Achebe

Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013

It's going to take me a while to have anything coherent to say about Chinua Achebe now that he has died. Not just because he was a great writer — and he was a great writer, as Aaron Bady says, "full stop". But because, right now at least, I can't think of a more deeply influential writer in our era. Not just for Things Fall Apart, though that book certainly did a lot. But for so much else — his work as an editor for the African Writers Series, his essays on Conrad, his championing of Amos Tutuola after Tutuola's work had gone out of fashion, etc. etc. (If you ever needed evidence of the irrelevance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fact that Achebe never won it is Exhibit A.)

The best writing I've seen so far on Achebe in the wake of his death comes from Keguro Macharia. You should read the whole, beautiful essay, but here is a taste:

His departure now – euphemism must be used, if only once – feels much like an encounter with his work: it was unexpected because it had been possible to believe that he was beyond mortality. Achebe simply was. He existed in the world and the world existed because he did. I could afford to take his existence for granted, could afford not to teach or discuss or write about his work, because he simply was. His being in the world made certain things unnecessary. Because he was. Certain figures inspire a kind of faith that they have transcended death, and their deaths hit all the harder – most recently for me, Adrienne Rich who, like Achebe, simply was. When they die – euphemisms can no longer work – we continue to call their names, hoping that they will return to us, that their ghosts will continue to energize the labor they started and sustained and that we now feel unable to continue. So it is that we continue to call for Audre Lorde. Believing, as we must, that she can still provide the right words, the necessary words, the transforming words.

Simon Gikandi has written that Chinua Achebe “invented” African literature. This is not a claim about who wrote first – other Africans wrote before Achebe. Nor is it a claim about the volume of his work – others have written more. It is a claim, I think, about Achebe as an institution builder, as one who made possible a certain kind of imagination and, in his role as editor with the African Writers Series, made possible many other imaginations for African literature. Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be given to a writer is this: that a particular book has been written. A particular imagination explored. A room populated. And multiple other rooms made possible.

Few contemporary Africans, if any, feel the need to write another Things Fall Apart. Indeed, by the mid-1960s, Things Fall Apart could not be written again. Achebe’s work had given African writers the permission to pursue their geo-histories, to take multiple paths, to pursue the mystical and the routine, the profane urban and the perverse rural, the unending past and the foreclosed future. Things Fall Apart had been written, and African writing pursued its multiple afters, with Achebe as inspiration, as guide, and as champion.

"Bombay's Republic" Wins the Caine Prize

According to the Caine Prize on Twitter, the winner of this year's award is Rotimi Babatunde for "Bombay's Republic".

You can read the story as a PDF via the Prize website. It was the first of this year's nominees that I wrote about as part of the Caine Prize Blogathon, and my post also has links to other bloggers' (quite varied) takes on the story. It was certainly among the top of the stories for me, though I'm glad I didn't have to make the choice, as this year's group of nominees was generally impressive overall. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Blogging the Caine Prize 2012: "Bombay's Republic"

This is my first post in this year's Caine Prize for African Writing blogathon, organized by the ever-awesome Aaron Bady (Zunguzungu). Our participant numbers have grown exponentially this year, which is very exciting. If you don't remember from last year, the basic idea is that a bunch of us bloggery people write weekly posts about each of the short stories nominated for the Caine Prize, so helpfully provided in PDF form to anyone who wants to read them at the Caine Prize website. We will do our best to keep our posts updated with links to each others' posts, creating a giant hyperlinked conversation. The virtues of this are many — none of us feels obliged to be comprehensive about the stories, there's the potential for extremely different viewpoints to be offered, and, no matter what, a bunch of people are writing and reading about African short fiction. I'll post the links so far at the end of this post, and keep it updated as more appear over the next few days. 


And now, to the story: "Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde, which you can read in PDF form via this link.




The first thing you should know is that "Bombay's Republic" is a delightful story, a story that, for me, fit all the requirements for that old clich矇: a pleasure to read. I say that because this is not always true of Caine Prize nominees, or, to be honest, nominees for all sorts of literary awards — there can be, with some nominees, a certain sense of ... dutifulness. Stories dutifully written and dutifully read.

And yet I wonder about that statement, now that I've typed it. Where, exactly, does dutifulness live in a text? Where would I get the perception that a writer was writing dutifully rather than passionately? How would I respond if the writer were suddenly beamed into my living room and said, "Hey, you! I wrote that story because it's a story I had to tell, a story that burned at my fingertips, a story that, if I didn't tell it, would have caused me to spontaneously combust! There's nothing dutiful about it!"

While it is the word that most quickly comes to mind when I think of many (not all, certainly) past Caine Prize nominees, I am also suspicious of it, because it seems to hide an utterly subjective evaluation behind a somewhat objective-sounding statement and also to close down a discussion of what, exactly, caused the evaluator to have such a feeling: what in the text failed to evoke a response in a reader due to that reader's expectations of texts, knowledge of contexts, and experience of life and reading.

Therefore, what I will consider here is the way I perceived "Bombay's Republic" to be very much different from a dutiful story, to be, in fact, the sort of story where the first word that comes to mind when I think of it is delightful.

The Danger of a Single Story

I think I might show this beautiful speech by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie on the first day of my Outsider course in the fall -- it's 18 minutes well spent.

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.