Chielo Zona Eze, author of
The Trial of Robert Mugabe, blogs frequently on
African Literature News & Review ,and I follow his news updates on African literature. Brief postings that link you to the source. His latest post is on Chinua Achebe's rejection of the label "Father of African Literature", which has been reported on
the Guardian and is based on an interview done by the Brown University newspaper, the
Brown Daily Herald.
Eze's blog will lead to other news about African literature, interesting reviews on such books as
Harare North,
An Elegy for Easterly,
The Thing Around Your Neck, and many others. Although short, his entries show a devotion to African literature, sometimes pure excitement, as when the announcement was made about the Oprah selection of Uwem Akpan's short story collection. Eze's entry celebrated the moment as great for African writers, pointing out that some agents and editors there may realize that they can profit from African writing. And indeed, Say You're One of them has been featured on
The New York Times best seller list, a good indicator that the book is being bought. Eze's is a good blog to follow.
Now, let me blog a bit about
Chinua Achebe. I used to teach
Things Fall Apart (TFA) in San Francisco. I would ask my students to read
Heart of Darkness , and excerpts of books on Africa, first; then we would move on to TFA, but not before we studied W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming", where the phrase "things fall apart" was borrowed.
It was a composition class, so we could not do with much with the literature stuff, but
Things Fall Apart never failed to interest the non-major English students, despite the initial cultural distance. Positioning some aspects of Things Fall Apart as a response to Conrad was perfect for the students because they could see how literature was used to argue a point, and they had fun (in my faithful judgment) writing a comparative essay on the two authors' approaches. It was always nice talking about Achebe, sharing my childhood exprience reading it.
That's the thing with reading. Not only will you associate the book's setting with places you actually know, but you will also remember where you were when you first read the novel. When I first read William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury, I was at Machipisa in Highfield, Harare, waiting for an Emergency Taxi to Glen View. That was in January, 1988; then when I went back to the rural areas during the school break (I was in Form 5), I read parts of the book to my village friends who had asked me how A-Level was, and my answer was to share with them some Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and a little Shakespeare (
Measure for Measure, etc,) never mind that some had failed O-Level literature. I remember we were walking along the Gwavachemai Mountain ranges, headed for the small hill known for its sweet baobabs,but on the way we would stop and I would read, trying my best to explain the mysterious Benjie.
As for
Things Fall Apart, the setting of the novel was not too different from Mazvihwa, the place I was when I read it for the first time. So when I think of how I first read it, I also remember the associations I made between its characters and real people in our village. There was an Okonkwo, a Nwoye, an Obierika, and so on. And all the spirituality in the novel was quite routine for the village; we may not have had
egwugwus, but we had
masvikiro (spirit mediums), and there was nothing to stop us from calling them
egwugwus. The book was depicting things that we saw everyday.
Things Fall Apart, which I read later than books by Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, was different in many ways from the British authors. The Dickens and Hardys, which I read in the same village setting, had transported me to distant places, but still, there was a certain familiarity, because I could picture and localize the setting and experiences, whereas with
Things Fall Apart, I located the setting within the village. I was lucky that at first, Achebe was taught to me from a comparative angle, as one of the writers in a syllabus that also covered Hardy, Dickens, Shakespeare. Lucky because I realized early the diversity in literature. But I would meet the real Achebe in that first year of univeristy, where we started by reading books like
Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, or
Decolonizing the Mind, or the
West and the Rest of Us,
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and many others.
Then suddenly, Achebe became the father of African literature (in English), and the evidence was there in front of us: the literary activity in the year the book was published and the prominent position the college syllabi accorded Achebe's books. You read
Things Fall Apart, then you desired
No Longer at Ease, and soon you would discover
Arrow of God, alongside the Francophone
God's Bits of Wood,
Xala, and
The Old Man and the Medal, without, of course, leaving out Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah. A door was opened to Kenya's Ngugi waThiongo:
The River Between,
The Grain of Wheat, Devil on the Cross. Then you zoomed back to the land of Achebe, quickly to be exposed to Wole Soyinka's
The Lion and the Jewel, but not his
The Interpreters (it's language was too opaque, its style too Eurocentric).
This went on for a while, until we finally came back to Zimbabwean literature. If one hadn't read them already (shame on you) here were the authors: Chenjerai Hove, Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera, Musaemura Zimunya,
Chenjerai Hove, Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera. Fathers of Zimbabwean literature? Why not? In my poem "Like the Poets", written during that first year, I called them "fathers of the literature". Some worked in publishing, and you knew they were involved in the shaping of Zimbabwean literature. But when you wanted to raise things to the bigger picture, to African Literature, you went back to Achebe. He had essays defining the literature. So did Ngugi. Defining and practising the form. The writers were the fathers of the literatures, the writers were the teachers in society, the writers were
responsible (a very big word then). Some of us began to write poetry that sounded like that of Okot p 'Bitek, Jack Mapanje and Steve Chimombo, taking the role of all the poets "that came before me: Zimunya, Marechera, Mungoshi, Hove, Diop...." It was great to learn that lovely phrase,
afrocentic sensibility. The syllabi argued one point:
All along you have been reading Eurocentric literature, now is the time to return home, to these fathers, and occasional mothers (Mariama Ba, Ama ata Aidoo), of African literature.
Now African literature has expanded. We have a new generation of writers and publishers (This should by now be obvious, but we really feel there is a rennaissance in African Literature. We: at least me.) The debates are changing. While the literature is not necessarily seeking to decolonize the mind,to free African language (but it occasionally does), it seems to affirm a new African (not necessarily Afrocentric) sensibility; we are now becoming aware of "
the dangers of the single story", and, increasingly, the message is becoming that of saying "
you're one of them". Taken out of context, this message seems to be saying that African literature is not a strange creature to other literary creatures, but that it can stand there with others when it's being considered for the Guardian Fiction Prize, or the Orange Prize for Fiction, or the Man Booker, the Nobel. Of course, this is not to say it has never stood there before. It has...many times, but there were times when it stood there because it was shockingly African. The creature now stands, still as African, but also simply as literary, with other literary creatures out there (or in here).
And why is Achebe rejecting the endorsement of "Father of African Literature"?
"It's really a serious belief of mine that it's risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature ... the contribution made down the ages. I don't want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us – many, many of us," he told the
Brown Daily Herald.In the meantime, universities have begun to set up Chinua Achebe Institutes, intiatives,
colloqiums, etc, and Things Fall Apart is required summer reading for most high school students in (at least) the United States. You don't have to be a father of a literature for all this to happen. You just have to be an excellent writer.
UPDATE: an edited version of this article has been published by the journal
Flatmancrooked. It was great working with the editor, James Kaelan.
