Image: Men of Letters: J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

[Funmi Tofowomo Okelola]

Men of Letters: J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

Image: Photographer: Unknown. 

Prof. Chinua Achebe: Rest in Peace. Sun re o.

"So let me now speak as a teacher. It is high time these illiterates were openly instructed that Achebe and Soyinka inhabit different literary planets, each in its own orbit. If you really seek to encounter – and dialogue with – Chinua Achebe in his rightful orbit, then move out of the Nigerian entrapment and explore those circuits coursed by the likes of Hemingway. Or Maryse Conde. Or Salman Rushdie. Think Edouard Glissant. Think Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Think Earl Lovelace. Think Jose Saramago. Think Bessie Head. Think Syl Cheney-Coker, Yambo Ouologuem, Nadine Gordimer. Think Patrick Chamoiseau. Think Toni Morrison. Think Hamidou Kane. Think Shahrnush Parsipur. Think Tahar Ben Jelloun. Think Naguib Mahfouz – and so on and on along those orbits in the galaxy of fiction writers. In the meantime, let us quit this indecent exercise of fatuous plaints, including raising hopes, even now, with talk of “posthumous” conferment, when you know damned well that the Nobel committee does not indulge in such tradition. It has gone beyond ‘sickening'. It is obscene and irreverent. It desecrates memory. The nation can do without these hyper-active jingoists....My literary tastes are eclectic, sustainable, and unapologetic."-- Wole Soyinka.

"For Nigeria, Africa and humanity in general, Achebe’s death is a huge loss. It is sad that many of those whom Achebe had nothing but contempt for while he was alive for the way they desecrated our nation are the ones crying loudest and lining the streets to honour him in death.  My utmost hope is that nobody will mourn all those who have brought us to this sad end; those who make our women die at childbirth and children from preventable diseases; those who have turned our young men to drug addicts, kidnappers, militants and terrorists and our young women to victims of the sex trade. For those who have made a vocation of “explaining” why Achebe was not awarded the Nobel Prize and diminishing him in the process, I have just three words: shame on you!". --Chido Onumah

PBS: Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After 'Things Fall Apart'

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june08/achebe_05-27.html

Prof. Chinua Achebe

Photographer: unknown

Transcript

JEFFREY BROWN: For a long time, the story of Africa was told almost exclusively through the words of European writers. That began to change in the 1950s, as African countries achieved independence and African writers began to tell their own stories.

One book in particular, "Things Fall Apart," published in 1958, has become a classic of world literature, translated into some 50 languages, selling 11 million copies.

It was set in a village in what is now Nigeria, just as the Ibo people there had their first encounters with European Christian missionaries.

Chinua Achebe was just 28 when he wrote the book, his first novel. He's since written numerous other works of fiction, mostly set in post-colonial Africa, as well as nonfiction and poetry, and last year was named winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.

Achebe was partly paralyzed in a car accident in Nigeria in 1990. For most of the years since then, he's lived and taught at Bard College in New York.

In Washington recently, I asked him what he'd set out to do 50 years ago.

CHINUA ACHEBE, Author, "Things Fall Apart": I knew that something needed to be done.

JEFFREY BROWN: Something needed to be done?

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: And what was that?

CHINUA ACHEBE: That was my place in the world, my story, the story of myself, the story of my people. I was already familiar with stories of different people.

JEFFREY BROWN: Because you grew up reading English literature...

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes, and having an English education and encountering accounts of events of people. And, at some point, I began to miss my own. Think of it in terms of a gap in the bookshelf, you know, where a book has been taken out and the gap is there.

JEFFREY BROWN: And so you set this story, "Things Fall Apart," at that moment in the 19th century, sort of the end of one time and the beginning of another?

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: And why then?

CHINUA ACHEBE: I wanted that moment of change, in which one culture was in contact, in conflict, in conversation with another culture, and something was going to happen.

JEFFREY BROWN: Certainly, in the portrait of village life before the Europeans come, you don't paint an idealized vision there. The main character, Okonkwo, is thoughtful, but violent.

