Bro Ken,
Thanks for your usual tough critical questions. However, this time, I beg to differ from your suggestion that any reading of social relevance in a novel is irrelevant to the value of the novel. The Iroko himself, Achebe, already established that arts for arts sake is like deodorized dog shit and since there is no such thing, it follows that a novel without policy implications is a nonentity. In addition, the great man has also written non-fiction which I cite more frequently in my policy texts than I do his novels and as you may have noticed, my reference to his resistance against segregation on that Zimbabwe bus comes from his book of essays rather than from his fiction. I am not a literary critic but the little I know about the sociology of literature tells me that creative writers almost always have the objective of influencing social change as Ngugi stated in Detained, as Baba Sho demonstyrated again and again, as Sembene established and as Fatunde and Iyayi informed in their interviews with the African Concord. It is in this sense that BJ described literature as a Truthful Lie.
Of course, it is not only African creative writers that aspire to influencing policy, European policy thinkers have even tried to out-creative the creative writers by adopting fictional anologies as 'evidence' in policy work. It is possible to read Karl Marx as a literary theorist given the way he cited fiction, potery and what have you in Das Kapital. Freud did the same with Oedipus Complex which he plagiarised from Oedipus Rex. Foucault cited Macbeth for evidence of Madness and Civilization without blushing. And Baba Fanon went to town with the novel of a black woman from Martinique in Black Skin White Masks. Hence my doctoral dissertation on Black Women and the criminal Justice system cited the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, and Ama Ata Aidoo alongside the novels of Soyinka, the essays of Achebe and the populist legal theory of Gani Fawehinmi and Winnioe Mandela as authorities every much as persuasive as theoretical and policy texts if not more so.
On the other hand, I do not know where you get the idea that policy is always uplifting while literature is always depressing. I am sure that there are abundant examples of uplifting literature, depending on the tastes of the reader, just as i am sure that policy documents are some of the most depressing genres of writing ever published. Yes, there are many uplifting pieces of policy texts but hardly any of them is without detractors with all sorts of alternative schemes that typify meanness and pettiness, authoritarianism and fascism, for instance.
Furthermore, I think that we should not be too dismissive of the questions that students raise in their reading of texts. As Achebe cautioned, what makes a forest is that when one thing stands, another thing stands beside it otherwise it would be a plantation if all the trees are the same. So let the students feel free to read any text in any way they see fit without being made to feel dumb simply because the teacher claims to have a deeper understanding of the text. You see, it is not just the students that share this peculiar reading of Achebe as a writer who did not deliver a utopian revisionist history - the envious reading that prompted my response came from a respected writer of Achebe's generation who wonders why he does not get the same attention that Achebe attracts when he believes in a deluded way that he is the better writer.
Finally, being a white man has absolutely nothing to do with the skin color: White people ain't even white, they are rather pink-ish. If you disagree, then take a look around you and make sure you take a piece of white paper to compare the skin colors in your class. By the way, black people are not black either, we are brown, Asians are not yellow and Native Americans are not red for that matter.
The marketability of representational inclusiveness was simply an advice that a publisher in London gave to a Nigerian writer who was trying to sell some manuscripts in London. It may have been a fad but in terms of historical specificity, writing about the colonial situation without white people just for orientalist authenticity would not market well to a European audience. What if the white men in TFA are caricatures? They were indeed made that way, not by the author but by the colonial administration that sent cardboard men with the mandate to dominate and control others whereas human beings are much more complex than that with the ability to fall in love, empathize, solidarize and refuse orders from above when the outcome is human misery. It is not about skin color because the man that Oknkwo killed was a fellow African who had the misfortune of bearing orders from the Empire. It is not about skin color because the rest of Umuofia refused to join Okonkwo in committing murder or suicide because madness does not afflict whole communities at once.There were pinkish people who supported African struggles against slavery, colonialism and apartheid but in the case of colonized Nigeria, hardly any sympathetic pink-white man of note for Achebe to represent without sounding ridiculous.
So join me and send a birthday greeting to the glorious Eagle on the Iroko: May his days be longer!
Biko
--- On Mon, 11/15/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - For Achebe at 80: Tulu Ugo
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Monday, November 15, 2010, 11:54 PM
dear biko when we read a novel for solutions, we read out almost anything of value, anything that is actually intellectually engaging or strong. if you want solutions to policy questions, why not read policy positions. i had a student complain about okonkwo committing suicide at the end of TFA. he too wanted uplift. well, if you want uplift, you shouldn't be reading texts that are doing other things. try to cite to me a great work of literature that is so pleasantly uplifting that you will return to it again and again. was it Death and the King's Horseman? The Interpreters? The Road? Arrow of God? Suns of Independence? Maybe you find the nostalgia at the end of L'Enfant noir uplifting? Or is the Samba Diallo's death at the end of Ambiguous Adventure. Or Oedipus blinding himself? or Hamlet getting shafted by fate? where is the uplift? is it not in the struggle and the portrayal that enlightens, that gives us the conviction to the cause, rather than the characters' fate? well, Toudi makes his escape good at the end of Une vie de boy. oh, forgot, he dies too. is his escape grounded in revolt what we remember, or his cynical statements about liking to drink? or isn't it really the illumination about domination and the means of resisting it that we ultimately learn about. we have classics, great works that lift us, not because of comforting endings that reassure us about what we believed at the outset, but b/c they shake us down to our soles, and souls. if the students don't like the shaking, their teachers are failing to expose them to what really matters in the text. why have teachers then? to tell the students they are right when reading on the surface? and believe me, it is not having the relatively wooden whitemen in TFA and Arrow of God to identify with--those are truly the weak points in both novels. do you really think the color of skin determines whom the reader identifies with? ken At 03:42 PM 11/15/2010, you wrote: ELECHI AMADI'S COLONIALIST CRITICISM OF ACHEBE
By Biko Agozino, Ph.D.
