INTERVIEWER

Has your work been translated into Igbo? Is it important for it to be translated into Igbo?

ACHEBE

No, my work has not been translated. There is a problem with the Igbo language. It suffers from a very serious inheritance, which it received at the beginning of this century from the Anglican mission. They sent out a missionary by the name of Dennis. Archdeacon Dennis. He was a scholar. He had this notion that the Igbo language—which had very many different dialects—should somehow manufacture a uniform dialect that would be used in writing to avoid all these different dialects. Because the missionaries were powerful, what they wanted to do they did. This became the law. An earlier translation of the Bible into one of the dialects—an excellent translation, by the way—was pushed aside and a new dialect was invented by Dennis. The way he did it was to invite six people from six different dialectal areas. They sat round a table and they took a sentence from the Bible: In the beginning, God created . . . or whatever. In. What is it in your dialect? And they would take that. The. Yours? Beginning. Yours? And in this way, around the table, they created what is called Standard Igbo, with which the Bible was translated. The result is incredible. I can speak about it because in my family we read the Bible day and night. I know the Bible very well. But the standard version cannot sing. There’s nothing you can do with it to make it sing. It’s heavy. It’s wooden. It doesn’t go anywhere. We’ve had it now for almost a hundred years so it has established a kind of presence; it has created its own momentum among our own scholars. There are grammarians who now sit over the Igbo language in the way that Dennis did in 1906 and dictate it into Standard Igbo. I think this is a terrible tragedy. I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out. They actually were beginning to do so, because Igbo people have always traveled and met among themselves; they have a way of communicating. But this has not been allowed to happen. Instead the scholars are all over the place. I don’t really have any interest in these translations. If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect. Maybe someday I will, myself, translate Things Fall Apart into the Igbo language. Just to show what I mean, though for me, being bilingual, the novel form seems to go with the English language. Poetry and drama seem to go with the Igbo language.

INTERVIEWER

As the author of one of the most famous books in the world, Things Fall Apart, does it bother you that your other books are not discussed to the same extent as your first one?

ACHEBE

Well, sometimes, but I don’t let it become a problem. You know, they’re all in the family; Things Fall Apart was the first to arrive and that fact gives it a certain position of prominence, whether in fact other books excel in other particular virtues. Things Fall Apart is a kind of fundamental story of my condition that demanded to be heard, to retell the story of my encounter with Europe in a way acceptable to me. The other books do not occupy that same position in my frame of thinking. So I don’t resent Things Fall Apart getting all the attention it does get. If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don’t really know. I wouldn’t even want to say. And I’d even go on and say, I don’t even think so. But that’s all right. I think every book I’ve done has tried to be different; this is what I set out to do, because I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you’re rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world’s stories should be told—from many different perspectives.

INTERVIEWER

When you write, what audience do you have in mind? Is it Nigerian? Is it Igbo? Is it America?

ACHEBE

All of those. I have tried to describe my position in terms of circles, standing there in the middle. These circles contain the audiences that get to hear my story. The closest circle is the one closest to my home in Igboland, because the material I am using is their material. But unless I’m writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write. So there is, if you like, a kind of paradox there already. But then, if you can, visualize a large number of ever-widening circles, including all, like Yeats’s widening gyre. As more and more people are incorporated in this network, they will get different levels of meaning out of the story, depending on what they already know, or what they suspect. These circles go on indefinitely to include, ultimately, the whole world. I have become more aware of this as my books become more widely known. At this particular time, mostly the news I hear is of translations of my books, especially Things Fall Apart . . . in Indonesia, in Thailand, Korea, Japan, China, and so on. Fortunately you don’t think of all those people when you are writing. At least, I don’t. When I’m writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I’ve got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That’s really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind—I’ll never say it’s not there because I don’t know—but it’s not really what I’m thinking about. After all, some people will say, Why does he put in all these Nigerian-English words? Some critics say that in frustration. And I feel like saying to them, “Go to hell! That’s the way the story was given to me. And if you don’t want to make this amount of effort, the kind of effort that my people have always made to understand Europe and the rest of the world, if you won’t make this little leap, then leave it alone!”

INTERVIEWER

Are you ever surprised, when you travel around the world, by what readers make of your writings, or how they bond to them?

ACHEBE

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I am. People make surprising comments to me. I think particularly of a shy-looking, white American boy who came into my office once—in the seventies, I think—at the University of Massachusetts and said to me, That man, Okonkwo, is my father!

INTERVIEWER

You were surprised!

ACHEBE

Yes! I was surprised. I looked at him and I said, All right! As I’ve said elsewhere, another person said the same thing: in a public discussion—a debate the two of us had in Florida—James Baldwin said, That man is my father.

INTERVIEWER

Okonkwo?

