The Legacy of Chinua Achebe - Maine Humanities Council

The Legacy of Chinua
      Achebe

Things Fall Apart
• I’m going to speak a bit about “Things
  Fall Apart”—indeed, you’ve probably
  already heard a great deal about “Things
  Fall Apart”
• But I am most interested in how that
  book has impacted African and American
  literature and generations of writers.
• I’m interested, too, in the tremendous
  cultural power that Achebe gained as a
  result of the success of TFA, and how that
  success in large part determined the
  future of African fiction.

The Cultural Moment

• For the most part, Africa was seen as a
  destination for literary texts from the West,
  and not as a continent that produced
  writers.
• Two notable exceptions: Amos Tutuola's
  Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and Cyprian
  Ekwensi's People of the City (1954)
• The « African Novel » was still in its infancy.
  And very few in the West believed that an
  « African Novel » would speak to the world.

Achebe as Father of
African Literature
• After an initial print run of 2000 copies,
  Things Fall Apart began to sell at a rapid clip
• Sold 20,000 copies after it became
  mandatory reading for the Cambridge
  School Certificate Examinations for overseas
  students in the United Kingdom
• It sold so well that his publishers at
  Heinemann became convinced that there
  was actually a market for African fiction.
• Achebe soon became the series editor for
  the African Writers Series, the incredibly
  influential series initially published by
  Heinemann.

Achebe as Father of
African Literature
• Achebe had achieved something
  that no African writer had before
  him—he’d merged the storytelling
  traditions of his people with the
  traditions of the West in a manner
  that was palatable to the West.
• In so doing, he created a template
  for the kind of African fiction that
  could sell in the West.
• He offered a compelling narrative
  that showed how the Igbo lived
  before the British arrived. And how
  the Igbo were irrevocably changed
  by that encounter.

First Encounter
• I read Things Fall Apart for the first time in
  high school, like many of you here, I’m sure.
• Yet the context was different for me. Achebe
  was a hero in my household. He was
  evidence of what my father had been telling
  me my entire life—that Nigerians could
  produce brilliant, world changing art just like
  anyone else.
• I didn’t know what the story was about, but I
  knew it existed, and I knew its very existence
  disproved all the things my friends and
  some teachers felt about Nigeria.

First Encounter
• And then I read it. It had a tremendous
  impact on me.
• For the first time I felt an intimate
  connection to the country that my parents
  were from, the country they discussed
  incessantly, the country where most of my
  family lived.
• I also understood for the first time what my
  family—and, indeed, Nigeria and the rest of
  Africa—had lost as a result of its
  engagement with Europe.

First Encounter
• I’d always felt a tremendous sense of loss,
  but now that loss was contextualized. The
  pain I’d felt for my entire life—much of it, I
  now realize, inherited from my parents—
  now made sense.
• I craved more stories but there was nothing.
  In class we moved on to the typical mix of
  European and American novels. And when I
  went to the librarian and asked for more
  African novels she told me there was
  nothing else.
• For many years in this country and the rest
  of the West, Chinua Achebe was *the*
  African Writer.

The Only One
• Achebe’s status as an artist had
  radically shifted after Things Fall Apart
  became successful.
• Though he struggled to find a
  publisher for his debut, after it was
  published and received success, for
  many years it became the definitive
  example of what an African novel
  could and should be.
• TFA was the only required African
  novel read in countless high schools
  and universities here and abroad, and
  for many students TFA was all they
  knew and would ever know of African
  literature.

The Only One
• So why was this the case? Why was Achebe’s
  novel the only novel of his generation to
  really break through and make an
  international impact?
• My theory is that TFA was so successful
  because it spoke directly to the dawning
  postcolonial moment. Many African nations
  were on the verge of declaring
  independence from their colonial rulers, and
  TFA explained what had been lost, and
  perhaps could be regained.
• TFA also spoke directly to the West. It
  featured Western characters and showed
  how the West had changed Africa.

