I state upfront that my original article was to be: “You ain’t literate if you haven’t read Things Fall Apart (TFA).” But upon reading “Achebe Versus Soyinka”, the submission of Sam Omatseye, my Editorial Board chairman, in his In Touch column in The Nation last Monday, I changed the focus of my write up and expanded the scope a little. Sam in his inimitable way re-stoked this long-running controversy about Chinua Achebe vs. Wole Soyinka; and what makes up art in literature. It is a continuation of some of our heated debates during meetings. As part of my vehement disagreement with Sam on his take on TFA, I thought of this new title. The trouble with TFA in my reckoning, is the trouble with Chinua Achebe; it is the trouble with Nigeria. I will return to it later.
TFA as pristine art
Sam asserts that Achebe “wrote good works, not great works, not textured by deeper insights you would see in better accomplished works”. He says further that “Achebe was a good storyteller (but) turning from a raconteur to an art of sublimity and depth belongs to the masters”. First, one would have expected to see a list of such exemplars of great works of sublime depths so we can compare with TFA but Sam did not give us such an opportunity. In my humble submission however, Achebe’s spare and simple style of narrative is deliberate and not to be mistaken for Wole Soyinka’s convoluted and multi-layered streaming. So it is first a question of style.
I believe that Achebe is capable of twisting his thoughts to the 10th degree if he wanted, the way Soyinka is wont and is naturally predisposed. It is genius no doubt but I find greater genius in deconstructing even genius so that mere mortals like us could feed from its morsels. Prof. Niyi Osundare says TFA, “ represents Achebe’s literary essence because of its delicate simplicity.” Gabriel Okara, another master of the art puts it this way: “I found it (TFA) interesting because here is a book written in a way I would have liked to write. I was happy that someone had done what I was trying to do in writing our African experience using the English man’s language to explain the African experience. And I appreciated the skills with which he did it.”
Elechi Amadi, another great man of letters and contemporary of Achebe’s puts it thus: “My impression of the book then (1958/59 when he first read it) was that I felt it was well written. The language was ‘rock-solid’. He handled the English language competently. In my opinion, compared to his other novels, Things Fall Apart is his best. It was the first novel written by a Nigerian or an African to attain world recognition…he galvanized us into action to write books of quality as he has done. Achebe was an inspiration.”
This is how Time magazine puts Achebe’s style in an obituary tribute in its current edition: “He liked writing in English.”I feel the English language will be able to carry my African Experience,” he declared in 1965. It would have to be a different English, though, “still in communion with his ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surrounding.” There it is: what Sam may have mis-read as a lack of depth or as pedestrian narrative was altered, contrived to suit; the way only a great mind would.
Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize and the Asiwaju controversy
I think Achebe was right to have asserted that Wole Soyinka is not the Asiwaju of African literature, Nobel prize or not. It is the way he said it that might have furrowed eyebrows. While only an illiterate would doubt WS’ genius, I think his forte is not literature. He is the quintessential human, the artful crusader for social justice and sanctity of the human man; a cultural icon. Soyinka represents the original man in his most pristine and divine state. With all sense of responsibility, I hold that Soyinka dabbled into literature as a platform to project his original essence.
Let us make a few conjectures: if WS didn’t write literature, he would have easily written anthropology, laws of social justice, governance with equal dexterity. Would he not have remained the universal icon he represents today? If he did not get the Nobel prize, his ultimate literary validation, would his literary works have amounted to much beyond serving as literary repast for gray-haired academics? For instance, while I read TFA in primary six, I could never grasp The Man Died in class five and I had to give away my copy of The Interpreters during Youth Service because I couldn’t break through it. One thinks that Soyinka effectively started his literary career with his autobiographical Ake, a story of his childhood days. Since then, he had dutifully ensured he brought his high genius down to the pedestal of mere earthlings.
On the other hand, without literature and the seminal TFA, what would Achebe be? Perhaps another renowned professor among a myriad, teaching contextual African literature and literary criticism across the world. But Achebe’s validation was in his world acclaimed literary prowess. Not getting the Nobel did not diminish him one bit. How many other writers of literature have a singular book which has sold 12 million copies worldwide; a book never out of print and is read in every corner of the globe? It has also been translated into about 50 languages and has been adapted into different forms including business books.
I wager that the Nobel clan will forever live with the burden of ignoring Achebe and TFA. I have a feeling that as the friendly fire of TFA continues to rage and ‘consume’ the world for a long time yet, I see the Nobel people shamefacedly admitting their error and reconsidering their policy on post-humus awards. TFA would elevate the Nobel.
Again, what is art?
Art, in my view, has been what the critics and superior culture determine it to be. Thus Mozart’s work is high art. So is Shubert’s and Beethoven’s? That is what they have trained our minds to accept. Is Osita Osadebey’s work art? What about Sunny Ade and Fela‘s? But if you ask me, beside Achebe and his TFA, the only other cultural and artistic export out of Nigeria and the Black world is Fela and his body of works. In other word, for me, art must have universal appeal for it to be so-called. And before I am accused of mixing pop culture with art, I note that even pop culture could grow to be art. Example: William Shakespeare’s work was pop culture in his days and the likes of Samuel Johnson derided him as a hacker. Today, Shakespeare is the touchstone of literature in English.
Trouble with TFA
The trouble with TFA, I dare say, is the trouble with Nigeria. Let us do further conjecturing: what might have been if Wole Soyinka was Chinua Achebe and vice-versa? My guess is that the armada of the boisterous and very active (God bless their souls) Yoruba intelligentsia would have hoisted TFA on their wings of glory and (mark my word), staged it on every street corners of the world. It would have been the recommended standard text of the Yoruba, nay Blackman’s worldview; his history, sociology, anthropology, etc. No grudges there though because enlightened self-interest is the first wisdom.
The trouble with TFA is the trouble with Nigeria. TFA is the hard copy, the crystallization of the ethnic rivalry between three major nations yoked together under one flag. The trouble with Nigeria is that three peoples; Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, three great nations are strapped together as one. Their very existence is a pervasive mind-game, a rivalry that will either make or mar them. Imagine England, France and Syria under one flag as a nation! That is Nigeria, a salad of a nation that gets increasing sour and unsavoury by the day.
But egbe bere, ugo bere, nke si ibeya eberele, nku kwa ya. That remains the Igbo dictum. Let the hawk perch, let the eagle perch (on the iroko), he that seeks to upstage the other, let his wings dislocate. Adieu Chinualumogu, the great ugo flies into the horizon…
