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Thanks KenWhat exactly was Oedipus hubrisI’ve not been able to get it or understand why it’s seen as a great play
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kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
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Hi chidi,I was trying to convey what the novel seemed to be saying. Not my own thoughts on what weakness might mean. There is a certain ambivalence about the characters, or some anyway, that achebe catches. The issue of what unoka “really” was might miss the point that this is a novel, not a biography or ethnography.Ken
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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2023 6:41:51 AM
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I come in peace and love: SHALOM
Re - “I took it that achebe was fed up with one-dimensional characters that typified european fiction-graham green or joyce cary, notably” ( Professor Kenneth Harrow )
Graham Greene????
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
No matter, just lump them all together!
What saith Ken about “ The Heart of the Matter “ ?
One-dimensional characters ? Scobie?
No moral complexity?
Of course, no war between the good and /or the only ugly evil?
As if I didn’t have a clue
I thought that for good measure you would have thrown in Conrad and you good friend
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul FRAS TC
Directly into the cannibal stew
Can it be true that one of the only reasons why Graham Greene was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature was that he was alleged to be more deeply anti-American than deeply anti--Something else….
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, IIM Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Editorial Adviser at News Updates (https://updatesonnews.substack.com)
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I had thought that you were being deliberately provocative.
On the other hand, unlike Scobie, Mr Greene, a lapsed Catholic, was perhaps guilty of un-American activity, but not necessarily for salvation.
BTW, in my humble opinion, for Mr Johnson’s sake Joyce Cary
Should be tried posthumously and almost hanged ( like Salman Rushdie) .
Just kidding. I almost wrote “Salam Rushdie” Like the fatwa on poor Rushdie.
They would have loved to make some salami out of him.
Your good friend Sir Vidia described the death fatwa as “an extreme form of literary criticism” .
I suppose that must at least have endeared him ( Sir Vidia) to you.
Then the headline could have been ,” Cary posthumously resurrected and hanged. For Crimes Against Humanity.” The sort of crimes that should get Adepoju praying that humanism will overcome. Amor Vincit Omnia? Too late, what would PEN Int. been able to do about it? Sanctions? Bring Cray back to life?
Thinking associatively about the above, three things come to mind:
¤ The Islamic Revolution in Iran generated a spate of anti-Shia propaganda issuing from some of the Sunni publishing houses from which you were liable to read this kind of intention attributed to the leader of the Iranian Revolution: “When as a conqueror I arrive in Saudi Arabia, I will dig up these two idols, Abu Bakr and Umar and hang them”
¤ In 1991, when I finally visited/ made ziyaret to the Al-Hussain Mosque in Cairo
where a blessed hair of Imam Husayn - alaihi salaam , the Prince of Martyrs is housed
at exactly the same time that I stood at the foot of his mausoleum a man ,his head wrapped in a green turban, signs of hardship, signs of travel and desert dust written all over his forehead, came bursting in and addressing the Prince of Martyrs, as if he could hear him, I think it must have been in perfect Arabic :” Ya Aba Abdillah ! I have travelled hundreds of miles to come and see you!”
And then threw himself down at the feet of the mausoleum in prostration !
¤ The Sayyidina Ḥusayn Mosque // "Gemma Sayyidina Husayn" as it is known, is where the Sufis meet every Thursday evening. I was there on eight successive Thursday evenings. A person is not Cornelius Ignoramus by accident. Here's what a little ignorance can cause. On my second Thursday evening visit, I almost got into a fight with the beer seller that had his stall opposite the mosque. That evening, it was about 41 degrees hot, to date, the hottest I have ever experienced, and had ordered a cold bottle of Halal Beer, to cool my thirst. It was the very first time that I had ever sipped “Halal Beer” and lo - it tasted exactly like a Czech Pilsner Urquell @the usual 7.5 % al-cohol-ic content. So I almost got hold of the quite perplexed halal beer seller by the scruff of his neck - almost - and told him, "Aki, I asked for HALAL BEER, not for Al-COHOL - what the hell - do you want me to turn up at the mosque, DRUNK? He protested - But I gave you halal Beer !
