Heard Chinua Achebe, the African author of Things Fall Apart, speak with Uche Okeke, the African modernist artist, at Newark Museum. Here’s a drawing by Okeke.
Pretty contemporary looking, eh? It was done in the late 50s or early 60s. Okeke collaborated with Achebe on an illustrated edition of the famous book — and there is a small show of his work at the museum.
The photographer Phyllis Galembo told me about this talk — it became an excuse to read Things Fall Apart, which had been on my bookshelf for decades. I’m glad I finally read it. “The Empire Writes Back” is a Salman Rushdie quote, referring to the wave of writers in former colonial countries that are now part of the literary global mix. Achebe’s book was a prescient antecedent to all of those.
The book is incredible. It came out in 1958, and along with Amos Tutuola’s books (My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was his second one) heralded the arrival of uniquely African literature. Tutuola’s books are fantastic and surreal, but Achebe went for something quite different. He saw Africans abandoning their own culture and he wanted to point out that there was something valuable there before it was all gone, before it was too late. The colonial powers had convinced most Africans that African culture was inferior, and that to engage the modern world one should adopt European models. Sounds like the era of globalization, no? Achebe describes this in beautiful language and through a story that is tragic but not didactic. The African characters often speak in proverbs — “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten” — so there is a metaphorical and even musical tone to the whole story.
The story begins with a man in a traditional Ibo village (southern Nigeria), describes a few years in his life, and that of the villagers, before the arrival of whites. Then, in what would be considered the 3rd act of the book, missionaries begin to arrive, in ones and twos, seemingly harmlessly. They challenge the local beliefs and customs, not through aggressive force or conquest, but slowly, subtly, overturning “superstitions” and even showing a kind of tolerance. (Of course it is a kind of passive aggressive tolerance — a kind of psychological warfare that gives no ground — tolerance as a destructive force). Eventually, they gain some converts and increase in numbers — numbers who are backed by the law of the distant white government — the district commissioners. From these sometimes innocuous and often well-intentioned interventions things do indeed fall apart.
At the Newark Museum the Africans, 2 men and 3 women, sat on the stage, a white woman moderated. The Africans all wore traditional robes and head wraps or coverings, which made a colorful and regal impression. Their body language was slightly reserved, dignified, calm and relaxed. When the men spoke they spoke slowly, deliberately, as if they were talking to people they knew.
Achebe at his teaching post at Bard.
In Africa and elsewhere, anthropology, and archeology especially, are European ways of separating a people’s history and culture from those who are still living. Sometimes science destroys the thing it seeks to examine and understand. Like young boys, we will understand our toys when they lie scattered in bits around us. For Africans though, archeology IS their history. In Achebe’s words, the establishing of museums in Nigeria that began to display the works of the great African civilizations “confirmed what we already knew — that we were human”.
Implicit in his statement is that colonialism had dehumanized the cultures that it had touched.
He made a statement near the end of the evening that had relevance for me. He said the “emperor” prefers that artists and writers and musicians relegate themselves to making beautiful things. The “emperor” says that the arts and politics should not mix, that political decisions should be left to the politicians. But Achebe implies that all art is political — even if, like the emperor approved work, it denies being anything but beautiful. That too is a political statement and a decision. To not act, not to not include part of life in one’s work is to leave it to the politicians.
That, to me, does not mean that I should write a bunch of rabble-rousing songs — though I might if I thought I could — but rather that every creation implies a worldview, a social context and resonates meanings beyond what it objectively is. I think we feel and sense all this, all these layers of meaning, without consciously bearing this moral and social weight. A song can be light but deep — that’s part of why we like them. As animals that is what we have evolved to be — beings that can sense the subtle meanings and repercussions of things. We have evolved to read intention, deceit, love and tenderness in faces, but we also see, read and hear music and everything else with the same mental and emotional acuity. But I’m getting off the track.
“Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter”. Achebe was instrumental in beginning to redress the balance of stories. Interesting that the Rushdie quote puns on both Star Wars and the postal service. Achebe says in his book Home and Exile that the British established the Royal Mail as an early and integral part of their colonial enterprise. The British were proud of its reach and organization, and Achebe remembers as a child the rumbling Royal Mail truck that would visit every little African village — the symbol of a far reaching global network and distant power. An Internet of paper. The British must have sensed that communication, in this case the Royal Mail, facilitated control – though they probably believed they were nobly bringing enlightenment to the “savages”. But like much else, communication is 2-way. What might have been established as a means of facilitating a European order in far-flung lands also became a way for the inhabitants of those lands to talk back. When I connect to you, you become connected to me. The writing back may have taken decades and not taken off until after independence, but the floodgates were opened.
The Internet, our modern parallel, is mainly managed and controlled by America and American companies. Yes, the communication is not one way, but structurally and philosophically it emanates from North America. I suspect that, like these writers, once the lion has a chance to tell his story many things will change.
