Chinua Achebe: Father of African Literature 1930 - 2013

Lecture 5http://viennachinuaachebe.wordpress.com/

Derek Barkerwww.derekbarker.info

Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com

Questions on interview I• Achebe quotes the proverb:

“until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

• What does he mean by it?

Questions on interview II

•What is the main lesson that Achebe draws from his studies at the English department?

Questions on interview III

•What are Achebe’s views on translation of his works into the Igbo language?

Questions on interview IV

•What are Achebe’s views on the writing process?

Questions on interview IV

•What is the role, if any, of the writer as a public intellectual?

Questions on interview V

• Is there a tension between aesthetics and political engagement?

Questions on interview VI

•What does he say about his representations of women in his novels?

Question VII

• “No longer at ease” - autobiography or fiction?

Ontology, what is it?

1: a branch of metaphysics concerned with the

nature and relations of being 2: a particular theory about the nature of being

or the kinds of things that have existence

Question: who are you?

Identities I

• Are you a typical / authentic Austrian / Italian / Kenyan?

Or• Do you see yourself as having a hybrid

cultural identity?

Identities II

Can you think of any political agendas that are supported either by the view that there is an authenic (original, essential) identity OR a hybrid (mixed, multicultural) identity?

Main Characters: Obi I

• Obi finds himself in a constant battle between traditions of the world into which he was born (that of the village and his traditional African roots), represented by the Umuofian Progressive Union, and the conventions of a changing world.

Main Characters: Obi II

• Obi finds himself at the beginning of a generation of change, caught between two worlds. He is unable to marry the woman that he loves because she is considered an outcast.

Main Characters: Obi III

• He claims to want to marry her anyway because by the time he has children, the world will have changed, and it will not matter, just as it does not matter now that his father is a convert to Christianity (a conversion that was once quite scandalous).

Main Characters: Obi IV

• Obi's birth name is Obiajulu which means "the mind at last is at rest," and this naming is a looming irony, considering the title of the novel and Obi's predicament. Obi is ill at ease in both of his cultural experiences—he lies in the middle, a difficult place.

Main Characters: Clara I

• Clara is another character in the novel that is struggling in the changing world of pre-independence Nigeria. She is educated abroad, like Obi, and has a career as a nurse. She has a mind of her own and is often stubborn but shows herself to be quite caring, nevertheless.

Main Characters: Clara II

• She is strong-minded though not intellectual and finds herself bound to a tradition that seems unfair to both her and Obi. She is burdened by the fact that she is an osu, which means that because of her ancestral past, she is an outcast.

Main Characters: III

• From the beginning Clara's romance with Obi was on unstable ground. Symbolically we need only to look at where Clara and Obi first began their relationship: in the water, on turbulent and fluctuating grounds

Main Characters: Green I

• The character of Mr. Green is symbolic of the white, European presence in Africa that resulted from the spread of England's empire and its colonial hold on Nigeria. He is an arrogant man, who believes that the African is "corrupt through and through" and that it is the British who have brought Africans civilization and education

Main Characters: Green II

• Significantly, Mr. Green is a symbol of an older world that is constantly present in the Nigeria of the late fifties, which Achebe portrays, only several years before its eventual independence, when a figure like Green will remain a problem but eventually become obsolete.

Kortenaar I Kortenaar, Neil ten. “Beyond Authenticity and Creolization: Reading Achebe Writing Culture” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 1, Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition (Jan., 1995), pp. 30-42See: Blog Page „Resources“

Kortenaar II •The discussion of culture in postcolonial literary criticism revolves around the twin poles of authenticity and hybridization.•One response to the experience of colonialism and the denigration of cultural identities has been to call for a return to pre-colonial authenticity.

Kortenaar III •In current debates the standard of fidelity to origins is often Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s rejection of English in favour of Gikuyu for the language of his novels•This contrasts with other writers’ acceptance of some degree of interfertilization / creolization / mongrelization or metissage

Kortenaar IV Advocates of creolization denounce colonialism but believe that it is irreversible. That position does not leave the former colonized without a culture: they have a hybrid or creole culture that has borrowed from the metropolitan culture and in the process subverted and indigenized it.

Kortenaar V When conceived as a peculiarly postcolonial condition, however, creolization is open to the same objection that is levied against authenticity: that cultures have always been characterized by fluidity and exchange.

Kortenaar VI Hybridization, like authenticity, is unintelligible without a notion of cultural purity. Both authenticity and creolization ascribe the significance of cultural elements to national provenance: ‘where a thing is from is what it means.'

Kortenaar VIIThere "are no anti-essentialist accounts of identity", reifications of culture (including not only authenticity but also creolization) are rhetorical in intention: they manipulate shared symbols in order to win consent for political action.

Kortenaar VIII

Although purporting to describe what people are and what they do, authenticity and creolization actually challenge people to identify with a certain image of themselves and so to adopt a certain identity.

Kortenaar IX To accept the validity of either authenticity or creolization as a description of oneself is to accept certain modes of dressing, speaking, and writing as belonging properly to oneself and to reject other styles as false.

