Achebe: redefining colonial values?

Recently, Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for 2007. Stephanie Kitchen argues that although the prize is decided by the literary establishment and still embodies the values of the former colonial power, African writers are fighting back as 'active definers and custodians of society’s values'.

‘The colonialist critic, unwilling to accept the validity of sensibilities other than his own, has made particular point of dismissing the African novel…did not the black people in America, deprived of their own musical instruments, take the trumpet and the trombone and blow them as they had never been blown before, as indeed they were not designed to be blown? And the result, was it not jazz? Let every people bring their gifts to the great festival of the world’s cultural harvest and mankind will be all the richer for the variety and distinctiveness of the offerings.
…
My people speak disapprovingly of an outsider whose wailing drowned the grief of the owner of the corpse… One last word to the owners…most of what remains to be done can best be tackled by ourselves.’ – Chinua Achebe[1]

At a ceremony in Oxford on 28 June 2007, Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s great living novelist, for some, the greatest, ‘the founding father of African literature’, and the founding editor of the groundbreaking African Writers Series, was awarded the second Man Booker International Prize (http://www.manbookerinternational.com/home).

Achebe has written over 20 books, including novels, short stories, essays, collections of poetry and children’s books. Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, has sold over 10,000,000 copies around the world and been translated into 50 languages. Achebe is the recipient of over 30 honorary degrees and numerous awards for his work. Now 77, and paralysed from the waist down in a car accident in 1990, he did not attend the ceremony.

In conjunction with the award, the prize hosted a public panel discussion of the jury, comprising Elaine Showalter (the chair), Colm Toibin, Nadine Gordimer and Ion Trewin, the Booker prize administrator. It was an extraordinary moment, a rare opportunity to listen to Nadine Gordimer, one of Africa’s greatest authors pay tribute to the work of another whom she deeply and publicly admires. Gordimer’s participation on the jury was doubtless instrumental in this much deserved, for many, too long delayed, recognition of Achebe by the international literary establishment.

The Man Book International Prize is intended as a ‘global’ literary prize, awarded to a writer ‘whose body of work has make a major contribution to world literature’, rather than to an individual book. It may be awarded to any writer whose work is available in English and deserves to be better known or more widely translated. In the words of John Carey, chair of the judges for the inaugural prize ‘This new prize will reward high international achievement, but unlike other global prizes, it will target fiction in English, or translated into English, and so will celebrate English-language fiction as a major cultural force in the modern world’.[2] The prize differs from other book prizes in that the judges, not publishers, authors or academics, nominate the candidates. Each year, the jury inherits and may discard or add to the shortlist from the previous year. The prize does not have hard-coded standards or criteria.

This new ‘international’ Booker prize should not bypass debates about its legitimacy unchecked. Once again, it raises questions about the British establishment’s all too familiar tendency to slide from national, parochial literary concerns into uncritical notions of the ‘international’ or ‘universal’ (for which, read London, Oxford, New York, Washington…). Worse, arguably, it plays to colonial and neo-colonial practices of the literary and publishing industries, whereby it is deemed not unethical, at least acceptable and inevitable, for the former colonial power to sit in judgement and exercise power over the books, authors and literatures produced by descendants of the empire. As the prize develops, these suspicions must be kept under scrutiny.

But for the moment, such a happy and imaginative choice doubtless increases the stature of this nascent award in the eyes of the international literary and publishing communities. The International Man Booker may raise lesser known writers out of the ghetto, for example the dubious, and for many discredited - on literary and ethical grounds - Commonwealth Writers Prize (which, for example, has disqualified Zimbabwean writers from entry - imagine, African literature without Shimmer Chinodya, Yvonne Vera, Dambudzo Marachera...), and into the mainstream. No one can be more deserving of that than Achebe after all he has given as enrichment to our different and shared cultures. If the award leads to the revival, promotion, translation and dissemination of all his works, then it will have made its mark.

The jury had begun with a longlist of 70 names, around 250 novels, collections of short stories, which included writers from 29 countries in 20 languages. They had met three times, in Washington, Toronto and Dublin. At the second meeting, the list was reduced to 30 names. At the final meeting, the shortlist drawn up and winner decided. The final shortlist comprised Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Peter Carey, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Michel Tournier.

The judges were keen to respond to anticipated media criticisms, such as the dominant presence of Anglo-Saxon writers on the shortlist, of their own national prejudices and the fact the list included few authors of books in translation. They asserted that they had made an enormous effort to be as wide-ranging and inclusive as possible, acknowledging the genuine difficulty that whilst one of the missions of the prize is to encourage translation, they could only review writers whose books had been translated into English, reflecting the challenge more generally for more books from languages other than English to be translated.

