Category: Columnists

[Being a revised version of a tribute written for Transition Magazine, U.S.A.]

Chinua Achebe had more than the standard allotment of respect and fame for writers, including even those who in their lifetime achieve great acclaim. One of the most notable expressions of this respect bordering on adoration came from one who is himself a celebrity among celebrities, Nelson Mandela. In their long time in the prisons of the South African apartheid system, above all other writers it was Chinua Achebe’s works that sustained the spirit of Mandela and the other giants of the anti-apartheid struggle. “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell”: That is how Mandela described the liberation of psyche and spirit that he and his mates felt when they encountered Achebe’s brooding and deeply insightful novels on colonialism and its complex legacies for Africa, the West and the rest of the world.

I had not yet read of Mandela’s uncommon praise for Achebe’s writings when, as a member of a volunteer team of professors of Cornell University that taught in both medium and maximum security prisons in Elmira and Auburn in upstate New York, I taught Achebe and Frantz Fanon to some inmates of these prisons. A disproportionately large number of these prisoners were African American, and all were men. I think these factors account for the fact that more than all the other Cornell volunteers, the inmates felt a very special emotional bonding with me since I was the only African male in the group. But beyond this, Achebe, shall we say, provided the real fulcrum for that emotional bonding – Achebe in dialogue with Fanon. Fanon was not exactly a hard nut to crack for the prisoners, but the mix of flights of spellbinding psychoanalytic and philosophical musings with visionary and prophetic prose was a bit too abstruse for them.

With Achebe, things ware different. His stories, his prose style, and the depth of his wisdom made an apparently deep impact on the prisoners. With very little prompting from me, many of these prisoners – some of whom were lifers who were serving time for extremely violent crimes – used Achebe’s works to throw further light on my explications on the more schematic or programmatic aspects of Fanon’s theories of radical decolonisation. One surprising thing in this was the fact that the two Achebe novels that I taught the prison inmates, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, told harrowingly tragic stories of the failures of anti-colonial revolt, whereas Fanon’s books mapped difficult but ultimately victorious paths to decolonization. When I probed the sources of this deft move by the prisoners, they revealed their deep empathy with aspects of Achebe’s novels that I hadn’t at the time paid much attention to, aspects to which their own situation had apparently made them far more responsive. Chief among these was the startling fact that beneath and beyond the main plotlines of failed and tragically flawed nationalist revolt against colonialism, Achebe’s novels told scores of mini stories of ordinary men and women whose humanity, resilience, and self-empowerment were not crushed, could indeed not be crushed by the otherwise powerful and all-conquering forces of colonialism and imperialism. This experience, this revelation served as the catalyst for two of the most important among the half dozen essays and monographs I have published on Achebe: “For Chinua Achebe: the Resilience and Predicament of Obierika” and “An African Cultural Modernity: Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the Philosophy of Decolonisation.”

The passage from the heroic world of Mandela and his prison mates at Robben Island to the world of hardened criminals and other carceral subjects in America’s prison colonies is typical of the centrality of passages between incredibly diverse spheres of sociality and community that Achebe as writer and public intellectual traversed in his life and career. One of the most portentous of these passages is the journey in his works in fiction and non-fiction into virtually all the literary languages of the world. He got extensive commendations, inquiries and plain “thank you and thank you again” correspondence from men and women, old and young, the highly literate and the modestly schooled. And these came from all the continents, all the regions of the world, and all stations in life.

This liminality, these wondrous passages into nearly every corner of the world of letters on the planet pose tremendous interpretive challenges to us. Achebe is one of two or three of the most popular, most widely read contemporary authors and yet he is a writers’ writer, an author who was/is deeply respected by some of the most influential authors of the past half century like James Baldwin, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka. He is a towering pioneer figure in modern African literature but he is also in the front ranks of the rarefied canon of World Literature. He is a constant subject of discussion in the popular presses of Africa, Europe and America but he is also an endless source of debate and controversy among literary scholars all over the world.

