Showing posts with label Katherine Frank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Katherine Frank. Show all posts

Friday, May 5, 2017

Chinua Achebe’s Unrelenting Feminist Critics

Chinua Achebe
*Chinua Achebe

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 
Recently, I was at a forum put together to celebrate the work of Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s widely read authors who is universally regarded as the father and rallying point of African Literature. As the speeches flowed and the ovations sounded, I could feel the depth of admiration in the various speakers for Achebe and his work.  The whole thing was moving on well until one lady came up with elaborate praise for Achebe for the significant “improvement” his female characters achieved in Anthills Of the Savannah, unlike what obtained in Things Fall Apart, his first novel, which is globally acknowledged as a classic, and which now exists in more than fifty major languages.
 
 Now, I would easily have ignored and quickly forgotten this comment as “one of those things” one was bound to hear in a “mixed crowd” if I had not also heard similar thoughts brazenly expressed by some female scholars whom I thought should be better informed. 

For instance, I was at a lecture in Port Harcourt some years ago when a female professor of literature announced with the excitement of someone who had just discovered another earth: When Achebe created his earlier female characters, she said,  they complained; then he responded by giving them Clara (in No Longer At Ease), they still complained; then he gave them Eunice (in A Man Of The People) and they still asked for more; and then he gave them Beatrice (in Anthills Of The Savannah)! 

Unfortunately, I have encountered thoughts even more pedestrian than this flaunted by several scholars and readers alike.

Honestly, I had thought that this matter had long been resolved and forgotten. It should be clear (and I should think that this has been sufficiently stressed) that whatever perceived differences in the various female characters created by Achebe are a function of the prevailing realities in the different settings and periods that produced them, and Achebe’s ability to record those realties so accurately should not be construed to mean that he also “celebrates” them (as some critics have wrongly imputed) or advocates their sustenance.

In his lecture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, specially slated to precede the very memorable Eagle On Iroko Symposium organized to mark Achebe’s sixtieth birthday in 1990, Prof Dan Izevbaye described Achebe as “history’s eyewitness,” and I easily agree with him.

Today Achebe is being widely hailed for using his first novel, Things Fall Apart, to change the distorted images of Africa celebrated in the heaps of mostly concocted historical and literary accounts about the continent and its people by mostly Western writers. But Achebe did not see any wisdom in countering these distortions with his own distortions. He merely presented reality with both its glowing and unedifying sides with exceptional insight, penetration and grasp of the real picture which the foreigner, whose impressions were mostly coloured by many years of deep-seated prejudices, was incapable of capturing.

It is a credit to Achebe’s mastery of his art that even though his readers might be shocked, for instance, at the bloodcurdling murder of Ikemefuna (which every sane person should find overly revolting), they would still find it nearly impossible to categorize the incident as  one more evidence of savage pleasure of the native in wanton bloodletting. The reader is able to see an Okonkwo with genuine human feelings that are even more appealing than those of the white man who was attempting to “civilize” him, but who would have no qualms wiping out an entire community, as happened in Abame!