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.

Here and Back Again

I went twenty days without posting here, and it's been an eventful time, pretty much all to the good.  I took care of some giant final tasks for my father's estate, taught some classes, made progress with planning classes for the summer and fall, volunteered on a movie shoot, wrote a screenplay for a web series a friend hopes to make in Minnesota (more on that as it develops), started another screenplay I hope to browbeat another friend into filming, wrote a very difficult review of a book I'd hoped to be able to say more good things about than I was able to (more on that later), and submitted a couple of short stories to places that might be friendly toward them, since though I haven't written any new stories in quite some time, I do have a couple that have proved difficult to place with publishers because I stubbornly insist that their weirdnesses, lacunae, contradictions, and nonsense are not flaws, but charming and essential features.

In amidst it all, there was some reading.  Here are a few highlights...

• I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace after reading Ron Silliman's praise of it. And it does, indeed, provide plenty of interesting fodder for anybody interested in such things as gender and machismo. It's also pretty darn entertaining.
  
  
• Speaking of machismo, I picked up Richard Sellers's Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed from the library because it looked like a light read and I realized I knew nothing about the actual lives of the four actors it discusses. It is, indeed, a light read, but also a depressing one -- it is nothing but stories of four immensely talented people being drunk, boorish, irresponsible, and destructive. I couldn't help thinking of a much better book, Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, where the destructive effect of alcohol on the later work of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway is contrasted with the blossoming of Eugene O'Neill's writing once he quit drinking. Sellers makes a point of noting that Burton, Harris, O'Toole, and Reed all said they had no regrets about the effect of alcohol on their lives, but it's obvious from the book that their lives were deeply hurt by their drinking.
  
  
• I finally got around to reading Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aka Not Before Sundown), which won the Tiptree Award for 2004, and which I've been meaning to read at least from the time it won the award. I should have read it then. Actually, I wish I had read it before it garnered any accolades, because I think my expectations for it pretty much ruined it for me. I expected a truly great book, and got a merely good one.  And sometimes a bit less than merely good.  I found the insertion of various excerpts from fictional texts tedious and obvious, the story itself at times rather silly, and the final images more goofy than affecting. I certainly would not have disliked it all as fully as I did had I come to it blind, and I expect I would have found it more surprising and more compelling if I'd had no expectations of it being of a particular quality when I began. Alas. My loss.
  
  
• James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts was a great joy to read. Naremore wrote one of my favorite books on Orson Welles, as well as an early and perceptive little book on Psycho and, most recently, a pretty good study of Kubrick. But More Than Night may be his masterpiece -- full of insights that help make even some films I've seen many times seem almost new.
  
  
• Truffaut: A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana was illuminating about certain moments in the life of one of my favorite filmmakers, but it was on the whole disappointing because it spends comparatively little time on each film he made, so it ultimate felt to me quite thin. I'll have to give Truffaut at Work at try, since the Dartmouth Library has a copy, and Bill Krohn's Hitchcock at Work is marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.
  
  
• Perhaps my favorite book read in the last month, if not during all of 2010 so far, is Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. It's full of insights, provocations, information. I'll be writing more specifically about it in the future, but for now, just know that if you have any interest in feminism, cultural history, and/or genre fiction, you'll get a lot out of this book.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago I discovered that over a year ago Norton released a Critical Edition of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, edited by Francis Abiola Irele. I love the Norton Critical Editions, but the NCE of Things Fall Apart may be the best one I've seen. The novel itself takes up just over 100 pages, and the whole book is nearly 600 pages long -- rich with background material, interviews with Achebe and other people, reviews, analyses, various material related to Achebe's critique of Heart of Darkness, etc. It's a thing of wonder and beauty.

I immediately wanted to use it in a course. But what course? I don't get to teach an African literature course, and would be hesitant to teach one at the college level, anyway, at least beyond the introductory level -- my interest in African lit is the interest of a passionate hobbyist, and my knowledge is full of gaps, ignorance, and, I'm sure, inaccuracies.

But I've been struggling to come up with a new syllabus for a course I'm teaching for the second time in the fall, The Outsider. My previous syllabus wasn't a disaster, but I'm more experienced with the sorts of students who take this course now, and I wanted to change a few things (not so much the texts, most of which actually worked pretty well, as my approach and writing assignments). The thing that I kept coming back to was the experience of teaching Nervous Conditions, a book I had had great luck with in a high school course on African novels. My Plymouth State students almost unanimously hated it -- mostly, I discovered, because they had trouble understanding it. Not the language, which is perfectly straightforward, but the cultural background. In the high school class I used the book in, by the time we got to it we had spent a few weeks learning about themes of certain similar types of African literature and the cultural situations of some of the writers. We'd had a bit of that in my first try with The Outsider, but not to an extent where it sunk in enough. College students in central New Hampshire in general education courses need to spend real time on learning about the world from which writers write if those writers are not writing from worlds that appear frequently in the students' experience of life and of media representations. Indeed, when it comes to an African country, the students need even more time to work through their knowledge, perceptions, and assumptions because so much of what they know, perceive, and assume is reductive or, often as not, flat-out wrong. Thus, Kafka made more sense to them than Dangarembga. I had not been prepared for that.

Thinking about this and about the wonderful Norton edition of Things Fall Apart , I had a eureka moment -- why not devote the entire course to African literature and perceptions of Africa in non-African writing? Surely, I could do this while also sticking to the basic idea of the Outsider course.  The general course description requires only that the course look at literature and film, include discussions of the individual in relationship to society, and emphasize differences in cultures, and include such topics as "gender, sexuality, race, class, wealth, behavior, and socialization."  No problem.  And with a course of this level -- the most basic and general offered by the University -- I wouldn't need more than my own hugely-incomplete-but-adequate-enough-for-this-purpose knowledge.