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes, I was doing that deliberately. Young as I was, I knew that I wanted the story to be true, true in the way fiction can be true.

JEFFREY BROWN: The way fiction can be true.

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes, in...

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you mean by that?

CHINUA ACHEBE: In a very profound way, there is -- even as you're making up a story, you're making it up, but there's a way you do it, and it tells you, something rings in my ear, you know, this is wrong, this is true, this is false, and I wanted to avoid that.

I wanted it to be seen in all its grandeur and all its weakness. And that seemed to me very important.

JEFFREY BROWN: When that clash of civilizations comes, it's really over religion first.

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: And I was interested to read that your own parents were converts to Christianity...

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... and then missionaries traveling around the country.

CHINUA ACHEBE: That's right. That's right. I was steeped in religion, the religion of the foreigners, because I wasn't there when my father converted, and so that was one aspect of life.

I wasn't questioning it. In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

There was no attempt to understand what was behind the Ibo religion. It was simply dismissed as the worship of stones and, you know, not as good as Christianity.

JEFFREY BROWN: I suppose it's ridiculous to ask you whether you were surprised by what happened to this book, "Things Fall Apart," that it would become read by so many people. How could you have known?

CHINUA ACHEBE: No, I couldn't have.

JEFFREY BROWN: But can you explain it?

CHINUA ACHEBE: Well, I can guess. I think what it is -- I suspect, from some of the things readers from abroad say to me, that they find something in this book which resonates with their own history, people in different places.

An example is a school, a class in a women's college in Korea. This whole class wrote to me many years back, because they just read "Things Fall Apart," and what they said was, "It's our history, our," their own.

JEFFREY BROWN: Even Korean? These are Koreans?

CHINUA ACHEBE: Even Korean, yes, and went on to explain that they were colonized by the Japanese. And for them, that was enough.

And so there must be things that are universal in the human story which one can use, one can hit upon, in telling your own peculiar story, the local and the universal.

JEFFREY BROWN: And Africa's story, of course, had been told by European writers.

CHINUA ACHEBE: Yes. The whole tradition of storytelling was created simply to tell the story of Africa. And the reason for that is not very far from the reason for the slave trade, because it's as deep as that, to present a people's story in such a way as to make them look bad.

JEFFREY BROWN: Where is the balance now? Are you satisfied with the development of an authentic African voice?

CHINUA ACHEBE: Well, it's only the beginning. It will take more time. But more people must get into it, and they are getting into it.

In fact, after my novel, "Things Fall Apart," was published, it just looked as if people had been waiting everywhere, in Africa, in Nigeria, in Ibo-land, to tell their own version of their story, as if something was holding them before. And it seems to me that that's a very good thing, indeed.

JEFFREY BROWN: The 50th anniversary of "Things Fall Apart," Chinua Achebe, thank you for talking to us.

CHINUA ACHEBE: Thank you.

Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

http://www.cafeafricana.com

http://www.indigokafe.com

[kenneth harrow]

i enjoyed this memorializing of these literary giants in their younger days.
however, the interview with jerrybrown starts on a note that seems a bit shortsighted, shall we say.
brown states,

JEFFREY BROWN: For a long time, the story of Africa was told almost exclusively through the words of European writers. That began to change in the 1950s, as African countries achieved independence and African writers began to tell their own stories.

this seems pretty obvious right? until you actually think about what he is saying. what does the term, "eurocentric" mean?
like, before the 1950s africans did not generate "stories" about themselves?
what he means is, european presses published colonial texts/narratives for european audiences until africans like achebe began to publish, in european presses, for european audiences.
because, when he means "told their story" he means to "us," to the west, not to "them," africans.
imagine the preposterous notion embedded in his statement that africans began to tell their own stories only after independence!

that's why the term postcolonial is so incredibly weak: it is at the core of the eurocentric vision of africa as a place whose chronological markers are defined by europeans, that is, by colonialism, by the european presence, and voices, and ears....

what bugs me is that everyone would pass over this statement of his without giving it a second notion. that fulfills the aspirations of assimilation, letting the imaginary of the Other becomes the only version available to one's self

still, i loved the pictures that went with this story!
ken

On 5/24/13 12:10 AM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola wrote:

Men of Letters:�J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

Image: Photographer: Unknown.�

Prof. Chinua Achebe: Rest in Peace. Sun re o.