Kortenaar X

Such definitions of identity create a world not only of members and nonmembers but also of loyalists and traitors. Implicit in such a world is the assumption that there are people who have lost their identity.

Kortenaar XI To say that authenticity and creolization serve rhetorical purposes is not to say that these constructs are false. They are the metaphors by which a communal identity is fashioned; identities have always been constructed by such means.

Kortenaar XIICommunities are constituted not by the possession of a shared culture that shapes the individual and makes him or her a replicate in miniature (a “mini-copy”) of the whole but rather by the ongoing debate over what the shared culture is, how members should behave, and what children should be taught

Kortenaar XIII People fashion/create their identity by identifying with cultural symbols and by narrating a place in the world. Of course, a community's narratives are shaped according to conventions, and narrative conventions change from age to age and differ from clime to clime.

Kortenaar XIV Narratives and symbols are social institutions that outlast the lives of individuals, and cultural agents must construct their lives within these inherited parameters. But individuals do not therefore merely replicate their inheritance.

Kortenaar XV Culture is not a pre-descriptive grammar but rather a reservoir [repertoire?] of often contradictory potential practices that social actors can make use of when communal identity is being renegotiated, as it always is.

Kortenaar XVI David Laitin distinguishes between two faces of culture. The first face is a symbolic system that establishes values and horizons of common sense.[Problem: there is almost always disagreement on values and „common“ sense]

Kortenaar XVII

The second face of culture locates the significance of cultural symbols not so much in their meaning as in the fact that they are shared and can be used to summon a community to collective action.

Kortenaar XVIII

The first face establishes the limits of the thinkable, whereas people self-consciously shape the second, that is, common communal concepts that can be used as calls to action. Laitin suggests how these two faces can be reconciled.

Kortenaar XIX

The second face acknowledges that symbols serve the political and rhetorical ends of cultural agents; it cannot predict, however, what those ends will be.

Kortenaar XX

For an understanding of ends (purposes), the first face of culture needs to be considered - as well as the narrative conventions available within a community at any particular juncture.

Kortenaar XXI

The inherited symbolic system does not determine who will win in any given conflict, but it directs community members to "what is worth fighting about"

Kortenaar XXII

Achebe's depiction of cultural redefinition at the time of the colonial encounter facilitates understanding of contemporary postcolonial communities.

Kortenaar XXIII

Achebe represents culture in Africa as Paulin Hountondji argues that it should be represented: as something invented and in constant need of reinvention

Kortenaar XXIV Authenticity and creolization are accounts of culture that do what Walter Benn Michaels calls "cultural work" (682). Michaels argues that attributing a culture to someone who does not practice it implicitly ascribes culture to genes, blood, or the collective unconscious and commits a racist fallacy.

Kortenaar XXV

My point is related but different: neither authenticity nor creolization has ontological validity, but both are valid as metaphors that permit collective self-fashioning.

Kortenaar XXVI In rejecting the notion of pure, uncontested cultures, I may appear to side with advocates of creolization against supporters of authenticity. Objections to authenticity's ontological status do not, however, negate its force as an enabling metaphor

Kortenaar XXVII One may not be able to return to the world of one's ancestors, but one can claim to be doing so, with political effect. Tradition has an ontological existence, not in the past but in the present, where it affects people's self-images and their behavior.

Kortenaar XXVIII Appeals to authenticity are neither regressive nor progressive in themselves. But Ngugi's call for a return to the language that he learned at his mother's knee, made in the name of decolonizing the mind, serves a Marxist-inspired project of social change by directly addressing the classes who could not read his novels if they were written in English.

Kortenaar XXIX Like authenticity, hybridization is a metaphor that does not define a particular political program. Hybridization is most often invoked by advocates of pluralism and tolerance, but it can also underwrite imperialism.

Kortenaar XXX "The intersection of races and the blending of opposed civilizations are the most powerful auxiliaries of liberty," writes Jules Michelet, a nationalist and believer in France's imperial mission

Kortenaar XXXI

Michelet claims that the blending of races makes France manifestly superior to other nations, which are less exposed to outside influences, purer, and therefore weaker.

Kortenaar XXXII Creolization, like authenticity, is a rallying standard in intracommunal debate. What is really at stake in such debates is not authenticity or creolization but democracy as opposed to totalitarianism

Kortenaar XXXIII My own attempt to subsume authenticity and hybridization within a single discussion is, of course, part of a current North American debate that has uncertain meaning for African debates.

Kortenaar XXXIV That I have eschewed the division usually drawn between imperialist capitalist modernity and pre-capitalist tradition makes possible a vision of the equality of cultural identities but precludes explanation of why some collectivities achieve power over others.

Kortenaar XXXV

A neo-Marxist narrative of late capitalist modernity's expansion and its integration of the globe in an unjust order might offer a response.

Kortenaar XXXVI

What my own narrative offers is a reminder that political and economic imperialism is not synonymous with the overtaking of one national culture by another.

Kortenaar XXXVII

Authenticity and creolization are best regarded as valuable rhetorical tools that can be made to serve liberation. It may also be liberating to remember that these constructions are effectively rhetorical.

•Next: “Arrow of God”…

•Enjoy your reading!