Babble Book Club: 'Things Fall Apart' by Chinua Achebe

atchfire wrote:

Many thanks to Kaitlin for choosing this book and to Left Turn for suggesting it!

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my friend Cara Ng, who posted an article on Facebook that advocated taking the occasion of Achebe's death to read his books. That's where I got the idea.

I predict: Caissa will read this one in a single night. I'm having trouble resisting myself -- I want to prolong the experience but it reads so quickly.

I am loving Achebe's economical style -- the way he delivers such emotionally intense moments quickly and simply is devastating. Has anyone else started?

Read it over the weekend.

An excellent example of modern day tragic hero replete with oracle and tragic flaw.

Kaitlin McNabb: Do you know if Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature was originally published in English, and if so is there an explanation for that?

I do not know, but suspect that it was originally (possibly only) published in English. The logic - I will hazard a guess - was that that text is itself an academic work, - not a 'work of literature', per se. Core to Ngugi's critique, as I recall, was the fact that contemporary African story tellers (ie authors such as Achebe) were betraying the continent's tradition of oral history by telling African stories in a medium that was only accessible to middle-class, urban Africans (at best) and colonialist audiences (at worst). 

Kaitlin McNabb: Also, there is an argument, which I will paraphrase here, that observing and reporting/ acknowleding an oppressive situation is in itself an act revolution and resistance, especially to write about it. It seems that can be the stepping stone to what Ngugi mentions of more radical policy and activism. There probably can't be the latter without the former?

Absolutely. This is all a bit foggy in my memory, but I seem to recall that at the time the Achebe-Ngugi debate seemed very inter-generational in nature. "Things Fall Apart" is more fatalistic than revolutionary, - but as you suggest, at least it provides some insight into colonialism as viewed  through African eyes, framed by African cultural understandings. No doubt this was revolutionary for the times (late '50s) but it certainly does not have the themes of resistance and rebellion that Ngugi subsequently addressed in the '60s and '70s. But time and Africa had moved on in the meantime, and of course the Kenyan (Kikuyu) experience of colonialism (and independence) was quite different from the Nigerian (Ibo) experience. 

One other note: back in the 80s, I also read Ousmane Sembène's novel Gods Bits of Wood - which was written in 1960 and is (to my mind) a much more sophisticated and powerful work of working class / anti-colonial literature than anything Achebe ever produced.  (Its about a workers strike on the Dakar - Niger railroad and is very much in the style of Zola and Steinbeck.)  But it seems to have taken some years before anything similar would be produced in anglophone Africa. 

Kaitlin McNabb wrote:

I know we have discussed Nabakov and his decision to write in English, specifically Lolita, and I think Joseph Conrad entered that equation as well, when talking about the decision to write in English versus a 'first language'.

You could add British or American ex-pats who attempt to write in vernacular tongues too. I'm thinking of Raymond Chandler who was a Bristish Schoolboy who ended up coining the vocabulary of LA hardboiled fiction that many readers took as local patois. Not so. He once read with coy interest in a review of The Big Sleep that the title came from a long-used underground American euphemism. He made it up, of course.

But back to Achebe. I'd definitely like to talk about Yeats's (very famous) poem, but I might go off. Like, more than usual. Normally I have a class of eager young undergrads who have no choice but babblers are a steelier bunch.

I'll stick to what I like most about Achebe: his lyrical, though simple and economic prose that weaves myth and story together in an enchanting series of cycles -- and then devastates you with a quick and terse description of indescribable violence, immediately undoing the trance you find yourself in. Wicked. Deadly.

Isn't it often the case that authors who are able to do so will write in English (or French or Spanish) rather than in their native Albanian or Polish or Gujarati or Igbo etc. in order to reach a lot more people with enough money to buy books?

I have no scientific evidence to adduce in that regard - just thought it was kind of obvious - but I stand to be corrected.

