Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

Copyright © 2008 Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

Chinua Achebe was undoubtedly one the greatest African writers. A precursor. His novel “Things fall apart” is the result of a feeling of revolt thus the need for an African to shed lights on the pre-colonial Africa and the shock that have been the first encounters with the West. It’s been fifty years in 2008 since the book has been published but it’s still the most-sold African novel.

The book is about a man named Okonkwo, a warrior and a talented farmer who’s willing to regain the prestige his family lost due to his lazy father. The story takes place among an Ibo tribe, one from southeast Nigeria, in the pre-colonial Africa. Chinua Achebe introduces us to a though, complex, ambitious man who is seeking personal achievement and the clan recognition. The author has that very sober way to tell the gradual rise, its peak and then the unexpected exclusion from the clan. The originality and thus strength of this novel lie in the thorough description it makes of the founding principles of that Ibo community. Beliefs, initiatory rites, funeral and wedding ceremonies all closely related to the agricultural production or justice, social values, the relations with other tribes, human sacrifices…everything in this book is recounted with lucidity. There’s no trace of prejudice, indulgence or self-whipping.

When Okonkwo is forced to exile with the whole family (including three wives) after he seriously trespassed one of the social codes, it brought him to put things into perspective, observe the hospitality of his mother’s tribe where he’s serving his sentence and perceive the first news of the arrival of the Europeans on the igbo land. That first contact between the two civilizations led to misunderstanding and violent frictions.

Things fall apart. The author then describes in the second part of the book, with great erudition, the civilization shock following the arrival of the first Christian missionaries. Chinua Achebe highlights the impact of their evangelistic message, the tension caused by the collusion between some missionaries, the colonial administration and the traditional organizations whose spiritual unity is jeopardized by the rising of the Christian community and the questioning of some practices like the infanticide of twin babies. There will be a failed attempt to initiate discussion. The rest is about pride, fear, hatred and ignorance.

I’ve rarely read a book whose author has such a good knowledge of the Christian doctrine and the African traditional beliefs. The author masters the implied philosophies beneath the frontal collision and the distance he keeps with the story make this novel remarkable. This is a very complete work which stays very accurate today. A classic.

[In 2007 Chinua Achebe received the Man Booker international Prize for his entire career, a prize which rewards the best English-writing authors. He was preceded by Ismaïl Kadare. Chinua Achebe died this year at age 83.]

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

Paperback: 209 pages

Publisher: Anchor (September 1, 1994) 

Language: English

Mariama Bâ : So long a letter

I’ve been wondering why some novels make more impact on us than others. The clues are: the author’s talent, the building of their work , the topic, the way we identity with the characters, the context of the reading, sincerity, rage, humor, the capability to look positively to the future…fill in the blanks.

The Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ’s So long a letter makes me identify with a character very close to one in my own life, though the Congolese context (mine) is different. What also strikes me about this novel is the quality of the writing, Mariama Bâ’s courage and lucidity when analyzing the urban society of her country. She has a very good understanding of the unheard pain of the many African women bending under the burden of patriarchal traditions. In 1979 she questions polygamy, caste systems. She calls for what can be qualified a reasoned emancipation of Senegalese women. Leaving aside an occidental-flavored feminism, she tells the story of two women through the letters Ramatoulaye and her childhood friend Aïssatou share. During the period of mourning following her husband Modou Fall’s death, Ramatoulaye recalls the beginning and evolution of their couples, the influence of the families, cast matters, betrayal or men’s cowardice, the choices when confronted with an imposed polygamy despite the original ideal they’ve imagined.

She also paints many other women from Aïssatou’s mother-in-law, keeper of the family’s noble lineage, to the mother of her own co-wife who brings her young daughter into marriage with the old Modou Fall.

This novel is all about women, sometimes persecutors, most of the time, victims of history and present. It’s a story of friendship, like the one bonding the two main characters of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

It’s way too hard for a woman to make a man understand the weight, the violence, the abandon that polygamy is in african big cities under the yoke of a rampant materialism and a triumphant masculine egoism.