"So let me now speak as a teacher. It is high time these illiterates were openly instructed that Achebe and Soyinka inhabit different literary planets, each in its own orbit. If you really seek to encounter � and dialogue with � Chinua Achebe in his rightful orbit, then move out of the Nigerian entrapment and explore those circuits coursed by the likes of Hemingway. Or Maryse Conde. Or Salman�Rushdie. Think Edouard Glissant. Think Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Think Earl Lovelace. Think Jose Saramago. Think Bessie Head. Think Syl Cheney-Coker, Yambo Ouologuem, Nadine Gordimer. Think Patrick Chamoiseau. Think Toni Morrison. Think Hamidou Kane. Think Shahrnush Parsipur. Think Tahar Ben Jelloun. Think Naguib Mahfouz � and so on and on along those orbits in the galaxy of�fiction writers. In the meantime, let us quit this indecent exercise of fatuous plaints, including raising hopes, even now, with talk of �posthumous� conferment, when you know damned well that the Nobel committee does not indulge in such tradition. It has gone beyond �sickening'. It is obscene and irreverent. It desecrates memory. The nation can do without these hyper-active jingoists....My literary�tastes are eclectic, sustainable, and unapologetic."-- Wole Soyinka.

"For Nigeria, Africa and humanity in general, Achebe�s death is a huge loss. It is sad that many of those whom Achebe had nothing but contempt for while he was alive for the way they desecrated our nation are the ones crying loudest and lining the streets to honour him in death.� My utmost hope is that nobody will mourn all those who have brought us to this sad end; those who make our women die at childbirth and children from preventable diseases; those who have turned our young men to drug addicts, kidnappers, militants and terrorists and our young women to victims of the sex trade.�For those who have made a vocation of �explaining� why Achebe was not awarded the Nobel Prize and diminishing him in the process, I have just three words: shame on you!". --Chido Onumah

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�
�

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[Olayinka Agbetuyi]

Another thing is the equation of literature and literacy with European orthographical conventions as normative.  So pre-gregorian signifying systems like the hieroglyphs which originated in African and in fact gave birth to that other  as well as the Jenne and Timbuktu manuscripts in the sub-Saharan region are discounted as non-literature-qua-literature.  We should not even mention the secondary status ascribed to oral literature, since it is not sanctified by scriptoral writing.

---

Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:55:42 -0400
From: har...@msu.edu
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Image: Men of Letters: J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

i enjoyed this memorializing of these literary giants in their younger days.
however, the interview with jerrybrown starts on a note that seems a bit shortsighted, shall we say.
brown states,

JEFFREY BROWN: For a long time, the story of Africa was told almost exclusively through the words of European writers. That began to change in the 1950s, as African countries achieved independence and African writers began to tell their own stories.

this seems pretty obvious right? until you actually think about what he is saying. what does the term, "eurocentric" mean?
like, before the 1950s africans did not generate "stories" about themselves?
what he means is, european presses published colonial texts/narratives for european audiences until africans like achebe began to publish, in european presses, for european audiences.
because, when he means "told their story" he means to "us," to the west, not to "them," africans.
imagine the preposterous notion embedded in his statement that africans began to tell their own stories only after independence!

that's why the term postcolonial is so incredibly weak: it is at the core of the eurocentric vision of africa as a place whose chronological markers are defined by europeans, that is, by colonialism, by the european presence, and voices, and ears....

what bugs me is that everyone would pass over this statement of his without giving it a second notion. that fulfills the aspirations of assimilation, letting the imaginary of the Other becomes the only version available to one's self

still, i loved the pictures that went with this story!
ken

On 5/24/13 12:10 AM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola wrote:

Men of Letters: J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

Image: Photographer: Unknown. 