It was after my second sip that I began to understand that halal beer tastes just like normal beer - and later on, the hypocrisy of those who consume so-called “halal bacon”
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
|
Dear Ken : Shalom!
Many thanks for this really halal food for thought :
” The issue of what unoka “really” was might miss the point that this is a novel, not a biography or ethnography.” -
or the voice of scripture, the uncorrupted, holy words from God
Since Adichie moans about the danger of the single story, for balance, here are some other versions:
From the horse's mouth : TASS
You may humbly and ironically confess to being “out of tune” , but that won’t get you off the hook. You're the Connoisseur!
I appeal to you just as Lou appeals to the magician, here, could you please recommend something light-hearted and easy on the nerves, something that delivers some pleasure, something that does not inflict more pain and stir an already bad conscience, something set in an African University milieu of the sort you are familiar with or can imagine possibly exists in a pleasant fantasy world ( but it doesn’t have to be highbrow, fiercely against the grain, with a very long dedication to illustrious ancestors, a long list of great fellow academics, family, various wonderful editors and friends , in the kingdom of the word - as the Holy Quran put it in Surah Al-Qalam ( The Pen) , not some really tough brain & BIG GRAMMAR African literature, but in real Broken English or Broken French, something such as an African version of Kingsley Amis’ ”Lucky Jim” (starring an absent-minded Oyibo professor in Africa or a bona fide Ojogbon, not stereotypical, love on the side, lost in translation or in transition or even distantly objective , as the last time I was laughing at us and ourselves in Paul Theroux’s “Fong and the Indians” - which he could never have written today, because that time is past, has passed…
The first novel that I ever read about Africa - and cried - was Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country”. I was soft hearted and not yet twelve years old back then.
Outside of the pastoral idylls of pristine, rural Africa, the love stories, poetries etc, the severe mental stress, the many several levels of psychological and material everyday reality -as real as Chidi, are so surreal, even innocent straightforward first person witness testimony becomes surreal or unintended satire confirming truth a stranger than fiction..
Quite a sober thought: On the brink ( of the abyss) Sierra Leone goes to the polls on 24th of June. Let us pray.
As I understand it, Shalom means peace, not war
Indeed, after all that poetry, when one hears the Pentagon’s Chief Gorilla Lloyd Austin telling the warmongers that the war in Ukraine is going to be” a marathon, and not a sprint” then from “Never Again “ it looks like we’re back to square one : the banality of evil without abruption, and it looks like he (Lloyd Austin) would like to give himself & his Uncle Joe already three score years and ten and living on extra time, would like to give his boss a life-extension at the White House and that their marathon war could go on well past Biden’s bed-time/ second term in the saddle which should normally quench hopefully with a happy ending massage in the oval office @circa 2028, if not before then. BTW, since his motto is not “ make love, not war”, in the name of poetic justice, should he deserve such a happy ending , or is it going to be, “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”?
Hugh Masekela: PHOLA
hi corneliusthis all has to take us back to colonial days. 1940s 1950s; how europeans depicted others, or Others. be they sherpas or incas, indians or "natives." sometimes comic, sometime foolishly imitative of europeans.sanders of the river.and indeed mr. johnson.
we've all know variations of this: even shakespeare's others—othello, the noble savage type, or shylock, now his name infamous.
hard to know how to parse all this.
if you want to defend naipaul, explain the characters in Bend in the River, without embarrassment. i can't quite come to that. some scenes in that novel were truly reprehensible.
but how do deal with prejudices or stereotypes with an even temperament? even the ancient greeks had their fools or others. and even achebe, in TFA, has his mr. smiths and mr. jones who are also stereotypes.
adichie is famous for her ted talk about how her roommate had a stereotyped vision of africans. but adichie's vision of the roommate also reinforced african views of the american/european view of africans. her roommate is another stereotype.
the "solution" becomes renaming; insteadof gypsies call them "rom"; instead of bushmen say "khoisan," until it turns out khoisan is also pejorative; instead of slave use enslaved person. etc. and so the problem is solved.
except that the new term simply means the same thing as the old term, until the context itself has changed.
thus i am out of tune with our times.ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
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