I enjoyed reading the interview of Elechi Amadi by
James Eze in The Sun in October 2004. I wish to thank Amadi
for sharing the open secret of his success as a
writer: you need to read hundreds, and he repeated,
hundreds of novels before you can master that art form
and venture to become a successful novelist. I hope
that this simple lesson will be encouraged in many
more high schools by requiring students to read for
pleasure beyond their textbooks.
As a high school kid, I read some of Amadi's novels
and books for pleasure and marveled at his ability to
move my emotion in sympathy with his characters. I
believe that it was his The Great Ponds that nearly
drove me to tears in sympathy with the people dying in
droves after someone swore an oath claiming a piece of
land that was in dispute between two villages. The
oath ended the bloody warfare but the mass suffering
from what we can suspect to be cholera (but which the
author represented as punishment from the gods) was
too much for a kid to take.
In the interview, Amadi was wrong in assuming that he is the first to
accuse Achebe of 'pandering to the white man'. This
question is raised frequently on the internet by
university students of World Literature who argue that
Achebe did not accomplish his stated objective in
Things Fall Apart. As Achebe stated this objective
shortly after the publication of the novel, his aim
was: "to help my society regain belief in itself, and
put away the complexes of denigration and self
abasement."
Like Amadi, the students point out that the white man
won the struggle and Okonkwo's people were humiliated
and they wonder how that could be uplifting to the
people of Umuofia. The question is whether Achebe was
pandering to the white man by portraying him as
dominant or whether he was reporting the reality of
the colonial and the neo-colonial situations in
Africa? Is it an insult to Africans for someone to
tell them that we are still under the domination of
Europeans? How do you 'help' a people under domination
to regain self-respect if it is taboo to tell them the
home truth that they remain under domination? Is it
more empowering to explain everything in terms of the
anger of the gods?
In the work of Amadi the white man is almost
completely absent but the author panders to
superstitious beliefs in gods and goddesses. Is it not
the case that Achebe was rendering a more urgent
service to the people by telling them a few home
truths? For instance, what if the white man had come
to The Great Ponds of Amadi and diagnosed the cholera
that was wiping them out and advised them to boil
their drinking water and adopt sanitation measures to
save more lives, could that be dismissed by Amadi as
the triumph of Western medicine and therefore an
insult to his people? Achebe wisely saw the need for
us to send our children to the white man's school to
learn his wisdom for our own purposes.
In other words, why should Amadi keep silent on the
colonial struggle in his own work and now try to
lampoon Achebe for addressing the struggle and
correctly concluding that our people have suffered
major set-backs? Achebe claims that he was named after
the husband of Queen Victoria, Albert, but that when
he went to visit the Victoria Falls in East Africa,
some petty colonial official tried to segregate him on
the tour bus by asking him to move to the back but he
refused and told him that in Nigeria we sit where we
like on a bus. I do not think that such is the
attitude of someone who would pander to racist
Europeans.
Apart from this point on realism, I suspect that Amadi
missed a secret in Achebe's uses of European
characters in his novels. I suspect that this is also
a clever marketing ploy to get more readers worldwide
beyond the place of origin of the author. Reading
books without a character that you can identify with
could be fun but it could be even more fun when you
find characters that you can identify with. Beyond
Africa, readers might find it difficult to identify
with Amadi's attempts to mystify the quite common
death of young men at a time that life expectancy was
so low in The Concubine or the senseless blood-letting
in The Great Ponds of interethnic wars that continue
to afflict sections of our society today.
As Biodun Jeyifo argued in The Truthful Lie, we need
more writers who would contribute to the
demystification of our crises and thereby contribute
to our search for solutions. Achebe could have blamed
Okonkwo's death on some god or goddess, but he made it
clear that he took his own life with his own hands and
severely criticized him for killing Ikemefuna to
appease some god.
I believe that the work of demystification runs
through Achebe's body of works in such a way that
after reading any of his books, we are encouraged to
seek human solutions to human problems rather than run
to flawed places of worship for answers to mundane
questions. The point of Achebe is that even though we
are a conquered people, the conquerors are not
perfect; even though we should learn the wisdom of the
conquerors, it does not follow that we should abandon
our ancient peace-loving ways either.
I use the occasion of Achebe's 80 birthday to re-circulate this response as my contribution to the good wishes for our father, Chinualumogu nwa Anichebe! May your days be longer, Odenigbo, more ink to your printers; we are watching those who are watching you; keep on going, no shaking!
Dr. Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.
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unsubscribe@googlegroups.com Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
harrow@msu.edu
517 803-8839
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