ACHEBE

Okonkwo.

ckkris:

Please Sir,
Was TRIBALISM ever dead in Nigeria since Awolowo introduced it in the 1950's, when Awolowo prevented Azikiwe from becoming Premier of Western Nigeria, after a free and fair election that returned a majority of NCNC, over Awo's minority AG?
Since 1965, when Awolowo's Action Group insisted that a Yoruba must be the Vice-Chancellor of UNILAG, instead of Prof Eni Njoku who was next in line of succession to the retiring European VC , have subsequent VC's not always been chosen on TRIBAL considerations?
Now its indigene vs non-indigene; indigenes vs settlers.
Awo's Legacy Rules!

TRIBALISM CONTINUA !

alaoeri: Pls save my ignorance who's Achebe & wetin he do for Nigeria?

TheBookWorm: Professor Chinua Achebe has been getting a lot of accolades from news organizations in the United States. He was truly a rare bright spot in Nigeria's troubled history.

NPR, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and a host of other news organizations have written Op-Eds. I believe Chinua Achebe's contribution to humanity is set for stone.

The pen is definitely mightier than the sword.

From Nobel laureates to roadside booksellers, Nigerians expressed their grief and shock at the death at 82 of Chinua Achebe, the literary giant whose works made him a household name and national hero. Many who had worked alongside him wept as they paid tribute, and bookstores in downtown Lagos said his books sold out as news of his death trickled in.



African literature burst onto the world stage with Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which portrays an Igbo yam farmer's fatal struggle to come to terms with British colonialism in the late 19th century. It remains the best-selling novel ever written by an African author, having sold more than 10-million copies in 50 different languages. Nelson Mandela, who read his books during his 27-year incarceration, once said of him: "He was the writer in whose company the prison walls came down."

Wole Soyinka, a fellow giant of African literature, who was informed by the Achebe family in a dawn phone call, said, "We have lost a brother, a colleague, a trailblazer and a doughty fighter."

Writing for the Guardian's Comment is free section, Soyinka said: "No matter the reality, after the initial shock, and a sense of abandonment, we confidently assert that Chinua lives. His works provide their enduring testimony to the domination of the human spirit over the forces of repression, bigotry, and retrogression."

Speaking from the town of Ogidi where Achebe was born in 1930, village head, Amechi Ekume, said: "There is deep mourning all over the village, both young and old are mourning."

"As we say in Igboland, when an extraordinary person dies, the iroko [African teak] has fallen," said a weeping Dora Akunyili, a former minister who worked with Achebe during his tenure at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Achebe's earlier works focused on the social upheavals wrought by British colonialism. "He was the first of our African writers to tell the story from our own perspective. But even beyond Africa, people who were colonised or oppressed could relate to his stories," said Denja Abdullahi, the vice president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, which was founded by Achebe and other writers in 1981.

dayokanu: He was a great fiction writer though he had problems with the truth and accepting fate

he died a bitter man bitter against Awo, Bitter against the Nobel committee, Bitter against Yorubas, Bitter against Nigeria

In short he died miserable in spirit

Eko Ile:

Still, no Nobel. It's like some Yeye Olympic athlete saying he got this and that award but not a single gold medal which is the ultimate prize ... Please cut out the BS.

No Nobel = Failure.

TheBookWorm:

Will you shut up bigot. I am just giving honor to someone who led the way. This is not some contest that your warped mind probably cannot comprehend.

Besides his own writing, Achebe served for years as editor of Heinemann’s “African Writer Series,”

African Writers Series


African Writers Series is a series of books by African writers that has been published by Heinemann since 1962. The series has been a vehicle for some of the most important African writers, ensuring an international voice to literary masters including Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Steve Biko, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nadine Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta and Okot p'Bitek.

History

Founded in 1962, the series provided a forum for many post-independence African writers, and provided texts with which many African universities could begin to redress the colonial bias then prominent in the teaching of literature. The books were designed for classroom use, issuing works solely in paperback to make them affordable for African students. They were published by Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) in London and various African cities.

The idea of the series came from Heinemann executive Alan Hill. The first advisory editor to the series was the Nigerian Chinua Achebe – who became one of Africa's most famous writers. Achebe focused first on West African writers, but soon the series branched out, publishing the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in East Africa, and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa. Achebe left the editorship in 1972. James Currey, the editorial director at Heinemann Educational Books in charge of the African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984, has provided a book-length treatment of the series.

After a fairly prosperous beginning, the series faced difficulties mirroring those which faced the continent as a whole. By the mid-1980s, only one or two new titles a year were being published, and much of the back catalogue had fallen out of print. By the early 1990s, however, the series had begun to revive, having recently branched out to publish new work, to republish texts originally published in local release, and to publish translated works.

Riba_man:

Why are you spewing this amount of hatred and bigotry?
I don't know if you are aware of the this dictum " from the abundance of the heart, speaketh the mouth"