The Only One
• The success of TFA also demonstrated, in a way,
  how precarious the enterprise of African
  fiction—including, of course, African novels—
  was.
• The success of a particular work of fiction had
  less to do with how authentically it conveyed
  the stories of a particular individual or group of
  people, and more to do with how much that
  story was valued in the West.
• In addition, Western tastemakers and
  kingmakers have consistently demonstrated
  that there isn’t much space for non-Western
  stories and art in the West.

The Only One
• What this means, generally, is that while
  Western audiences might have room in their
  minds and on their bookshelves for varied
  narratives by Westerners—in particular
  white men—they have less space for
  everything else.
• So Achebe’s success not only determined
  the rules for success for any future would-be
  African novelist, it also foreclosed the
  possibility that any other novelist would
  achieve the same level of success
• In other words, Achebe became “the one.”

The Only One
• Achebe’s status mirrored the fates of a
  few other artists who were working at
  the same time and afterward.
• In those artistic fields with strong
  barriers, fields in which a small group of
  mostly white tastemakers determine
  who will be granted an opportunity to
  succeed—film, literature, and visual art,
  among many, many others—a small
  collection of black artists receive the
  bulk of the attention and praise.
• This applies to other artists of color as
  well.

The Only One
• So Achebe became shorthand for
  African fiction.
• This was despite Achebe’s efforts. As I
  mentioned before, he edited the
  venerable African Writer’s Series until
  1972.
• The AWS was responsible for
  introducing many previously unknown
  African writers to the world, including
  Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Bessie Head, Doris
  Lessing and so many others.

The Only One
• Yet most of these writers—with a few
  notable exceptions, among them
  Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing,
  both white writers who went on to win
  Nobel Prizes—weren’t as well known
  as Achebe.
• By focusing so vigilantly on one writer,
  critics and readers in the West don’t
  have to engage with the full range of
  humanity of people in the rest of the
  world.

The Only One
• I didn’t know much about the African
  Writes Series until I was a graduate
  student at Oxford, studying African
  Studies, and I made it a mission to read
  as many AWS books as I could.
• At Oxford I read books by Alex La
  Guma, Bessie Head, Ousmane Sembene
  and many others.
• I began to truly understand the
  diversity of African life—the wide
  diversity of experiences and
  perspectives that stretched across the
  African continent.

The Only One
 • I also began to understand how
   impoverished the general perception
   of African fiction was.
 • Here was a multitude of narratives,
   beautifully rendered and edited, and
   yet the general idea of what African
   fiction was and could be was Things
   Fall Apart.
 • Because I was spending so much time
   reading literature at Oxford, across so
   many traditions—English, Indian,
   South American, etc.—I began to
   think about literary canons.

The Only One
• Generally a literary canon is formed over
  time.
• When a book is released a host of critics
  and might debate how artful it is,
  whether and how it addresses larger
  concerns in a particular society, whether
  it stands as a shining example of the best
  kind of literature that the society can
  produce.
• Then in subsequent generations critics
  and academics will debate how well that
  work addressed contemporaneous ideas,
  whether the work holds up, etc.

The Only One
• The one work of literary art from Africa that
  has received that kind of sustained attention
  over the years is Things Fall Apart.
• The African Writers Series, as wonderful and
  important as it is, also reveals the problems
  that accompany trying to invent a literary
  tradition from abroad.
• The African Writers Series wasn’t the only
  outfit publishing African literature, but it was
  the most prominent, and it reflected the
  biases of a small brain trust of gatekeepers
  who were based in or had connections to
  London.

A Period of Stagnancy
• Over time the influence of the African
  Writers Series waned and, frankly, the
  publishing world—meaning houses in
  Europe and America—lost interested in
  African fiction.
• The late-eighties through the nineties were
  an especially barren time for African
  literature.
• There were novels that were published
  during this moment (among them great
  novels like Nervous Conditions) but for the
  most part the literary world had moved on.

A New Hope
 • A few things changed in the early
   2000s.
 • Among them, the appearance of
   the Caine Prize for African Writing
   in 2000.
 • The prize annually issues a call to
   writers in Africa and in the diaspora
   to submit short stories for a 10,000
   pound prize.

