culture, and the story of Okonkwo just one bead in a string. His story is tragic, but it is only the tragedy of his people
writ small, Okonkwo's flaw is the flaw which does in an entire society.

We see literature as an exercise in character, but is character as we know it a Western tool for reading Western literature that fails when it contacts non-Western literature? It seems to me that to some extent Achebe wants to have it both ways, but at the same time is telling us, "This is the best I can do; my mode of storytelling is corrupted in the way that this culture of mine has long been corrupted."

Like his novel, Achebe himself cannot be extracted from white influence; he grew up in a Protestant home and attended school in London. His decision to write in English has been controversial among African writers who wish to reject the forms imposed on them by colonization; so Things Fall Apart is by its nature a tacit admission of the grim success of European colonizers. It is easy to imagines those critics as Okonkwos, proud and resolute against invading forces, but ultimately the ones who pay the most for immutability.

While I found Things Fall Apart, as I did in high school, a little dull--as a stylist, Achebe rivals the greatest textbook writers--I also think that it is impossible to appreciate it without reflecting on what it represents merely by existing. When Okonkwo's tragic downfall is considered beside the contradiction that is the world's greatest English language African novel, then, and only then, can you recognize how powerful it is.