What would happen, I thought, if we read not just Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, but also The Story of an African Farm and King Solomon's Mines? And then move from there to books by post-Independence African writers? (That would also let me use another great Norton book, Modern African Drama). I immediately started making a list of possible texts -- and then realized I should probably limit myself to books currently in print, since that would make things a bit easier when it comes to making books available to 25-30 students...

Lo and behold, lots of things I wanted to use are currently unavailable. I was particularly annoyed to discover that Ngugi's Devil on the Cross is out of print. Grrr. One of the most important novels by one of the most important African novelists. Not available. And so many others, too. Not available.

But many great books are available, and I've ordered copies of some I haven't yet had an excuse to get hold of. Now I've got the excuse. I expect at least some of my posts here over the next few months will be about the books I'm either revisiting or encountering for the first time as I prepare for the course. I'm looking forward, too, to rereading Things Fall Apart, which I last read no more recently than nine years ago.  First up, though, will be The Story of an African Farm, which, I'm sad to say, I've never read before.

Zunguzungu

I had promised myself I would not blog again until I had finished x, y, and z, and while x and y are finished, z (an essay about J.M. Coetzee's memoir-novels) is beating me up and winning.

But I'm going to pause in the fight for a moment and break my self-promise because today I discovered Aaron Bady's astoundingly excellent blog Zunguzungu via a marvelous post Bady wrote at The Valve about Chinua Achebe and the African Writers Series (a post that previously appeared on Zunguzungu).

It's been a long time since I last encountered a blog where the excitement of discovery came from finding someone giving expression to inchoate thoughts I'd never quite found words for, but that happened again and again as I read through Bady's blog, especially the post "When Good People Write Bad Books" and this earlier Achebe post, referencing Norman Rush (whose Mating I adore, or, at least, I adored when I read it about ten years ago) to explore the idea of "great writers" and who has the authority to write about/represent particular cultures in writing -- the discussion in the comments section is as wonderful as the post. Indeed, in one of the comments, Bady sums up what I most respect in fiction far better than I ever have:

...what I find most interesting in Achebe is his attention not to questions of who is right and who is wrong (since every perspective is flawed and mediated) but his exploration of how official truths are produced, which TFA as novel becomes a vehicle for. Or, in Arrow of God, his interest in how official truths get subverted when they don’t “work” the way they’re supposed to. In both cases, it seems like he manages to make any conception of “representation” take on so much water, so fast, that you’re left, like Foucault reading criminology texts, scratching your head and trying to figure out how people come to believe the things they do, instead of trying to figure out what the correct belief should be.

It's not all about Africa and African lit -- Bady's interests are wide-ranging and eclectic -- but that's what first captured my interest and attention, so it's what I'm highlighting here. I was taken, too, with Bady's explanation of the blog's title:

In Tanzania, you learn that you’re an mzungu when children shout “zunguzungu!” and follow you around, and in California you learn to forget because they aren’t there to remind you. But you still are, so I’ve kept the name, even though I’m now writing about other things. And I won’t define what it means, because you can if you want, and words aren’t so easily corralled into order as it might sometimes seem, thank goodness. And anyway, it’s not such a bad thing to be, really. They were delighted to see me, and I was delighted to see them, if not for the same reasons.

I learned a long time ago that I’m a white guy from the United States, long before I ever left Appalachia. But being called an Mzungu–for out of the mouths of children!–can teach you different things, if you let it. Too many people take the name Mzungu as an insult; but it isn’t, not exactly. Tanzanians sometimes use it as a compliment for other Tanzanians; wewe kizungu sana! It isn’t that either, not quite. Race is physicial, but “kizungu” is tabia or utamaduni, words that get mistranslated as culture or civilization, but mean something deeper about how and why people relate to other people the way that they do. Some people like to be called “Western,” and some people don’t; some people have that option and some people don’t. But I’ve taken the name zunguzungu for this blog not as a claim but as a provocation, and a reminder for myself. I’m really not sure what it means, on the deepest level, and I want to remember that ignorance. It also means many different things, so I want to remember that too. But whatever “zunguzungu” is, I know that I am it; the task, then, is to make that “it” into something good.

I could keep quoting all night. I won't. I have a z to keep working on before I let myself return to this here province. Meanwhile, you should be reading Aaron Bady.

(Oh, you want to know what I think of Coetzee's Summertime? Well, since I'm here already... It's magnificent and thought-provoking, of course, because I think Coetzee is just about the best living writer in the English language, at least among the living writers of English I know. It's been billed as the third in a trilogy of memoir-novels begun with Boyhood and continued with Youth, but though the "John Coetzee" of those books seems to be roughly the same creature as the "John Coetzee" of Summertime, the book itself is more of a piece with Dairy of a Bad Year [a book I think I underestimated when I first read it] and Elizabeth Costello in the ways it forces readers to become active, even self-aware participants in the meaning-making in a more insistant way than many other books -- indeed, it seems to me that Coetzee is using the fame he gained from winning a second Booker Prize and then a Nobel to question the whole idea of the writer as role model and authority -- an idea he's been questioning pretty much his entire career, but the changed and extraordinary circumstances of his life now give him some particularly powerful tools [in the form of readers' expectations and desires] to work with. I don't think it is a coincidence that Disgrace was his last novel to have a traditional narrative structure [it being the work that got him his second Booker, and the first I have with the word "bestseller" emblazoned on the cover]. I also think Summertime shows how vital the conversations and essays in Doubling the Point are to understanding a lot of what Coetzee is up to, even now, nearly twenty years after that book was put together. Confession and complicity remain powerful concerns for him. More -- hopefully, much more -- on this subject anon...)