Realizing the sacred: power and meaning in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God.(Critical Essay)

Like nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around the question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of the African text and its distance from or subversion of European literary forms constitutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, the "Africanness" of the African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of, on the one hand, the oral tradition, both in terms of form and content, and on the other, myth and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide the impetus for political judgments, prescriptive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes the primacy of the political in the discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis has, from its beginning, allied itself in varied ways to the process of decolonization and social critique. The relation between the text and the world was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with the extratextual world through different narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that "the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse through which it articulates the world" (189), then the African world presented to us was one rent by conflicts and contradictions: the scatological and the sublime, the demonic and the utopian, the mythical and the historical. Yet, at the same time it was also a world of profound unity. In both the "mythical" and "realist" writers, early postcolonial literary production aims towards a sense of totality-an idea of the interconnectedness of the African world.

In dealing with the political imperative, Chinua Achebe employs a strategy of metonymic recuperation, of substituting his specific traditional framework for an elaboration of African culture in the pan-Africanist agenda. He mobilizes Igbo history and culture to articulate the upheavals and dislocations of colonial and postcolonial existence. Implicit in this procedure is the belief in the unity and certain homogeneity, both political and metaphysical, of Africa. Similarly, Wole Soyinka offers Yoruba myths as a basis for the understanding of African religious, political, and philosophical thought and practice. This "primal phenomenon" posits a cosmological order in which "man exists in a cosmic totality" (3). The reciprocal porosity of the natural, social, and supernatural spheres derives from an animistic religious framework. Soyinka's appropriation of the term "myth" and its institutionalization through his theoretical writings have come to determine the terms in which his work and those who share similar aesthetic strategies have been analyzed.

"Myth," which minimally refers to a narrative about gods of mythic personalities, in common usage, often indicates error, fiction, make-believe, and superstition. The co-incidence of myth and falsity may be traced back to a Platonic privileging of reason over narrative, transcendent truth over myth. Plato warns the citizens of the Republic that "pleasure and pain will be enthroned in your city instead of law and the principles which the community accepts as best in any given situation," if they fall under the spell of myth (74). In his conceptualization, myth and narrative are opposed to rationality and truth. The dominant strand in African literary criticism that opposes myth to truth, be it historical or political, partakes of a movement that began with the birth of Western metaphysics and, as Jean-Pierre Vernant explains, is specific to Western thought: "The concept of myth that we have inherited from the Greeks belongs, by reason of its origins and history, to a tradition of thought peculiar to Western Civilization in which myth is defined in terms of what is not myth, being opposed to reality (myth is fiction) and, secondly, to what is rational (myth is absurd)" (186). This conception inaugurated in classical Antiquity "became clearly defined through the setting up of an opposition between mythos and logos, henceforth seen as separate and contrasting terms" (187). For Vernant, this opposition between mythos and logos came to dominate the various attempts to conceptualize myth. Myth, for Soyinka, however, is both real and rational. The "primal reality" that is myth is not a regression into a subconscious world of fantasy but rather the "essentialization of a rational world-view, one which is elicited from the reality of social and natural experience and from the integrated reality of racial myth, into a living reality" (34). "Myth," therefore, is a problematic term to house the process representing this complex African reality, at least in its conceptualization within the Western episteme. Although modernity, as Max Weber would have it, has completed the process of disenchanting the Western world that began with Greek speculative philosophy, the recent history of the term from the Romantics to the Modernists has tended to invert the hierarchization of mythos and logos. The modernism associated with T. S. Eliot has accorded myth the perspective of transcendence, perfection and order. Myth, for Eliot, is opposed to "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (177); it is an escape from history. Soyinka's positing of the mythical as an ideal order and his privileging of the mythical method to the narrative method seem to derive from Eliot's modernist articulation of the mythical, and is necessarily implicated in the abrogation of history. However, we have noted that Soyinka's "mythical" is also inextricably linked to the "historical". This suggests that Soyinka's view may be associated with the ancient Greeks, for whom myth was foremost a religious epiphenomenon. This allusion to the ancient Greeks serves to introduce what was central to their religious symbolic order, and it is that which I will tentatively and provisionally offer as an alternate category to the "mythical," i.e., the idea of the sacred. The mythical will however not be abandoned but will be used in a very specific manner, in its reference to narratives of divinity.

Emile Benveniste identifies two words in Latin that denote the idea of the sacred: sacer (which corresponds to the Greek hieros) is a thing or person consecrated to the gods; and sanctus (the Greek hagios) applies to a person who as a result of the attribution of divine favor, possesses a quality that raises him above other men. However, sacer has an ambiguous character. Not only is homo sacer animated by a divine force, he is also affected with "an ineradicable pollution." He is both "august and accursed, worthy of veneration and evoking horror" (Benveniste 452). Sacer incorporates both the mythic hero and the sacrificial victim. Mary Douglas observes that there is "little difference between sacredness and uncleanness" (3) and Mircea Eliade notes that the sacred is at once sacred and defiled (15). Therefore, divine energy, e.g., the Polynesian mana, which can be both sanctifying and polluting, is associated with danger. This association includes those invested with divine favor, i.e., the pure is also absolutely impure. Martin Heidegger writes of the sacred that it is "the violence of chaos that offers no pause, the terror of the immediate that thwarts all access" (cited in Hill 89). The sacred presents the universe as a mysterium tremendum, dreadful and ambiguous.

The sacred is also intimately related to power. The noumen, Dudley Young points out, derives from neu, the Greek word for nod--the nod of the god that "unleashes power that brings order or disorder" (313). The sacred, then, establishes the gods' sovereignty over the domain of power and demands mortals' submission to the will of the gods. Within this symbolic framework, the gods can act as destroyers or preservers. However, Karl Kerenyi reminds us, as Johannes Kleinstuck argues, that for the ancient Greeks and Romans, submission to the power of the gods did not mean a blind belief in or willing submission to the will of the gods; they were as much antagonists to the gods as dependents. The anthropomorphic nature of the gods means that antagonism, rivalry, and conflict between the gods themselves and between gods and humans define the ambit of the mythic narratives of ancient Greek religious thought. By proposing the use of the term "sacred" to analyze what was previously termed the "mythical" in Achebe's Arrow of God, I wish to preserve both the religious charge of the mythical and the original ambiguity of the sacred as both divine and defiled, as evoking horror and reverence, as that which animates and that which puts to death (sacer-sacrificium). I aim to show that, as both a moral and cognitive category, the sacred, in those societies determined by it, places a structure of indeterminacy at the heart of political and epistemological questions.

The idea of a god who saves and destroys (like Soyinka's paradigmatic essence, Ogun) is central to Achebe's rendering of Ulu, the chief deity and protector of Umuaro in Arrow of God. Ezeulu, his chief priest, asks the assembly of elders: "Is there any man or woman in Umuaro who does not know Ulu, the deity that destroys a man when his life is sweetest to him?" (Arrow 27). Moreover, in an essay on the significance of chi to Igbo religious thought, Achebe writes that "a man may worship Ogwugwu to perfection and yet be killed by Udo" (Morning 94), pointing to both the sovereignty and inscrutability of the motives of the deities. However, the primary concern of this paper, the articulation of the sacred, will not be explored by proceeding to identify the traces of myth per se and mythic personalities in the text. Rather, I seek to interrogate the conceptual underpinnings of the symbolic order of the world created by the text, i.e., the political and epistemological implications of a specific articulation of the sacred.

Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God has drawn much critical attention, perhaps the most of all his ...