Prof. Chinua Achebe: Rest in Peace. Sun re o.

"So let me now speak as a teacher. It is high time these illiterates were openly instructed that Achebe and Soyinka inhabit different literary planets, each in its own orbit. If you really seek to encounter – and dialogue with – Chinua Achebe in his rightful orbit, then move out of the Nigerian entrapment and explore those circuits coursed by the likes of Hemingway. Or Maryse Conde. Or Salman Rushdie. Think Edouard Glissant. Think Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Think Earl Lovelace. Think Jose Saramago. Think Bessie Head. Think Syl Cheney-Coker, Yambo Ouologuem, Nadine Gordimer. Think Patrick Chamoiseau. Think Toni Morrison. Think Hamidou Kane. Think Shahrnush Parsipur. Think Tahar Ben Jelloun. Think Naguib Mahfouz – and so on and on along those orbits in the galaxy of fiction writers. In the meantime, let us quit this indecent exercise of fatuous plaints, including raising hopes, even now, with talk of “posthumous” conferment, when you know damned well that the Nobel committee does not indulge in such tradition. It has gone beyond ‘sickening'. It is obscene and irreverent. It desecrates memory. The nation can do without these hyper-active jingoists....My literary tastes are eclectic, sustainable, and unapologetic."-- Wole Soyinka.

"For Nigeria, Africa and humanity in general, Achebe’s death is a huge loss. It is sad that many of those whom Achebe had nothing but contempt for while he was alive for the way they desecrated our nation are the ones crying loudest and lining the streets to honour him in death.  My utmost hope is that nobody will mourn all those who have brought us to this sad end; those who make our women die at childbirth and children from preventable diseases; those who have turned our young men to drug addicts, kidnappers, militants and terrorists and our young women to victims of the sex trade. For those who have made a vocation of “explaining” why Achebe was not awarded the Nobel Prize and diminishing him in the process, I have just three words: shame on you!". --Chido Onumah

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[kenneth harrow]

this is true. and you don't need to go to egypt. you have ajami, which created an archive in arabic language or arabic script texts, going back at least 600-700 years and continuing for hundreds of years; and you have the bamun scripts created by sultan njoya of cameroon, whose invented scripts were ultimately outlawed by� french colonialists who closed his schools, forcing the children to go to french schools.
oral literature was an archive for all of africa; and when the anthropologists got hold of it, initially, and recorded the performances, they not only froze them into unchanging form, they "adapted" them, changing the language to make them more conventional to the europhonic reader.
but you know, the same thing happened, basically with the stories that birago diop put into Les Contes d'amadou koumba, which are the greatest of all african stories; and niane did the same with Sundiata, taking the oral epic, and turning it into something halfway between a novel and an oral account. if you want to understand this, how it works, how it feels, read John Johnson's collection of the sundiata epics to see the difference between a recorded transcription and niane's heavily edited version.

the passage from oral to literary happened everywhere, and is fascinating. in africa, it was crossed by the power differential of colonialism, and later european modernism. the results ranged from brilliant works, with people looking for the oral everywhere--in aidoo, for instance, or in senghor's poetry (with its serer rhythms) or okara's experimental novel, the voice--as if there were something quintessentially african about orality, and in the process the oral, as performative, got rigidified into a set of cliched notions.
archives never come without power, without those on the inside creating the official, and those booted out. derrida has the last work on this in Archive Fever
ken

On 5/25/13 5:52 PM, Olayinka Agbetuyi wrote:

Another thing is the equation of literature and literacy with European orthographical conventions as normative. �So pre-gregorian signifying systems like the hieroglyphs which originated in African and in fact gave birth to that other �as well as the Jenne and Timbuktu manuscripts in the sub-Saharan region are discounted as non-literature-qua-literature. �We should not even mention the secondary status ascribed to oral literature, since it is not sanctified by scriptoral writing.

