Welcome, Guest: Register On Nairaland / LOGIN! / Trending / Recent / NewStats: 3,195,474 members, 7,958,439 topics. Date: Wednesday, 25 September 2024 at 02:20 PM |
Nairaland Forum / Nairaland / General / Politics / Achebe: Fall Of The Iroko. (661 Views)
The Rise and Shameful Fall Of Nnamdi Kanu (PICS) / Awolowo's Daughter To Achebe: We Are Disappointed / Achebe On Awolowo: Has He Gone Too Far? (2) (3) (4)
(1) (Reply)
Achebe: Fall Of The Iroko. by Nobody: 10:58pm On Dec 02, 2013 |
Achebe - Fall of the Iroko 29 March 2013 , By Adamu Adamu, Source: Daily Trust The death last 8month at 83 of Professor Chinua Achebe, one of Africa's towering men of letters and its most well-know novelist, was a great and irreparable loss and a big blow to African literature and Igbo culture. In a long career, which spanned more than a quarter century, Achebe would come to tame English language and create a brand new form—African literature -for it. A great storyteller of enduring impact, a poet, essayist, novelist, short-story writer and literary critic of note, Achebe was a master of the tale and of the vernacularised English turn of phrase, always pregnant with layers of meaning and each take garnished with the palm oil of proverbs, but which proved incapable of conveying the stuff of which the work of the great masters was couched. Even though the medium was less than the message, his work was nonetheless received by the world to great critical acclaim. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, went on to become a classic of African literature, though, it must be said that it was a classic that was not truly literary, at least not in the tradition of great world literature. In spite of all its other merits, Achebe's writing, especially in his novels, is characterised by plainness or what sympathetic critics have called deceptive simplicity; and it is a plainness that cannot be rescued or made up for by even the most powerful and compelling of themes. Some of it indeed betrays the perfunctoriness of an intellectual work-in-progress that is yet to begin an approach to the level of a world classic of great, timeless literature. Though he had said that the "English of the African will have to be a new English, still in communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings," his style could not but be compared with other notable English writings. The Igbo society in which Achebe lived is a community with a culture in which status is dependent on masculinity and eminence is judged by the value of yam harvest, or, in Achebe's words, the culture "believed in too much manliness. Perhaps this is part of the reason it crashed," a conclusion that, in retrospect, ought really to have absolved the other regions of blame. In the end, however, it would seem Achebe and other Afro centric writers might have worried too much what colonialism thought of, or said about, Africa and the African condition; and he was perhaps the most successful African anti-colonial exponent of native Igbo culture who probably saw himself as the midwife of a cultural synthesis that would restore pride to a wounded tribe. Achebe saw the establishment and imposition by colonialists of '"warrant- chiefs"—[as] a deeply flawed arrangement that effectively confused the Igbo democratic spirit;' and, here, he seemed in practice to have negated all that he had, in theory, stood for; but what was there in pre- colonial Igbo society was not a democratic spirit as such—it was merely pre-feudal republicanism that was all too elementally primitive in its pre-modernism. It was as if he wanted to celebrate the fact the Igbo society had democracy before the coming of the White man. He was a pioneer of African—or Africanised —literature; he was not just the doyen of African writers of that literary genre; he actually reinvented it, turning almost everything else prior to Things Fall Apart a mere prologue to his output. But this teller of tales was not an artist for arts' sake; he saw himself as a man with a mission—'to write back,' as he said—and write back he did, using the language of the new master, the language in which the original lie was told and an insult couched; and, in the process, he bent it to serve his own purposes. A great and playful manipulator of words, which to him were bullets, Achebe domesticated and indigenized the tongue of the conquering English to serve as his weapon for the counter-attack in his battle against what he interpreted as a condescending representation by the colonial enterprise. There Was a Country, which he described as his personal history of the Biafran civil war, released as a literary swan song almost at the very last hour, was meant to exorcise the ghost of it, and lay it all neatly to rest; because, unfortunately even here and up to this late hour, Achebe was still writing back, not to the earlier misrepresentation but to a reading of the nation's contemporary history that was for him altogether too inconvenient. And so, he now decided perhaps unconsciously but certainly not unmindful of his expected role as the intellectual arm and 'writer-back' of the Biafra experience, to take his final parting shot at Nigeria. If soldiers fought with guns, Achebe, the