Chinua Achebe and the Damnation of Faint Praise
by zunguzungu
A few weeks back, at Critical Mass, there was an interesting interview with Norman Rush, the author of a variety of mzungu novels (hat tip). I won’t comment on Rush himself, but a comment he made caught my eye. After the interviewer asks him if he was influenced by any African writers-and good for Scott Esposito for asking a question that wouldn’t occur to nine tenths of critics in his place-Rush namedrops the usual troika (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o) and moves on. But he first places himself in his place as mzungu, noting that “No non-African could do what Achebe has done.”
Maybe. Probably. Hell, almost certainly. But there’s a backhandedness to this compliment that makes me nervous. See, here’s the thing: Achebe is just a great writer, full stop. I’m not sure anyone could do what he did; I’m biased, but I’m pretty sure no one has. And while this may seem like a small point, like complaining that a genuine compliment just isn’t enough of a compliment, there’s a larger point of which it’s in service, a larger issue of who gets to “know” what sorts of knowledges and why. It diminishes his achievement to pretend that white writers don’t write about the things he wrote about, because if Rush’s novels (or any post-war white novelist) had to be placed next to Achebe’s, we might have to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that the best practitioner of English literature is an African.
I am certainly not suggesting we treat novel-writing like a foot race. But there are those who certainly do think of literature as a kind of olympic sport, and for “our” writers to share the same field with “their” writers would be as calamitous as for a black pitcher to throw to a white batter in baseball’s pre-Jackie Robinson era. He might strike him out, after all (or, more complexly, he might not). So, as a result, we get separate events for “race” or “cultural” writers, distinct and cordoned off from the more universal concerns of real writers. And, as widely read as Achebe is, it always irks me that people so rarely revere him in the way that I think he should be revered. I may seem to be making the banal request that people should revere him more, I’m not, not really; I’m saying we should revere him better, doing so for better reasons.
Things Fall Apart, for example, is a very deceptively simple book, and this apparent simplicity deceives (I suspect) the vast majority of his readers. Okonkwo may be a man who never let thinking get in the way of whatever he wanted to do, but his puppetmaster’s seemingly uncrafted and naïve narration is as tightly plotted and structured as the Greek dramaturgy it both tropes on and defies (something Soyinka has done more ostentatiously). It may seem to be the simple story of a man and his destiny, a simply redemptive vision of a romantic lifestyle wiped out by colonialism and a condemnation of the colonialists that did it, but part of its magnificence as a piece of writing is that it manages to be all of this without disturbing its ability to also be about the ways that culture gets politicized, the way that traditionalism manages to express (and, dare I say, sublate) deeper and less coherent political anxieties and desires, particularly different modes of gender practice. And it’s a novel which enacts these conflicting desires with a certain magnificent disdain for resolving them, or moralizing on them; in fact, so much of what Okonkwo does is gets moralized upon in such spectacularly unsuccessful ways that one can (I would argue) understand Okonkwo only by deferring judgment of him, like a particle in a parable on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The plot hinges on why Okonkwo kills his stepson, but that act is also the novel’s black box; one can offer any number of explanations for Okonkwo’s act (and the consequences which it provokes in the style of Greek tragedy), but the novel does everything in its power to illustrate the ultimate unknowability of that origination, until one is left only to reflect on the ways that Okonkwo’s unknowability gets known, the ways that fictive truths take the place of a true truth eternally deferred. Precisely because the author refuses to authoritatively know Okonkwo, the novel has a profound and complex double-life, a narrative given shape by the absence at its center.
As I read back on what I just read, I find myself sounding uncomfortably like a bad post-structural theorist from the eighties, so although I think my reading is sound, I’ll put it aside. The real point buried back there is that Achebe is not, in a “literary” sense, anything but a peer of “great” writers. And of course Norman Rush didn’t say that. But there is, hidden in the nest of assumptions out of which his aside slithered, a particular claim for the proper spheres inhabited by white writers and the proper sphere inhabited by Africans: what an African knows, an mzungu cannot, and vice versa. To say that only an African could write what Achebe wrote is to excuse himself for not having done so, and to claim his own little piece of the rock, the mzungu novel.
Not many people waste their breath in asserting that only a white person could really understand what it means to be white, and rightly. I think of the mystifications of the title character in Esk’ia Mphaphlele’s “Mrs. Plum” as an example of how it can be through the eyes of non-white characters (and authors) that “whiteness” gets expressed in all its glory. Sometimes those who live outside your world understand you in a way you don’t understand yourself, and this is as important a part of identity as the kind of claims made by a “race” writer. It is largely a white fiction that only Africans can understand Africa, and so too is Rush’s space-clearing gesture for himself a popular kind of white privilege within “African letters”: he is happy to be shielded from competition, to be awarded a tiny, but comfortable corner in which to sit. Rush is as much a race writer in this sense as Achebe. But while Achebe was canny enough to realize that wazungu were quick to extend him the benefit of the doubt with regards to his subject (being African, he must surely know Africans), he was also aware that he hardly deserved that credit, and made something of that realization. What, after all, did a Christian-educated Nigerian of the mid-twentieth century really know about the inner life of a late nineteenth century Igbo warrior, a man who never lived to hear the word Nigeria? So instead of eliding that knowledge, he built a magnificent literary edifice on top of it. Instead of donning the victory wreath he was awarded for a game he was too good to play, he proclaimed that the center was hollow, and would not hold.
addendum:
We’re coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of Things Fall Apart, so the haters have started to pile on.
zunguzungu 
This is a really smart, interesting commentary.
The payoff argument has a lot of implications. It reminds of the argument between Obeyesekere and Sahlins, and of the rhetorical and discursive moves of Obeyesekere, the native subject claiming exclusive insight into the subjectivity of all natives. The risks of abandoning that move from the standpoint of any “African writer” are considerable, however, simply in market terms. That is what the African novel is asked to do: authoritatively represent to the universal (read: white Western) reader the particular experience of Africans. To give that up is to expose African novels to other judgements, while opening the possibility that quintessentially colonial and colonizing representations have truth or value or pleasure to them, too, of some sort or another. (E.g., we have to rescue the official at the end of Things Fall Apart from being boxed off as Achebe represents him). I read Rush as a fiction of my own experiences first, obviously, but it’s definitely interesting to consider what happens when Rush is read not alongside Fuller or Naipaul or Achebe, as a fiction of “being there” or “being African”, but alongside Updike or Bellow or David Foster Wallace or Pynchon, etc., as a fiction that is not there but here, in the here of everywhere.
Thanks Tim, that’s helpful. I had been holding off on this post until I read the Rush novel, but work piled up and made me put it off for a while; as a white guy who finds himself trying to professionally “represent” Africa, I’m interested in what you said about him for many of the same reasons as you are, I think. I’ll have to check out the Obeyesekere and Sahlins debate, which I’ve only read about, not actually read.
I like the phrase “the here of everywhere.” As for the Updikes of the world, even when Updike writes a novel like “The Coup” (set in an “fictional” African state called Kush) or The Terrorist, more recently, this doesn’t seem to make him a “world” writer when he writes about Rabbit, as if Rabbit doesn’t live in the world. A classically American isolationist conceit, of course. But Achebe once mentioned a letter he got from Updike regarding Achebe’s novel Arrow of God, where Updike praises him for doing what (as he puts it) a Western writer could never do, kill off his main character in a cloud of ignominious defeat. This seems on the most basic level, simply wrong; there’s nothing Western about saving the protagonist, and plenty of Western novels do kill off and disgrace their main characters (and someone like Soyinka seems to take his conception of tragedy whole-cloth from greek models, though he, rightly, demurs at seeing ancient greece as western). But its more interesting to see how Updike is there fashioning himself as “Western Writer,” whose task and criteria are simply different than an African writer like Achebe. For Achebe, by contrast, universalism always has a peculiar status: he’s really attentive to people’s misuses of it but doesn’t dismiss the possibility that there might be somethign of value there (he calls for a moratorium on its use until we can get it right, sort of like the death penalty in Illinois).
The trap here for “African fiction” is set by more than the Updikes of the world, though. It’s also fashioned by the way that African nationalism has captured the high literary project. Even when “African fiction” writes against nationalism or writes from exile (Ngugi, for example), it is still stuck with representing the real or true African nation, still stuck with being a basically didactic fiction, teaching the Western and African intelligentsia that compose the audience what the official African subject should be. The freedom to write fiction which has no didactic task, or which is about the novel itself as a form, or is a commentary on a popular genre, and so on and so on, is not available to “African fiction”. (Much as “African history” as a scholarly form often disciplines itself to a certain kind of sobriety and piety, and sniffs at work which in other fields might be judged to be creative, whimsical, innovative, and so on.)
The way out strikes me as paved by exactly what you note about Achebe: that Achebe is performing a feat of historical imagination that is not altogether that different from what a mzungu might perform with the same history, from some of the same vantage points. So the way that we might put Joyce Cary and Achebe in different “boxes” is suddenly called into question, and we might wonder why we call upon Achebe to serve as the authentic voice of the vanished African subject while we shove Cary aside to be taught in some other way, some other time (if taught at all).
You’re right, though in strict terms of market forces, it does tend to be the Updikes who set the terms on which writers like Achebe enter the global literary marketplace. There’s certainly plenty of examples of non-sober and non-pious African fiction out there, too (or at least there used to be); the old Onitsha pamphlets were about as trashy and sensational as could be, as were the first Nigerian writers in general, people like Cyprian Ekwensi. And Kenyan crime fiction is good and charmingly irreverent (Son of Woman is my favorite, though its long been supplanted by newer stuff). But that stuff is/was all for domestic consumption, while the African fiction that gets marketed in an international market (and which, as you put it, takes the name “high literary” tends to be about pious and sober topics (child soldiers seems to be all the rage these days, for example).
I would, though, put some pressure on the idea of “fiction which has no didactic task,” if only because, in my neck of the academic woods, notions of a depoliticized “aesthetic” feel much more limiting to me than the expectation of political relevance or didactic purpose,especially when people blithely assert that aesthetic is somehow an escape from, as opposed to a strategy of, politics. For me, putting Updike/Cary/Rush and Achebe in the same category makes visible Achebe’s “literary” qualities, but it also helps emphasize the ways that white writers are just as actively self-fashioning themselves as representative of a racial subject, and the constitutive nature of that practice to any sense of what the “literary” is. That probably has as much to do with my particular projects, though; what I find most interesting in Achebe is his attention not to questions of who is right and who is wrong (since every perspective is flawed and mediated) but his exploration of how official truths are produced, which TFA as novel becomes a vehicle for. Or, in Arrow of God, his interest in how official truths get subverted when they don’t “work” the way they’re supposed to. In both cases, it seems like he manages to make any conception of “representation” take on so much water, so fast, that you’re left, like Foucault reading criminology texts, scratching your head and trying to figure out how people come to believe the things they do, instead of trying to figure out what the correct belief should be.
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