---

Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:55:42 -0400
From: har...@msu.edu
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Image: Men of Letters: J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

i enjoyed this memorializing of these literary giants in their younger days.
however, the interview with jerrybrown starts on a note that seems a bit shortsighted, shall we say.
brown states,

JEFFREY BROWN: For a long time, the story of Africa was told almost exclusively through the words of European writers. That began to change in the 1950s, as African countries achieved independence and African writers began to tell their own stories.

this seems pretty obvious right? until you actually think about what he is saying. what does the term, "eurocentric" mean?
like, before the 1950s africans did not generate "stories" about themselves?
what he means is, european presses published colonial texts/narratives for european audiences until africans like achebe began to publish, in european presses, for european audiences.
because, when he means "told their story" he means to "us," to the west, not to "them," africans.
imagine the preposterous notion embedded in his statement that africans began to tell their own stories only after independence!

that's why the term postcolonial is so incredibly weak: it is at the core of the eurocentric vision of africa as a place whose chronological markers are defined by europeans, that is, by colonialism, by the european presence, and voices, and ears....

what bugs me is that everyone would pass over this statement of his without giving it a second notion. that fulfills the aspirations of assimilation, letting the imaginary of the Other becomes the only version available to one's self

still, i loved the pictures that went with this story!
ken

On 5/24/13 12:10 AM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola wrote:

Men of Letters:�J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, & Wole Soyinka

Image: Photographer: Unknown.�

Prof. Chinua Achebe: Rest in Peace. Sun re o.

"So let me now speak as a teacher. It is high time these illiterates were openly instructed that Achebe and Soyinka inhabit different literary planets, each in its own orbit. If you really seek to encounter � and dialogue with � Chinua Achebe in his rightful orbit, then move out of the Nigerian entrapment and explore those circuits coursed by the likes of Hemingway. Or Maryse Conde. Or Salman�Rushdie. Think Edouard Glissant. Think Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Think Earl Lovelace. Think Jose Saramago. Think Bessie Head. Think Syl Cheney-Coker, Yambo Ouologuem, Nadine Gordimer. Think Patrick Chamoiseau. Think Toni Morrison. Think Hamidou Kane. Think Shahrnush Parsipur. Think Tahar Ben Jelloun. Think Naguib Mahfouz � and so on and on along those orbits in the galaxy of�fiction writers. In the meantime, let us quit this indecent exercise of fatuous plaints, including raising hopes, even now, with talk of �posthumous� conferment, when you know damned well that the Nobel committee does not indulge in such tradition. It has gone beyond �sickening'. It is obscene and irreverent. It desecrates memory. The nation can do without these hyper-active jingoists....My literary�tastes are eclectic, sustainable, and unapologetic."-- Wole Soyinka.

"For Nigeria, Africa and humanity in general, Achebe�s death is a huge loss. It is sad that many of those whom Achebe had nothing but contempt for while he was alive for the way they desecrated our nation are the ones crying loudest and lining the streets to honour him in death.� My utmost hope is that nobody will mourn all those who have brought us to this sad end; those who make our women die at childbirth and children from preventable diseases; those who have turned our young men to drug addicts, kidnappers, militants and terrorists and our young women to victims of the sex trade.�For those who have made a vocation of �explaining� why Achebe was not awarded the Nobel Prize and diminishing him in the process, I have just three words: shame on you!". --Chido Onumah

�
�

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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�

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�
�

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

This seems to be the pic of the three writers going to Dodan barracks to appeal to then Head of State Ibrahim Babangida to spare the alleged coup plotter Mamman Vatsa and his cohorts so as  to put an end to the cycle of bloodletting represented by coups.

I remember the picture from the Guardian, Nigeria.

As for the quote attributed to Soyinka  describing  whom Achebe should be compared with, what is he really saying? That you cant compare two writers because one is best in fiction  and the other is not?

An odd  and unsustainable notion.

What is this invocation of Nigerian entrapment he mentions? In what way is Nigerian literature as represented  by Soyinka and Achebe fundamentally different from any other kind of literature?

toyin

--