A New Hope
• Still imperfect in certain ways—prize is
  based in London, external gatekeepers
  still exert influence over the process—
  but it heralded the beginning of a new
  era.
• A few short years after the launch of the
  prize, a bumper crop of debut novels by
  African writers debuted to much fanfare.
• Including Purple Hibiscus by
  Chimamanda Adichie (2003), Beasts of
  No Nation (2005) by Uzodinma Iweala,
  and The Beautiful Things That Heaven
  Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengestu.

A New Hope
• As it happens, I was in college when this
  new engagement with African literature
  began.
• I read Purple Hibiscus as a senior in college
  and was so excited about it that I sent a few
  copies to friends and family.
• I read Beasts of No Nation in graduate
  school and The Beautiful Things That Heaven
  Bears after grad school, when I began
  working in London.
• This, for me, was a terribly exciting time.

Personal Engagement
• In graduate school I was part of a
  small community of Black students
  who were all intensely interested in
  the arts.
• We wrote and acted in plays, we
  wrote stories, exchanged and
  critiqued them, and we read every bit
  of black literature we could find.
• Many of us had direct ties to Africa, so
  we were intensely interested in the
  new literature that was emerging from
  the continent.

Personal Engagement
 • We noticed certain trends and
   discussed why these books might
   have been successful.
 • For example, Purple Hibiscus owed an
   obvious debt to Achebe’s work,
   Beasts of No Nation seemed
   especially timely because the
   international press was reporting
   many stories about child soldiers and
   The Beautiful Things That Heaven
   Bears covered the same territory as a
   few recently successful immigrant
   novels.

Personal Engagement
• Yet the very existence of these novels
  seemed to indicate that there was an
  emerging space for the kinds of
  narratives we were interested in
  writing.
• Inspired by these novels, I began to
  write fiction in grad school.
• I wrote a long novel during my final
  year of graduate school, then
  abandoned that and began to write
  another novel as I worked at my first
  job post grad school.

Personal Engagement
• I thought a lot about Achebe as I tried and
  failed and tried again to write a novel.
• I thought of his courageousness, and how
  he wrote a novel that responded to his time
  but also—because it such a compelling
  piece of art—defined his time as well.
• I also thought about how I wanted my work
  to differ from Achebe’s. I wanted to write an
  intensely personal story that shows how an
  individual who grew up in the diaspora
  related—and could not relate to—Africa.

Personal Engagement
• I published my first short story while I
  was still working on my novel, and this
  story won the Caine Prize for African
  Writing.
• I subsequently had an opportunity to
  travel all over Africa, Europe and
  America on a kind of extended tour.
• I met many African writers in places like
  Nigeria, South Africa and Germany.
• We spoke about the kind of writing we
  wanted to publish, our influences, and,
  of course, Achebe.

Personal Engagement
• Perhaps the most significant
  experience I had during this time
  was my inclusion in a list of the
  most promising African writers
  under 40.
• The Hay Festival invited all 40 of us
  to Nigeria for a weeklong festival.
• Many other writers and aspiring
  writers were there as well.

Personal Engagement
• We spent hours talking about
  literature, reading each other’s work,
  gossiping, trading compliments and
  insults.
• It became apparent to me, then, that
  we are living in the midst of an African
  renaissance of literature.
• So many African and Diasporic writers
  are creating compelling work.
• African publishing houses like Cassava
  Press are publishing incredible books.

Personal Engagement
• There are still profound constraints—again,
  the major publishing houses abroad
  determine what books will get published
  and receive critical attention
• But the walls are breaking down.
• I traveled to Nigeria every year after I won
  the Caine Prize and spent time with writers,
  critics, and visual artists.
• I also spent time with artists of every stripe
  here in America, and in Europe.
• My debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black
  Man, was published in 2019.

Achebe’s Legacy
• I would not be here speaking with you
  if it weren’t for Chinua Achebe.
• His example is so incredibly important
  because he created a work of art that
  moved people and convinced many of
  our humanity.
• He also inspired successive generations
  of artists to create art that critiqued
  and offered commentary on their
  societies—artists who have also
  inspired me.

Personal Engagement
• Finally, the grand irony of his legacy
  is that his most well-known book is
  called Things Fall Apart, but his life
  and his literary work taught many
  of us how to forge new
  connections, and to fashion thriving
  communities.