Chinua Achebe
From the Ethnocentric to the Global
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Achebe at the time he wrote his great novels
Why is Chinua Achebe's writing so widely revered globally even though often based on an ethnic centre?
A core of assessment of a writer's work is-how effectively can you derive universal human values from the cultural core of your work even as that cultural specificity gives individuality and authenticity to your story and characters?
Why is Things Fall Apart so widely revered globally even though based on an ethnic core?
What speaks so deeply to so many from different cultural and geographical contexts from within the Igbo nexus of that work?
Achebe succeeds gloriously in dramatizing universal human challenges through the imaginatively realized historical contexts of Igbo culture, in the process fashioning a form of English that is universally accessible and yet carries the rhythms, idioms and philosophies of Igbo in terms of great poetic force, projecting the language's musicality and imagistic power.
That is the core of his achievement in Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and his short story "The Madman", his greatest works known to me.
Those critics and readers who venerate him are often aware of other African writers writing in various languages, but they acknowledge that they are yet to see many writers anywhere who combine so many cultural worlds so successfully, English and Igbo, Christianity and Igbo religion, Africans and non-Africans, cultural sensitivity and cultural critique, empathy and ironic distance, among other qualities, in the context of superb characterization, plot and language, the complexity that shapes Achebe's best narratives.
Inspired by a Facebook debate on Theresa Ogwuanyi's wall.
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