Last week, Chinua Achebe died. Other people also died, but none of them wrote Things Fall Apart.
I first read the book during the university years at the recommendation of a tutor and quickly Achebe’s work came to be one of the mess of things that my bachelor’s dissertation was about. Getting to know it through the strange lens of postcolonial theory, with its Jabberwocky-esque jargon and habit of declaring itself an imperialist waste of time, gave me the sort of collegial slant on the book which arises only through sheer inordinate time, actions repeated and scenes replayed. We may not have got along at first but years later it greets me with a knowing half-smile, and I believe I can greet it the same.
There is, I learned, inch by inch, studying something to the point that you know a lot about it, and then through and out the other side of that there is studying something to the extreme that you can’t really say anything at all about it, a Socratic sort of higher ignorance which in the university days was probably just a mask for some fear of conceptual commitment, a hemlock potion against the absolutisms of elsewhere. Despite my commitment issues, however, Achebe taught me two things: who owns language; who owns the novel.
One of the major debates around him involves his use of the English language in his work, and the accusation (most loudly made from Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o) that one can’t achieve cultural and political liberation while writing in the old colonial ‘mother tongue’. In retort, Achebe once said the following.
The use of French, in the case of [firebrand Martiniquan poet Aimé] Césaire, is the use of a French that has been in dialogue with other languages, you see. In my case, it is an English which has been in dialogue with a very rich alien linguistic milieu – that is, you have African languages strong in their own right, and an African history and experience. An English that has had this particular encounter cannot be the same English of Kingsley Amis writing in London.
Language is owned by whoever is using it at a given time and it’s simply too complex a thing to say that there are discreet languages with set boundaries that are owned by certain political groups. Just as language was used as a tool of subjugation by the colonial powers, and later came to be ingrained as a way for native populations to keep themselves subjugated, so too can it be reappropriated and used for liberation – through books like Things Fall Apart. This to suggest that the mental space of the Nigerian today need be no more owned by the language of the seventeenth century British colonist than the thoughts of the colonist were owned by the Normans, Saxons or Romans, or any of those who fed linguistically into what English can be today.
Similarly, was Achebe’s taking the title of Things Fall Apart from Yeats’s The Second Coming an example of his yielding to the cultural authority of the West? He would have considered it to be taking what he was expected to imbibe without challenge and instead reforming it. In the poem the lines ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’, ‘the best’ is often taken to mean Europe’s rulers; through Achebe’s invocation of the poem, the best would surely by those tribespeople who bowed to the colonial authority – in turn flipping Europe’s rulers into ‘the worst’. This is reappropriation. But in Achebe’s awareness of how the process of colonisation requires involvement from all parties (his ‘best’ lacking all conviction) he shows an ambivalence which is beyond the simple idea of the hapless native subjugated through a cohesive European ideology of expression. Irishman Yeats was himself from a colonial nation and the political elements of his work were ignored for decades. As much as flipping the meaning of aspects of the poem, Achebe was also bringing to life meanings that were already there. This kind cultural collision is the furnace from which new things are made, not just words and grammars but, crucially, the ideas that new words and grammars make room for.
That is, of course, a pretty Anglophone attitude to have towards language, where it’s considered the route towards culture and therefore malleable, as opposed to the more Francophone attitude where language (or, more specifically, the French language) is itself the seat of culture and therefore not to be tampered with. The Académie Française embodies this attitude which, it seems to me, is upheld only in the more conservative parts of French society and which appears now to be eroding as immigrant voices are heard more clearly. In the French colonies it was broken down much earlier by people such as Césaire, as Achebe mentions above, and Édouard Glissant (the star of another ramshakle dissertation).
Secondly, and this is not something widely accepted by even those who love Achebe’s work, he showed that European modes in novel-writing are not the be all and end all of what was and often still is considered to be a European form.
South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer said his work was ‘an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence’. While this comment is clearly intended to be generous (take any connotation of that word you wish), I feel it’s disengenuous to place Achebe’s orginality within the bounds of his merely sythesising external traditions. This is to misrepresent the source of his techniques. He grew up with a tradition of oral storytelling and history which in narrative terms somewhat pulls the rug from beneath the idea of objective, positivist knowledge; where this arises in Things Fall Apart it’s easy to ascribe it to literary trends that were developing in Europe and America in the 1950s, but Achebe reached this through his own cultural routes. Parallels can be made with Latin American magic realism, but this is something of a character long-situated in oral cultures and has been much overlooked in Achebe’s work.
Springing also from his taste for orality is his vocabulary of proverbs (‘Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten’), manifesting in dialogue and narration of constant, shifting metaphors, and most interestingly there is his use of speech rhythms that are, in Achebe’s words, ‘coloured to reflect the African verbal style [with] stresses and emphases that would be eccentric or unexpected in British or American speech’. Many never get past seeing his writing as sparse and simplistic when he was actually working on a much subtler level. See B Eugene McCarthy’s essay ‘Rhythm and Narrative in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart‘ for more on this.
So the claim that Achebe’s work is not of any serious literary merit – nowadays thankfully rare – is nonsense, yes, but this is still all secondary to the political impetus of his work and his desire for as many people to read it as possible, including people who may never have read a novel before. Achebe created a style which succeeded in this while at the same time succeeded in having significant and innovative literary merit – he just did so without pandering to the traditional Western sensibilities of what this would be, and therefore some were unable to see it.
In doing these two things at the same time he achieved what is one of the holy grails of writing, and perhaps even all art, and he did it without just being ‘good for an African’ as he knew Western critics would dub him on release of Things Fall Apart; he was able to do it because he was simply one of the greatest writers that we human beings have ever had the fortune to read.