Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Re to prof Aluko: [:ACHEBE DESERVES A NATIONAL BURIAL

"------Who were these "mainstream" readers of Achebe's memoir and what
"mainstream" are you talking about?"
------Obi Nwakanma

They are the same persons who have been trying to dominate
contemporary Nigeria Literature from Europe and America. The same
tendency, a few years back on this forum, that tried to dictate who
was a poet, who should be and the themes that must be treated. We (at
Arugo Motor Park Owerri) ignored them of course.

They were not challenged then, why now?

CAO.


On 29 Mar, 17:28, Rex Marinus <rexmari...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "During those period when TWAC burst on us and this forum was afire with commentaries and controversies, the mainstream reading of the memoir was that of a failed Achebe who, with that work, detracted significantly from his pre-TWAC greatness. For most of the commentators, on either side of the debate, Achebe was less than a Nigerian."
> -Shina Shina, I'm very intrigued by your statement above and its implication, and so I'm compelled to ask you these questions: (a) Who were these "mainstream" readers of Achebe's memoir and what "mainstream" are you talking about? (b) What data do you have to measure the conclusions of this "mainstream" of Nigeria's reading public, and of the readers on this forum, to conclude that most of them thought "Achebe was less than Nigerian;" I'll be very interested in that data (c) finally, when does a "mainstream" readership decide the "Nigerianness" or otherwise of any particular writer or individual? Now, in his writings, and to use the specific example of his Open Sore of a Continent, Wole Soyinka has often taken a thoroughly Yoruba position, and has frequently analyzed Nigeria from what you might call a self-conscious position, does that make him any less Nigerian? I mean, J.P. Clark and the revered Gabriel Okara have been known as "poets of the Niger Delta" and did approach a Nigerian national identity from the unique prisms of their own involvements. Okara, particularly, was like Achebe an Ambassador for Biafra. Now, what shall we do with Okara? Does Ken Saro Wiwa, who spoke out for and died for the 'Ogoni cause" qualify as Nigerian, and what do we make of his own powerful memoir, A Month and a Day (Penguin, 1995) which speaks for itself? What could this mythical "mainstream" reading of Wiwa be? I ask these questions merely, in fact, to point to the need for a more rigorous, less timorous imputation in the reading of Nigerian cultural history.  Achebe's "memoir of Biafra" was part of his objective of showing, "where the rain began to beat us." His forceful interrogation and indictment of the powerful tin gods of that history and that situation was a nationalist and patriotic service to Nigerian national memory. And Achebe spoke clearly: there can be no peace, no progress, no harmony, if any one part of Nigeria - no matter which part - is made the constant victim of collective violence and injustice. It so happens that Achebe was spawned of proud Igbo loins; yet there is no part in Achebe's book, or in his life, that failed to recognize the equal necessity of every part of Nigeria; nor did he fail to live up to that Igbo cultural ethic: "no man is better than the other; all people deserve to live, because life itself is the only measure that connects things." Achebe spoke from an Igbo position because it was not contradictory to his vision of an ideal Nigeria which is founded on: justice, equality, prosperity, freedom for all including the Igbo. Indeed, the "mainstream" of those who have read Achebe's last gift to nation is, "there again goes Nigeria's Voltaire!" - the conscience of his time. And I can show you the data of responses that validate that claim. Nigeria honors itself by honoring Achebe. What Nigeria does with Achebe's life and death will basically be a measure of its own self. That is the "mainstream" opinion.Obi Nwakanma
>  Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Re to prof Aluko: [:ACHEBE DESERVES A NATIONAL BURIAL
> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> From: shina73_1...@yahoo.com
> Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:53:29 +0000
>
> Should Achebe Get a National Burial? Excavating the Credentials of a Patriot.
>
> Oga Okey,
> You got the underlying point of my post and questions wrong. During those period when TWAC burst on us and this forum was afire with commentaries and controversies, the mainstream reading of the memoir was that of a failed Achebe who, with that work, detracted significantly from his pre-TWAC greatness. For most of the commentators, on either side of the debate, Achebe was less than a Nigerian.
>
> I contributed to that thread on TWAC with an attempt at reading the memoir as a statement about redeeming the Nigerian nation by a writer whose, in his own words, "earliest awareness in the town of Ogidi did not include any of that British stuff, nor indeed the Nigerian stuff. That [awareness] came with progress in school." In other words, Achebe came to the Nigerian state from a heavily ethnic background. Most of us came to the awareness of Nigeria that way. We were first Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Nupe, Ijaw, etc before we came to understand what Nigeria was supposed to mean. And yet, for most of us, as for Achebe, "Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting." We have all tried, again like Achebe, to make sense of what it means to be a Nigerian even though the Amalgamation didn't give us a basis for that. We were all yanked from our ethnic/cultural mooring into an arrangement that is 'abysmally frustrating'.
