The Autumn of the Literary Patriarch: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Remembering.(Africa)

For any notable writer and cultural icon, the autumn of career, or "the doyen's December," is an acute and memorable milepost. It is the last bend of the great river. There are final obligations to be met, ancient feuds and awkward accounts to be settled, and the equivalent of a literary will to be written for generations to follow. The anxieties of influence long settled, it is the anxieties of being influential that remain to be settled. Where such a writer is also the crystallizing exemplar of a paradigm shift in literature--postcolonial literature for that matter--the anxieties are bound to be particularly poignant.

Arguably Africa's most influential and most admired writer of the postcolonial epoch, Chinua Achebe is also one of its most retreating and enigmatic. In him, natural habits of dignified reserve and poised restraint have matured in old age into a gnomic, sage-like reticence. Achebe is like a traditional African deity, all-knowing, all-seeing, but enveloped in a forbidding wall of silence. Not for him the coterie of devotees, the tribe of squabbling adulators, or the swarming literary lunchers. Instead, the grand old man of Nigerian--and African--letters has cultivated his own wise, Olympian counsel, and his rich career is distinguished by its rectitude and exemplary decorum. In an irony that would not be out of place in his own exactingly nuanced fictional labors, Achebe's fine manners, his courtesy, and infinite politeness remind one of an English gentleman rather than a long-distance cultural warrior from Africa.

A calm and contemplative character with the proverbial memory of an elephant, it is only the extremely foolhardy that will be tempted to confuse Achebe's natural reserve and equanimity with political timidity or moral cowardice. As many of his compatriots and the world at large would remember, Achebe can be outspoken and forthright to the point of political incorrectness; his natural aversion for cant and hypocrisy may lead in the direction of a radical contempt for established political norms. In 1987, his celebrated put-down of Chief Obafemi Awolowo as a tribal leader undeserving and unworthy of a state funeral drew anguished sighs of disbelief from many quarters and brought massive concussions to Nigeria's literary and political establishment, just as his stern dismissal of the Nobel prize for literature as nothing but one more instance of cultural imperialism provoked a greater earthquake.

That particular intervention was as awkward as it was ill-timed, the prize having just been awarded to his rival and great compatriot, Wole Soyinka. Having detonated his well-timed bombs, Achebe quietly withdrew behind the great wall. It might not have been his finest moment, but the point has been made: no national consensus can be forged on what he perceived to be a monumental heist. A teacher by instincts and a moral crusader by inclination, Achebe believes in the benign virtues of fiction, and for him, the essay form is often a bully platform for lambasting the ills of mankind in general and his country in particular. His philippic on the failure of leadership in Nigeria, The Trouble With Nigeria (1982), remains a classic of the genre, and his terse rebuke of the Nigerian press is as memorable as it is forthright. When he is cross, Achebe can be pithy and pitiless, and as Sir Vidiadhar S. Naipaul will discover in the current collection of essays, Achebe does not take hostages.

The foregoing explains why this new collection of essays, published under the title Home and Exile (2000), ought to be celebrated as a literary event. Apart from coinciding with Achebe's seventieth birthday, the publication comes at the end of a memorable decade for author, country, continent, and the world at large. The turn of the last decade witnessed the dramatic collapse of communism and actually existing socialists states, the global triumph of liberal democracies and its "end of history" ideology, and of course, the intensification of metropolitan cultural imperialism under the rubric of the new phenomenon of globalization. (see my "The Uses of Adversity"). In moments of acute stress, the plight of a nation is often reflected in the plight of its most gifted children. For Achebe, personal tragedy coincided with national debacle. Early in 1991, just as the Nigerian postcolonial state began its final descent into animal savagery, Achebe was involved in a terrible car crash.

With medical facilities nonexistent, and with Nigerian hospitals nothing more than glorified consulting clinics, only prompt evacuation to the metropole saved Africa's master-craftsman of fiction from a needless and pitiless end. The horrific irony would not have been lost on Achebe. Thereafter, as the Nigerian monster-state bared its killer-incisors, Bard College in New York provided the much needed sanctuary. Achebe, probably to his private horror and disquiet, has become part of some vital statistics of a new class of borderless, nationless international migrant workers escaping from the concrete horrors of the postcolonial state: intellectuals sans frontieres. The annulment of the 1993 Nigerian presidential election brought a dignified and measured response from Achebe, an intervention bristling with characteristic forthrightness and integrity. As darkness enveloped his beloved country, Achebe also retreated behind his wall of grim silence.

The publication of this collection marks the re-emergence of Achebe in the intellectual arena after the years of solitude. As it had been noted, were the author to be a man of less restrained temperament, it ought to be an occasion for celebration, coinciding as it also does with the return of civil governance to Achebe's much abused country after years of military brutality and misrule. The slim volume is a collection of three lectures delivered as the Mcmillan-Stewart lectures in December 1998 under the notable aegis of the W. E. B Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. Three years earlier, during Nigeria's darkest moment, the same cultured ambience had provided the platform for Soyinka's remorseless excoriation of the fiction of the postcolonial nation-state in Nigeria in particular and Africa in general (see Soyinka; Williams, "Closed States and Open Borders"). If Achebe has any word about the controversial "voyage of discovery" to Africa of the director of the host institute--an expedition that has occasioned literary cannons exploding from both sides of the trenches--he wisely kept it to himself. Neither did he belabor the postmodernist predilections of some of the avatars of the prestigious center, despite his famous distaste for intellectual modishness. Like a well-mannered and diplomatic guest, Achebe manages to have his say without ...