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Chinua Achebe: no longer at ease in exile - Interview
UNESCO Courier, June, 2001 by Amy Otchet
In your last book, you recall listening as a child to the conversations of your relatives and family friends who met at the piazza of your father's house. You only began to understand the significance of their discussions decades later. Today, at the age of 70, are there any ideas from those early times that continue to rattle around in your head?
Yes--the recognition of the importance of stories. We don't know one-tenth of the stories knocking about. But if you want to understand a people's experience, life and society, you must turn to their stories. I am constantly looking for that moment when an old story suddenly reveals a new meaning.
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At the age of 25, you began writing your first story, Things Fall Apart, which is considered one of the first African classics to be published in English (1958). Legend has it that the book was the result of what you describe as a "landmark rebellion," when your fellow students openly challenged the latent racism in Mister Johnson, written by a British author and revered by colonial teachers. At the time, did you have any idea where this rebellion would lead?
Mister Johnson did not turn me into a writer--I was born that way. But it did open my eyes to the fact that my home was under attack and that my home was not merely a house or a town, but an awakening story in which the first fragments of my own existence began to have coherence and meaning.
To begin with, it just seemed to me that everyone was entitled to tell his or her own story. Some of the first people to embrace this notion were friends and classmates who more or less said, "Well if Chinua can do it, so can I." Then came the ladies. Even the British writers who had previously tried to represent us began to step back and leave the telling to the owners of the story.
This recognition hasn't stopped growing. It's gone to the point where the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature includes Things Fall Apart as a major contribution of the 20th century.
Artists are now pushing to not only tell their own story but to do so in their own language. You must understand their frustration. Things Fall Apart has been translated into about 50 languages but not your native Igbo.
Of course it bothers me. However, I feel very strongly that a novel written about the Igbo people in English is better than no novel at all. You can never wait for the ideal circumstances to take action. You do what you can right away--not in 50 years or 15--because you cannot be certain where the current situation will lead.
For instance, a few months ago I went home for the first time in 10 years. The real purpose of the journey was to give a public lecture in Igbo about the problem of the language (the continued use of a standard dialect imposed by colonial missionaries). It was one of the most incredible things I have ever done in my life. Thousands and thousands of people in an open stadium were dramatically responding to my words. So the question of Igbo language is very close to my heart and I'm working on it all the time. Things Fall Apart tells the world about the Igbo people. Now let us figure out how to tell our children and ourselves in our own language the same story and even more. It's not a matter of choosing this language or the other, but about accommodating both possibilities.
Your stories revolve around the weaknesses of your central characters. As you've written, "it's not very exciting when monstrous characters cause trouble. When an ordinary man causes havoc, that is more ominous." But Western critics often seem very uncomfortable with this irony. They'd rather see a hero come through. Their criticism seems to reflect an essentialist view of the good African or the bad.
I think the word essentialism is appropriate. I don't know where this defective way of looking at art comes from. I suspect it's more Western than African because in my case--that of the Igbo--art is inclusive. It includes ordinary people and their lives.
We have, for instance, this Mbari celebration in which ordinary people are secluded for a few months to work with professional artists. Everyone and everything is included in the creative process. Whatever appears on the horizon--be it a new religion or a missionary's bicycle--is part of this story. This is a way of domesticating what is new or foreign. By bringing a new element into your home, you bring it under surveillance. It's both about hospitality and practicality to ensure your own safety.
The goddess--called Ani by the Igbo--who commands the Mbari festival is not only responsible for art and creativity but morality as well. So there is always a frontier between good and evil. This is why art cannot be used to justify destruction or an essentialist view of people. That doesn't mean that our heroes are angels--they are human like anyone else.
However, Westerners see a moral message in art as a weakness. In the West, a novel that is said to be "political" is not very good. Or critics say, "despite its political message, it is good," which is in itself a very political thing to say. For it means, "the world is okay; we don't need to drag any extraneous or political issues into the story."