intellectual, would do his bit with words. And so he did. As an activist, his politics was as dismal a failure as his fiction had been a phenomenal success. A self-proclaimed follower of M. Aminu Kano, Achebe never really threw himself headlong into the fray of radical politics as would be expected of a social critic of his standing; but identifying with the political tendency dominant in the former Biafran enclave, which from his writing was something he would naturally have wanted to do, would have exposed him as a tribal champion, which was probably what he was at heart. While in his fiction the plotting might sometimes be as gripping as the characterization is memorable, his analysis of Nigeria's misfortunes had often been neither thoroughly original nor strikingly profound—and nor yet as prophetic as touted. It never went beyond a justification of rebellion or Hausa-Fulani bashing. But if Nigeria was a proposition worth saving— and it was and is—then rebellion against its authority and territorial integrity ought never to have been attempted; but since it was, it was only right and proper that it was crushed. And if federalism was itself an idea worth defending—and all leaders of all sections of the country had always maintained that it was the only right way Nigeria could be governed—then Nigeria's real heroes were the soldiers who risked their lives in July 1966 to save the nation's federal spirit that then faced clear and present danger at General Aguiyi-Ironsi's hand and not those who precipitated the rebellion that pushed the country into a civil war. Today, neither the British nor the Hausa- Fulani are rulers of Nigeria; but, still haunted by the spectre of an incurable persecution complex, he was to return again and again to that exhausted theme of a permanent victimhood for his people. Harping on that theme might help by rekindling the grand idea behind that early post-independence communal orthodoxy of I-before-others. And here, to all intents and purposes, Achebe was the African grandfather narrating the account to children around one of the civil war's last bushfires. If, as is often said, memoir writing is chiefly inventing the truth, here Achebe had indeed really spun some yarns; and it was here also that he finally revealed his last literary persona, of which the world would come to see four. He wrote his novels as a black man, his criticisms as an African, his essays as a Nigerian, and he wrote There Was a Country, as an Igbo man. And in retrospect we must now read The trouble with Nigeria backwards and see it for what it is—merely that book's prematurely released epilogue of the swan song. For, if with the Anthills of the Savannah, he had, still embittered and not by way of a choice unforced, come in from the Biafra cold to re- embrace Nigeria, with the publication of There Was a Country, he was back, boots, bayonets and all, in the trenches. And today, with the benefit of hindsight, even his admirers might have to indeed begin to wonder whether their patriot had in fact all along been a closet ethnic jingoist. For, the fact of patriotism is not established by the mere act of dissidence or social criticism in which Achebe revelled throughout his career; and, in any case, it would remain difficult and problematic to accurately measure the degree of the fervour of the patriotism of a former rebel, especially more so in a nation like Nigeria that is now out to prove the innocence of many a self-confessed convict by an all too convenient reinterpretation of his guilt. And our hero finally exited the stage as an anthill of the rainforest. But all this in no way diminishes the quality of his writing or the Africanness or even the Nigerianness of his total output, or the allure of his authentically drawn native characters or the piquant domestication of the colonial tongue, or his place in the pantheon of African literature, which for a long time to come will remain assured. During his life, Achebe was the recipient of multiple literary honours, though he was to miss the Booker and the Nobel. On the national scene, he twice rejected Nigeria's national honours given by two regimes that he believed had no honour to bestow. But at the real home where it mattered, he was honoured by his kinsmen in 1999 for his dedication to the myths and legends of his ancestors. And now that he had gone to join them, may they receive him with all the honours and the glory due to a devoted descendant. |
Re: Achebe: Fall Of The Iroko. by naijaking1: 11:15pm On Dec 02, 2013 |
Who be this intellectual dwarf |
Re: Achebe: Fall Of The Iroko. by ruffhandu: 12:42am On Dec 03, 2013 |
Good command of words |
(1) (Reply)
Some Notable Events In The Live Of Africa Apartheid Icon--nelson Mandela / Defected Govs Will Come Back Like Prodigal Sons.....gulak / Nigerian Launches Own Drone
(Go Up)
Sections: politics (1) business autos (1) jobs (1) career education (1) romance computers phones travel sports fashion health religion celebs tv-movies music-radio literature webmasters programming techmarket Links: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) Nairaland - Copyright © 2005 - 2024 Oluwaseun Osewa. All rights reserved. See How To Advertise. 25 |