>
> So, Achebe could say, for instance, 'in my next reincarnation I want to be a Nigerian again', and yet that a return to Nigeria is an absurd contemplation. We all live with this kind of paradox daily: we want to believe in this country, yet we have nothing to anchor that epistemic desire on.
>
> I therefore attempted to read TWAC as the work-the last statement, as it turned out to be-of a troubled patriot, a Nigerian who couldn't reject the country in spite of its deep dysfunction, but who couldn't continue with 'business as usual'. This is what I had in mind when I talked about excavating the patriotic credentials of Achebe. I was only attempting to stimulate a debate about that troubled relationship. Achebe asked 'What was Nigeria to me?' I am asking the same question: What do we think Nigeria was to him?
>
> Prof. Aluko is therefore right in his assessment of what the Federal Govt should not jump into doing. My people say 'it is when we die that we become instantly deified while we are practically useless alive'. That proverb speaks to the Federal Govt which instantly wanted to become Achebe's Chief Mourner when in actual fact, there was a point of critical difference between them. Would Achebe have wanted a national burial?
>
> To qualify for that position of Chief Mourner, the Govt needs to respond to Achebe's fundamental query: What is to be done? Let me end with a final quote from Achebe to back that query: "Nigeria needs help. Nigerians have their work cut out for them-to coax this unruly child along the path of useful creative development. We are the parents of Nigeria, not vice versa. A generation will come, if we do our work patiently and well-and given luck-a generation that will call Nigeria father or mother. But not yet.... The hard words Nigeria and I have said to each other begin to look like words of anxious love, not hate. Nigeria is a country where nobody can wake up in the morning and ask: what can I do now? There is work for all."
>
> I should be clear now: Beneath the supposed veneer of a ethnic jingoist, there lurks a deep and concerned patriot.
>
> I had never doubted this credentials. I don't think anyone should.
>
> Adeshina Afolayan
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTNFrom:  Okechukwu Ukaga <ukaga...@umn.edu>
> Sender:  usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:55:01 -0500To: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>ReplyTo:  usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Re to prof Aluko: [:ACHEBE
>  DESERVES A NATIONAL BURIAL
> "And the question is: To what extent can we excavate Achebe as a Nigerian patriot in the light of TWAC?"
> ... many reviewers of the work considered it an ethnic work that detract from any relationship Achebe may be said to have had with Nigeria. So, if we are sure Achebe wasn't a Nigerian patriot, why a national burial?
> -Adeshina Afolayan
>
> Adeshina:
> What do you mean by "excavate Achebe as a Nigerian patriot"? What do you mean by "ethnic work". And who decides who is a patriot and what is ethnic work and by what metric?  Whose reality counts?  By the way, have you considered the possibility that your opinion and most of the reviews you referenced below may have been (consciously or unconsciously) affected by ethnic bias or is the apparent relationship between reviewers ethnicity and their relative dis/agreement with Achebe a coincidence?  And if Achebe has had a troubled relationship with Nigeria, perhaps it is because Nigeria had a troubled relationship with Achebe; after all, as we learned in secondary school science, "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
>
> Now, there are good reasons for the Federal Government to NOT rush into a national burial for Achebe the most cogent, in my view, being that articulated by Bolaji (and others) as follows: "I maintain that the Federal Government should not step out in front on this matter, but should quietly find out from the Achebe family what role it should play in conformity with the sensibilities of the now departed Prof. Chinua Achebe."  But the reason given by you below makes no sense to me.
>
> Regards,
>
> Okey Ukaga
>
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:44 PM,  <shina73_1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> If I am permitted to barge in here, the issue of national burial raises a fundamental issue of the relationship between Nigeria and Achebe. I just finished reading an essay in Saturday's Nigerian Guardian which excerpted what is titled his troubled relationship with Nigeria. And the question is: To what extent can we excavate Achebe as a Nigerian patriot in the light of TWAC?
>
> I asked this question because I remember the dimensions of the controversy around TWAC on this forum and the extent to which many reviewers of the work considered it an ethnic work that detract from any relationship Achebe may be said to have had with Nigeria. So, if we are sure Achebe wasn't a Nigerian patriot, why a national burial?
>
> Just musing.
>
> Adeshina ...
>
> read more »

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