Nadine Gordimer was keen to keep the discussion focused on the shortlist, the purpose of the prize being to make important works better known, and to give them as much publicity as possible. Anthills of the Savannah has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987; this award gave opportunities for wider promotion of the book. ‘It would be presumptuous to say we chose the greatest writer in the world’, but nevertheless ‘Chinua Achebe’s early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature. He has gone on to achieve what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer’s purpose: “a new-found utterance” for the capture of life’s complexity’. Achebe’s books ‘explore the mystery of life…bringing ‘a new found utterance’ to what we are as human beings, to what life is and its changing circumstances’. Additional to the famous trilogy of novels, Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), she spoke warmly of A Man of the People (1966), ‘a prophetic book, an exposure of corruption in a newly independent African state after colonial oppression; in its attendancy to the corruption, not only in Africa, also in other parts of the world, eating away at our humanity…preventing the establishment of true democracy’.

The other judges commented on Achebe’s achievement in his original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the post-modern breaking of sequence traditions and arriving at a new prescription thereby out-dating any prescriptivity. They commented Achebe describes changes taking place that are momentous. He had written books that could be given to anyone in the world, to any general reader who loves books. Elaine Showalter described Achebe as ‘a wonderful choice’. It had been ‘the year of judging dangerously…in the current state of the world, we can’t pretend fiction does not have some political repercussions’. Gordimer added that governments feared literature because it makes people think, ‘true thought is a danger to governments that are oppressive in the weight of propaganda’.

The judges stressed they had not been overtly concerned with ‘politically correct’ categories of the gender, sexuality or nationality of the writer. There had been no discussions about ‘balancing the list’. ‘What matters is the quality of writing…writing is the important issue…nor did we sweep anything under the bookcase’. Nadine Gordimer stressed that concerns of sex or race had been irrelevant to the literary question of ‘new found utterance’, and ‘literature being about the mystery of modern life’ – echoing and inversing Achebe’s thoughts on the matter, expressed elsewhere: ‘it is not even a matter of color. For we have Nadine Gordimer’.[3]

James Currey, the eminent African studies publisher and inspirational force behind the African Writers Series (AWS) asked about the extent to which the judges had taken into account the ‘general literary situation of the writer’. After all, Achebe’s contribution to literature had not only been his own books, but the ‘massive contribution he had made to the African Writers Series’. In this sense, the award celebrated not only Achebe, but the body of literature, not always uncontested, he had inspired. Gordimer agreed about the importance of the publication of the AWS, which had brought African literature ‘out beyond the borders’. It had been ‘an assertion of the freedom of expression’ and had served as ‘an encouragement to younger writers’. In the end though, she felt Achebe’s lasting and greatest achievement remained his ‘new found utterance’. It is ‘all there, he synthesises all these things’. From all ideas and thoughts about what it takes to be a writer, ‘there must be some special quality’. For as the writer, you are ‘going to bear the chalk around your eye’. Writers are engaged in the endless task of finding new modes of telling our stories as human beings, and ‘Achebe has gone very far in that’.

Gordimer, now 84 years old herself, is one of the most exceptional novelists and short story writers in English. She won the Booker Prize in 1974, whose work has been translated into over 20 languages. With acute intelligence and her deep, long and intimate understanding of the art of writing and literature, she spoke in almost mythical proportions. For many of us present, and for others throughout the world, she has helped shape and deepen our understanding of apartheid South Africa and the human dimensions of its injustices and horrors. Her now canonical and classic texts will doubtless go on elucidating that period of history and lived present for generations to come.

African literature and its appreciation are currently in rude health from our perspective in Britain. There has been Achebe’s Booker prize award; the passing of Sembene Ousmane to accolades of his massive contribution to literature, film and culture globally; Wole Soyinka’s multitude of appearances in conjunction with his new work You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s marvellous success at winning the Orange Prize for her new novel Half a Yellow Sun, and achieving popular status, including TV recognition.

This said, there remains a long way to go to achieve true cultural exchange and dialogue between North and South, ‘…the problem of dialogue which has plagued Afro-European relations for centuries’ that will persist ‘until Europe is ready. Ready to concede total African humanity’. But in the literary domain – involving ‘the active definers and custodians of society’s values…literature giv[ing] us a second handle on reality; enabling us to encounter…the same threats to integrity that may assail...in real life’[5] – Achebe’s prophecy is being fulfilled: ‘I have no doubt at all about the existence of the African novel. This form of fiction has seized the imagination of many African writers and they will use it according to their differing abilities, sensitivities and visions without seeking anyone’s permission. I believe it will grow and prosper. I believe it has a great future.’[6]

Stephanie Kitchen
July 2007

References
1 ‘Colonialist Criticism’ in Chinua Achebe: Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 2003 edition, 1st publ. 1989, p. 89
2 Press release of the inaugural prize,
3 ‘Thoughts on the African Novel’, in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 2003, p. 93
4 ‘Impediments to dialogue between North and South’ in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, p. 23
5 ‘What has literature got to do with it’, in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, p. 170
6 ‘Thoughts on the African Novel’, in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 2003, p. 99

* Stephanie Kitchen is Publications Manager for Pambazuka News.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org