Darkness Writing Back Itself
Chinua Achebe and the Reflexivity of Civilizations
in the Light of Literary Modernism
Posts by Kenneth Harrow at the USAAfrica Dialogues series Google group
on Wed, May 29, 2013 at 6:28 pm and Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:08 pm
compiled and titled by
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
[Chinua Achebe's ] novels were much more than one-dimensional encomia, were not apologetics for African inferiority or anything of the sort. They were critiques… but also were larger than "regional" or "ethnic" literature, larger in ambition that "minor literature."
He was writing on the scale of contemporary modernism in the 1950s, and was addressing a world audience with a world-literature approach. This became increasingly apparent as his writing grew with the novels and stories after Things Fall Apart.
Have you noticed the glosses in Things Fall Apart, where he will use an Igbo term, and then tell the reader what it means?
The implied reader is the outsider, not only because of those explanations, but because the entire book does the same: it describes something--a set of people, their practices, their surroundings--for the benefit of those who do not know these people, their lives. It is an "insider" writing for the "outsider," even if the outsiders are the children and grandchildren of that generation of Umuofia (as was Chinua himself).
I do think the decision to submit the ms. for publication in London, where the novel would then be sold to an English, and then a worldwide Anglophone audience, as well as to Nigerians, was not by chance. He was writing for the next generation as well. His most famous statement on this: "I would be quite satisfied if my novels did no more than teach my readers that their past--with all its imperfections--was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them." What I read this as meaning is that people like me were to read his novels over the shoulders of the African readers for whom this statement is intended, and Achebe is so aware of my presence, he is translating for me as he goes along.
So why modernism? Not in the sense of avant-gardist, but rather a modernist world-view in which the old world of European high culture, European sensibilities as the center of true civilization and value, was to be contested by another vision of value and of the world. In part, this novel was a response to the horrific images of Africa purveyed by Joyce Cary (grotesqueries of Mr. Johnson) upon which the Europeans could base their sense of superiority, but a new notion of a modern world would be created when the "New Africa" no longer consisted in the "assimilés" or worse, the "évolués."
If the Europeans depended on their uncivilized Africans in order to know themselves as civilized, and superior, what would they be when the ironic, subtle sensibilities of the narrator of Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God, were now ironizing their civilizing missions in terms that debunked their own textual assumptions, mocking the colonial administrators' words at the end of TFA. or to take another image, as those all those eyes that Joseph Conrad described as looking at Marlowe the white passengers on the boat as it moved up the Congo river [in Conrad's Heart of Darkness] were now laughing as they wrote the real story about their trip into the Heart of Darkness. When a darkness is writing back it can no longer be thought a darkness, much less a shadow.
What was that project, to reengage the colonizers so as to restore an equilibrium in the reader's mind, partly to correct the errors of prejudice, but simultaneously to celebrate the dancer who could stand in two places at once so as to see something that the English, capable of standing only above their Africans, could not see. the great irony of genet in undoing a racist bourgeois society, or the quieter irony of Achebe whose vision was to see a dancing masquerade, publishing in London, writing in Lagos. In that sense post colonialism was undergoing a painful birth, astride the grave of yesterday, with echoes of modernist laughter of [Samuel] Beckett in Godot.
Waiting for Godot: 1953
Things Fall Apart: 1958
[Jean] Genet's The Blacks: 1959
Who were the audiences? Here is what Genet wrote:
This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the show should welcome him formally, dress him in ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the first row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance.
But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used.
The same with Things Fall Apart, for which I can be seen as the dummy in the audience, the necessary dummy since he was writing for me, as well as all those Black children of tomorrow.
Also posted at
Walks of Art (Blogger)
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