Chinua Achebe: "English and the African Writer" Transition 18 (1965) [JSTOR]

One final point remains for me to make. The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether they ought to. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.

 But, for me, there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it. I hope, though, that there always will be men, like the late Chief Fagunwa, who will choose to write in their native tongue and ensure that our ethnic literature will flourish side by side with the national ones. For those of us who opt for English, there is much work ahead and much ex­citement.

Writing in the London Observer recently, James Baldwin said:

Quote:

My quarrel with the English language has been that the lan­guage reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter another way.... Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.

I recognize, of course, that Baldwin's problem is not exactly mine, but I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but al­tered to suit its new African surroundings.

Caissa wrote:

Ah, what is truth?

Beauty.

Quote:

When push comes to shove, if an author doesn't have an audience, the message is irrelevant.

And when the author doesn't have a message, the audience is irreverent.

Caissa wrote:

Well, I thought the novel was beautiful in its simplicity and the author clearly had a message.

Whoops - I made a dumb attempt at a joke - no intent at all to criticize the book, which I just started reading!

Kaitlin McNabb wrote:

I like sherpa_finn's idea of discussing the affect of that poem on the themes of this book.

Here's what sticks out for me: Yeats's poem is often read as the emblematic response to modernity, specifically its tendency to atomize, Taylorize, isolate and break down every aspect of society. Modernity in this context is often read as the legacy of the enlightenment, or, our "emancipation from self-imposed tutelage," i.e. of religion and sovereign power. But what we found when we move the "centre" of our worldview from God to "man" (sic) (Think Descartes, "I think therefore I am") was that it doesn't work as an organizing mechanism: it can't hold. Moreover, the more we break down aspects of society to understand them, the more it actually takes those aspects out of our ability to understand them: instead of priests telling us what to think, we have microbiologists--and our relationship to them is effectively the same. Just like with God, we just don't have the maths to understand our world.

Yeats is also a postcolonial (Irish) coming from a very strong mythical tradition (Catholcism) that we know, and Yeats knew, was dangerous and poisonous to human growth. But what's our alternative? It's meant to deliver us from psychological slavery but we just witnessed the worst human disaster in history: the Great War (the poem is from 1919). The moderns were extremely worried that they had abandoned a terrible model for looking at the world in favour of something much, much worse (think also Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant."). Yeats actually embraced occultism and automatic writing through his young, young wife (whom he thought was a medium) shortly after this poem was published.

So Achebe here is doing many things: he is situating his (English) novel in the literary canon; he's indexing his place as an explicitly postcolonial writer, aligning himself with Yeats; he's placing his novel in the context of the European Enlightenment, as the myths of African civilizations become unwound to find nothing underneath, and the alternatives much more fearsome; and finally, the book, in its style of storytelling and weaving of alternative myths and narrative methods, also reads as a critique of the Anglo-American Enlightenment-->modernism continuum and thus the novel itself "breaks apart" the hegemonic way English speakers understand their relationship to the colonized. He's a clever chap, this Achebe.

Re the Yeats poem .... we obviously have some literary masters in the room with multiple layers of understanding and analysis. In such company, I am paddling well out of my depth.

My somewhat less nuanced 'layperson's' reading of the poem is as follows: Shit happens ..... things fall apart ... people want to believe that a better world lies ahead after all the change and turmoil .... surprise, surprise, more shit happens.

Applied to Ireland in 1919: just wondering, - is it really about looking back at WW1 or forward, to the uncertainties of Irish independence?

And to Nigeria in 1958: is it really all about looking back at colonialism, or forward towards the uncertainties of Nigerian independence?

Bottom-line: to my reading, there seems to be an ominous, almost reactionary sub-text to the poem.  While not a great believer in identity politics, I think I am correct in saying that both Yeats (an Anglo-Irish Protestant) and Achebe (a member of the Ibo minority about to be 'ethnically cleansed ' in the Biafran War) were both members of minorities that had to some degree been 'protected' if not favoured under colonial rule.