So here is a woman speaking openly to another woman. A very beautiful african letter.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Mariama Bâ, So long a letter

Edition Heinemann, Translator Modupe-Bode-Thomas, 96 pages

Richard Wright : Native son

Literature, novel most specifically, enables a difficult and rather unusual exercise: walk into the incredible, incomprehensible, fantastic, violent universe of someone else.

The reading of some novels gives that unique opportunity to pause and sometimes discover what’s unfathomable.

Richard Wright confronted me with rage. A guts-seizing rage. A muffled fury that’s been waiting for the moment to express itself. Richard Wright has chosen the mighty pen to put words on the tremendous rage his peers  were going through. And he did that with two fabulous and absolute must-read novels: Native Son and Black Boy.

Native Son takes the reader in the 50’s America. A highly anti-communist and racist America where minorities would play a second role. Wright takes us down the road to hell with Bigger Thomas, a young African-american from a slummy ghetto in Chicago, charged with a murder he committed “accidentally”. This disturbing, revolting novel though set in the 50’s still enlightens the realities of today’s America and in some point, in a lesser extent, France’s.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Richard Wright, Native son 
Ed. Harper Collins, 1940, 504 p.

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury

 

© Gangoueus

It took me nearly three years to complete this work of William Faulkner. Still, I thought to be extensively trained to the elaborate structure of writings by this author. But, here we are halfway through the novel, I sadly gave up. It was enough.

The sound and the fury put the action in the location of Jefferson in one of those old decadent Southern families we find repeatedly in Faulkner's work. This is the portrait of a family over thirty years. Three brothers, one sister. Quentin Compson the eldest, Candace Compson, Jason Compson, Maury Compson also known as "Benjy" the cheesy. The novel is a dive into the abyss of passionate feelings that bind or ravage these characters.

Faulkner chooses polyphonic form and divides this novel into four chapters; the first three are respectively narrated by the Compson sons. Candace is the center of their narrative. Faulkner's genius is expressed by the various tools he uses through his various narratives that are marked by the specific breakdown of each character. The writing is like possessed by the voice of the character and is morphed throughout the chapters. The problem lies in the fact that the reader must adapt to the context, or even to the delusions of each character.

The first voice is that of a fool, a mentally retarded person. His chaotic perception of the world surrounding him imprints his speech. Benjy is deaf and mute and only expresses himself by shouting. But it is what he perceives that Faulkner puts in perspective. His train of thought is not necessarily consistent; the reader must cling onto the reading to follow Benjy. Although Faulkner only recounts a day of Benjy, the thoughts of the latter wander and takes the reader back to distant episodes and gives several clues to understand the relationships between the siblings.

Similarly, it is for the second voice, that of Quentin Compson, the depressive first born, a Harvard student who bestows an incestuous love for Candace that encapsulates him into a morbid jealousy reflected toward contenders of her sister's love. This part of the text is perhaps the most complex, one where the reader gets the least clues. We really walk in darkness. I freaked out at this level.

Reading the criticism of Lilly on this novel two years after I abandoned, I thought I missed something. How could she be so excited about a book which gave me so many headaches? I'm not a masochist, but I must have missed several clues. After reading the novel over, I realized that the clues were in the preface of Maurice Coindreau. But then, in principle I never read prefaces before reading a book. So I ended reading the broken text of Quentin in which Faulkner slides Candace unfinished sentences.

 Then comes the third voice, that of Jason Compson. If Benjy and Quentin share feelings of love for Candace, Jason pours his fury, frustration and hatred for this sister who is a failure and of whom for family reasons of honor, he raises the daughter. Despite this description you are in the presence of characters without knowledge of the events that stir their wrath, their distress. It is up to you to immerse yourself in this novel.

As often in the texts of Faulkner, Blacks, Negros have an important role. The most prominent figure is that of Dilsey, the maid, a kind of guardian of a temple slumped by a type of curse that falls on the Compson. The position of Blacks in this novel puts us in the context of the Mississippi and allows experiencing the conditions of the latter in the 20s with the case of Dilsey resulting in a deletion of me persona for a total inclination to the other. At least out of Faulkner’s ink anyway.

Another element that will surely destabilize the reader is the chronology of events that adds to the complexity of the text.

Nevertheless, this novel deserves some attention and patience from booklover to read and possibly re-read the story to grasp in its entirety.

Happy reading

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury