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Wednesday
I’m slowly but surely getting a sense of the “Post-colonial Anglophone Literature” class I’m currently teaching at the University of Ljubljana. It’s a wonderfully international class, with students from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Macedonia and Turkey joining the Slovenian students. I’m also finding that my (admittedly limited) acquaintance with Slovenian literature is coming in handy because I’m able to note how Slovenia too once used literature to find an identity separate from the Austro-Hungarian empire that once controlled it.
Last week we looked at two Nigerian novelists, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in the light of the post-colonialist theories of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. Said describes how the West has Orientalized other parts of the world, imagining cultural features that confirm in it its own superiority. In my first week with the class, we talked about how H. Rider Haggard in She and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness depicted Africa as both repulsively barbaric and strangely alluring, with beautiful women in the heart of the dark continent casting their spell over white explorers.
We also talked about Fanon’s insight that colonized people are brainwashed into seeing themselves through Western eyes. It’s bad enough for others to see you as barbaric and inferior, but the problem is compounded when you see yourself that way. I talked about how colonialist indoctrination was a form of soft power, which supplemented the hard power of armies with rifles. William Blake’s compelling image for such soft power is “mind-forged manacles” (from his poem “London”).
To counteract such brainwashing, Fanon called for a “literature of combat,” writers who would help create a new national consciousness. One of the writers he had in mind was Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart gave names and stories to African characters. In this novel about the tribal Igbo at the time of the British incursion, we get a very different picture of native villagers than we do from Heart of Darkness. Indeed, in an important post-colonial essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Achebe calls out Conrad for his two-dimensional depictions of Africans and for his shuddering horror that he shares something in common with them. Achebe finds objectionable what for Conrad is a great revelation: that the heart of darkness lies not only in Africa but in civilized England as well.
My own view is that Conrad has much to teach us about Europe’s existential crisis at the time—how its view of itself as Christian and enlightened clashed with its brutal grab for Africa’s natural resources. But I agree with Achebe that, in using Africans as no more than props in this internal drama, Conrad dehumanizes them. In class I contrasted Conrad with Shakespeare, who always grants characters their full humanity.
In any event, Fanon, had he lived to see Achebe’s essay, would have applauded. And he probably did read Things Fall Apart, which would qualify in Fanon’s eyes as “literature of combat.” Fanon complains about those native writers who write for the colonizers rather than for the colonized, but this cannot be said for Things Fall Apart, which played a role in Nigeria’s liberation two years later.
For proof of the book’s impact on a native Nigerian, we have the example of a next-generation Nigerian author. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was a girl, she read only English-language stories, especially (so her Wikipedia entry tells us) the racist and sexist stories of British author Enid Blyton. Many of Blyton’s stories were typical of British attitudes in the 1920s to 1950s, including (to cite one particularly obnoxious story) The Little Black Doll. In it, a dark colored doll is considered ugly and is mocked by the other dolls until a shower of “magic rain” washes his face clean—at which point he is welcomed back into the fold. When Fanon talks about colonial culture teaching Africans to hate their bodies, these are the kinds of stories he has in mind.
Having been raised on such fare, Adichie experienced Things Fall Apart as a revelation when she read it at 10. Indeed, Achebe’s novel worked just as Fanon said combative literature should work, instilling in Adichie a liberating sense of national pride. (Other works that aided in her awakening were Camara Laye’s The African Child, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child and Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood.) Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus, in a nod to Achebe, opens with the line, “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja did not go to communion…” Her new sense of national pride also led Adichie to continue learning Igbo along with English, even though she could have dropped it. And indeed, Purple Hibiscus is scattered throughout with Igbo phrases.
We talked about this feature of her novel. If, as Fanon announced, authors should write to the colonized rather than to the colonizers, shouldn’t they use tribal languages instead of English? It’s an issue that many African authors have wrestled with. Achebe said he chose English because he found Igbo to be too wooden and perhaps too because he wanted to reach beyond the Igbo—not only to the rest of Nigeria but to all of Africa and to all of the world. Indeed, many readers in other African countries consider Achebe to be their Shakespeare.
Salman Rushdie addresses the issue of writing in the language of the conqueror. In India’s case, English is much of what gives the country, which features 122 major languages, any sense of unity. (Nigeria for its part has 525 different languages.) If one must use the language of the colonizer, then the question becomes how to make it your own, what cultural historians call hybridization. This week I will be looking at how the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko creates hybrid forms with the aim of simultaneously honoring tribal history while dealing with a changing world.
By sprinkling Igbo throughout her book, Adichie gestures toward her own country’s indigenous culture. And unlike Achebe, she doesn’t provide a glossary. The phrases can generally be figured out from the context, however. And then there is always google, and the mixture of old with new characterizes modern Nigeria itself.
I find it fascinating to compare and contrast Purple Hibiscus with Things Fall Apart. In both, one finds a toxic masculinity, an autocratic father who beats his family, along with a rigid Christianity that distorts the culture. In Purple Hibiscus, the fanatically Catholic patriarch breaks with his own father, who is a “pagan,” and narrator 15-year-old Kambili finds herself torn between her desire to please her father and her longing for the far richer life of her grandfather. Her wise aunt, a liberal Catholic, observes at one point that
Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a traditionalist, that sometimes what was different was just as good as what was familiar, that when Papa-Nnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of innocence, in the morning, it was the same as our saying the rosary.
The grandfather himself is baffled by the Catholics who have converted his children, reporting at one point,
One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?
Interestingly, whereas in Things Fall Apart the accepting and ethnographically-open missionary Brown is followed by the rigidly orthodox and destructive Smith, in Purple Hibiscus the priests are reversed. At first there’s the orthodox Father Benedict, who degrees that services must be in Latin rather than in Igbo and who bans clapping in church. His sensibility is that of Kabili’s abusive father, but he is followed by the far more humane Father Amadi, who helps Kabili develop a sense of self and to build her self-confidence.
One striking difference between Achebe and Adichie is in their handling of female characters. Whereas they are two-dimensional in Things Fall Apart, they are richly textured in Hibiscus. The liberation struggle described by Fanon, in other words, doesn’t only involve liberation from the colonizers but continues on in other battles. Adichie is writing her own literature of combat.
One other thought: Because peaceful transfers of power are on my mind these days (as I noted in Monday’s post about Shakespeare’s Richard II ), I note that Nigeria, after five years of democratic rule, experienced a long succession of military coups, along with a bloody civil war. But rather than see this as a vindication of colonialism, Kabili’s professor aunt sees a process at work:
There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.
In other words, there’s still work for Nigerian literature to do. It doesn’t stop being important once freedom from the colonizers is achieved.