As much as these passages are constitutive of Achebe’s fame and renown, they cannot be taken as self-evident or self-explanatory. Of course it is not the case that “explanations” that don’t explain much, that are in fact rather tautological have not been proffered as interpretive keys for unlocking the enigma of these exemplary, border crossing passages of Achebe across the typically fragmented publics of writing and cultural production in the African continent, its Diasporas and the world at large. For instance, here is one such “explanation”: Both the popular mind and the world of scholarly researchers and exegetes have focused almost exclusively on Things Fall Apart, ignoring other writings of the Nigerian author like the infinitely more complex Arrow of God and the fascinating and reflexive meta-narrative that is Anthills of the Savannah, thereby making the passage from the “high” to the “low” and back again to the “high” a fairly easy one to make. Here is another “explanation”: Things Fall Apart cemented Achebe’s celebrity status among both “naïve” readers and the professoriate of letters because it enabled legitimacy for African writing in the upper stratospheres of academia to be tokenised without compromising that legitimacy with racial and cultural condescension which, for a long time in literary history, had been a constant, almost inevitable precondition for granting legitimacy for any intellectual or cultural production from our continent.

These “explanations” are neither false nor redundant. But they are external to writing qua writing. In other words, they do not even remotely engage the fact that both the passionate enthusiasts and the sometimes equally passionate if more politely and discretely self-restraining opponents of Achebe as an author base themselves on his writing. And on this central issue of writing, and in particular on the nature and status of Achebe’s writing, we are caught between two fundamentally opposed notions or traditions of writing. Writing, the best writing, must draw attention to itself, to its forms and modes of self-constitution: this is the fundamental article of faith of modernists and postmodernists alike, even if both camps differ in big ways on the specific terms for self-display and self-reference in writing to be manifested. Conversely, writing must not unduly draw attention to itself; it must find a balance, an equipoise between what needs to be expressed and the formal and linguistic means for its expression. That is the classical and much older but still extant tradition of writing to which – so goes the determination of the arbiters of taste in the contemporary world of letters – Achebe putatively belonged. I would personally argue that Achebe actually made the passage to and from these two seemingly opposed traditions in several of his writings in both fiction and non-fiction. But that was not the judgment of the border guards of modernist and postmodernist literary culture and thought. This, it seems to me, lies at the root of why the so-called “highest” prize, the Nobel Literature award, was denied him.

In all, I personally met Achebe only a few times, on four, perhaps five occasions, only one of which was at his home at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka when he taught and lived there. But among contemporary authors, he was among the select few to whom I felt a great closeness because I found myself returning again and again in the last four decades to his works. He was a master storyteller who had the quite unique gift for folding countless stories of ordinary women and men into the big, “world-historical” currents and forces of modern culture and society. In certain key areas of artistic vision and humaneness, I think he quite easily surpassed nearly all the other great novelists on colonialism – Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and Ngugi. First of all, Achebe took the humanity of both coloniser and the colonised for granted; he neither deified nor demonised one or the other, coloniser and the colonised. By contrast, most of these other great novelists of colonialism could not, did not entirely escape this trap. Secondly, Achebe forcefully showed that both sides in the colonial divide were simultaneously subjects and objects of powerful forces whose outcomes they could neither control nor predict. And thirdly, Achebe had a deeply tragic sense of life and history that was however leavened by irony, wit, humor and a calm openness to the absurdities of existence. As perhaps the single most important historical force in the making and the unmaking of the modern world as a global community structured by and in inequality and interdependence, colonialism needed a master novelist and essayist whose works could resonate throughout the world in the West and the Non-West, among both the ex-colonisers and the ex-colonised. It was given to our own Chinua Achebe to be the novelist and essayist who rose to successfully engage that challenge.

With his recent death, another passage, perhaps the most significant of all, has taken place. I once joked that Achebe was second only to his own creation, Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, as the most famous Igbo person in the world. But that was about half a decade ago, long before Achebe’s demise. With the number and scale of the outpouring of the mix of grief and celebration from all parts of the world that followed the notice of his transition, Achebe, it now appears, is second only to Nelson Mandela as the most famous African in the world. I don’t think the near unanimous judgment that he has achieved immortality through his works is premature.

In due time, Achebe’s works will undergo passage into the regime of posthumous commentary and debate, free of both the positive and negative consequences of their imbrication in the towering presence and subjectivity of Achebe himself. I am thinking here in particular of his last published book, There Was A Country. The anger, the bitterness and the outrage caused in many quarters by some of the views and claims made in the book will stay with us for some time to come. But I personally see no portent at all in the fact that this last book was the most controversial among all of Achebe’s writings. His legacy is much vaster than the controversies engendered by that book, just as it is also absolutely unconstrained by the Nobel Prize that was not awarded to him. Speaking about the loss of another great Nigerian, Wole Soyinka once remarked that that personage will walk tall among the ancestors. With my unabashed rationalist and humanistic idealism, I read that benediction as meaning that the departed had entered the hallowed ranks of the true immortals of all ages. So let it be with Chinua Achebe.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu