Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe's Novels [1 ed.] 1032746645, 9781032746647

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Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe’s Novels

This book is a new study of Chinua Achebe’s novels in which they are read as works of literary art, as literary works are studied and discussed within the discipline of literary studies and criticism. A central concept, care, which is a humane value, is found to run in the texts, and is the crux of the test that the major characters are subjected to. What challenges them as things to be taken care of through concern may be a human being in a dire circumstance, as with Ikemefuna (Things Fall Apart), the human group itself exposed to famine in what should be harvest time (Arrow of God), or the state which needs to be brought to its proper being, as Heidegger would say (No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People), or human suffering calling to be relieved (Anthills of the Savannah). The novels are all in the tragic mode, because intervention is under some kind of interdiction. Amechi Nicholas Akwanya retired as a Professor of English & Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka in December 2022, and moved to Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike as a Contract Professor. He is a Fellow, Nigerian Academy of Letters (FNAL). Besides his numerous journal and book articles, he also has many books on theoretical and practical questions of literary studies and language. Of these, the most recent are Literature and Aspects of Causality and Literary Criticism: From Formal to Questions of Method, both by the University of Nigeria Press. He is the author of Orimili (a novel, Heinemann, 1991 at http://www. geocities.com/africanwriters/AuthorsA.html), and several poetry collections. He gave the 17th Inaugural Lecture of the University of Nigeria, entitled: English Language Learning in Nigeria: In Search of an Enabling Principle (Nsukka, 2007), and the 4th Professorial Valedictory Lecture of the University entitled No Longer a Tribe: Chinua Achebe, the Novel, and Optimistic Postcoloniality (2022).

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

62 At Home with Ivan Vladislavić An African Flaneur Greens the Postcolonial City Gerald Gaylard 63 Posthumanity in the Anthropocene Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias Esther Muñoz-González 64 The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels Eva-Maria Windberger 65 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in Historical Crime Fiction ‘What’s One More Murder?’ Anthony Lake 66 Modern and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry Cultural Identities, Political Crises Kyra Piperides 67 Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures Edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann 68 Stephen King and the Uncanny Imaginary Erin Mercer 69 Postmodern Reading of Contemporary East African Fiction Modernist Dream and the Demise of Culture Andrew Nyongesa 70 Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe’s Novels Amechi Nicholas Akwanya For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Literature/book-series/RSCL

Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe’s Novels Amechi Nicholas Akwanya

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©2024 Amechi Nicholas Akwanya ‘Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe’s Novels’ is a revised and expanded version of the 4th University of Nigeria Valedictory Lecture given by the author, Professor A.N. Akwanya on 1 December 2022 entitled ‘No Longer a Tribe: Chinua Achebe, the Novel, and Optimistic Postcoloniality’, University of Nigeria Senate Ceremonials Committee, 2022 at Princess Alexandra Auditorium, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The right of Amechi Nicholas Akwanya to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-74664-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-74833-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-47112-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

1 Introduction: Renewed Concerns

1

Theories and Approaches  4 Textual Symbolism  8 No Longer a Tribe  13 2 Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions

18

Foundational Works of a Tradition  18 The Literary Work in the Field of Perception  27 Re-reading Achebe  37 3 Rootedness: The Father’s Field of Control

41

Tribesman 43 Ancestral Rule versus Theocracy  48 Story Events Rendered a Pure Present  56 A Man Belongs to His Fatherland  66 Structures Upturned and Reset  69 4 A New Language’s Reference Index Visitations 74 Settling and Resettling Existences  79 Tragic Loss: New Beginnings  85 The Clan: Continuity and Change  91 Ethics and Politics  98 Osu, the Ancestors, Loss  105

73

vi Contents 5 Resemblances, Refigurations

107

New Critical Discoveries  107 Mythical Action  115 Tribal Non-Affiliation: Sam Finds a Vacuum  121 High-Souled Individuals  134 6 Involvement under the Ethics of Care

139

Solidarity: The Call of Care  144 Care Structure in the Lifeworld’s Native Soil  151 Absent a Shared Lifeworld  158 7 Exercise of Ethical Being

162

To Be Brought to Its Being  163 Depths of Discourse  172 Post-Tribal Sense  183 Postscript: Optimistic Postcoloniality

185

Works Cited

199

Index 205

1 Introduction Renewed Concerns

Achebe’s inaugural literary work, Things Fall Apart, established the man’s reputation as emphatically as its hero Okonkwo’s throwing of the great wrestler Amalinze the Cat. He went on to produce other very important works, but even though these are significant literary productions in their own rights, the success of Things Fall Apart seems to have put them all somewhat in the shadow. At all events, in global terms, it seems to draw a great deal of the light available to itself. Yet there are scholars who think that Arrow of God is at least as great. Of the other novels, the least has been said about No Longer at Ease, which seems to be generally taken to be a minor work. However, it is striking that the narrator devotes much care, as it were, in going over the precious few months of freedom Obi experiences from his return to Nigeria from his studies in England to his arrest and imprisonment for corrupt practice, to dig up the facts and traumas of the experiences of those months in a (private quest for an answer to the sentencing judge’s confession of inability to comprehend why Obi had failed so dismally, despite his education and great promise. He does not end up justifying Obi: he had not set out to do so. But he had exercised painstaking care and personal concern over the matter, and ends on a note of self-affirmation for having done something worthwhile. Of course, this careful search produces a realistic effect, as if Obi was a real person known to the narrator, also a real person, who must not only have witnessed the events, but also had personally followed and recorded them, knowing that the young man was going to be the target of a sting operation, and knowing also that he would not be taking his records to the court as a witness of some kind, but rather would be using them for a novel he was going to write. Paul Ricoeur reminds us that poetry springs out of an ‘as if’ (The Rule of Metaphor 300), which does not mislead adult criticism into construing a fictional work as historical reality, or part-history and part-fiction. Nonetheless, a character can still be real in the writer’s perception. For instance, Achebe apparently lived with the four central

DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-1

2 Introduction characters of Anthills of the Savannah for many years before the novel was written; as he explained it in an interview soon after its publication: I began this book 15 years ago. I had the characters but I didn’t have a story. So I put it away and five years later I took it again and still wasn’t ready. So I simply let it stay, until three years ago when I began again and this time it worked. (Conversations with Chinua Achebe 155–156) He would not have used those characters as ‘devices’ of any kind, being settled existents in his mind long before the story they are involved in came to him; and, as he also notes in the volume of interviews, when the story comes, ‘it comes complete’ (51). Care is a high value to the narrator in No Longer at Ease – it is something he demands of himself in carrying on his task. But apart from the self-affirmation of having done something worthwhile, this painstaking care has also brought about the unveiling of hypocrisy and superficiality in the attitude of the judge and the other colonial officials and expatriates pronouncing upon Obi in that ‘in spite of [their] certitude’, they have only sought and found an excuse to maintain their prejudices – not against Obi (they have nothing in their hearts against the hapless young man), but against ‘the African’. Mr Green, Obi’s boss, ‘famous for speaking his mind’, and rather cross that his fellow expatriates ‘refuse to face facts’, was to take advantage of the occasion of Obi’s sentencing to voice out this prejudice, that ‘the African is corrupt through and through’ (No Longer at Ease 3). The narrator’s example of care, however, in going into the matter oneself imposes a special kind of attentiveness in reading and rereading the other novels, where the narrator is not necessarily the one exercising it. Care is found to be a value which both directs to their term the actions of the characters in all the five novels of Chinua Achebe, including those of No Longer at Ease itself, and defines the horizons of their moral choices. Each of these works discloses the situatedness of its characters in a network where care is summoned beyond its accustomed limits. To be able to home in on this network and the summonses beyond it, we will rely on the elucidation of care in Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein. Reading with this tool gives a deep and fresh understanding of these works and the characters who are caught up in their actions. It further enables a reading of all the novels by means of one and the same principle that is internal to the works. Efforts in existing criticism to capture all the novels by means of one principle, apart from feminism – on which one or more of the works are always found or proved to be defective – have tended not to be able to find a place for No Longer at Ease. In others where there is room

Introduction  3 for all the works, Achebe himself, who sustains the image of Ijele the great Mask, is the figure in focus, with the literary works placed all over as decorations on its body. However, his novels easily provide paradigmatic examples for the approaches to African literature that have been touted as particularly suitable for African literature, such as sociological-historicist theories and postcolonialism. It is noted that approaches to literature have been much more readily followed in dealing with African literature than theories of literature. The attraction of these approaches is probably because they mark a positioning of the scholar and the writer in a space where they are associated with a political role. On this basis, the development of literary scholarship going forward is increasingly towards political commitment, with value decided by what the piece of writing is allegedly committed to. But how is it to be decided whether the piece of writing is poetry/literary art in the first place, and therefore properly before the literary scholar – a critic, that is, rather than communication, a protest, or an appeal to whom it may concern? Emmanuel Ngara expresses this political interest in his Stylistic Criticism of the African Novel My own opinion on all these issues is that the African critic cannot see himself in isolation from the African politician, philosopher, theologian, or educator, all of whom are looking for African solutions to their problems. The best of these and the truly African ones among them are striving to accelerate the process of decolonization and liberation. In the same way, the African critic should search for African solutions in criticism, or should search for those solutions which, though not specifically African, will nevertheless do justice to African works of art. With regard to the second alternative, Marxist criticism seems to have much to offer to the critic of African literature. (6) According to Ngara here, the overarching aim of African intellectuals and professionals is the accelerating of the process of decolonisation and liberation. The African critic is also working with the same aim in view; yet this critic has to strive to ‘do justice to African works of art’. There is no clear reason why Marxist criticism would be considered as capable of doing justice to African works of art. It is capable of enabling their reading in revolutionary terms, which is not necessarily the same as doing them justice. To do justice, a criticism has to be focusing on the work of art on its own terms: one may say, on seeing the object for what it is, a work of art, and not in a relational way by tying it to the politics of decolonisation and liberation. Being an approach to literature, rather than a theory of literature as such, a theory that aims to capture the nature of

4 Introduction literature, Marxist criticism is probably not about doing justice to African works of art, but about assisting the work of decolonisation and liberation. It may well be that a change in focus is in the horizon at the present, with economists, medical science, the academic community, and so forth increasingly citing international best practices as the worthwhile goal to aim for in human development and professional behaviour. Of course, what art wants – literary and any other – is ‘preservers’, no matter where they may be found, as long as they are able to ‘respond to the truth happening in the work’ (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 64). As far as international best practices are concerned, it is the discipline, literary studies, criticism, that must respond to the challenge. Theories and Approaches The approaches to literature are all interest-based – interests which frequently arise in the social space and for the time being exercise the attention of the intelligentsia. These approaches are rarely concerned with the nature and being of literature. Thus, whereas in Aristotle, being concerned with the nature and constitution of poetry, the character (ethē) is simply the one who performs the action, since ‘mimetic artists represent people in action’ (Poetics, chapter 2), sociological, historical, and postcolonialist criticism tend to think of character as a representative individual and a means of achieving specific aims. Such is the thinking that runs in James Booth’s discussion of Odili Samalu in Achebe’s A Man of the People: The character of Odili is a most subtle device for exploring the relation between ideals and reality, the moral world and the world of politics. His underlying integrity and high ideals never waver, while he continually points out to the reader the failure of himself and of his whole society to achieve such integrity in practice. (101–102) The difference, therefore, between reading a literary work of art to help to accelerate the process of decolonisation and liberation and reading it to do it justice is that the first makes an appropriation of the work, while the second is content to let it be itself. Some would regard this appropriation as an act of violence. In any event, a one-sided reading of a literary work could never be doing it justice. One is either ‘stopping up one’s ears’ (Derrida, Dissemination 118) in order not to hear all that the work may be saying, or one is attempting ‘to arrest its play or its indecision’ in order to ‘fix it on … one of its terms’ (231). The discussion of Chinua Achebe’s works in this essay owes to the fact of priorly paying close attention to the movements of signification that are

Introduction  5 awakened in the reading, and building an argument around one or two of the many patterns at play, in the present case, the movements of care and concern. Doing ‘justice to African works of art’, just like doing it to a work of any other derivation, demands that it be listened to, that it be read in full openness ‘in order to perceive all that is being said’ by it (Foucault, The Order of Things 325), which may otherwise ‘lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things’ (36). It does not seem to help to claim unique status for African art and literature, such that special rules and guidelines should be laid down for its study, nor is it to be supposed that Aristotle was concentrating on the nature of art and working out the rules for its study because there were no social or political problems in his republic to take up his attention. The pointlessness of demanding unique status for African literature is already evident in Ngara offering Marxism, even though ‘not specifically African’. One general rule should suffice for literature as the entire body of literary works that has been produced across the whole world, as long as it enables discovery of the poetic object as such, and as long as it can be ascertained that it does not exclude anything that should properly be considered its object, or, in Mulder’s terms, that it satisfies the requirements of adequacy, simplicity, and consistency/coherence. Aristotle’s Poetics, and the theories that derive from it in a consistent manner, involve such a universal claim, and are ascertainable as satisfying the above requirements. This philosopher’s theory of literature comprises the simple statement that it is an art form that comes about by means of language alone (Poetics, chapter 1). Simplicity is first underscored here. By reason of this very simplicity, however, the statement does not contradict itself – so, satisfying the requirement of coherence. This simple statement applies to all of literature, whether dramatic, lyrical, or narrative consistently, and applies in the same way to Greek, English, Latin American, African, or any other literature – which means that it does not exclude any literary work of art. Aristotle’s Poetics may safely be regarded as the most important and basic of all texts in the discipline of literary studies. It is here In fact that the common name of the object the discipline deals with is first provided and given content, namely poetry (which Latin was eventually to receive as litteratura). To say that the discipline deals with this object is, unfortunately, not with implication of being master of, but specialising in reading or engaging with it. In giving the name, Aristotle also provides an answer to the first and most important question in the discipline – the question that constitutes the discipline: What is poetry; what is literature? And the answer is that poetry/ literature is a hyponym of art, containing all the feature specifications of the notion art. But it brings something additional to art, namely language: it is an art form that comes about by means of language alone. Aristotle’s Poetics goes further: it provides the characterising feature of art, namely

6 Introduction mimesis, as well as the basic concepts of literary criticism, such as ‘action’ (praxis), ‘character’ (ethē), ‘narrator’ (appangelia), ‘story’ (muthos), and so forth, which themselves have generated the theoretical discussions and postulations that make up what is today known as modern literary theory. To understand Aristotle to the core and the foundations of the discipline of literary studies, it will certainly be of great help to add to one’s reading such other critical texts as Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, and Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in which, respectively, the nature of poetry and the work of criticism both laid out in more or less schematic form in Aristotle are more deeply thought and elaborated. From the Renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century, humanism reigned in literary studies, and literary studies stagnated, saying the same thing over and over about literature being able to improve man, although, there being no concrete evidence for this, the ultimate argument became: just imagine what the world would have been without it! Plato had critically investigated this idea in the Republic, under the claim that in education, the art of the Muses catered for the soul, while gymnastics catered for the body. His finding is that poetry could not be trusted with training of the human mind, as it worked by misrepresenting and falsifying things. Aristotle’s Poetics, which had developed an account of the nature of poetry, giving wide berth to the idea of its possible uses, began to move to centre stage at the end of the nineteenth century, and this movement was to launch what has been called ‘the age of theory’. But the farther that modern literary theory has advanced and ramified, the more remote to consciousness the driver of this revolution has become. The need to intensify our reading of Aristotle is not only to keep that driver in consciousness, but also to retain awareness of what we are theorising, what for, and why it matters. Evidence of inattention to Aristotle in Nigerian criticism is manifest in some of the debates that have preoccupied this critical tradition from the very beginning, such as the question of ‘African literature’, whether such a thing exists and under what conditions. But if ‘African literature’ is not simply the name of an archive, but a descriptive concept, is Africanness a characterising feature in this literature; if so, where does the Africanness lie?; how do we know it in contradistinction to any other? However, the history of criticism suggests that there is such a thing as poetry/literature, which is knowable and describable, without necessarily calling up a specific geographical/cultural space. Hence if we read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, it does not seem to matter that the poem is by an American, or that this American was residing in London at the time of the writing. It was in vogue at the time of the birthing of scholarship on literary works produced by Africans to spend effort on the history and culture of the time and place of the writing. Scholarship on the new literatures in Africa apparently simply followed suit. But that path now deserves questioning.

Introduction  7 Another debate which remains unsettled is the language of African literature: is the literature African if the language is European? Does use of an African language necessarily create African literature? However, the bulk of the productions we call African literature is in languages bequeathed by the former colonial powers. If this no longer causes embarrassment, still when criticism was faced with a poem that demanded concentration, the poet was often dismissed as a victim of the ‘Hopkins disease’. The expectation was that the poem was to carry a message on its sleeve, so to say, missing the whole point about the working of literary creations. As Benjamin presents it: The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. (90) In much the same way that ‘Hopkins disease’ was used as a cudgel to beat non-transparent writing, criticism with rigour is usually has the tag ‘Formalism’ pinned on it. One minor issue, which some are already taking as read, is the bright new concept of faction as opposed to fiction. For some indeed faction is a distinctive African invention. But a preliminary question is: does such a thing as faction exist, the fictionalising of facts (Soyinka, Ibadan ix)? It exists. But that is what is called fiction. Basically fiction is a ‘made thing’ (fingo – Latin – is the base form of the verb: ‘to make, to fit together’, ‘to fashion’). There is no fiction that is not a fitting together of things that are already, in some way, known or thought. The notion faction actually seeks to reinvent the wheel, for we read in Poetics: indeed even if it turns out that he is making [his work] out of actual events, he is none the less a poet – a maker: for nothing prevents some actual events from being the sort of things that might probably happen, and in such a case he is the maker of those events. (chapter 9) The critical requirement in fitting together of events, regardless of where they were derived from, whether from experience, history, other texts and stories, including folk narratives and songs, is probability: the first condition of a poetic construct is its having the character of ‘the sort of things that might probably happen’. The incidents in one and the same poem may have come from a variety of sources, but if they cohere together in a

8 Introduction new arrangement, a poem – a new art object – has come into being. Hence whereas Charles Nnolim’s ‘“A Source for Arrow of God”: Matters Arising’, which discusses the source of materials with reference to a pre-­ existing document, is a legitimate exercise in literary scholarship, it does not affect in any way the status of Arrow of God as a creative and literary work of art. Academic disciplines all have founding concepts which are laid out at the introductory stage and accepted beforehand so that one does not have to start from scratch each time in carrying out the business of the discipline. So often indeed do we see attempts in African criticism to define literature: this does not make any sense unless there is something proven to be wrong with the existing definition. Similarly, the task charged to literary studies, the task that constitutes it as a discipline, is stated in very clear terms in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. That task is criticism. Poetry is anciently constituted. It is Aristotle that assigns it as the thing that literary artists produce. Literature is also anciently constituted in ancient Latin, while criticism is Greek. Grammaticus, the Latin name for criticism, never settled into the English repertoire. Criticism is a task in its constitution: namely judgement. The object of this judging is the literary product, to determine if it is poetry/literature; and, if so, by what criteria (Greek again: ‘standards, canons’). A by-product of judging is reviewing. But whereas the output of a publisher, including literary ones, may – and should – be reviewed, criticism has tools that apply specifically to poetry – the art form that comes into being solely by means of language. It may be dramatic poetry, narrative poetry, or lyrical poetry. But they all share a common nature. Chinua Achebe’s novels are great literature – the world attests to this. Beyond the world’s testimony, they manifest power, the power of the spirit inherent in them (Hegel’s notation for genuine art), by always springing into life in the space of reading. They are going to be read again in this study, and ‘a new discourse [conjoined] to the discourse of the text[s]’ (Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences 120), with accent on a motif that I find recurring in each of them, namely care. In other words, this reading is not being offered as the meaning or the overall point of the oeuvre; it is offered because the texts authorise and necessitate it within their movements of symbolisation. Textual Symbolism There is always more in a poetic work than what it directly shows, and what can be heard in its ‘murmurs’ in any one instance of reading owing to its symbolic nature. What it directly shows is captured in Heidegger’s phrase, ‘its thingly nature’. For example, a printout of ‘Our Father’ is

Introduction  9 production of a thing, a prayer. And a poem is a thing in the same respect. But: the art work is something else over and above the thingly element. This something else in the work constitutes its artistic nature. (Poetry, Language, Thought 19) Heidegger elucidates further about this ‘artistic nature’, namely that it ‘makes public something other than itself’ (19). By its artistic nature, the literary work arouses thinking. This is what it shares with the symbol in general, the giving rise to thought (Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations 288). The poem is symbolic; and this is normal. But it is not normal to treat the Lord’s Prayer as symbolic, even when it is read as one would read verse. On the contrary, language with the power of speech, as well as the undertone where there is murmuring, is essential for literature. Unlike in poetry, however, a murmur from within communicative language can only be a factor of distraction. Foucault in fact distinguishes the language of literature as literary – the one out of which poetry is made, being that it ‘never cease[s] to speak within itself’ – ‘in that endless murmur in which literature is born’ (Foucault, The Order of Things 114). This literary language is a system of potentiality; in Paul Ricoeur’s vibrant metaphor, its words ‘revolve in the closure of the lexicon’ (The Conflict of Interpretations 92). But it is in the poem, that is, as the poem itself, that this language attains actuality. Henceforth the capacity to ‘speak within itself’ in an ‘endless murmur’ may be intercepted and investigated. Such is the textual event that in Ricoeur’s practice, criticism attempts ‘to intercept’ and understand (114, 120). In this practice, criticism, far from seeking textual meaning, rather ‘intercepts the movement of the text towards meaning’. This is important in our tradition which so stresses meaning that it ends up discouraging experiencing the text since it already knows what it is ‘all about’. How indeed can this quantity be known if, as we have seen, the literary text manifests something other than itself? Unlike Foucault, Pierre Macherey maintains that fiction has no need for a specific ‘literary language’, nor is the everyday language altered as in the account of the Formalists by the concept of ‘defamiliarisation’, (ostraneniye, literally, ‘making strange’) (Swingewood 13): it is simply putting words into new relationships, in exactly the procedure of producing discourse: The novelty of this language derives from its self-constituting power. With nothing apparently before or behind it, untroubled by any alien presence, it is autonomous in so far as it is, in effect, lacking in depth, unfolded entirely on its own surface. So it has no need to coin new words to differentiate itself from ordinary language; it transforms words

10 Introduction by weaving them into a text; once the old bonds are broken there emerges a new ‘reality’. (Macherey 50) This applies equally to the incidents that make up a story, for instance, that ‘once the old bonds are broken there emerges a new “reality”’. Heidegger accounts for his ‘something else’ in the poem in the very constitution of the poem, not something someone puts into it, but of its essence. This conception we can also read in Northrop Frye’s imagery of birth and delivery in discussing the relationship of the poet and the poem: [The] poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind. He is responsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him. (Anatomy of Criticism 98) It comes into disclosedness whole and complete, ‘always already’ (Heidegger), an ‘art-being’. Frye further writes that ‘the new poem, like the new baby, is born into an already existing order of words’ (97). Some of the murmurs in the poem come from association with this pre-existing order of words, some even from between the spaces of the poem’s own words – which is why philology, according to Foucault, must ‘turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them’ (The Order of Things 325). But there are other murmurs that are heard at the site of the enacting of the reading of the text, as this does not happen in a pure space. It has to be mentioned that murmurs of all kinds can become audible in the space of reading, and can sometimes derail reading into pursuit of things outside the text’s world, ‘interrupting the flow of the presentation with “transcendent force”’ (Arendt, ‘Introduction’ 39). The critical reader can only be one who concentrates – a capacity that Walter Benjamin considers to be in low supply in the modern world (238). But it an irreplaceable enabler of close reading. Such is the question of care, which is discussed in this study under the Heideggerian sense of ‘something else’ that the texts manifest. It is a core notion in the philosophy of existence, and implicated in the more commonly discussed concept of thrownness of Dasein, however, with the aspect of Dasein’s potentiality missing. This partial view gives prominence to the conjoined themes of alienation, with a sense of modern man’s ‘exclusive concern with the self’, being ‘ejected from the world in which it normally moves’ (Arendt 114), and his being always ‘thrown back upon himself’ in every attempt at self-expression, of ‘transcending or freeing [himself] from the recurring cycle of its own functioning’ (115). While thrownness is undoubtedly the human condition, one finds oneself thrown

Introduction  11 into a world, into the midst of things, in Heidegger, ‘being-with is an existential constituent of being-in-the-world’ (Being and Time 120). There are existentialist responses to this situation, like Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, where the human, in being thrown into a world, is constrained in a hell he cannot escape from or change. In Heidegger, however, it is essential in ‘the existential constitution of being’ that ‘Dasein always has understood itself and will understand itself in terms of possibilities’ (136). These potentialities orient Dasein to others and things ‘at hand’. He explains: Accordingly, the relation to innerworldly beings lies in it ontologically. Even if only privatively, care is always taking care of things and concern. In willing, a being that is understood, that is, projected upon its possibility, is grasped as something to be taken care of or to be brought to its being through concern. For this reason, something willed always belongs to willing, something which has already been determined in terms of a for-the-sake-of-which. If willing is to be possible ontologically, the following factors are constitutive for it: the previous disclosedness of the for-the-sake-of-which in general (being-ahead-of-oneself), the disclosedness of what can be taken care of (world as the wherein of already-being), and the understanding self-projection of Dasein upon a potentiality-forbeing toward a possibility of the being ‘willed.’ The underlying totality of care shows through in the phenomenon of willing. (181) ‘Taking care’ is constitutive of Dasein in its thrownness, as long as there is ‘disclosedness of the for-the-sake-of-which in general’ and ‘the disclosedness of what can be taken care of’. Care and taking care are not common words in Achebe’s works, at least not in the Heideggerian sense. But the double disclosedness of ‘what can be taken care of’ and that ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ – which summons one oneself may issue in one being thrown back upon oneself because action is forbidden by some social norm or by some interest. The result is that whereas the action works out its logic, often a tragic logic, it always appears that the real question is the exercise of Dasein’s potentialities of concerns towards the others as well as the things at hand in its world, and whether the character (ethē) has been able to exercise his ethical being in free exercise of will towards what calls out to be cared for and ‘the for-thesake-of-which’. In all cases, there are boundaries and constraints which under everyday ethics might be clung to as an excuse to hold back, with willing blocked or headed off. It may even happen that what stands in the way is another call that may be considered more basic, such as the impulse of self-preservation. But authenticity is found along the path of exercise of

12 Introduction will, with self-understanding in terms of possibilities in relation to something outside the self, as ‘something to be taken care of or to be brought to its being through concern’. Each of Achebe’s major characters is brought to a boundary situation where the question is not ‘to be or not to be’, but whether or not the call of care is seen as going before all else. Thus a major reason for use of the present conceptual framework in this study is to call attention to the fact that these books are art works, and constantly challenge us to look at them afresh. Students and teachers of African literature, in particular, should be aware of this challenge. The monuments of African literature not only deserve their place in the archive of the tradition, but also retain their novelty always; as Benjamin says, the literary work of art ‘does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.’ It is for researchers to re-discover and constantly bear witness that the difference between literature and public discourse narratives is that the former is endowed with the capacity always to spring back into life, while the latter, tied to the time of their relevance, flow with that time into the past of events and reactions to those events. Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe’s Novels brings into sharp focus the essential functioning of care and concern in human community building and maintenance, with the finding that the materials ready to hand – ­cultural, political, historical, interpersonal, and so forth – were used to construct artworks of great distinction, which can inexhaustibly yield new critical discoveries (Frye 17). The major critical discovery in the study is that care and the call of care are among the main challenges the characters face in all or most of the selected novels, and how they recognise and respond has a major role in the structuration of these novels. It is also found that from one novel to the next in the sequence of production, more or less, there is a change in scope from the narrow, constricted world of the tribe, which understands itself as one family, sprung from one progenitor in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God to a much wider level of organisation in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, where the call for exercise of care and concern is coming from human beings, not just members of one’s tribe, and the things to be taken care of are no longer just things of the tribe, but of a civil order, sometimes the state itself. The call of care is a challenge which, in Things Fall Apart, has salience for one specific individual. In other works, one and the same call confronts different individuals in turn, but whether they advert to it and how they respond is the measure of their authentic being-in-the-world. And the hero is not just a narrative category as the one who makes the moral choice on which the story turns and complicates, but it may also be a moral category if he is one who adverts to the call of care spontaneously and is resolute in following through. These kinds of moral entities are best seen in Anthills

Introduction  13 of the Savannah. But throughout the texts, we see human need in different forms, and in whatever form it is encountered, it is care’s urgent call to bring something to its being, as Heidegger phrases it. In all the works, we also see what human personages (in their inauthenticity) can prefer or shield themselves under so as to avoid adverting to this demand to bring something to its being. Such preferences and places of refuge are an inviolable lifeworld with its coded responses, as in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, power and self-glorification, as in Arrow of God and Anthills of the Savannah, and greed and self-gratification, as in A Man of the People. No Longer a Tribe This book, which fully develops my Valedictory Lecture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka on 1 December 2022 titled ‘No Longer a Tribe: Chinua Achebe, the Novel, and Optimistic Postcoloniality’, is prompted by a number of issues, one of which is the tendency in African and Nigerian literary studies to trip as, say, in the world of fashion, with an eye on generators of public discourse, where literature is presumed to be an example of the airing of these issues, then moving on again to the next topical issue. Another idea that helped to prompt this reflection is that the tone and postulations associated with early readings of Chinua Achebe have stuck. The result is that students and young scholars who have been raised in this intellectual sphere generally are convinced that they know all about these novels, and that there is no further need to read them. This has contributed to the slide of these rich literary productions into gradual forgetfulness, or even a sense that they have been read to exhaustion, when the reading has hardly begun. The reading in this essay shows that these novels are much richer and far more important than has been made out. There is an implicit call here that people, particularly in the discipline, should go into the matter themselves, and experience the texts themselves. It needs to be emphasised that as an artwork, a literary text is on the one hand fixed in its form, not to be updated or revised, and on the other constantly in need of rereading, affording new insights, and what Frye calls ‘new critical discoveries’; and it is inexhaustible not only by reason of ‘the changing forms of comprehension to which posterity gives rise; it is inexhaustible of itself, by its nature’ (Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 72). One of the consequences of literary studies moving rapidly over the literary works as they come off the press so to say, paying attention only to the political, social, and other such concerns, is that the primary reason that these books may claim attention in the discipline of literary studies, instead of sociology, history, public morality, and so forth, is increasingly lost sight of. In my view, this reason is that by nature they are works of art.

14 Introduction Another consequence is that literary works in Nigerian and African culture have a very short life span in the public consciousness, not because of their nature as literary works, but because of the quickly changing interests of the very community whose task is preserving these works. Incidental to this is that the works that gain and retain prominence may not always be the ones with the most worth. Some important works of Nigerian literary artists have dropped out of the attention of the critics and the public – or have been unable to engage that attention, resulting in the diminishment of the literary culture which ought to have been growing all the time. To mention just a few examples: John Munonye (Oil Man of Obange and A Dancer of Fortune); Kola Omotoso (The Combat and The Edifice); T. Obinkaram Echewa (The Land’s Lord; The Crippled Dancer); and Nkem Nwankwo (Danda; My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours). I personally find what Benjamin calls ‘strength’ in these, and this has been ventilated in a few studies, such as Fifty Years of the Nigerian Novel, 1952–2001. But they have rarely been addressed by other critics; and, given that they would mostly fall under productions of what has been called the ‘first generation’ and the ‘second generation’ of Nigerian writers, where authors’ names are mentioned to cover their works indifferently as if the importance of a work depended on who wrote it, not on the ascertainable ‘strength’ of the individual work, the chances of ever seeing them discussed may seem remote indeed. For that matter, there is not much discussion taking place on Wole Soyinka’s novels, despite the fact that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, presumably, with these very works counting for him. In the same vein; and even though Chinua Achebe is acclaimed as the ‘founder’ of modern African literature, and no one else has been found to displace him from that pedestal, some think that his ‘social relevance’ has been exhausted or that his relevance is for an age that is now in the past. Those who continue to bother with his works examine them to see if the issues of current interest may be glossed in the work. To be clear, ‘generations’ of Nigerian writers poses no problem as a convenient term of classification, referencing the time of birth of the author, and perhaps the time of his or her literary output. In an older classification, for instance, Chinua Achebe is listed among the Mbari Club, whose output was around the time of independence and immediately after. The idea of ‘a critical categorization of [for example,] third-generation writing based on certain assumed ideological leanings’ (Oluwole Coker, ‘Theorising ThirdGeneration’) raises concerns, however. For, although the works of some of Chinua Achebe’s contemporaries like Onuora Nzekwu, Nkem Nwankwo, and T.M. Aluko configure similar social issues, and possibly share certain ideological leanings, they have not received much critical attention. This suggests that the ones that feature in critical discussion owe their recognition to other things than the kinds of facts configured and the shared

Introduction  15 ‘ideological leanings’. Other contemporaries, like Cyprian Ekwensi, John Munonye, and Elechi Amadi, are occasionally mentioned in critical scholarship. For some time the latter two did feature even as secondary school prescribed texts, before dropping out of sight. It is hard to explain the absence of some of the writers in presenting their period’s literary history, based on the criteria used for categorizing the different generations, since they frequently meet all the criteria. Some, such as T. Obinkaram Echewa, seem to be utterly unknown, despite featuring in the mainline Heinemann African Writers Series. To this extent, the division into ‘generations’ has been unable to capture all the significant writers in the tradition. It has also resulted in truncating research in the elder waves of literary art production, as though all the writing of these have already been identified, and, worse still, as though the writings have been totally and exhaustively characterised. Indeed the need to revisit the literary history of Nigeria has never been greater given the serious omissions in current accounts, and given the reductionist strictures the generational model has placed on artworks, straitjacketing them into time schemes and ideological frameworks, and thereby facilitating turning away, and stopping one’s ears from ‘that endless murmur in which literature’ exercises its existence over time (Foucault, The Order of Things 114), the murmur which normally grips the critics with the longing to hear more, to make out what is being said in signs and symbols, ‘to turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them’ (325). A great deal of the studies currently being done is on the so-called ‘third generation’, possibly because of the contemporary issues of environmental degradation and climate change, migration and globalisation, identity and alienation, gender and gender conflict, postcolonialism, racial oppression, and the exploitation of the underclass. These issues apparently resonate with contemporary society, and comprise the so-called thematic thrusts of the works of this generation. There are important lessons, however, to learn from the experiences of the past. For example, the themes said to mark the Mbari Club generation, post-independence disillusionment, breakdown of social and political institutions, civil conflict, and so forth were once topical and ran in public discourse. The tensions have persisted, and perhaps aggravated in the polity to the present, but they are not supposed to be exercising writers as much as before. Why is that? It cannot be that they have ceased to be relevant socially. We may take it that the automatic appeal of the issues currently exercising the writing community will eventually wear off, without those issues necessarily going away. Other problems will come to the fore. We may expect that some of the writers currently being discussed, as with some of the ‘Mbari generation’, will gradually sink into forgetfulness. Hopefully, some will continue to feature in literary discussions. The difference between those that will sink into

16 Introduction forgetfulness and the rest, to judge from experience with the elder generations, will not be whether or not they meet the listed criteria. The history of written literature in Nigeria is within its first one hundred years, but it is already manifesting some serious problems, especially the failure to capture all its significant productions (and there is no ruling out that some of the ones rated highly may not deserve the rating). Some of its significant production may conceivably have sunk permanently into forgetfulness because they had failed to strike the popular note that the literary commentators were on the lookout for, while others dropped out of sight because the literary commentators had found other toys, so to say, to play with. An issue that might be of lesser importance is where the literary work exhausted itself upon the first reading, except that this could have been aided and abetted by a criticism maintaining a very low threshold for recognition. Having works like those of Chinua Achebe in the foundations of a literary tradition has great advantages. For readers all over the world continue to find Chinua Achebe’s writing engaging to read over the passage of time, with some searching for and finding the so-called contemporary issues in them. The more such works are read, the better, and the more penetrating the understanding of literary phenomena. And the need for actually reading these should be emphasised in the literary institutions, especially the curriculum and public examination authorities, who should ensure that examination questions are crafted in such a way that the chance of success depends on having actually read the works, not just plot summaries and past examination questions on the given work. This need of personal confronting of the texts is being not served, but rather undermined, in the efforts to impose a grid on Nigerian literature based on nonartistic parameters. Furthermore, some texts of past generations are being profitably explored referencing the identified contemporary issues. Examples are migration (see Okolie, ‘Remapping Exile in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’), although this is treated by some as a recent phenomenon; ableism and debility (Ukwueze and Okey-Agbo, ‘Social Construction of Debility, Difference and Complex Embodiment in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’), to say nothing of subaltern and gender studies, and the corrupting influence of multinationals and foreign powers. If issues said to be the dominant concerns of the ‘third generation’ writers may also be shown to be commonplace in Achebe, we may be left with only the time of birth for his inclusion among the ‘Mbari generation’ of writers. A literary tradition, it must be noted, is not unidirectional, from writer to the reading public, from producer to consumer. Its economy also involves a demand pattern; and this demand can become compelling. Achebe recognises this fact, as well as the necessity sometimes to resist, observing that:

Introduction  17 no self-respecting writer will take dictation from his audience. He must remain free to disagree with his society and go into rebellion against it if need be. But I am for choosing my cause very carefully. (‘The Novelist as Teacher’ 28–29) Of course, there are several different publics. There is such a thing as a general reader, for example, as distinct from the literary scholar community, or, more strictly, the literary critic, the one who reads and writes about what he/she reads for consideration by other readers of a similar experience. The scholar community can have a great deal of influence on the writer. Therefore, a great deal depends on the tone of their writing on what they have read. The demand to write about contemporary issues and the everyday problems faced by ‘the man in the street’ may be precisely the kind that Achebe would want to resist, without thereby denying ‘that the palm tree is a fit subject for poetry’ (30). In the hands of a genuine artist, no material is trivial or unworthy of poetry. But the everyday may come too easy to those who lack the gift, who then produce, at best, what is sometimes called ‘consumer literature’, whereas ‘consumer culture’ can know nothing about ‘the “quality” of the work (which supposes finally an appreciation of “taste”)’, for ‘the operation of reading itself [cannot] differentiate between books’ (Barthes, Image – Music – Text 161–162). ‘Taste’ is something cultivated or imbibed through continuous exposure to literary phenomena, but literary appreciation can also be formally taught under literary studies. The main outcome of literary studies, however, is the know-how for literary criticism, the judgement of what is, or is not, a literary work of art.

2 Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions

As has been mentioned in the preceding chapter, because the study of ­African literature has been paying almost exclusive attention to the social realities considered to be topical at the time of their first appearance, or some specific interest it allegedly deals with, literary works are accorded importance to the extent that they engage with problems, and these problems they are said to be concerned with are treated as their raison d’être and account totally for them, meaning, significance, justification, all. It works out that the books do not need to be read at all. One only needs – especially students facing certificate examinations – to note what issues the given work is said to deal with, and what positions it is supposed to have taken on the politics of the day. This is why foundational works of the tradition, such as Chinua Achebe’s novels, are not being read, even by students preparing for certificate examinations in which those very texts are prescribed. I personally encountered a situation where undergraduate students were told not to bother with Chinua Achebe and his generation because there was nothing they could say about them that had not already been said. A great deal has in fact been said about Achebe’s work, a lot less about that of his contemporaries, but what has been said is in terms of the surface configuration – its ‘external existence’ (Hegel), or, as Edward Said references it, the ‘social and economic outside facts of its existence – [post] colonialism and imperialism’ (177). Yet, as Hegel maintains, a work’s external existence ‘is not what makes [it] into a product of fine art’ (29). For this, we have to search for artistic criteria in the work itself. Foundational Works of a Tradition Giving a keynote address at an international conference by Pan-African Writers Association, Nigerian Academy of Letters, and the Association of Nigerian Authors on 24 June 2022, Professor Bernth Lindfors, who began his scholarly career in African literature in the early 1960s and remained in the same field until retirement in 2003 and devoted much of his research to DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-2

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  19 Chinua Achebe’s writing, doing a major study, Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1978) with C.L. Innes, called attention to two issues to keep in mind: African literature study as an academic discipline and African literary works having long-lasting value. There were many other issues raised in the lectures in the course of the conference, especially in regard to what according to these scholars should preoccupy the creative writers: the problems of conflict, violence, and insecurity, and war and slaughter of Africans by Africans on a vast scale. Also highlighted as values to be promoted by writers were peace, democracy, economic and social development, conflict prevention, conflict management, and conflict resolution, gender relationships, gender justice and equity. All these are issues that can be built into a literary work and literary works can be built out of them. But whether or not the work will be of lasting value is a totally different question, and does not depend on what it was built out of – some would say, its content. If work of lasting value is to be identified, that is the task of the critic, and the business of the academic discipline of literary studies. There is need for criteria to distinguish the significant from the insignificant. Here again the division into ‘generations’ is not of any help, as these critical criteria are missing. Work of lasting value is conceivably something that creative writers may keep in view as they write, but some may say that it is not absolutely necessary, and that the business of the writer is simply to write. Fair enough. But if it be granted that the reason a literary work may claim attention in the discipline of literary studies is the work’s artistic constitution, it is the business of the critic, not to interpret as such, but to judge and propose works that he or she considers to have the character of art, and to show how this determination was made. This judgment is hugely important for culture. It identifies the great works, the monumental achievements of the culture itself, works that the people can take pride in, which are also the individual culture’s contribution to world culture itself. At this level, an author does become something of a representative individual, a corporate person. The judgment is also an essential service to the academic discipline in both teaching/researching and curating of the literary tradition. The specificities of what gives a work the character of lasting value have to be worked out in technical and explicit terms, and this comprises a core part of what is taught by the academic discipline. So what are the criteria for lasting value; which literary works in our tradition have this character, and therefore should have a permanent place in our African literature programmes; in other words, how do we know a work of lasting value?: these are things discussed within the academic discipline. Professor Lindfors gave a number of counts based on such parameters as publications in Research in African Literatures and subjects of coverage in African Literature Association conferences. The works he found to be of

20  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions lasting value were not very many, but in each count, four of Achebe’s five novels, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah, were given special recognition. While acknowledging that many scholars have difficulties with categorising No Longer at Ease, and some unimpressed by what they called its portrayal of ‘true romance’, despite its topicality, hence the claim that the novel was inspired by Hollywood (Chukwukere 22), whereby the work has been designated as a minor novel, some others in Nigeria especially treat Anthills of the Savannah as blemished. But I am going to cover all the five novels in this essay. And far from a minor work, it is to No Longer at Ease that the impulse for the paper is owed; and Anthills of the Savannah is to be treated to a lot more space than any other in our author’s oeuvre. The attitudes that govern the reading of these works in the present essay are different, maybe even opposite to what is commonly encountered in Achebe criticism, where those who read politically tend to have much to say about A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah, with Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God being held up the champions of anti-colonial politics. One of the distinctive features of genuine literary works is the ability to unfold new dimensions at every reading. But discovery of multiple dimensions is what literary scholars in the strict sense of the word can do; and this strict sense entails that they are capable and have the patience for close reading. Although Chinua Achebe’s novels were put into a generational compartment corresponding to a historical period and associated with an assortment of ‘thematic thrusts’, the novels demand close reading, whereby they disclose their artistic constitution. They are not merely stories. In close reading, the work itself totally holds the gaze: one does not see through the work to something, whether in the background or the foreground; one does not seek to reconstruct an outside intelligence, and its alleged intentions, nor is one engaging the murmurs of this intelligence. Rather there is a composite image, and reading is placing oneself in openness to ‘seeing the total relationships’ (Williams 60) – needless to say that they will not all be seen in any one reading. There is here an answer to what must be the first question in Achebe studies, as to what precisely one is confronted with: whether history – which may be socio-political or personal – or sociology; whether cultural studies or literature; and if literature, whether in the general sense of Latin, litteratura, covering everything from learned discourses and treatises, to personal letters and memoirs, or in the strict sense of art. I do not take the view that Achebe is all that and more, because this is a levelling attitude that discourages trying to know in detail and in depth. Various classifiable forms of writing have their distinctive features and also a raison d’être, without which they would not have come about, or continued in existence, and which remain a basis for their reading going forward.

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  21 Among these are individual scientific studies, which are normally captured in research under the title of literature review. Obviously, Achebe’s texts are not literature reviews of any kind. Those who try to use them as literature to be reviewed in the course of investigating, say, a philosophical question soon find that each work configures its own textual facts for its own purpose, and what one text says cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by another. Rather they are reviewed, always as primary and selfstanding documents; and their reviews can only lead to conclusions and observations about themselves. Achebe’s texts, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah and Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems, are literature in the strict sense of art of which the proper name is, really, poetry – art made by means of language. By virtue of their standing at the head of what has been called African literary tradition, and by evoking a history stretching from the penetration and transformation of formerly isolated and autonomous cultural entities into outposts of an imperial power, their reduction to client states and the inevitable setbacks and crises, all of which have been configured in novels that present a composite image that is ‘thoughtprovoking’, in fact, ‘most thought-provoking’ because each ‘of itself gives food for thought’, and is ‘what wants to be thought about’ (Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 30), the corpus may be regarded as what ‘remains to be thought about always, because it is at the beginning, before all else’ (4). The attitude commanded by these texts recalls the gift of Christopher Okigbo’s poetry concerning which Achebe comments that ‘his best poetry is more appealing and rewarding with every reading, always starting new ripples of significance’ (‘Don’t Let Him Die’ 118). The poems are read again and again because they invite rereading: they are food for thought. Achebe also admits, in like manner that he rereads his own novels. These works are poetry in Heidegger’s and Aristotle’s sense – which means then that poetry is not another name for verse; nor is verse a characteristic feature of poetry. Strictly speaking, verse is a convention of writing, just like prose, only one that has tended to be used mainly for poetry of a lyrical kind in modern times. But the confusion of verse with poetry is from ancient times. We note in Aristotle, for instance: Of course, people attach the verbal idea of ‘poetry’ [poiein] to the name of the metre, and call some ‘elegiac poets,’ others ‘epic poets.’ But this is not to classify them as poets because of mimesis, but because of the metre they share: hence, if writers express something medical or scientific in metre, people still usually apply these terms. But Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; so one should call the former a poet, the other a natural scientist. (Poetics, chapter 1)

22  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions By contrast, some modernist writers like Hugo von Hofmannsthal have works classified as prose poems. In mentioning that both Homer and Empedocles write in verse, and one a poet, the other a natural scientist, Aristotle also identifies the feature that distinguishes poetry from other kinds of writing, namely mimesis. In fact, mimesis is shared by all the arts: each is a mimetic practice, differing one from another in virtue of what the philosopher calls the medium (en) of mimesis. Poetry is mimesis by means (en) of language alone (monon tois logois), sculpture by means of shapes, painting by means of colour, and music by means of sound. This word mimesis is the crux in art theory, and art is whatever anyone makes of it, unless the concept is properly and technically specified. The destiny of criticism is also tied up with this word, for criticism as judgment from the very beginning sought to put in place the criteria for judging, criteria which could only work on the basis of determination of the nature of art itself. Criticism was therefore striving to be a law-founding discipline, before it could become a law-applying one. But the issue of nature was a primary one; and that is what brought philosophy into the scene. A judgment based on misapprehension of the object being judged could never be right. It is not necessarily right if the nature was correctly apprehended, but it had a chance of being right. Criticism is not unique in this. Many other disciplines do not even worry about their own natures; and those that worry about this always call philosophy to their aid. Hence there is philosophy of history, philosophy of education, philosophy of law, philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, and so forth. Writes Martin Heidegger: By way of history, a man will never find out what history is; no more a mathematician can show by way of mathematics—by means of his science, that is, and ultimately by mathematical formulae—what mathematics is. The essence of their sphere—history, art, poetry, language, nature, man, God—remains inaccessible to the sciences. At the same time, however, the sciences would constantly fall into the void if they did not operate within these spheres. The essence of the spheres I have named is the concern of thinking. As the sciences qua sciences have no access to this concern, it must be said that they are not thinking. Once this is put in words, it tends to sound at first as though thinking fancied itself superior to the sciences. Such arrogance, if and where it exists, would be unjustified; thinking always knows essentially less than the sciences precisely because it operates where it could think the essence of history, art, nature, language—and yet is still not capable of it. The sciences are fully entitled to their name, which means fields of knowledge, because they have infinitely more knowledge than thinking does. And

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  23 yet there is another side in every science which that science as such can never reach: the essential nature and origin of its sphere, the essence and essential origin of the manner of knowing which it cultivates. (What Is Called Thinking? 32–33) Philosophy is not exactly what Heidegger means in speaking of ‘thinking’, but something ‘that is at once poetic and philosophic’, according to J. Glenn Gray (xxi). The truth at stake here is not correctness or correspondence, but aletheia (‘unconcealment’), and calls for deep and genuine insight. Therefore, nothing short of ‘a gathering and focusing of our whole selves on what lies before us and a taking to heart and mind these particular things before us in order to discover in them their essential nature and truth’ will suffice (xxii). To think along with Heidegger, therefore, it is not philosophy that determines the nature of art, poetry, or any other sphere. It is a thinking which is older than the discipline of philosophy, which is a field of knowledge like any other academic discipline. In this dimension it teaches what has already been thought and documented, and, in this way, without directly thinking it, cultivates thinking. Literary studies, similarly, does not directly cultivate poetic mimesis: it teaches what has been written about poetry, the various approaches in which thinking about poetry has been carried out, paying great attention to the approaches which know poetry as mimesis, the pure act of mimesis, and presents living poems to illustrate these, presents living poems to elucidate the difficult concept of mimesis; it teaches theoretical knowledge about poetry; it teaches the history of continuity and change in poetic practice; it compares poetic works among themselves – preferably the great ones – in order to see the poetic object better, how it works, how it holds together as a work, ‘whole and complete’ (Aristotle), ‘self-contained and self-sustaining’ (Heidegger), and what commonalities they share whereby the name poetry, literature applies to them equally. The student who has seen all this and been part of it may respond with creations of his own, if inspired. Equally important is that he or she will be able to judge whether his/her product is genuine or not. For, as Halliwell observes, the discipline is rendered possible by: the recognition that poetry has a history of its own, and that this history is indispensable for the interpretation of certain conventions and possibilities of poetic practice. Literary criticism and literary history are here simultaneously delineated and conceptually intertwined. (8) Mimesis is Greek, and hard to translate into any other language. Of course, languages are not mutually translatable. Frequently, approximations and interpretations are used. Translations from ancient languages present extra

24  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions problems; and this is seen in the constant need for new and alternative translations to the Bible, for instance. The preservation of meaning seems to be especially difficult in translating from Greek. One of the ways in which English has dealt with this problem in its own history of management of meaning is through borrowing, with the problematic words directly borrowed and progressively naturalised. Words like phenomenon, crisis, criteria, emphasis, phantasy, category, synthesis, and thesis while others like taxi, symbol, morphology, physics, graphology, biology, toxin, and pharmacy, have undergone one word-formation process or another. The borrowing of words like synthesis and crisis did not cause displacements, nor redundancies in English vocabulary because they were borrowed whole, in Saussure’s terms, signifier and signified together, enabling English to think the idea in the first place. Language contact always leads to the discovery of gaps that need to be filled, and borrowing is frequently the recourse for filling these gaps (Baugh and Cable 3). Igbo was quick to borrow such words from English as parlour, veranda, window, and tumbler, some of which English had previously borrowed (parlour from Old French parleur, ‘veranda’ probably from Hindi varandā); while ‘window’ is probably native, and is recorded in Middle English. ‘Tumbler’ is a formation from the native English word tumble; originally, for a drinking cup designed not to stand on its bottom and which thus had to be emptied before being set down. During the era Michel Foucault calls the Renaissance, mimesis was usually translated as imitation. But there is a fundamental insufficiency in the term. Inevitably it brings into play Plato’s notion of a copy, in contradistinction to the original, with the echo effect of structuralism’s binary sets, where the copy must fall short of the original in quality and perfection. ‘Representation’ has since been used, but it has not been able to shake off the sense of something pre-existing, which the representation is aiming at, to know which is to understand the reason and the meaning of the representation. Mimesis, however, is a making in which a new reality emerges, which exists for itself and looks only to the relevant artistic form (kai kata tên peri toutôn technên), translated variously as ‘without infringing the relevant art’ (Halliwell 129), ‘by conforming to the requirements of the art’ (Dorsch 70). It is a common belief that Achebe’s works mirror Igbo or Nigerian society. But what are ‘the conditions for redeeming the validity claims raised’ in order to reasonably maintain such a position, for ‘the meaning of an utterance is inherently connected’ with the utterance? (McCarthy xiv). The position has empirical significance. If the claim is criticised or challenged, as now it is being done, it calls for redeeming by verification. Rather the claim has always been taken for granted or speculatively confirmed.

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  25 What we are facing here is precisely the problem of mimesis. Literary works may bear resemblances to actuality, but are not thereby copies of actuality. In making mimetic objects, art makes use of media, which it does not create. It makes use of some matter: it may be stone; it may be colouring stuff; it may be historical events. It does not make these either. Aristotle was to work out the general rule for poetry: namely ‘the construction of events’ (Poetics, chapter 6) into a muthos or a ‘plot’, insofar as it makes up a ‘whole … which has a beginning, middle, and end’ (chapter 7). Therefore, just as … in the other mimetic arts a unitary mimesis has a unitary object, so too the plot, since it is mimesis of an action, should be of a unitary and indeed whole action; and the component events should be so structured that if any is displaced or removed, the sense of the whole is disturbed and dislocated. (chapter 8) In this construction everything has a functional role and everything inessential for the life of the poem is excluded. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of the novel is the very reason why it is now the most loved literary form, namely the arrangement of incidents with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Setting aside the implications of beginning and end, that movement from one incident involving human individuals to another accounts for the novel’s power to seduce the reader into thinking that it is a ‘portrayal of life’ (Lukács 217). This deceptive sense of a portrayal of life goes with a keen eye on the moral of any given circuit together with characters to identify with or to indict and condemn. As well as this, the linking of incidents together by the law of temporal succession gives the sense of a historical record. However, the beginning and the end announce a structured totality. Hence Aristotle’s insistence on the sense of unity: the poem is ‘a unitary and indeed whole action’. This means that the work cannot be explained in parts or phases, but as one object, a work. We read Achebe’s works and endlessly interpret them because they are not history, portrayals of observed social realities or answers and solutions to observed social problems, nor are they memoirs or allegorical constructions of which the individual psychological history is the hidden content. For the latter kinds of documents, we may learn what they say for our own information. When we learn it, their use may change to a reference material; and they survive for this very purpose. We do not describe them; for they lack the object status that pertains to an Achebe text. There is no interpretation either, except to unite them with the truths they are concerned with. Things Fall Apart or any other of the works we are concerned

26  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions with in this essay is fundamentally different from the kinds of works that may serve to give information and later shift to functioning as reference materials, because they are single acts, whole and complete. We make acquaintance with them, and renew the acquaintance from time to time, as we may do with the Harcourt Whyte recordings we have or Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The music, the literary work: they are aesthetic objects and always exist as such. Whether being an aesthetic object is adequate as a destiny for literary works is a question that has been raised since at least Plato. He thought that it made much better sense if such works had a role in education. But no sooner than he had expressed this than he found that they could not be trusted to teach, having no genuine knowledge of the truth – or maybe having no interest in the truth as such: As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small—he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth. (Republic 278) Achebe famously postulated that the ‘trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership’ (The Trouble with Nigeria 1). Many agree with him on this, and also agree as in Plato here that we are dealing with a city – read, Nigeria – where ‘the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way’. We shall come to reflect further on this in a moment. Since the early questioning of the literary by Plato and postulations by Aristotle, a discipline has emerged, with a number of founding principles: 1. Literature is an art form, and therefore embodies all the distinguishing properties of art whereby it is both knowable and describable, but has language for a specific difference; 2. that it consists of three forms: drama, lyric, and narrative, each with sub-types; 3. that mimesis is a fundamental principle in art, and therefore in literature; 4. that each production is composed of parts, is a work, and free-standing; 5. that it is something that human beings produce in virtue of being human In these highlights derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, we see what he considers to be the essential properties and conditions for recognising poetry, and, according to Heidegger:

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  27 it is precisely this essential element of the essence that we are searching for—that which compels us to decide whether we are going to take poetry seriously and if so how, whether and to what extent we can bring with us the presuppositions necessary if we are to come under the sway of poetry. (Existence and Being 294) Criticism as an order of knowledge is an academic discipline, with poetry as its object. Criticism is careful to keep its object in view at all times, and strives not to allow anything to get in the way, sowing confusion. So there is a problem where it is becoming fashionable in the critical community to see the critic is an arbiter of social practice, and use the space of literary criticism as an opportunity to have one’s say about social practice. In this case, clearly, knowledge of the essence of poetry is in question, for knowledge of the essence – the outcome of thinking – ‘compels us to decide whether we are going to take poetry seriously and if so how, whether and to what extent we can bring with us the presuppositions necessary if we are to come under the sway of poetry’. The listed highlights guide us into both the essence and the effects of the essence of poetry, and pertain to all poetry – lyrical, dramatic, and narrative; and there is no poetry unless constituted in the poetic form and free-­standing. Not pertaining to the essence of poetry is the specific nature or origins of the incidents or events – whether they come from experience, from a dream world, from old books, from past history, from cultural or political activities, or from any other source, whether human or extra-human. The requirement is merely that incidents are arranged in some order, but in such a way that they interconnect among themselves and make mian praxin holen kai teleian (‘a single action, whole and complete’). Thus the poem ‘is a mimesis of an action’ (praxeōs mimêsis estin). Determining the action that the poem aims at is therefore of central importance in literary criticism, for, according to Aristotle, hê tôn pragmatôn sustasis (literally, ‘the synthesis of action’, but translated variously as ‘the incidents and the plot’ (T.S. Dorsch 40), ‘the structure of events’ (Stephen Halliwell 51), ‘the putting-together (? structuring) of the events’ (George Whalley 21)), is of the highest ‘priority and the aim of a superior poet’ (chapter 14). Whether the work succeeds in this aim or not is also important, because this action aimed at is megiston de toutôn estin – ‘the most important of [the] things’ (Halliwell) that go into the making of a poetic mimesis. The others are character, thought, and diction. Additionally, there may also be melody and spectacle. The Literary Work in the Field of Perception Renewal of acquaintance with the work of art is not demanded merely to shore up failing memory. It may well be that the call is to see it in a new

28  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions instance of perception, and therefore, to see it ‘for the very first time’, as Heidegger would say, which says something about its aesthetic nature: aisthētikos is ‘perceptual’. The work of art sustains itself in the field of perception: it silently demands to be seen, to be poured over, to be held in an enthralled gaze. Human beings honour this demand in different ways; for example by hanging paintings in living rooms and hallways where they can catch attention. But this is not all. The same work may be not quite what we see each time we engage it in perception. As Walter Benjamin has argued, ‘the tenor and the significance of the great works of literature undergo a complete transformation’ over time (73) and consequently unfold ‘potentially an eternal afterlife’ beyond the time of their first appearance (71). By contrast, the contents of historical, sociological, etc. documents are fixed, and ordered for verification by reference to a specific historical or geographical context. Such documents do have contents. With literary works, the content – or rather the tenor – is the same as the work. That is what undergoes complete transformation over time, and demands to be perceived afresh. Thus the literary work of art, a genuine output of mimesis ‘is, so far as we know, an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries, and would be even if new works of literature ceased to be written’ (Frye 17). The present discussion of Chinua Achebe’s five novels is precisely to share some new critical insights, and to remind the critical community that the reading of these texts is only beginning. And this is the great thing about literary theory. There are some which enable only one kind of discovery to be made in the work of art. They are not in the strict sense theories of art, but ways of perceiving a literary work with a standpoint in other universes of discourse and academic disciplines, such as psychology, economics, ethics, politics, history, and linguistics. They may be useful for the purposes of multidisciplinary reflections. But the theory or theories that pertain to art, pertain to the nature of art, are the ones that will yield these limitless new critical discoveries. Scholars who think that all that can be said about them has already been said should beware that these are genuine works of art, and belong to the category that Walter Benjamin calls great. These great works are not to be taken for granted. Yes, they undergo transformation, but they also shape our minds. The impact may even awaken deep-seated psychological forces when we neglect to look at them again and rethink them. For foundational works like Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, teachings about them which were never revisited, will inevitably settle as unshakeable certainty. The knowledge content of these teachings received as adolescents, very often given by people who have no idea how literature works – because their own discipline which they are qualified to teach was something totally different – these teachers assigned literature courses because there was no one with the qualification available

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  29 to handle these often, and, alarmingly, have excellent results in the public examinations. This reinforces the notion that anyone can teach literature. We can read Plato again against this backdrop: As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less… Plato directly blames art and the artist for false content going into the mind. And art has not changed or made amends for this. We recall that the Christian Church was hostile towards art early on, especially epic and drama. St Augustine devoted chapter XVI of his Confessions to the denunciation of dramatic literature, using against the form some of the very points that the rhetorician Quintilian had listed in its favour. The neoClassicists were to negotiate, as it were, an accommodation between the two, by introducing the idea of poetic justice right on the stage or the narrative, so that it would be clear that the poem and the poet were on the side of virtue and good sense. This additional fiction cane at a cost. By standing out as these poetic acts of justice were meant to be, the old deus ex machina that Aristotle had pointed out to be ‘irrational’, and bad for art became the norm in artistic representations (Poetics, chapter 15). It undermined the naturalness of a well-made or an inspired work, its ‘thingly character’, in Heidegger’s phrasing (Poetry, Language, Thought 19). In fact the modernist revolution from the nineteenth century resulted in freeing art from control by those who traditionally held authority, whether political, religious, or moral; from the authority of tradition itself. Hence Michel Foucault writes that under modernism, literature had become: detached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation during the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and [has created] within its own space everything that will ensure a ludic denial of them (the scandalous, the ugly, the impossible). (327) To know how literature works entails knowing that it makes fiction seriously. Freud was to highlight this remarkable phenomenon in Creative Writers and Daydreaming, where creative writing is considered as a form of play parallel to infantile play. At play, the child ‘creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him’ (Freud qtd in Sandler and Sandler 65); for his part the creative writer ‘creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously – that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion – while separating it

30  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions sharply from reality’ (Freud qtd in Britton 84). Because of this seriousness, which itself is fiction, readers tend to fall in line. The Old Testament instruction not to make carved images is precisely because of this (Deut 4.15–20). But art is part and parcel of the human at the very point of emergence. We read in Ernst Cassirer’s Language and Myth: art, like language is, originally bound up entirely with myth. Myth, language and art begin as a concrete, undivided unity, which is only gradually resolved into a triad of independent modes of spiritual creativity. Consequently, the same mythic animation and hypostatization which is bestowed upon the words of human speech is originally accorded to images of every kind of artistic representation. (98) Art is something that man cannot in any way give up. Great art still exercises the mythic power that is endowed to words and images and also sound, as in great music. But there is a question of self-commitment. Primitive man had no choice in this. If the mythic power of words moved him, he responded in one of two ways, fear or hope. He did not know how to stand back, and be uninvolved, as a poem by Fernando Pessoa we shall soon see would say. The Greeks were the first to develop and teach the art of standing back, which is the very first move in what is called criticism. This is the discipline that is taught in literary studies; and someone who has mastered this art in all its dimensions, if possible, is called a literary critic or an art critic. Such a scholar understands that as Philip Sidney put it back in the sixteenth century, Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth: for as I take it, to lie, is to affirme that to bee true, which is false…. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writeth: he citeth not authorities of other histories, even for his entrie, calleth the sweete Muses to inspire unto him a good invention. In troth, not laboring to tel you what is, or is not, but what should, or should not be. And therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not. (lines 1079–1085) This strong advice not to count too much on poetry is directly counter to the humanists’ optimism in the reliability of the pleasure/profit exchange, and was infrequently given its due in studies of Renaissance criticism. The Roman poet and critic Horace had taught that poets aim to give pleasure

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  31 or profit (instruction), and the poet is indeed great who can combine the giving of pleasure with delivering profit to the reader. Humanist optimism in the power of poetry for good completely disregards Plato’s disquiet over poetry. To him, poetry can have but one function, to educate. But in reality, it behaves like the medicine man in Achebe’s Arrow of God who left what he was called to do and did another. Poetry fails, according to Plato, and would always fail in that it is far removed from the truth. To treat poetry the way Sir Philip Sidney points, one must take a path opposite to humanism, a very powerful strand in Western civilisation whose roots are traceable to Plato, and endures to the present. Renaissance humanism was ‘a cultural and educational programme’ (Kristeller qtd in Stillman 3), and it shaped the attitudes of the cognoscenti from the Renaissance age and far beyond. Thus Stillman calls Sidney’s defence of poetry ‘startling in [that] humanist republic of letters’ (3). This anti-humanist view is startling in what the Renaissance called litterae humaniores, roughly the ‘Humanities’. But it is a position that suits the modernist temper, as expressed in Fernando Pessoa’s poem entitled ‘This’, which reads in part: They say that all I ever write Is but pretence and lies. Not so. It’s simply that I feel With the imagination. I do without the heart…. So when I write I’m in the midst Of what is far from me. Completely uninvolved myself, In earnest for no reason. Feelings? They are for the reader! In literature and art generally, the reader has to be wary, and avoid mistaking the seriousness in this play as an invitation to self-commit. Art is art, despite the popularity of the saying: art is life! So, what has literature, what has art got to do with life. In this question, we are opening up the fissure in literary studies, with the humanistic attitude on one side, and on the other another attitude which some call aestheticism. A Frenchman called Benjamin Constant supplied the slogan in the early nineteenth century which the humanists have wielded as a cudgel against their opponents: art for art’s sake. Constant wrote: Art for art’s sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 3.165)

32  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions The answer to this by another Frenchman, Victor Cousin, is much less well-known, but nonetheless thought-provoking: We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake… the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself. (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 3.186) Religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, education for education’s sake, work for work’s sake, and so forth. If you ask me, I would excuse myself from Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria, that the trouble is ‘simply and squarely a failure of leadership’ (1). I would rather say, with all respect to the much-admired great, that it may be wise to look not only at the world of action – politics, but priorly in the dimension of mentality. We had better look at these formulations despite that they sound aberrant: education for education’s sake, work for work’s sake, morality for morality’s sake is an attitude that calls attention to a Latin adage about committing to what one is engaged in: age quod agis (translated literally as ‘do what you are doing: pay attention’ (Branyon 18)), which is part and parcel of the Roman ideology of gravitas. The alternative which takes no effort at all to agree with is a thoroughgoing utilitarianism, so that mention of these values only ‘alerts us to our own advantage and merely teaches us to pay attention to it’ (Kant, Groundwork 36). Thus engaging religion would be for my welfare’s sake, morality for staying out of trouble’s sake, work for my stomach’s sake. Yes, he who does not work, let him not eat. But is that all? Should that be all? Is this even the most important of the reasons for working? I do not think that Paul meant that that food was all the reason to work – he who said that he ‘worked harder than all the others’ (1Cor 15.10). Surely, it wasn’t for the sake of his stomach that he was doing all that. Rather in his vision of those headed for destruction are those whose ‘god is the stomach’ (Phil 3.19). Immanuel Kant proposed the difficult philosophy of the moral imperative which says in effect that a virtuous person does something virtuous ‘out of a recognition of the importance of so acting [and] sees it as making a claim’ on him or her. In short, the virtuous person has ‘a commitment to doing what morality requires’ (Groundwork 101). This view of morality is found in the English proverbial tradition, with the following maxim: whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, being first documented in 1746 (The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs), and so older than Kant’s Groundwork (1785). The question may be why the thing is worth doing in the first place, which brings into focus the issue of certain actions having worth in themselves. There is in fact an Igbo saying of similar import,

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  33 if one may borrow from Achebe’s practice: ife di nma omume di nma omume (‘what is worth doing is worth doing/what is proper to do is proper to do’). Something having worth in itself is what needs to be thought through, and this thinking through is relevant even with regard to what has been framed as ‘the trouble with Nigeria’. Answering it as a problem of failure of leadership does go a long way, and rather saves us all a troubled consciousness. But responsibility is much more widespread if attitudes do come into play. To return to my main issue, which is the question of truth in relation to the literary work of art: it has to be said that to this day, humanism continues to trust literature. What has changed is that the work itself is much reduced in importance, or perhaps that its importance is no longer its being as literature, but something of value that is somewhere inside it. According to Seymour Chatman, the active agent in the literary works ‘instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn’ (148). For his own part, Sven Birkerts suggests about text handling to find the object of value it holds: Read… slowly…. If you imagine your attention as a kind of gauge, at what point does the needle shoot up most dramatically? Where is the uranium deposit? (10) All this means that the work itself does not really matter to the humanist. I.A. Richards’s apprehension of the work of art is that it is ‘a vehicle of communication’ (27), making exception, however, for tragedy which he says ‘is too great an exercise of the spirit to be classed among amusements or even delights, or to be regarded as a vehicle for the inculcation of such crude valuations as may be codified in a moral’ (63). In the humanist attitude, mimesis boils down to a technique of hiding communicable matter for retrieval by the cognoscenti. In the opposite view – Hans Robert Jauss calls it ‘the aesthetic attitude’ (35), but I think the practitioners would call it the literary or the critical attitude, ‘mimesis is poiesis, that is, construction, creation’ (Ricoeur, Hermeneutics 141). This means that the poetic object is one totality; it is ‘whole and complete’, as Aristotle says. For, as has already been mentioned, just as … in the other mimetic arts a unitary mimesis has a unitary object, so too the plot, since it is mimesis of an action, should be of a unitary and indeed whole action; and the component events should be so structured that if any is displaced or removed, the sense of the whole is disturbed and dislocated.

34  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions Frye therefore specifies as central to the work of the poet that ‘he is responsible for delivering [the poem] in as uninjured a state as possible’ (98). The thing that is whole and complete, that is delivered ‘in as uninjured a state as possible’, is the poem itself. In the Aristotelian tradition, the value object is the poem itself, not what it allegedly contains. This is how it comes about that in this tradition, what is at stake in mimesis-making in all its forms is truth, the authentic and autonomous truth itself, which needs no support system nor a verifier, but is self-standing, self-sustaining, an art-being. Heidegger elucidates: In the work, the happening of truth is at work. But what is thus at work, is so in the work. This means that the actual work is here already presupposed as the bearer of this happening. At once the problem of the thingly feature of the given work confronts us again. One thing thus finally becomes clear: however zealously we inquire into the work’s selfsufficiency, we shall still fail to find its actuality as long as we do not also agree to take the work as something worked, effected. To take it thus lies closest at hand, for in the word ‘work’ we hear what is worked. The workly character of the work consists in its having been created by the artist. (Poetry, Language, Thought 56) This created thing is self-sufficient, and a thing in its own right. Its truth is not by correspondence to something external to itself – truth as adequatio rei et intellectum. Instead, it is patent; it manifests itself (aletheia). But, on the other hand, we may be the ones being changed by the agency of a work that resists digestion, not being an informative text. Coming under the sway of poetry can be a problematic phrasing in a civilisation in which literature was made an optional secondary school subject precisely for the fear of this happening, believing literature to be not just the portrayal of culture, but its being rendered seductive. As a signpost and a warning that all who choose to study it despite this partial prohibition do so at their own risk, it was assigned the title Literature in English. In this educational culture the irresistible call to come under the sway of poetry is nothing but ‘the lure of the abyss as freedom’ (Spivak lxxvii). It may be that African literature also falls under the partial interdict since it is mainly also in English. There would be a problem in this since English is accorded a high place of honour in the curriculum and, moreover, is the official language of the country. The debate over the language of African literature ignited by Obianjunwa Wali in 1961 gave occasion for some African critics to assert the existence of African literature, apart from the language in which it is encountered: the language is a pure medium; and what we see directly is the literature, not the language as such. According to Emenyonu,

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  35 this literature revealed itself in the psychological reality that is specifically African, while Adeola James argues that it is an authentically ‘African experience’ embodied in this literature that marks it out. The attitude they seem to project as appropriate in response to these values is what Jauss calls ‘admiring identification’ (‘Levels of Identification’ 303). An admiring identification would be acceptable to many African critics, as long as the ‘African’ qualities are found. This would both honour the African tradition and respect the partial interdiction imposed on English. But the basis of identifying with the African values and wariness over English is the common humanist doctrine that literature is really secular scripture, and like the sacred one ‘profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness’ (2 Timothy 3:16). When we speak of African literature, the emphasis frequently falls on the novel, a subtype of narrative, which Achebe and others agree is new in Africa, entering into this region through the agency of colonisation and colonial education (see Achebe, ‘The Igbo World and Its Arts’ 44). Some critics believe that the criteria for discussing the novel should be African; and there are already generations of Nigerian and African graduates who have but a smattering of information about the criteria and concepts which Izevbaye and other elder critics like Adeola James have emphasised have come with the novel and with the formal teaching of literature generally. Such basic questions as how to identify the novel as a novel extend beyond the telling of a story, with or without a moral, and beyond the question of writing in prose. They belong to that class of things that ‘gives us to think’; for ‘some things are food for thought in themselves, intrinsically, so to speak innately’ (Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking 6). To be specific about the object in question, Heidegger quite drops the word ‘literature’, and speaks of poesy. In poesy, according to him, we encounter what is: thought-provoking not just occasionally, and not just in some given limited respect, but rather gives food for thought inherently and hence from the start and always—is that which is thought-provoking per se. This is what we call most thought-provoking. And what it gives us to think about, the gift it gives to us, is nothing less than itself—itself which calls on us to enter thought. (121) The whole point of this discussion is that Chinua Achebe’s novels, both individually and as a collective set, give themselves to thought, and are thought-provoking in themselves. Recently I led a team of scholars, national and international, in a big exercise of thought by invitation of these works. The outcome was a substantial volume of more than thirty new and original research papers, collected under the name Chinua Achebe’s Works and

36  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions Legacy. But no sooner had that task been accomplished than I saw that the thinking had not been laid to rest, and never would be as long as these works ‘find preservers … such as respond to the truth happening in the work’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 64). The summons and movements of care and concern are undoubtedly at play in Things Fall Apart, but it is their highlighting and frustration in No Longer at Ease that have caused the reverberations demanding that the older novel be taken up again in thought, in this way, widening and interplaying the other novels. The honoured tradition on Chinua Achebe studies hallows him as a fighter of the African corner and opposer of the colonist’s racialism. I would plead to be excused from reading his novels under that strict regimen. I have already cited Walter Benjamin to the effect that great works of art undergo a transformation over the passage of time. But I do not want to take shelter under Benjamin’s wing in my re-conception of the works. I’m rather rooting with Frye’s teaching that the literary work is an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries, which allows the traditional readings their accustomed cogency, and in fact other readings as well, which have a right to their own day and space as long as they have the force to hold their ground (Derrida, Writing and Difference 29, 442). The uncovering of the summons and movements of care as what Heidegger calls ‘something else’ the works have a capacity to yield also involves a human context, now the closed network of the tribe, then a more open environment where the call is unrestricted. The movements are not only circumscribed in a tribal world within the tribal boundaries, the paths both the summons and the response follow are known and predictable. But things are different in the kind of world Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God give way to. It may be noted that the figurations of the tribe were often discussed in what we may see as traditional readings in terms of portraying a way of life, in the new insight at play in this reading, the tribe is a tableau which must be placed side by side with other tableaux to activate complex seeing, particularly of connections and deviations, repetitions and transformations, stories and re-storying, flow-paths and destination points, blockages and reversals. Movements become discernible; in our particular case, a movement that mandates a grouping of the novels into three, the first group comprising Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the second No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, the third comprising Anthills of the Savannah alone. The next four chapters will be concerned with tracking, first, the institutional structure of the tribe as the lifeworld against which action has meaning, within whose ambience care is circumscribed; the destruction of this lifeworld and its supplementation with what No Longer at Ease calls ‘our dear country’, and the mythography of Black Mother in A Man of the People, and finally, in Anthills of the Savannah, the nation configured as a human-space-for-functioning-of-care. It

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  37 underlines the need, especially in the scholar community, to read the texts again; to try and read them, as Heidegger would say, for the very first time. Re-reading Achebe To recognise Chinua Achebe’s novels, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah, as works of art means, first of all, that each is recognised as a self-contained and self-sustaining entity, and secondly – and consequently, that each comprises a world – again, self-contained and independent. These recognitions impose a reading attitude, namely a willingness to stand in openness to this world and this work. Each work, accordingly, may be read and activated anywhere, any time. Whereas the convention in reading Achebe or any African text for that matter is to bring into play the social and political history about which the text is thought to say what it says, being artworks, as is here maintained, they are oriented towards timelessness; and even though we can detect elements that implicate the story of a specific cultural and historical geography, these are no more decisive in characterising the product than the zinc and cement imported from England in colonial times and used by the nouveaux riches in constructing their residences. Those edifices do not thereby become English homes. Nor, on the other hand, does the edifice stand as an effigy for the zinc and cement and house-builder, and so forth involved in its construction. The house is strictly a new thing, a product. So it is with the novel or any work of art, except that the house ‘is produced expressly for employment and use’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 28), in contrast to the ‘self-contained independence’ of the poem, the painting, or the sculpture (31). These productions are properly food for thought; and within the work’s self-contained existence, any individual material element can give the spark that lights the way of thought through the entire object. Standing in openness to the work’s world entails a readiness to see it for the very first time – and to see it for the very first time at every reading. This is particularly important since convention has so far governed the reading of Achebe’s works, and readers know beforehand what they are all about, what they are saying, and to whom they are saying what. (Some in the tradition, it would be fair to say, understand ‘what they are saying’ as shorthand for ‘what Achebe is saying through them’.) A work of art creates a world, instead of merely being part of one. Being a self-contained world, the options are whether to enter into this world – and at what cost, or not to enter it, to stand aloof. But it is another matter to mistake that world for the reader’s own world, even that of the so-called ‘authorial audience, or the hypothetical audience’ for whom the author is said to have designed the work, who are ‘presumed to be capable of “getting” the

38  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions author’s full intended meaning’ (Johnson 37). The cost of entry is really high. It requires reading the work deeply – close reading, which carries with it the risk of, as Heidegger calls it, coming under the work’s sway (Existence and Being). Reading Things Fall Apart deeply, for instance, entering into its space, and afterwards deeply entering the space of Arrow of God, and then all the others is what has made possible the argument of this book because of the discoveries it has enabled. To begin with, this argument prescribes a different arrangement of the novels than usual, not taking them in the sequence of publication. Recognising the novels as works of art means that they may be perceived in a world of relationships, where they share with other works of art – and can relate with one another, not because they are works by the same author, but because they are things of the same kind – works of art. For example, Things Fall Apart, coming to birth with its famous headnote from W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, not only locates the source of its title, and hints at the nature of the crisis to unfold, but also claims for the novel neighbourhood in the world of poetry. In other words, it announces its coming into being within the world of poetry/literature. Yet the material elements of the novel are obviously derived from a cultural world. In the convention, this is taken to mean that the novel belongs to a specific cultural world. But we have already mentioned the building of homes with imported materials which do not thereby give the character of the source of the building materials to the output. The convention of reading the surface configuration of Achebe’s works had the consequence of tying each to a specific situation it was taken to address or to arise from, a situational awareness which in a study like Writers and Politics in Nigeria by James Booth meant that politics and ideology were the content of literature. According to this view, the difference between European and African literatures was that whereas in European literature ‘events and movements are easily placed within a developing historical context of competing ideologies based on socio-economic classes…. The modern African cannot feel so certain of his political and ideological context’, with Africa having ‘to cope in its development with the prior existence of an immensely powerful developed world which has in the past dominated its political and cultural life and still attempts to do so in the present’ (5–6). For political and ideological literary criticism, the material elements of the work were the window that opened to the work’s political gravity. This was to become more or less conventional in reading African literature. It gave rise to a need to ascertain the specific political gravity of each moment, each work had a political gravity that determined it, and reading consisted of tracing links from the work to the ‘political unconscious’, as Fredric Jameson would call it; in that way keeping the work directly pinioned to the political history and the social and political

Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions  39 ‘outside facts’. In the worst case, the novel was used as a door through which one stepped into the outside facts which were in fact the objects of interest and thus the focus of discussion. This favourite approach was not tied to criticism only. It has led, in fact, to complicity between readers and writers in favour of literature that gave information about experienced events, political culture, and the knowledge of everyday life? Literature, as we have said, uses as materials things that are near to hand, but what differentiates it from, say, a biography, a memoir, social commentary, and so forth is precisely that these kinds of writing are committed to the histories they represent, to the extent that they would submit to rewriting if found at variance. But literary art has a form called play; and each literary work in fact enacts play: it may play history, political struggle, personal development, a lament, and so on. Literature constitutes an art(being); hence mythopoiesis is an excellent term implicating the process of art-making and the outcome. As mythopoiesis, literary production can only work with materials near to hand. LéviStrauss brings this out citing a kind of workman who improvises in pursuing an aim, the bricoleur. Such were the material elements of Things Fall Apart. Whereas mythopoiesis highlights that the poet’s arranging of incidents with a beginning, middle, and end aims at creating a myth, the early responses to Things Fall Apart were mostly with focus on the material elements of its construction. Some of the early readers were to prove very influential in Chinua Achebe studies. As a result, the material elements were seen as the path to follow in deciding the meaning and significance of the stories themselves. Cultural assertion, the politics of cultural assertion thus gave this work, and others like it, political gravity. Under mythopoiesis, the question should have been, was the aim of myth achieved; what kind of myth? In Aristotle, for instance, the elements put together make up a ‘structure of events (tês sustaseôs tôn pragmatôn), which is the higher priority and the aim of a superior poet’, and a tragic ‘plot should be so structured that, even without seeing it performed, the person who hears the events that occur experiences horror and pity at what comes about’ (Poetics, chapter 14). The world one enters into in Things Fall Apart is a tribe. In Arrow of God, the very needs of survival have led to a number of tribes giving up their autonomy in a confederation, and finding that sometimes they are unable to act as one – not because of the knife wielded by the white man of Things Fall Apart, but because of the encroachment of the confederate deity into spaces previously controlled by the ancestral tribe. The white man will subsequently arrive on the scene with an agenda that would override the space claims of both the ancient ancestor-based tribe and the confederate deity. The aftermath of the white man’s incursion and rearranging, or even attempting to abolish the world of the tribe is configured in No

40  Chinua Achebe’s Major Literary Productions Longer at Ease; the shakiness and proneness to crisis in A Man of the People, while in Anthills of the Savannah, there is hint of what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘a humanity without frontiers’ (166). In Anthills of the Savannah, there is hardly any trace of the tribe, and none of the criteria listed by Bodley respecting territoriality, reproduction of successful households, and so forth is profiled in this novel. Among the elite, not even marriage and family particularly resonate.

3 Rootedness The Father’s Field of Control

According to Bodley, tribe is often used by the missionaries to mean ‘ethnic group’ (464). It was probably also favoured by the colonial authorities in referencing the ethnic nationalities that make up Nigeria; hence it has continued to be commonly used in that sense in political discourse. In strict terms, tribe designates ‘a politically autonomous, economically self-­ sufficient, territorially based society that can reproduce a distinct culture and language and form an in-marrying (endogamous) society’ (95), which would make it out as the same kind of self-governing community called a ‘clan’ in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, except that endogamy is not a requirement in either case, as both Okonkwo and Ezeulu are children of women married into their clans from outside. These clans have not only shared religious practices and festivals, but also a worldview that reflects strong ‘individual self-interest in maintaining and reproducing successful households’ (Bodley 1). Okonkwo, who is a roaring success in every other social measure, has a great anxiety precisely on this point of maintaining and successfully reproducing his household because of his son Nwoye, with ‘his incipient laziness’ (Things Fall Apart 4), and ultimately defecting to the Christians, in which event, Okonkwo envisions ‘the prospect of annihilation’ (60). ‘He never stopped regretting that Ezinma was a girl’ for ‘she alone understood his every mood’ (56): with her in Nwoye’s place, the fear would never have occurred to him of ‘himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days, and his children the while praying to the white man’s god’ (50). Okonkwo’s great fear of a break in ancestral succession is notwithstanding his having other sons besides Nwoye. The first son may be associated with a more complex role in ancestral succession than is directly expressed in the narrative. There is certainly more in symbolism. The story of the direct line is told in the temporariness of Edogo’s compound in Arrow of God. He has a much smaller compound than his younger brother Obika, and it is immediately adjoined to that of his father: ‘like the compounds of DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-3

42 Rootedness many first sons, it was no more than a temporary home where the man waited until he could inherit his father’s place’ (89). The father’s seat expresses the rootedness of ancestry in a specific patch of the earth. And that is where succession strictly takes place, where it presumably comes off or fails. Okonkwo feels like a fish out of water when he is physically uprooted from this patch of earth where the ancestral line has its being. But he is a certain embodiment of that ancestry, and remaining attached to him is in this thinking – and that of the tribe – how Nwoye would ensure his own rootedness in the tribal patch of earth, even when the father is on exile in Mbanta. His break away and detachment from Okonkwo is, therefore, for this tribesman, a real calamity. The word tribe does occur in Things Fall Apart – in both a somewhat pejorative sense, in the thoughts of the white colonial officer, who sees himself on mission to pacify the ‘Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’ (68), as well as in the deepest sense referencing the embracing ‘horizon of [a] lifeworld[] whose spell’ is yet unbroken (Habermas 5); for example, where at the unmasking of an ancestral mask, ‘the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son…. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming—its own death’ (60). In this deep sense, tribe does not properly name an organised system, but designates the ‘foundation of meaning inhabiting everyday practice and experience’ (Habermas 22). This is the tribe that is total meaning for Okonkwo; in it, everything that may count as a value finds a place. It is quite a different case with Nwoye. Similar in their need for a foundation of meaning, Nwoye cannot find it in the tribal lifeworld: the message of the Christian missionaries was to supply it for him: It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled. (48) Okonkwo is a man of action in contrast to Nwoye’s thoughtfulness here. In Things Fall Apart criticism, he is also commonly contrasted to Obierika in this regard. Okonkwo may not have gone through a similar agony of thought like Nwoye, there being only one system of meaning available to him in his formative years, and an abyss on either side for a thinking that

Rootedness  43 becomes venturesome. But that he does have a mental life at least as active as Nwoye’s is seen in the personal crisis he is plunged into after the killing of Ikemefuna, as will be discussed presently. Tribesman Fiction is as serious as it can get in Things Fall Apart, as it raises the deepest questions of existence, and presents characters who are not just content to exist, but are experiencing ‘the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, that is to say, the will to meaning’ (Solomon 355). What is important is the confrontation of the question, and the striving to comprehend. The answers depend on the lights available to the individual. We do not see Okonkwo at the point where he is striving to comprehend. He may have had an illumination on the night of Chielo’s seizing his daughter Ezinma to bring her to Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves that had demanded to see her. But he is mostly taciturn about his inner life. However, his exceptional bonding with this daughter, which begins to be highlighted subsequently, is suggestive. His repartee to Obierika when he criticises him for his role in killing Ikemefuna shows his overall concern for the tribe: ‘But someone had to do it. If we were all afraid of blood, it would not be done. And what do you think the Oracle would do then?’ (22). He personally knows the power of Agbala, and how he himself had been completely overawed and without any means of reaction when Chielo lifted to a higher realm of action by her deity had carried Ezinma to Agbala’s abode. At the scene of Ikemefuna’s death, Okonkwo shows that he has not cast his humanity to the winds but has taken care to withdraw to the rear of the file of elders so that he would not be the one to strike the blow. But he proves to be as ill-fated as the lad himself, and had to do the evil deed himself. The story does not say what function the killing of Ikemefuna was to serve, nor even why he had to be exacted from Mbaino in the first place. There are many contradictions and gaps in understanding in Things Fall Apart’s ancestral system; for example, what explains that the swelling disease is ‘an abomination to the earth goddess’ (5), such that victims like Unoka are sent to the evil forest to end their days, and to be unburied when they die? Obierika will be forced to list more of these gaps in understanding: Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What

44 Rootedness crime had they committed? The Earth had decreed that they were an offence on the land and must be destroyed. And if the clan did not exact punishment for an offence against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. (41) Okonkwo himself ‘will be buried like a dog’ because he had been driven by the white man to kill himself. Although his friend Obierika is outraged at this turn of events, he will nevertheless go through the prescribed procedure of cleansing and placating the earth. Obierika is not the man of the tribe that Okonkwo is. He has a different frame of mind. As the narrator reports above, Obierika is ‘a man who thought about things’. He acts in all the above cases where there is a deficit in rationality, not out of ignorance, but despite what he knows. The existentialists would call his attitude ‘bad faith’, as in acting he concerns himself only ‘with what is respectful and discreet’ in the circumstances (Being and Nothingness 96). Okonkwo’s attitude appears to be to accept whatever decision is handed down – whether by superior tribal decision-makers or by tradition itself – and act accordingly. The first time he tries to influence a decision is by striking down the white man’s court messenger, only to discover, as Mamun puts it, that he is utterly ‘alone in a crowd’ (15). The attitude of ready compliance and no questions saves Okonkwo some, but not all mental torture. Given his reflection on the frustration of the ‘fathers’ gathering for their sacrificial tributes and finding nothing, it is probable that denial of burial to his own father might have been a cause of concern to him. The narrative does not portray him showing any concern. But the killing of Ikemefuna does touch a raw nerve, even though he does so ‘dazed with fear’ (19), resulting in the fact that his doing so in the circumstances is not congruent to his willing: Okonkwo did not taste any food for two days after the death of Ikemefuna. He drank palm-wine from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor. He called his son, Nwoye, to sit with him in his obi. But the boy was afraid of him and slipped out of the hut as soon as he noticed him dozing. He did not sleep at night. He tried not to think about Ikemefuna, – but the more he tried the more he thought about him…. But he was so weak that his legs could hardly carry him. He felt like a drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito. Now and then a cold shiver descended on his head and spread down his body. (21)

Rootedness  45 Neither his nor Obierika’s approach guarantees peace of mind. Tribal life is exacting and provides few securities. Everything could unravel at any moment, as more than once happens to Okonkwo, the great man of the tribe. The tribal system found support sometimes in magic. According to Ezeulu: A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs. When we want to make a charm we look for the animal whose blood can match its power; if a chicken cannot do it we look for a goat or a ram; if that is not sufficient we send for a bull. But sometimes even a bull does not suffice, then we must look for a human. Do you think it is the sound of the death-cry gurgling through blood that we want to hear? No, my friend, we do it because we have reached the very end of things and we know that neither a cock nor a goat nor even a bull will do. And our fathers have told us that it may even happen to an unfortunate generation that they are pushed beyond the end of things, and their back is broken and hung over a fire. When this happens they may sacrifice their own blood. This is what our sages meant when they said that a man who has nowhere else to put his hand for support puts it on his own knee. That was why our ancestors when they were pushed beyond the end of things by the warriors of Abam sacrificed not a stranger but one of themselves and made the great medicine which they called Ulu. (133–134) This is how Ezeulu explains to his friend Akuebue his reason for sending his son Oduche to the white man’s school. He does not seem to realise that this is tantamount to sending him to the new religion. However, Akuebue takes him literally; that he is sacrificing his son as appeasement, perhaps, to the new deity – or the ‘masked spirit’ of the day. In the event, this sacrifice does not save him or Umuaro from the feared danger. But it is a big stride, though unintended, that has opened the way to a world beyond the tribe. ‘Beyond the end of things’, as is clear from the reference to the Abam warriors, is a threat to existence itself with no known remedy, and causes the framing of the question of existence this way: what is the most that may be given for the sake of maintaining existence. The highest, apparently, is a human life, human blood being the only thing that matches the power of such a threat. But human life, according to Ezeulu’s narrative, admits of ranking; and those of the tribe are ranked highest of all. Thus when it comes to giving up one’s own, as he explains, the ‘back [would really have been] broken and hung over a fire’. He freely confesses that this has been done before on behalf of the socius itself. Okonkwo may be presupposing in his repartee to Obierika that the Oracle turning on its very devotees in case of withholding the sacrifice of Ikemefuna was not to be ruled out.

46 Rootedness Although the terrible deed has already been done, the fate of Ikemefuna remains for Okonkwo a point where thought is held up, unable to go forward without unbalancing a major plank in the scaffolding of the tribal lifeworld. And would the loss of such a plank be survivable? Of course, literature does not raise the questions of existence – or any questions in fact – in the abstract. Thus in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, when properly philosophical questions become pure objects of thought, the characters appear out of touch and ludicrous. In literature, one has to have been pushed to the end of things by the movement of the action one is entangled in to enter into such questioning, for nothing in the literary work occurs for its own sake, only for the sake of the action. Brought to this turn of events, the anguish of the confrontation is an ‘incommunicable state of consciousness’, and as uniquely personal as the resultant ‘findings’. Okonkwo appears to have been able to move on beyond his crisis over Ikemefuna by mentally reducing himself to an instrument in the hand of the Oracle, just as Ezeulu in confrontation with the clan mentally transfers all decision-making and action to Ulu, so that he himself is ‘no more than an arrow in the bow of his god’ (Arrow of God 192). In the anonymous functioning of the ancestral system of Umuofia and Umuaro, self-effacement is a core value: it is enacted in the ancestral mask institution; and it is by self-effacement that the lords of the clan exercise power. Someone like Ogbuefi Nwaka of Arrow of God has bought his way into the highest of titles in the land. But he is unwilling to self-efface. He even makes a mask called ‘Ogalanya or Man of Riches’ to flaunt and celebrate his wealth, and particularly to celebrate that he had publicly challenged Ulu, and the deity had done nothing about it. At the Idemili festival, in that year of his challenge, ‘the Mask spoke a monologue full of boast’: Folk assembled, listen and hear my words. There is a place, Beyond Knowing, where no man or spirit ventures unless he holds in his right hand his kith and in his left hand his kin. But I, Ogalanya, Evil Dog that Warms His Body through the Head, I took neither kith nor kin and yet went to this place…. When I got there the first friend I made turned out to be a wizard. I made another friend and found he was a poisoner. I made my third friend and he was a leper. I, Ogalanya, who cuts kpom and pulls waa, I made friends with a leper from whom even a poisoner flees…. I returned from my sojourn. Afo passed, Nkwo passed, Eke passed, Oye passed. Afo came round again. I listened, but my head did not ache, my belly did not ache; I did not feel dizzy. Tell me, folk assembled, a man who did this, is his arm strong or not?

Rootedness  47 The crowd replied: ‘His arm is indeed very strong.’ The flute and all the drums joined in the reply. (39–40) Somehow this does not bring scandal to the cult of the ancestral Mask. But when the ancestral ruling power of which he is a member makes itself known in the presence of Ezeulu, he has to be excluded to show ‘how desperate they all were to appease Ezeulu’ (205). In Chinua Achebe, having experienced the existential moment does not predispose the subject to compassion for another’s existential moment. If anything, it doubly blinds one: a) by having gained a settled consciousness and an assured perspective on the question in virtue of one’s own experience; and b) by being locked out of the processes by which the other’s trial is configured. Thus, Okonkwo is unable to enter into the experience of his son Nwoye. Having found a way of accommodating himself within the tribal lifeworld, the young man’s struggle with the contradictory – and sometimes harrowing – realities of existence in tribal Umuofia are nothing but signs of ‘incipient laziness’; rather ‘he sought to correct him by constant nagging and beating’ (4). Similarly, Nwoye, the Isaac of No Longer at Ease, is incapable of entering into his son Obi Okonkwo’s moment, when the question of marriage to Clara triggers for him the question what it means to be, what obligations and rights his individuality and personhood confer on him. In Isaac, moreover, Obi Okonkwo is confronting a remnant of tribal culture which is deeply ingrained in a region of the mind his own reason dare not approach. That remnant is also ingrained in Obi, and he had to master it first in himself before he can take the fight to his father. Without his ever bringing it to conscious cogitation, that element of tribal culture had stuck with him through his mission education and higher studies in England and back again to Lagos in the ‘senior service’ of the colonial administration. Osu is a sticking point, and pertains to what has been called ‘the very soul of the tribe’. The marriage negotiations in Things Fall Apart include the fathers and their older male relatives, and they play key roles, being the direct representatives of the ancestors on either side. Accordingly: There were seven men in Obierika’s hut when Okonkwo returned. The suitor was a young man of about twenty-five, and with him were his father and uncle. On Obierika’s side were his two elder brothers and Maduka, his sixteen-year-old son. (23) What is in question is not just an alliance between two families. Deciding who may or may not marry whom is connected to the self-identity of the

48 Rootedness tribe over time. This must be the reason the procedures, qualifications, and rites are so deeply ingrained. Ancestral Rule versus Theocracy Winterbottom, the District Commissioner in Arrow of God, places his finger on the core issue of territoriality in his sarcastic remark to the newly arrived road maker Clarke, asking about the distance from the headquarters at Okperi to Umuaro: ‘Oh, about six miles, not more. But to the native that’s a foreign country’. A village six miles away is ‘a foreign country’ to the native because each of these villages is, as Bodley points out, politically autonomous an economically self-subsisting. All the other features mentioned by Bodley derive from these. Umuaro, however, has become a political and economic entity since it confederated six villages in one political entity. In the narrative, it appears that religious and cultural unity have been largely achieved, but since each of the villages has its own territory, ancestral descent has not become a point of friction, nor has it blended to reduce the confederation to one tribe. The areas where Ulu’s claims of sovereignty are causing or have potential to cause friction are in the economy, because the agricultural cycle had become part of Ulu’s ceremonial, and politics, because the priest is willing to push the implications of control of the economy to its logical conclusion. Arrow of God is a highly sophisticated narrative. A line could be traced from the crisis of the story back to its prognostication in Ezeulu’s ruminations following the announcement of the new moon in chapter 1. This line would connect all the ‘real hinge-points of the narrative’, while the incidents not captured exist to ‘“fill in” the narrative space separating the hinge functions’ (Barthes, Image – Music – Text 93). Thus, the initiating of the anxiety that will run through to the end of the story is in the question whether the power claimed by Ulu over the year, planting, and harvesting is real or merely ceremonial floating up to his consciousness right after enacting the new moon rituals of his deity, Ulu: Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his power over the year and the crops and, therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real. It was true he named the day for the feast of the Pumpkin Leaves and for the New Yam feast; but he did not choose it. He was merely a watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that was said to be his. As long as the goat was alive it could be his; he would find it food and take care of it. But the day it was slaughtered he would know soon enough who the real owner was. No! the Chief Priest of Ulu was more than that, must be more than that. If he should refuse to name the day there would be no festival – no planting and no reaping.

Rootedness  49 But could he refuse? No Chief Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done. He would not dare. Ezeulu was stung to anger by this as though his enemy had spoken it. ‘Take away that word dare,’ he replied to this enemy. ‘Yes I say take it away. No man in all Umuaro can stand up and say that I dare not. From this hinge-point where Ezeulu addresses his unseen enemy, and his claim of intimidating presence, incidents, which are properly cardinal functions connect in a chain in which ‘total sense’, is by a ‘syntagmatic ratification’ understood to be ‘always “further on”’ (Image – Music – Text 93), with the last function concluding the uncertainty set up in the movement – would he dare to refuse to name the day of the festival or harvest; would there be someone to challenge Ezeulu’s claim of pre-eminence; and will they prevail against him? The imaginary line linking the functions in terms of this happened … then this … and so forth typically leaves out large portions of narrative. In fact, the tissue of the narrative normally comprises a vast number of other functions which do not affect the movement of the cardinal functions, but are dependent on them. At work in the prognostication and fulfilment may be what Achebe calls ‘the Powers of Event’ (‘The Writer and His Community’), with the effect of stretching out a purely mental dilemma and translating it into lived history. In substance, the narrative is the story of the knowledge seeker, an ancient mythic symbol that links Arrow of God to such ancient myths as Adam and the forbidden fruit and King Oedipus of Thebes. There is always an interdiction in this kind of sequence; as a result, the knowledge seeker will inevitably cross a line, with tragic consequences. Ezeulu will find out the truth, like all the knowledge seekers, but far from making him free, as in Jn 8.32, this knowledge will quite destroy his mind. The political autonomy and economic self-sufficiency of the tribe entail that the tribe’s territory is strictly marked, and no one who is not a member can become incorporated. Hence Ikemefuna is doomed, not on the day he is taken out to be killed by the elders of Umuofia but in being selected by his own people as a sacrifice to Umuofia to avert more widespread bloodletting. All the tribal features are strongly in evidence in Things Fall Apart and – within the confederating villages – in Arrow of God. Okonkwo, the hero of Things Fall Apart, is in every respect a tribesman, as these features define his life and worldview. And Umuofia itself is strictly a tribal society for the same reasons. In these terms, Arrow of God is only partly a tribal society. It is a confederation of six previously autonomous communities – tribes in the strict sense. The confederation has sanction under a common deity who increasingly expands his space and functions. Originally a ‘special deity’ (Cassirer 41), not only has he expanded his functions, but he also regulates their

50 Rootedness seasons and festivals, controls agricultural productivity, births and deaths. This expansiveness has far-reaching consequences: Having charge over the regulation of agricultural production, that is, the economy itself, has deep political implications. It is clear from the very first pages of this novel that tension has been building up from the interplay of the confederal and ancestral/tribal systems, whereas, according to James Booth, Achebe’s own novels of traditional village life, Things Fall Apart … and Arrow of God … take a rather complex approach, involving the reader’s sympathies through a detailed evocation of an harmonious traditional culture before introducing the disruptive and uncomprehending whites. (7) These tensions are temporarily relieved during the annual New Yam festival, being not just an agricultural festival, but the occasion when ‘the coming together of the villages was re-enacted’ (Arrow of God 201). In fact, at Ulu’s festivals, people from all the six villages ‘drank palm wine freely together because no man in his right mind would carry poison to [these ceremonies]; he might as well go out into the rain carrying potent, destructive medicines on his person’ (66). On the other hand, referencing Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God as ‘novels of traditional village life’ is by upending the material elements of the construction. But these elements are of no help in determining whether a myth had been produced, and what kind of myth. The tribal society in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God has for its highest level of social organisation the clan. In Umuofia, it is a community of nine villages; in Umuaro, a confederacy of six tribes was established for defensive purposes. These in the distant past had ‘lived as different peoples, and each worshipped its own deity’ (Arrow of God 14) – which may be one of their making, like the ‘special deity’ Ulu, or one like Idemili said to be ‘there at the beginning of things [and] nobody made it’ (41). ‘Village’, clearly, does not mean the same thing in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. In the latter work, the tensions between the before and the after of the confederation are not disguised, and when they threaten to boil over, it is as if a break-up could occur and that each going its separate way would not be considered a calamity. The tensions do heat up over a land conflict, for example, between Umuaro and their neighbour Okperi, with Nwaka of Umunneora leading the war party, and excludes from a conclave to plan for the war anyone from Umuachala, Ezeulu’s village, undoubtedly on the assumption that a denizen of Umuachala being of the same network of tribal sympathy, would not be able to see merit in any viewpoint but that

Rootedness  51 of his fellow tribesman. The very division that the deity Ulu was instituted to help overcome is hereby given new leash by Nwaka: Since when did Umuachala become head of the six villages? We all know that it was jealousy among the big villages that made them give the priesthood to the weakest. We shall fight for our farmland and for the contempt Okperi has poured on us. Let us not listen to anyone trying to frighten us with the name of Ulu. If a man says yes his chi also says yes. And we have all heard how the people of Aninta dealt with their deity when he failed them. Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbours and set fire on him? (28) Ulu and its priesthood are in fact part of the enemy that Nwaka is making ready to fight. The deity is implicated primarily by association, and a fight with him may not have been necessary at all, for as he also points out in his speech that the priest ‘is there to perform his god’s ritual and to carry sacrifice to him. But [this particular priest] is a man of ambition; he wants to be king, priest, diviner, all.’ In this confederacy, political decisions are arrived at by consensus. As consensus could not be reached in the present crisis, Nwaka and his village Umunneora, and any others that might be so minded may take action as they see fit. This consensus will also fail in the crisis over the new yam festival, with Ezeulu alone, on behalf of his deity, dissenting, causing a major breakdown in the system as a political unit. But there is no evidence that the tribe itself is affected. Whereas the ethic of care is to bring something to it’s being through concern, Ezeulu’s reflexes are self-directed. When Nwaka raises it in respect of the farmland that the lore of the land appears to affirm to belong to Okperi, Ezeulu recognises this as a false call, rendering himself Nwaka’s enemy, who turns the situation around to the effect that Ezeulu is moved by tribal loyalty against the overall interest of Umuaro. Thus, in going ahead to witness in favour of Okperi before the white District Officer, his standing as a leader and moulder of opinion suffers irreparable damage. The crisis over the delayed harvest could be seen as a last opportunity to redeem himself. But he is unable apparently to respond to Umuaro’s distress. In the case of Umuofia, there is a mythological founder of the clan, with a bond further strengthened historically through a defensive pact enacted with ‘a potent war medicine’ called agadi-nwanyi (Things Fall Apart 3). The organisation of the clan is more detailed here than Arrow of God, which is taken up by conflict from the opening scenes, a conflict threatening the clan with disintegration. This conflict runs through the whole narrative, but is changing its aspects from scene to scene. There is in fact a

52 Rootedness series of displacements in which the original issue of contention, the struggle for influence between two powerful orators, Ezeulu and Nwaka, is progressively lost sight of. First it transforms to enmity between Umuachala and Umunneora. Then this is displaced as conflict over the role of Ulu in regulating times and seasons. Correspondingly, Nwaka is moving back from view as a protagonist in the struggle, with the Umuaro clan coming increasingly to the fore, and Ezeulu standing out as the human antagonist. The odds are overwhelmingly against Ezeulu at this human level, for ‘no one ever won judgment against his clan’ (Arrow of God 230). In another sense, he is caught in the middle, because he cannot stand aside in the fight as the deity has commanded, his self-identity being so tied up with the deity. So he has to take in his own body the blows his deity is aiming to throw at his enemy. In both Umuofia and Umuro, the clan is organised at three levels: the family comprising a man and his wife or wives, with their children in a walled compound ruled by the householder, who is also its priest (12), and kept its ‘“medicine house” or shrine [containing] the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits’ (4). The link between the power of governance and the cult of the ancestors is underscored in the very constitution of the compound; and the pater familias who rules the compound and maintains its shrine of personal gods and ancestral spirits also represents it at the higher levels of social organisation. Beyond the level of the household is the kindred (8); and at the top level, the clan itself. The difference is that Ezeulu combines the priestly duties of the pater familias with those of the deity Ulu, and participates in the government of Umuaro both as the head of an ancestral line and the chief priest of the confederacy’s deity. Things Fall Apart has spiritual entities with cultic attributes such as in other civilisations like the ancient Hebrew one gave rise to a higher organisational level. One such attribute is the Ani goddess, which exists in other clans with similar taboos: Ogbuefi Ezeudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men who came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. ‘It has not always been so,’ he said. ‘My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.’ ‘Somebody told me yesterday,’ said one of the younger men, ‘that in some clans it is an abomination for a man to die during the Week of Peace.’

Rootedness  53 ‘It is indeed true,’ said Ogbuefi Ezeudu. ‘They have that custom in Obodoani. If a man dies at this time he is not buried but cast into the Evil Forest. It is a bad custom which these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the result? Their clan is full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living’. (9) The reason that this deity with a central shrine and cult in each of the surrounding clans does not constitute a bond of unity and an organising principle to support a political grouping is probably to be explained by her very limitlessness, being that she is co-extensive with the earth. Although ‘the festival of God as the creator’, that is Chineke, exists in at least one locality in Igbo land said to be the very spot from which the work of creation was done (Umezinwa 62–63), the lack of a shrine or a cult in honour of the Supreme Being in the worlds of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God is conceivably because of the remote universality of this Being. He is known, however, by the people. In Things Fall Apart, we first encounter him in Ikemefuna’s recollection of child play in his younger days (19), then in serious adult discourse, in an exchange with the leader of the missionaries in Umuofia: ‘You say that there is one supreme God who made heaven and earth,’ said Akunna on one of Mr Brown’s visits. ‘We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods.’ (58) There is no sense here of Chukwu’s direct involvement in the people’s lives and affairs. What seems to be feared more is that which exercises immediate impact. Agbala, for example, ‘a great god’, has the following attributes: the owner of the future, the messenger of earth, the god who cut a man down when his life was sweetest to him. (Things Fall Apart 35) Okonkwo’s subdued attitude in the passage with Chielo the priestess on an errand from Agbala is certainly because of the visible effect of the power of this god while on his errand. To carry out this errand, Chielo, the friend of Okonkwo’s wife, Ekwefi, who ‘shared a common shed in the market’, is already transformed, and people who knew her ‘in ordinary life … would hardly believe she was the same person’ (15). It would not be difficult to believe that this god could ‘cut a man down when his life was sweetest to

54 Rootedness him’. This power to wreak instant destruction is also an attribute of the chief of the ancestral spirits, Ajofia. This is him introducing himself: I am Evil Forest. I kill a man on the day that his life is sweetest to him. (31) The earth goddess is obviously a greater deity and spirit than either Agbala or the ancestral spirits. Agbala is in fact no more than her messenger. But she forbears to kill Okonkwo the day he breaks the Week of Peace; thereby she allows room for placation. But being appeasable is not the same thing as inconsequential. Therefore, although inwardly repentant for breaking the Week of Peace, but failing to manifest his penitence, not being ‘the man to go about telling his neighbours that he was in error’, there is a backlash against Okonkwo, as people said he had no respect for the gods of the clan. [And] his enemies said his good fortune had gone to his head. They called him the little bird nza who so far forgot himself after a heavy meal that he challenged his chi. (9) By contrast to the earth goddess with one dedicated shrine in each clan, ancestral shrines are spread throughout the length and breadth of the clan, wherever there is a male householder, and the ancestors, as suggested in Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s story about Obodoani being ‘full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead’, are apparently rooted to the patch of the earth that belongs to the clan. In Umuofia and Umuaro tribal systems, the strong ‘individual self-interest in maintaining and reproducing successful households’ (Bodely), is rooted in the ancestor tradition and its perpetuation. The story of the killing of the war emissary of Umuaro’s war party in Okperi is directly linked to Ebo inadvertently unmasking Akukalia’s failure to reproduce and thus perpetuate his ancestral line: ‘If you want to shout like a castrated bull you must wait until you return to Umuaro. I have told you this place is called Okperi.’ Perhaps it was deliberate, perhaps accidental. But Ebo had just said the one thing that nobody should ever have told Akukalia who was impotent and whose two wives were secretly given to other men to bear his children. (Arrow of God 28) Akukalia’s response is to destroy Ebo’s ikenga, a huge symbol. It was ‘the strength of his right arm’, to destroy it is to have made the man ‘a corpse

Rootedness  55 before his own eyes’, but Ebo’s lament over it, ‘Nna doh! Nna doh!’, is a plea to ‘his dead father to come to his aid’. There is sympathy in Umuaro for this man, as the people say that: their clansman had done an unforgivable thing. ‘Let us put ourselves in the place of the man he made a corpse before his own eyes,’ they said. ‘Who would bear such a thing? What propitiation or sacrifice would atone for such sacrilege? How would the victim set about putting himself right again with his fathers unless he could say to them: Rest, for the man that did it has paid with his head? Nothing short of that would have been adequate.’ Clearly, ‘putting himself right again with his fathers’ shows that the ‘abomination’ by Akukalia goes much deeper than attacking the strength of Ebo’s right arm. That this symbol is split at a man’s death can only be because while he is alive, it signifies his bond with his fathers, and will no longer be needed when he joins them through death and burial. Akukalia has lived in the pretence of having maintained and reproduced a successful household, maintaining the bond and continuity with his fathers. His revenge at his own unmasking is to destroy the symbol of the integrity of Ebo’s ancestral line. It goes without saying that the spirits of the ancestors remain constrained in the same area that was home to their living bodies before death. For example, because of one ‘bad custom’, the clan of Obodoani is said to be ‘full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living’. The understanding, therefore, is that proper burial is the rite of passage from the world of the living to the domain of the dead; and it recalls the ceremony of ‘closing the grave’ in some Hindu cultures ‘to prevent the dead spirit returning’ (Lamb 38). Ancestor cult is a very important function in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; and although it is one of the reasons why those novels are readily appropriated by Igbo intellectuals as their cultural texts, whereby they speak of the texts as portraying their culture, this matter is not often discussed in the criticism. There is what Graff has called ‘unreflective empiricism’ in criticism that is preoccupied with the portrayal of culture and portrayal of lived experience (247). In regard to extra-textual realities, two points need to be mentioned. The first is that it is critically significant that by means of a concept like that, literary works do acknowledge the existence of ‘the general text (culture) of which they are part and which is in turn, part of them’ (Kristeva 36). The second point is that the literary text will use this borrowing in its own ways, the same way that it uses words taken from the group’s linguistic repertoire, ‘by weaving them into a text [and] once the old bonds are broken there emerges a new “reality”’

56 Rootedness (Macherey 50). Highlighting their textual and text-forming roles, Jean Baudrillard speaks of the appropriated incidents as ‘hyperreal’, and explains that in the text: they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their ‘real’ goal at all…. It is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real – power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becoming a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and mass simulation). (373–374) The relationship of the text to the ‘general text (culture)’ is a complex one indeed, and there is no simple equation between the textual facts and the cultural ones. So the absence of documented evidence from the precolonial era of the attitude of the Igbo towards Chukwu is not an acceptable reason to seize upon literary textual facts as the desired evidence. In the same way, some literary scholars take ‘Niger Delta literature’, ‘civil war literature’, ‘migration literature’, and so forth as unvarnished facts concerning the specific question, and think that if they are interested in the social, cultural, and historical questions, the novels save them the trouble of historical research or the social-scientific field work that would bring them face to face with the facts in the real world. Indeed if the interest is social or historical reality, the scholar should minimally furnish himself or herself with the tools and knowhow for meaningful research in the area. Story Events Rendered a Pure Present The complexity of literary texts includes that self-contradiction does not affect their integrity as literary texts. For instance, there is a contradiction in the narrative presentation and the performative portrayal of the role of fear in Okonkwo’s actions. In the narrative presentation, fear is the basis of his every reaction, but that is not necessarily the case in performative instances of portrayal.

Rootedness  57 Thus in the report of Things Fall Apart’s narrator, Okonkwo’s whole life: was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. (4) This is a key statement in the characterisation of Okonkwo, and reflects the traditional telling method, as against the later showing or ‘performative’ strategy in story construction. The ‘telling’ method puts the action at some remove from the site of the telling, while the ‘performative’, by deleting the verbal act of telling, renders the incident ‘immediately perceptible’, and thus ‘transformed into an objectivity – the reigning law of discourse in the civilization of the sign’ (Kristeva 40). That is, both are fictions of realism; and this should not be lost sight of. It is the role of criticism by constantly exploring and exercising vigilance over its own language and the language of the text (Of Grammatology 91) to keep this fictionality and its various devices and techniques in view, and the text irreducible to other things whose existence it may only have acknowledged. The allotting of more and more story space, especially in modernist literature, to various performative strategies reminds us that although the formal properties of a literary work are determinable and describable, experimentation is still ongoing, rendering the texts, as Heidegger would say, most themselves. According to Roland Barthes, the changes in strategy aim to: transpose narrative from the purely constative plane, which it has occupied until now, to the performative plane, whereby the meaning of an utterance is the very act by which it is uttered: today, writing is not ‘telling’ but saying that one is telling and assigning all the referent (‘what one says’) to this act of locution; which is why part of contemporary literature is no longer descriptive, but transitive, striving to accomplish so pure a present in its language that the whole of the discourse is identified with the act of its delivery, the whole logos being brought down – or extended – to a lexis. (84) The telling method dominated novelistic discourse from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, reflecting an authoritative voice in the novel to

58 Rootedness which the non-critical reading eye quickly aligned itself, quite unlike the critical attitude which instituted a distance in every act of reading. If a contradiction be made out between the narrative account of Okonkwo’s ‘whole life’ and the portrayal of him acting for higher purposes, traditional humanist criticism would smooth this over by citing the figure of speech exaggeration – it had to be a deliberate act of the genius; in short, this is just one of ‘the means [the implied author] has chosen to let us learn’ (Chatman 148). In traditional omniscient third-person viewpoints, there would be nothing more to say about Okonkwo, as the utterly reliable narrator would have said it as it was. But things are not the same in modernism. A major problem in Things Fall Apart criticism is that many treat it as traditional, not only in the sense of the outward configuration in a life lived in a context untouched by outside/modern influence, but also in the sense of the narrative practice associated with the well-made story, especially the strong and absolutely reliable narrative voice, presenting one event fully rounded and characterised after another, in all their details, ‘to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see’, in the famous Conradian phrase. However, the idea of an indigenous modernism is ‘to some extent also integral to Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity when he points to the heterogeneous dimensions of postcolonial societies and subjects’ (Helff 194). But in strict terms of modernism, Things Fall Apart has got what Wayne Booth calls a ‘fallible or unreliable narrator’. This is a purely modernist technique, and contrasts with ‘the reliable narrator’ who ‘speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work’ (278). A similar modernist experimentation is seen in Arrow of God where the crisis of the narrative is first partially enacted in thought as a hypothetical situation, ending in Ezeulu mentally flinging down a challenge at his enemies. The enemies not only reveal themselves as people of flesh and blood shortly afterwards, but also enthusiastically take up the challenge at the moment of crisis, as though they had witnessed and were the respondents to Ezeulu’s private ruminations. On the other hand, even though the number ten thousand used as an estimate of the number of Umuofia elders in the square on the day of Okonkwo’s killing of the white man’s court messenger may sound outlandish, it is not at all in conflict with the norms of the story, and does not render the narrator unreliable. But Okonkwo’s reply to Obierika’s criticism for participating in the killing of Ikemefuna is in conflict with the idea that ‘his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness’. But someone had to do it. If we were all afraid of blood, it would not be done. And what do you think the Oracle would do then? (22)

Rootedness  59 Okonkwo has experiential knowledge of the power of the Oracle. It gives a sense of hardness to his religious sensibility which plays in his ‘And what do you think the Oracle would do then?’ In his reasoning here, Okonkwo is following the rhetorical procedure of the ‘antecedent–consequence argument’ (Corbett 115). The ‘antecedent’ is that the Oracle has given an order. There must be a ‘consequence’ if that order is not carried out. Has Obierika thought about that? It may be noted that ‘Okonkwo was not a man to go about telling his neighbours that he was wrong’ is of course a sign of the unreliable narrator. That statement is not a report, but a comment, an ironic comment, showing a personal perspective on this protagonist – the personal perspective is limited, not anonymous, omniscient. He – some prefer to say it – can only see what is near, having submitted to the rule of time and space. The appearance of such a perspective requires the reader to give up the attitude of implicit trust towards the narrator, so that even though the third-person mode, which is the norm in the anonymous, omniscient perspective is in use, the associated conventions have been suspended. The narrator of Things Fall Apart does not warn the audience that its presentation is a personal view, from a specific standpoint, not a panoramic view to be treated as authoritative. Readers, however, do not generally question this narrator, and naively take it from a secretly mocking narrator that ‘Okonkwo was not a man to go about telling his neighbours that he was wrong’. A similar situation is noted where Okonkwo is said not to be the ‘man to stop beating somebody half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess’ (9). The greatness of Things Fall Apart is in part because of the high sophistication it requires of the reader. It is not purveying information to be simply swallowed; rather in the very act of narrating, it is arousing and feeding critical vigilance. But generations of readers have been brought up not to trouble themselves with the text, and if they do read, not to see the text, but the fables of moralists and seekers of relevance in the world of action who are committed to using the text for their own interests, and in serving their own political objectives. And critics have often accepted that facile approach. It even begins to look like a partisan issue, with true believers on one side, and maybe anarchists on the other. The anarchists are conveniently labelled Formalists, who quickly notice that they are a small minority, and must make a decision whether to fall in line or remain in the outer darkness. It must be mentioned also that a writer like Wole Soyinka has popularity problems with his novels, as some complain that his writing is not in the African mode. Phrases of this sort, of course, have no real content, nor criterial determinants, but foster the illusion that ‘African literature’ is something objectively knowable and unchanging.

60 Rootedness Repeated reference has been made to literary theory and the requirements of the art as prerequisites for criticism. In addition to this, there is the skill of close reading – which also goes with critical distance for objectivity. In close reading, one sees; one sees the text; one sees its textuality. One begins to see it as a certain form – that this form is its intimate nature. Form is intimately connected with seeing. As Derrida notes, this concept cannot be, and never could be, dissociated from the concept of appearing, of meaning, of self-evidence, of essence. Only a form is self-evident, only a form has or is an essence, only a form presents itself as such. (Margins of Philosophy 158) Clearly, form is not something put on: it is identity. At the risk of stating the obvious, let us highlight that it is the study of literature/poetry/literary art that gives identity to the scholar of literary studies. As with any academic discipline, the object of study for the literary scholar demands concentration, a point worth emphasising, first, because this object comes naturally with distractions; secondly, our epoch, as Walter Benjamin has observed, has infinitely more to distract us than any that has gone before, and distraction has in fact become ‘a variant of social conduct’ (Illuminations 238). Quite apart from this general distraction, the literary object, despite that its mode of being is to self-display, with the result that for the critic, there is only the book, nevertheless, by reason of the parergon, ‘the surrounds of the work of art … its outskirts’ (Derrida, The Truth in Painting 11), reading can quickly become disoriented and lose sight of its object. Some of the entities in these outskirts that could ensnare reading are society, history, culture, and the author. But there is also a whole raft of issues that engage public discourse from time to time, with research in literature becoming motivated by nothing higher than the desire to be ‘part of the conversation’: such are issues of war, economic collapse and migration; racial oppression and exploitation; female genital mutilation, gender oppression, and child marriage; environmental despoliation and climate change, political marginalisation, human rights abuse, and political activism which may indeed be used in art-making – and nothing whatever is excluded from use in art-making. But the business of the artist is still the making of art, using whatever may be available to work with; and that of the literary scholar is not to investigate the material that has been put to use, but the question whether art has successfully been made, and how this may be determined. Therefore, studies in social commitment, writer to reader communication, extrapolations about our culture, or reconstructions of the writer’s time and circumstance (historicism), and discussions of theme, namely the social issues of the day, these mark

Rootedness  61 the extent to which the literary scholar has yielded to distraction. The narration of the marriage event in Things Fall Apart, for instance, may cause a reading merely following the incidents one after another to think of marriage customs as an object of representation, and may even lead to ‘multidisciplinary’ analysis with anthropology. But we have just seen that although there is implicit acknowledgment of the existence of some culture, the marriage story is part of a larger story. Theme, of course, is unavoidable in literary studies. But it is my theme, not the author’s theme. ‘Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe Novels’ is my theme in this essay. I have to make the case. If I am unable to defend it, the blame is mine, not Chinua Achebe’s. And if I have gone through all his texts, and satisfactorily made the case, it is no more than a reading. Other people will still read, guided by their own themes as organising ideas to piece together in some order the textual data that have struck them in their engagement of the text(s). Discussions claiming to have discovered Achebe’s themes in any of the works are a tendentious derecognising the work of art as ‘a bounded text’ (Kristeva), and a violation of what Heidegger calls the ‘workly character of the work of art’. Being a bounded entity is an entailment of structuring in literature. As Paul de Man reminds us: The structure is summarized in the description of the work as a ‘windowless monad’… a concept that unites a notion of isolation with a notion of totality. On the one hand, the work is an entity that exists for and by itself, without any inherent possibility of entering into a relationship with other entities, even when these other entities are themselves aesthetic in kind. On the other hand, it is a cosmos; that is to say, perfectly self-sufficient within this isolation, since it can find within its own confines all it needs for its existence and is in no way dependent on anything that would exist outside its boundaries. These boundaries, says Lukács, ‘are genuinely immanent, the kind of boundaries that only a cosmos can possess’. (41–42) In the face of the work’s self-contained and self-sufficient existence, multidisciplinary discussions can at best touch upon aspects of its surface configuration: there may be but a partial contact that veers away. Comparative literature, as it is called, may also focus attention on these same surface elements, but, when mindful of the work’s art nature, may also lead to genuine illumination. For example, analysis of the mythical symbol of the knowledge seeker in Arrow of God and any other of the kind, may rightly bring out that Ezeulu’s individuality and personhood are caught up and transmuted in the enactment of this myth, with the result that there is more figure, than a concretely individual: there is about him something of the

62 Rootedness Nietzschean ‘Schein, i.e. [an] appearance or semblance’ (Geuss xx). Thus, in the Ezeulu sequence is the concretion of something that by its nature overflows time and space. But because of its manner of concretion, it creates its own unique world which is irreducible to that of any other of the genre. For some, social analysis on grounds of social commitment and theme referencing the author are the normal African way of reading African literature. But none of those is an African invention; and there is no reason why they should be considered as normal, while studies of form and structure are not. Theme, for instance, is an old humanist idea. Here is I.A. Richards writing about it: Perhaps the chief reason for the decline of drama in the seventeenth century (social factors apart) was the exhaustion of the best themes which could be used in order to appeal at all levels. (199) He goes on further: When a writer has found a theme or image which fixes a point of relative stability in the drift of experience, it is not to be expected that he will avoid it. Such themes are a means of orientation. (Principles of Literary Criticism 278) Richards’s book was originally published in 1924, and marks a phase in the history of criticism with roots in Renaissance humanism when the overriding interest was to access the mind of the artist, to try and make out by any means what he or she is aiming to communicate. Literature, during this phase, was understood as secular scripture, and modelled on the transcendental and religious, where the exegetical labour was to learn ‘what the spirit [was] saying to the churches’ (Rev. 2.7). Romance, a highly rated form of Renaissance literature, for instance, is said to divide ‘into two main forms: a secular form dealing with chivalry and knight-errantry, and a religious form devoted to legends of saints’ (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 34). Kanneh has highlighted the inconsistency that has become endemic in African criticism by reason of insistence that African literature is sui generis, without any manner of proof and without a specific aesthetic theory to help to characterise this unique literature: The critics work within the terms of the English literary values with which they are confronted and this leads them to claim the equal fulfilment of these values in African literatures while demanding that they be assessed by wholly other traditions and aesthetics. (39)

Rootedness  63 The way out for many is to use the non-African terms, and try and make out that they are somehow congenial to Africa, while turning a blind eye to the question of the sources and derivation of the concepts. The demand for impact factor publications for the purposes of promotion is pushing this non-agenda of loss of identity for literary scholarship, since the vast majority of the impact factor outlets that might be accessed by the Humanities are centred on or connected to social science research. The result is that discussion of the art nature of the art work is a rarity in Nigerian literary scholarship. Before the sell-out, literary scholars used to pay occasional lip service to form–content discussions of literature, but rarely going to the heart of the matter, namely that the interaction of form and matter means that a third thing comes into existence. This is explained in Aristotelianism as hylomorphic unity. When this fusion has occurred, attempts to separate the two simply means the annihilation of this third thing. Thus, the literary work is studied as one object, one act, something other. Literary humanism was of course eclectic in modelling from scripture and exegesis; hence it rather short-changed the core concept of form, and has turned out to be, according to Richards, ‘through our selection among the possible signs present, within certain limits what we like to make it’ (152). Yet there is an astonishing text of scripture about it. That scripture in Latin: Christus qui cum in forma Dei esset non rapinam arbitratus est esse se aequalem Deo (Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped (Philippians 2.6)). This ‘form’ of God is not something that Christ has put on. It is himself, by right of which he has equality to God (esse se aequalem Deo). In coming into the world, ‘he empties himself’, ‘taking the form of a slave’ (v.7). This ‘form of a slave’ is no more an outer garment than the form of God. Thus, in Christian theology, he has two natures, divine and human. In Christ, form is identity. Form as that which specifies and gives identity to something is what is at stake in literary criticism. Literary form addresses the question of the specific difference of literature and art, setting them apart from other things that may resemble them, but are not literature, and not art. It is at the heart of the knowledge that is cultivated in literary studies. And students of literature had better take it seriously. At all events, Okonkwo is, in the instance of discourse with Obierika, pointing to a different motivation of action than fear. Besides, other emotions are sometimes at work in him, preceding and blocking out any others, such as at sight of the white man’s messenger when he springs to his feet, ‘trembling with hate, unable to utter a word’ (66). Literary narratives require close reading in order to see all that is happening in them; they also require that incidents are balanced against others in that ‘they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs’.

64 Rootedness Strict Africanists may find it offensive to relate Things Fall Apart to modernism, as they think of Achebe as a great Africanist, perhaps the greatest to have lived. His only fault, if that should be called one, is to have written his novels in English, instead of some African language. Some scrutinise his work for an African narrative tradition, African tragedy, African techniques, and so forth. Even non-African scholars read Achebe with these expectations, writers like G.D. Killam and Robert M. Wren. And I  think that these great Achebe scholars deserve a salute. Others are C.L. Innes, Bernth Lindfors, and Charles Larson. What is important, however, and needs to be emphasised is that formal properties comprise what Aristotle calls the requirements of the art – not of the West or of Africa or of an individual writer. Yes, some of these may have evolved historically, with individual experimentation. To evolve is to have the capacity within. Thus Aristotle speaks of certain properties of tragedy evolving as ‘each new element being developed as it came into use, until after many changes it attained its natural form and came to a standstill’ (Dorsch 36). So Achebe’s work is in the same language shared by some of the literary works which he himself had read, but use of this particular language does not belong to the requirements of the art. On the other hand, there is a debt that Things Fall Apart acknowledges to W.B. Yeats, namely the myth of the rough beast or of the gyre. But strictly these are names that appear in Yeats’s vision of an ancient myth, the myth of eternal return. The ancient myth arises from mythic ideation, and hence an available material for poetic construction. This, and other archaic narratives like crime and punishment and the knowledge seeker, have become the paraphernalia of poetry; and we can say that they belong to the ‘estate’ (Milosz) of world poetry. And a poem that enacts this is traditional – in the sense of belonging to this world estate, together with other formal properties like narrative voice, narrative tense, tragedy, narrative perspectives, ‘the third person of the novel’ and of narrative generally (Banfield 14). What emerges in its ‘natural form’ from the innovations and improvisations is poetry. This product is recognisable universally, and may require only that the language barrier be removed or offset, as by translation. We may call it Igbo poetry or English or Greek in honour of the language in which it has taken shape. But what it is, by nature, which connects it to objects of the same kind anywhere they may be found is poetry. The poetic character of narrative shines out all the more clearly with innovating of the unreliable narrator, helping to keep poetry apart and unconfused with communicative or thematic writing. A reading that fails to notice the unreliable in Things Fall Apart’s narrative processes will always fall short, failing to see the object in its totality and art nature. Therefore, the instance of discourse, where Okonkwo asks Obierika what do you think the Oracle would do then?, must be allowed its part in

Rootedness  65 explaining Okonkwo’s motivations. That instance of discourse reflects not fear as such but a religious attitude, and moreover that of a person who has had a personal encounter with the deity and learned in this event the limit of his power. This kind of knowledge, sophrosune, is often lacking in the Greek tragic stage, and where it is lacking as with Pentheus in The Bacchae of Euripides, this is a key ingredient of the tragedy. But this is not to say that its presence will necessarily assure safety, for a tragedy also entails the inexorable. Hence Cadmus is not spared in the catastrophe that overtakes Pentheus’s world. We should therefore expect that even though both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God borrow the concept from the same general text culture, they interact differently with other textual elements, building up a new structure of significance in each case. In Arrow of God, the ancestral shrine is integrated into the obi, as in both Ezeulu’s and that of the Okperi man whose ikenga is violated by Akukalia. Their due cult is presumably maintained; hence their ‘faceless okposi’ are ‘black with the blood of sacrifice’ (6). Ezeulu’s prayer at the appearance of the new moon is addressed solely to his deity Ulu, and reveals that he has charge over agricultural production, that is to say, the economy itself. In Marxist terms, political authority should follow. All this comes about apparently from the New Yam festival which reminded the six villages of their coming together in ancient times and of their continuing debt to Ulu who saved them from the ravages of the Abam. [Hence] at every New Yam Feast the coming together of the villages was re-enacted. (201–202) Ezeulu’s attitude is that there is already a political economy in place, and people like Ogbuefi Nwaka have already made out that in his thinking, he has a political role in the clan merely because he serves as Ulu’s priest: The man thinks he is a king! Umuaro, however, had already made ceremonial concessions, in that they now offer him sacrifice of gratitude, not just when they win a war, but when they register population increase. There is no one in Umuaro ‘who cannot see the moon in his own compound’, yet they have left it to Ulu’s priest to announce the new moon, the moon of planting, and particularly that of harvesting. Ezeulu will also be the first to sight a further change in the political economy in the new system the white man would usher in. But this would be fatal to the Ulu political economy, just as Ulu’s regime, if fully developed, would be to the ancestor-based power distribution system. The narrative unfolds a historical-materialist logic in its inner core, and is looking to the succession of modes of production, with little or no human direction.

66 Rootedness In these terms, the human conflict in its ‘passionate immediacy’ that occupies the textual surface (Jameson 62) is in effect a collateral. A Man Belongs to His Fatherland The citing of the ancestral system in Arrow of God is as part of the story of succession of modes of production, quite unlike Things Fall Apart where it is an ideology which comprehends all meaning for Okonkwo, without which he cannot even begin to think what to do with himself. It may be mentioned that the ancestral system is seen in another modality in John Munonye’s Obi. Here it is an object of fascination. We read: Ugoada went on with her story. The child was none other than Amanze. Amanze had all these years refused to be re-incarnated; he was waiting to return as Joe’s child. That was what Unebo [the diviner] had told them. Having disagreed with his nephew in his life time, Amanze had been anxious to make amends. And what better amends could he have made than to be reincarnated in his nephew’s family? But after he had waited for so long a time, he decided to go to another family. (94) There is here a Negritude sense of representation, taking interest in cultural facts and worldviews for their own sake, but even here in this early John Munonye, a critique is occurring, for, in the story of Amanze’s disagreement with Joe ‘in his life time’, we are referred back to the author’s The Only Son (which forms a trilogy with Obi and Bridge to a Wedding). In this sequence, faithfulness to the principles underlying the traditional ancestral ideology is what is not happening. The principles are paid lip service, but manifestly and notoriously violated for purely selfish motives by the pater familias himself whose role is the transmission of these values. The betrayal of the ancestral ideology in The Only Son results in a flight to the mother’s kindred. A flight to the mother’s kindred also occurs in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where it is called a ‘motherland’, presumably because in this case, it is another clan than Okonkwo’s father’s, called his ‘fatherland’. This is a concept that resonates with Latin patria (fatherland), Rome being a city-state, not with English ‘fatherland’, which is the country in which one is a native-born. Okonkwo is disconsolate in his motherland not just because of the disaster that has caused him to take refuge there, and certainly not because of the people, who welcome him with open arms. His tribal feelings have been torn up from their moorings in a patch of land whose spiritual value is that his fathers are there, permanently; and he cannot think a time when they were not there. Group solidarity can only be by

Rootedness  67 thinking the group as ultimately a single family – in Things Fall Apart – by patrilineal descent, and marked, in Habermas’s phrasing (in Knowledge and Human Interests), by ‘the impossibility of having recourse to anything behind or prior’ (182) to this ‘founder’, as indeed Things Fall Apart calls that mythical individual. More than a political or cultural grouping, it is a mental habit issuing from a lifeworld. The group is therefore inward-looking and self-­contained. Not only that the ‘land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors’ (40), the very patch of earth that bears the name of the clan is permanently inhabited by the fathers, which binds the humans to the land. The gods themselves are part of this bonding. The ancestors belong together inseparably with their gods. An old man of Okonkwo’s mother’s kindred puts it succinctly in admonishing his younger kinsmen, what was formerly unthinkable is now happening, thanks to a new and ‘abominable religion…. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors’ (55). Okonkwo’s exile from Umuofia owing to the accidental killing of a kinsman recalls Marx’s simile in Capital that in such a case, ‘the individual has as little torn himself free from the umbilical cord of his tribe or community as a bee has from his hive’ (452). But Okonkwo feels otherwise; quite ‘like a fish onto a dry, sandy beach, panting’ (Things Fall Apart 43). So Uchendu, Okonkwo’s uncle has to remind him: ‘a man belongs to his fatherland’ (44), no matter what. Exile in his motherland does not change that. So, to this fatherland, must a man return when his exile is done. And so, apparently, does a woman. The narrative looking at Mbanta from Okonkwo’s viewpoint calls it his motherland. But it must be as her own fatherland that his own mother’s remains had been brought back there for burial. That fatherland circumscribes a person’s whole existence. In John Munonye’s Obi, the suggestion is that human existence is circular: the ancestors reincarnate, pass through the physical phase of existence, return to the ancestral realm where they await reincarnation. The story of the return of Okonkwo’s mother to Mbanta for burial is a preface to the narrative of the ancestral ideology that sustains the tribe in Things Fall Apart. The ancestral ideology ensures that every person is accounted for. A man belongs to his fatherland. Being on exile does not change this. A woman also belongs to her fatherland, and marriage does not change this. When she dies, she still returns to her fatherland and is buried with the ancestors of her people. Having children in her (temporary) home does not change this. It is in fact her very children that will lead the way in bringing her back to her people at death, ‘crying the traditional farewell: “Mother, mother, mother is going”’ (43). Mother is going back home from the other kindred among whom she had temporarily settled her existence, or had settled her temporal existence. But she does not really belong there.

68 Rootedness Only one person is lost in Things Fall Apart, the ill-fated lad Ikemefuna. His killing has been much discussed in Things Fall Apart scholarship, frequently in emotive terms, and centring on Okonkwo’s role in the incident. It definitely deserves discussion, but also with full awareness of all the pertinent facts. He is lost, despite that his name is a plea, presumably by the father of this child, reflecting a view of ‘marriage and childbearing [as] the focus of life’ projected by Mbiti in his Introduction to African Religion (100). Thus, Ikemefuna is a plea to the powers that be, that his own sign of having been, his sigillum (seal) of existence, may never be lost. Ikemefuna’s simultaneous figuration as a plea for permanence and of irrecoverable loss to the tribe is curious, and recalls other names like Obiajulu (No Longer at Ease), and Nwanyibuife and Amaechina (Anthills of the Savannah), which are explained and shown to be significant for the action of their sequences. Ikemefuna was doomed in the elders of Mbaino choosing him as an appeasement to Umuofia. He is being sacrificed to Umuofia, literally. This is the mutual understanding in the transaction. To Mbaino, the hazard is the field of battle, with the prospect of more widespread slaughter, since ‘Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country’ (3). In the view of Umuofia, of course, Ikemefuna was a blood tribute whereby Mbaino saved itself more bloodshed. Still there is a decision to make, only that the elders of Umuofia are in no hurry about this (4). Possibly, this is a decision of when, not whether. There is no reference to prisoners of war and their resettlement in Things Fall Apart, even though there is mention of two inter-tribal wars in which Okonkwo ‘had shown incredible prowess’ (2). And in Umuaro where one such war takes place, the report is about the number of warriors killed on either side (Arrow of God 28). In the tribal ideology based on ancestry, there appears to be no room for a non-tribesman becoming incorporated in the tribe. To account for Umuofia’s delay, however, there remains the possibility of a ransom by Mbaino where alone in the ancestral universe he has an assured place. But there is no hint in the text that such an option existed. Some scholars like Al Mamun, highlighting the warning by Ogbeufi Ezeudu not to have a hand in the death of Ikemefuna who calls him father, treat the killing of Ikemefuna as the trigger for Okonkwo’s tragedy. In terms of literary symbolism, however, the case of Ikemefuna recalls some the grimmest tragedies of the Greek tradition, where one action commanded by traditional piety or law and carried out in the course of a tragic action becomes the transgression that yields another tragedy. The Oresteian trilogy is a case in point. Obi Okonkwo in fact thinks that tragedy at its best is this sort. As he puts it, ‘Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever’ (No Longer at Ease 36).

Rootedness  69 Structures Upturned and Reset In terms of the moral environment which these narratives spring from and gain sustenance by, Things Fall Apart is more deeply set in ancestral culture. At all events, there is one common founder of the clan (1), who is, therefore, a father-figure, from which their organic solidarity as one clan originates. The highest political decisions are by a group who deliberate out of sight, and are presumably ‘the lords of the clan’ spoken of in page 40. They are people of the highest titles of which there are four in Umuofia. That these are not just a social title is seen in the special rite of passage of these ‘lords of the land’ at death: Ezeudu had taken three titles in his life. It was a rare achievement. There were only four titles in the clan, and only one or two men in any generation ever achieved the fourth and highest. When they did, they became the lords of the land. Because he had taken titles, Ezeudu was to be buried after dark with only a glowing brand to light the sacred ceremony. (40) Burial, as has been seen, is the gateway to the domain of the ancestors. On two separate occasions before, according to Obierika, the white man ‘put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart’ (57), these great men and lords of the land make decisions for the clan. The decisions take their course. However, after the white man wielded his knife, the clan was unable to speak with one voice any more. These highest decision-makers take decisions of momentous consequence, while keeping out of sight. Their role is first seen at the meeting of the elders to receive the news of the killing of a daughter of Umuofia in Mbaino when it is reported that Ogbuefi Ezeugo ‘was always chosen to speak on such occasions’. So a meeting had already been held and decisions taken to be conveyed to the assembly of Umuofia. Another occasion is three years later when the decision to kill Ikemefuna is leaked to Okonkwo by Ogbuefi Ezeudu. A great man though he is, there is a level of power from which he is still excluded. This same group may have taken decisions ahead of the last assembly, only that they were yet to be presented for deliberation and ratification before the appearance of the court messengers sent to stop the meeting. There is also a small group of highest-level decision-makers in Umuaro, comprising the highest title holders in the clan. It includes the orator Nwaka, but not his rival Ezeulu. On the occasion of their appearance, it is to try to override Ulu’s prerogative in decisions on the dates of communal festivals. The power of this group of elders derives ultimately from the ancestral system. They are Umuaro (208). Ezeulu, however, will divine the deity’s decision, whether his guidelines for counting the months to harvest should be stood down in the specific instance as it has malfunctioned – at

70 Rootedness least in the eyes of Umuaro. Thus, the two sources of power in Umuaro, Ulu and his priesthood on the one hand, and the ancestors on the other, are in confrontation. The six villages of Umuaro are entities that see themselves as sharing the same ancestral descent, whereas Umuaro itself is a socio-cultic contract established for defensive purposes. This contract does not seem to replace the ancient tribal system based on a shared patrimony; and so each of the villages has its own festivals and public celebrations to which other townsmen could be invited as spectators. Ezeulu’s own village, Umuachala, has one called Akwu Nro. It is a minor festival, but is important in terms of the sense of a tribe. It is a memorial offering by widows to their departed husbands. Every widow in Umuachala prepared foofoo and palm-nut soup on the night of Akwu Nro and put it outside her hut. In the morning the bowls were empty because her husband had come up from Ani-Mmo and eaten the food. (194) The Ani-Mmo in question is peopled by Umuachala ancestors. The festivals do tell an important part of the story of Umuaro’s sociopolitical structure, and the ones that bring Umuaro together are all celebrations of the Ulu deity, from such minor ones as Oso Nwanadi, a ‘quiet retreat’ meant ‘to placate the resentful spirits of kinsmen killed in war or in other ways made to suffer death in the cause of Umuaro’ (193), to the Feast of Pumpkin Leaves, in which Umuaro was cleansed of sin before the planting season would start, and ultimately to the greatest of the festivals, the New Yam festival, which was attended by all, including deities from various villages. In addition to celebrating the new yam: it was also the day for all the minor deities in the six villages who did not have their own special feasts. On that day each of these gods was brought by its custodian and stood in a line outside the shrine of Ulu so that any man or woman who had received a favour from it could make a small present in return…. The festival thus brought gods and men together in one crowd. It was the only assembly in Umuaro in which a man might look to his right and find his neighbour and look to his left and see a god standing there – perhaps Agwu whose mother also gave birth to madness or Ngene, owner of a stream. (202) The villages that make up Umuaro have experience of socio-cultic contract and supra-ancestral social organisation. Security from their enemies was enough motivation to give up or stand down to a secondary status their

Rootedness  71 previous independent tribe-based existence. The threat they now face is from an unhinged agricultural calendar. Joining the Christian harvest is the expedient offered for avoiding disaster. But this expedient which they have taken may become a permanent solution unless that unhinged calendar is set right. In the emergency, and with the Christian church promising protection from Ulu’s anger to those who bring yam offerings to the church, instead of awaiting Ulu’s own good time for the New Yam festival, Ezeulu is the one who experiences immediate harm. The logic of immediate harm therefore takes its course: the sufferer suffers because he has offended, while the one who is not hit is thereby vindicated! In short, to the people of Umuaro and their leaders, the case is a simple one: Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest. (230) But this is more than a statement of self-affirmation against Ezeulu; it is also reaffirmation of their faith in the deity. He is their god, and not to be taken out and set on fire as Nwaka had threatened. Ulu has survived as the common deity of all Umuaro. The socio-cultic contract that held the six villages together under the patronage of Ulu had been strained to breaking point, but had survived. Presumably Umuaro would still be gathering together in honour of the deity’s festivals. But it is also true – even more patently than in Umuofia – that the Christian pastor in promising immunity in exchange for yam tributes, ‘had put a knife on the things that held [Umuaro] together’ (57). If they have not fallen apart, it is likely that they cannot remain what they have always been. Moreover, in the peace that is restored between them and their god, the god has had to reduce his priest to a kind of pharmakon (scapegoat), who is, accordingly, ‘by him rejected, belittled, abandoned, disparaged’ (Dissemination 76). Ezeulu is confirmed as the cause of the tension between the deity and the people, and by being scorned, confirmed as the remedy for what had gone wrong. In his abandonment by both the deity and the people, no one apparently knows how to respond to him with care and concern, unlike Okonkwo, whose friend Obierika suddenly breaks out to the District Commissioner, uncowed by his well-known power to compel obedience, and charges: ‘That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself and now he will be buried like a dog…’ He could not say any more. His voice trembled and choked his words. (68) That care and concern do not figure in the actions of the district officer is to be noted in Obierika’s charge here. Indeed whether in Things Fall Apart

72 Rootedness or in Arrow of God only power and manifestations of power are allowed free play in the white man’s dealings with the natives. It is intolerable to Obierika to see Okonkwo come to a state in which he is other than who he is, the mighty man he had always been; and if it is now impossible that he ‘be brought to [his] being through concern’ (Heidegger), and he will inevitably be buried ‘like a dog’, Obierika is in no doubt who is responsible. He fearlessly and pointedly charges the District Commissioner for his culpability in this state of affairs. Contrarily, there is no one to stand up for Ezeulu when he himself is brought to a state other than usual for him. Instead, all who see him are gloating over his fall. Before this turn of events, however, both heroes have heard the call of care and concern, but no action is forthcoming because of a restricted selfunderstanding within the milieu of their social and cultic identities. In the resolution of the crisis in Umuaro, it is striking that it is the god who makes the sacrifice to restore peace, not the people who had previously declared themselves ready to take the blame if Ezeulu should cause offence by eating up the sacred yams from the last harvest festival on their instruction and declared the festival of the new yam (Arrow of God 208). He sacrifices someone very near to himself, namely his priest, recalling a situation where the ‘back is broken and hung over a fire’. Undoubtedly, in Arrow of God, it is the Christian church that gains the most in the crisis and its resolution in terms of converts and goodwill and esteem from the populace. But for the clan itself, something fundamental has occurred. The struggle between the two sources of power has been decided: the deity, by taking the people’s side, concedes priority and higher authority to the ancestral system. The ancestral system had faced a double destruction in Arrow of God: from the cult of Ulu – from within, and from the Christian church from without. It may have survived the onslaught from within, but the forces from without are becoming entrenched and empowered. In Things Fall Apart, the onslaught is originally from the Christian missionaries, but Umuofia’s fight back brings the colonial administration hastening to the help of the missionaries, and then taking the fight out of their hands. It is as if the Christian church has been nothing more than a surrogate; in practical terms, it is the colonial power that has won the victory. But while the conquering colonial administrator is settling in his mind the posting of his great victory in the colonial metropolis through his book on ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’, the people are thinking of the abomination that has wounded the ancestral system through Okonkwo’s suicide, which had to be repaired. At this level, Umuofia has not changed in the least. For Okonkwo, however, there has been something of a personal catastrophe. With Nwoye gone and himself buried like a dog, there is a clearing in which one might ‘stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live’ (Arrow of God 11).

4 A New Language’s Reference Index

The highest of all values in Things Fall Apart is the clan, and the highest aspiration a man can have is to become one of the lords of the clan. For one like Okonkwo, it is home in the strict sense, a place of security, and fixed and socially recognized roles; it is also a world of stable identities, and pure self-reproduction. The values of the speaker in this author’s ‘Beware Soul Brother’ are his as well, and the reasonable appeal in the poem may well be spoken to one like Nwoye his son: Pray protect this patrimony to which you must return when the song is finished and the dancers disperse. This speaker cannot conceive of the tribe being no longer. The tribe is the final point of referral and the final point of return when a man has finished dancing ‘the dance prevalent in his time’, as in Ezeulu’s instruction to his son Oduche (Arrow of God 189). In fact, the substance of this instruction may also be heard to echo in the lines in ‘Beware Soul Brother’ about mindfulness of the earth: where a man’s foot must return whatever beauties it may weave in air, where it must return for safety and renewal of strength. When Ezeulu sends Oduche to the mission school, he is the traditional pater familias with the sense of certainty of being totally in control of the situation, and firmly established where the boy is venturing out from and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-4

74  A New Language’s Reference Index where he must return to. There is no fear that he will always be there to oversee things and make necessary decisions whatever may chance: The world is changing [and] I do not like it…. I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not ­befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow. (45–46) To his wife who objects that her son should be chosen, he charges: How does it concern you what I do with my sons?

(46)

The pater familias is the stable foundation of the household because of his direct link to the founding father himself, and the representative of the tribe. Thus, he is certain that he can wheel and deal with the new civilisation that is setting down its infrastructure in Umuaro on a perfectly equal basis. As to Ezeulu, however, his spirit may have told him ‘that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow’, but he has no idea how seductive the mission school is, nor that the changes happening are not just by way of new things entering into the spaces of traditional society and settling, but also that they are going to be working profound changes internally so that the tribe itself may end up not being what it was. He has a wholly personal response to the white man, and anyone who does not want to say ‘had we known tomorrow’ is welcome to follow his example. This would-be political leader of Umuaro seems not to have thought of the fate of the clan itself in regard to the white man’s presence. Visitations As we have noted, Arrow of God narrates the double destruction of the tribe. Ezeulu’s household is centrally involved in this demolition work. He, in fact, has some awareness of his personal responsibility in this, as is brought out in self-deprecating humour with his wife, Oduche’s mother, after sending the boy away to save him from Ezeulu’s rage because of his assault on the sacred python: You must be telling me in your mind that a man who brings home antinfested faggots should not complain if he is visited by lizards. You are right. But do not tell me you don’t know where your son is. (59)

A New Language’s Reference Index  75 He is willing to confront his sense of guilt in dealing with the missionaries to the extent of sending one of his sons to learn their ways, but he does so by trying to make light of it. This is also observed in his conversation with his friend Akuebue, where he offers some sort of explanation for his possible misstep: sending his son to the mission school is his way of dealing with a situation he could not wish away or in any way avoid. He is not really the one who has brought home ant-infested faggots. It is the people he calls we, who ‘showed [the white man the way into the clan and “the entire Olu and Igbo”] and are still showing them’ (131–132). He is taking a very limited view with Akuebue; and he is right that he is not responsible for involving the white man in the life of Umuaro. But there is a longer view, extending to before the arrival of the white man, where he had been engaged trying by any means to entrench the confederacy so that with its deity the supreme giver and sustainer of life and livelihoods, and he himself the supreme arbiter of the deity’s will, the old ancestral prerogatives and decision-making based on consensus would be further eroded. His vision of the world is more complex than that of Okonkwo. For the latter, the world of action is circumscribed by the tribal boundaries, which also mark the point of separation of the in-group and the outer world. For Ezeulu, on the other hand, the world of action spans a domestic and a wider level. At the domestic level is the tribe, where the power of the father is intact and unchallengeable; the wider level is called ‘the clan’ in Arrow of God (131, 219), that is Umuaro itself. Here political power resides. Ulu is the supreme deity of the collective. Yet Umuaro was originally designed not as a theocracy, but as a defensive pact which, therefore, had a territory in its purview, and implicitly decision-making powers relevant to its unity and security, with the confederacy deity Ulu as the guarantor. The deity was progressively to add other functions, such as the guardian of the agricultural cycle, the giver and sustainer of life and livelihoods. In sign of its pre-eminence, the deities of the six villages make an annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Ulu on the Feast of the New Yam (202), but political power was to remain contested. Hence: On the day, five years ago, when the leaders of Umuaro decided to send an emissary to Okperi with white clay for peace or new palm frond for war, Ezeulu spoke in vain. He told the men of Umuaro that Ulu would not fight an unjust war. (15) Even though he has called attention to Ulu’s attitude towards an unjust war, his contribution in the debate is seen as just one of the opinions, and carries no authority as such. The resultant war was to turn out to be a misadventure for Umuaro. This experience may have been a factor in the leaders’ weakness before Ezeulu on the demand to eat the remaining yams

76  A New Language’s Reference Index from the previous year’s harvest and name the day of the New Yam feast. But this is a significant failure to assert their political prerogatives, leaving Ezeulu with a sense of the superior position of a leader who had been gainsaid at great cost to the gainsayer, who must now be regarded with greater respect, or even awe. His son Oduche, whom he had sent to school for education and to serve as a lookout, had so exceeded his brief as to imprison the totemic python in his box with the intention of killing it at an opportune moment. This attack on the sacred python is the first fruits, as it were, that he is bringing home to Ezeulu, who had instructed Oduche to be ‘his eye’ among the Christians, ‘If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share.’ From the point of view of ‘Beware Soul Brother’, Ezeulu might be seen as one of ‘those hardheaded / men of departed dance’, but right before his own eyes, although he cannot see it clearly yet, his own dance is dispersing, reducing him to ‘a dancer disinherited in middance / hanging a lame foot in air’. There is a Cultural Revolution taking place in Umuaro, and everyone is affected, both those trying to ride the change and try and manage it to serve their own interests and those who are unaware of what is afoot. As with human cultural productions, especially those with the life world’s imprint, destruction does not mean dissolution into nothingness. Things survive which can insert into other cultural/spiritual productions for conveyance. They may even find conveyance in the very forces of destruction targeting them. In No Longer at Ease, for example, the kolanut ritual is enacted in a way quite different from Things Fall Apart. In Things Fall Apart, Okoye accepts the kola presented to him by Unoka: ‘Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it,’ replied Okoye, passing back the disc…. As he broke the kola, Unoka prayed to their ancestors for life and health, and for protection against their enemies. (2) In No Longer at Ease, Odogwu, a man of title and a traditionalist, prays: ‘Bless this kola nut so that when we eat it it will be good in our body in the name of Jesu Kristi. As it was in the beginning it will be at the end. Amen.’ Everyone replied Amen and cheered old Odogwu on his performance. Even Okonkwo could not help joining in the cheers. ‘You should become a Christian,’ he suggested. (47–48) The kola has been blessed, even though there is no mention of the ancestors who also had a share in it, with a lobe traditionally dropped on the

A New Language’s Reference Index  77 ground for them (Things Fall Apart 15). This is probably what Okonkwo means in mentioning that his objection to the sharing of kolanut is their being ‘used as a heathen sacrifice in [his] house’ (47). Rather Odogwu’s intercession for the blessing is ‘in the name of Jesu Kristi’, that is ‘in the Christian way’, as he had previously promised. With the invocation of Christ, old Odogwu has introduced a significant change in the kola ritual, which is enthusiastically received – or endorsed – by his mixed audience of Christians and non-Christians. But there is no ritual act of communion with Christ as with the ancestors in Things Fall Apart. Odogwu, however, is not signalling a breaking of the ancestral bond, as he responds to Okonkwo’s banter about converting to Christianity with ‘Yes, if you will agree to make me a pastor’. In the double gesture of kola ceremonial and invocation of Christ, a middle ground of intercourse between the Christians and the non-Christians is coming to light. In A Man of the People, something similar is observed in regard to the culture of masking, with young boys creating masks at Christmas and trooping together with them for impromptu performances. Odili encounters some of these as he waits to see Edna in Nanga’s house: In that time I gave out three shillings to three different groups of boys and their masked dancers. The last, its wooden mask-face a little askew and its stuffed pot-belly looking really stuffed, was held in restraint by his attendants tugging at a rope tied round his waist as adult attendants do to a real, dangerous Mask. The children sang, beat drums, gongs and cigarette cups and the Mask danced comically to the song: Sunday, bigi bele Sunday Sunday, bigi bele Sunday Akatakata done come! Everybody run away! Sunday, Alleluia!

(96–97)

It is a children’s Mask dancing here as part of the celebration of Christmas, and its name is Sunday, and Alleluia thrown in perhaps as a praise name! Egwugwu in Things Fall Apart and the Mask in Arrow of God are the quintessence of the ancestor of the tribe. This is seen in high relief in the incident of the unmasking of one of them in Things Fall Apart, in the leadup to which the following prologue is provided: It happened during the annual ceremony which was held in honour of the earth deity. At such times the ancestors of the clan who had been committed to Mother Earth at their death emerged again as egwugwu through tiny ant-holes. (60)

78  A New Language’s Reference Index Similarly, in Arrow of God, as part of the preparation for a mask performance, a team of ‘young men ran up and down the different quarters beating their ogene and searching for the Mask; for no one knew which of the million ant holes in Umuachala it would come through’ (195). This is presumably what A Man of the People calls the ‘real, dangerous Mask’. The playful one, however, has chosen to honour Christmas with its appearance, which must be a friendly gesture; and Christmas is on the way to acculturation, as sociologists would say. In Arrow of God, friction is raging at the textual surface and seizing all attention. It reaches maximum intensity in the aftermath of the detention of Ezeulu for months in Okperi by the colonial authorities. As tensions reach breaking point, there is a pullback for the asking of basic questions. The most important and authoritative figures are together in this conclave where Anichebe Udeozo puts the question: ‘I want you to look round this room and tell me what you see. Do you think there is another Umuaro outside this hut now?’ ‘No, you are Umuaro,’ said Ezeulu. ‘Yes, we are Umuaro. Therefore listen to what I am going to say. Umuaro is now asking you to go and eat those remaining yams today and name the day of the next harvest. Do you hear me well? I said go and eat those yams today, not tomorrow; and if Ulu says we have committed an abomination let it be on the heads of the ten of us here.’ (Arrow of God 208) Umuaro is the name of the clan now demanding tribal loyalty from Ezeulu as the ultimate authority to command it. The group of ten are Umuaro not just because they speak for it as a final authority; they also embody it by embodying its six tribes. In this embodiment, there is no loss of individual identity. The disappearance of individual identity and substitution with the tribal representation or symbol is probably what happens in the functioning of the ancestral mask: it simply figures forth the ancestors. However, the drama of visitation by the leaders is momentous for the whole narrative, and what is important is not the readiness to take the punishment of an offended deity – such readiness rather renders the leaders abject; what seems to be of moment is that forceful leadership has been called for. The leaders almost step up to give it, as in Udeozo’s acknowledgment to Ezeulu, but ultimately let the moment pass: Yes, we are Umuaro. Therefore listen to what I am going to say. Umuaro is now asking you to go and eat those remaining yams today and name the day of the next harvest. Do you hear me well? I said go and eat those yams today, not tomorrow.

A New Language’s Reference Index  79 This would have been the path to take back their position as the supreme political authority in the clan. But taking the position of abjection, in addition to all the ground they have historically yielded to Ulu and his priest, their claim to be Umuaro is now quite empty. Settling and Resettling Existences Things Fall Apart’s reference to ‘the soul of the tribe’ is deeply expressive, with equivalent utterances that include ‘the clan’ and ‘the land’. As was previously noted, certain titles raise their holders to the status of ‘lords of the clan’ or ‘lords of the land’. In the idea of ‘the soul of the tribe’, we seem to be dealing with a spiritual entity whose field of operation is a space with settled boundaries so that this geographical area bears the name of that spiritual entity. We notice, for instance, that the search team for the Mask is searching within Umuachala ‘for no one knew which of the million ant holes in Umuachala it would come through’. But there is no question but that it would emerge from one of those million ant-holes in Umuachala. Ancestral authority can express itself in a Mask like Ajofia, embodying its power of adjudication of cases as the final arbitrator as the nine egwugwu, each representing a village in Umuofia (Things Fall Apart 23). It can also express its power of self-government in the group of ten visiting with Ezeulu, or those who are said to select Ogbuefi Ezeugo to speak after previously deliberating an issue relevant to the group identity and security. The individual members of the clan who can transition to the world of the ancestors and become objects of worship may also embody this spirit or act on its behalf. For these kinds of individuals, the basic questions of existence obviously cannot be answered in a personal way. Indeed the questions may make sense only in Heidegger’s formulation: ‘who man is, and where he is settling his existence’ (Existence and Being 312). In Things Fall Apart, where one is settling one’s existence, apparently, cannot be a matter of choice. As Uchendu precisely puts it, ‘a man belongs to his fatherland’. Thus, Okonkwo cannot be quite who he is anywhere other than Umuofia. In No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, who man is and where he is settling his existence are two questions, and do not necessarily comprise a bundle. Chief Nanga lives in the political capital Bori, which he probably sees as no man’s land, but where government money is abundant and a ‘free for all’ to those who are well-positioned to gather for their own private use. The settling of existence is another matter: in his village of Anata, he has ‘the very modern four-storey structure going up beside the present building’. It is ‘a “dash” from the European building firm of Antonio and Sons whom Nanga had recently given the half-million- pound contract to build the National Academy of Arts and Sciences’ (A Man of

80  A New Language’s Reference Index the People 96). In his judgement, the proper place for this very modern building is not Bori, but his own village, because, mentally, that is his place of settlement, the patch of earth: where a man’s foot must return whatever beauties it may weave in air, where it must return for safety and renewal of strength. Far from the patrimony that ‘Beware Soul Brother’ is concerned about, the patch of earth is a possession for Nanga, and his four-storey building which can have no imaginable utility in Anata is his laying claim to the place as a possession. Then again, and bizarrely, the general election which forms the crux of the action of A Man of the People is a moment for ­returning to the constituency and the village for ‘renewal of strength’. For the oldest of the men of the Umuofia union in Lagos at the meeting over Obi Okonkwo’s misadventure, the questions are as interconnected as they would have been to an Okonkwo or an Anichebe Udeozo. He says as much in his kola prayer; and the rest of the people seem to be fully in agreement, as reflected in their fervent Amens: ‘We are strangers in this land. If good comes to it may we have our share.’ Amen. ‘But if bad comes let it go to the owners of the land who know what gods should be appeased.’ Amen. ‘Many towns have four or five or even ten of their sons in European posts in this city. Umuofia has only one. And now our enemies say that even that one is too many for us. But our ancestors will not agree to such a thing.’ Amen. ‘An only palm fruit does not get lost in the fire.’ Amen. (5–6) On the literal plane, it is hard to know who are ‘the enemies’ referred to. In logical thought, Obi would be considered fully responsible for what has happened to him, but not in mythic thought. Here causative agents may be visible or not, but effective nonetheless, and one may choose the manner of reaction, whether by forceful opposition, if physical, or sacrificial appeasement otherwise. Even when physical, what is directly sensed is much less important than the force understood to be behind it. In Arrow of God, for example, chi is the name commonly used for such an invisible force, as in Nwaka’s ‘if a man says yes, his chi also says yes’. Umuofia Union in No Longer at Ease, or ‘the men of Umuofia’, as the narrator also calls them, are here assembled to deal with an emergency perceived not as Obi Okonkwo’s legal problem but as an emergency for

A New Language’s Reference Index  81 the whole of Umuofia. It is the hazard of Umuofia’s lone palm nut getting lost in the fire, a situation to be blamed on the enemies of Umuofia as a collective. This is the problem that the men of Umuofia have assembled to deal with and try and find a way out of. The men of Umuofia are functioning here as the outpost of what Umuofia of Things Fall Apart calls ‘the ­elders’. Emphatically, the men of Umuofia do not see themselves as part of the urban population, but as an enclave ensconced in the urban place. It would make use of the facilities in the urban place, such as its social hierarchy the highest of which in the old man’s discourse is ‘European posts’. Sharing in this is a great achievement for Umuofia and enhances their selfimage as a collective. Their celebration of Obi’s car when he arrives in it at their communal meeting is almost as if more important than Obi himself: They clapped and cheered and danced when they saw the car pull up. ‘Umuofia kwenu!’ shouted one old man. ‘Ya!’ replied everyone in unison. ‘Umuofia kwenu!’ ‘Ya!’ ‘Kwenu!’ ‘Ya!’ ‘Ife awolu Ogoli azua n’afia,’ he said. (71) The punch line is that a rarity long denied a wife is now available in the open market! It comes from and projects the same habits of thought as ‘now our enemies say that even that one is too many for us’. In their view of the world, they are an entity spiritually held together with Umuofia itself. They are bonded to the soul of the tribe, a bond to be maintained at all costs. They will have acquisitions of all kinds: have public service jobs, own cars, learn the dances ‘prevailing’ in the time and place, as Arrow of God puts it, and attend dance parties with their girlfriends, but nothing was to be allowed that would infiltrate into the core being that might be able to work changes within. They have even added the organisational structures of modern collectives, with officers having constitutionally established roles, terms, and authority, unlike the Umuofia system which worked in part by consensus, in part by norms handed down by the fathers of the clan. But these two processes appear to resolve into one, as the tribesmen who have risen to the status of ‘lords of the clan’ and the same ones who reach consensus through deliberation. The Umuofia tribal system is more integrated and friction-resistant than that of Umuaro which, as a confederation, lacks the sense of common ancestry, creating room for the claim of supremacy by Ulu: the ruler of their agricultural cycle, the protector of life and the giver of increase, and

82  A New Language’s Reference Index the arbiter in matters of war and peace. Even though Anichebe Udeozo is able in the above encounter to obtain concession from Ezeulu that he and his group of elders are Umuaro, and there is no other, it is clear that this Umuaro lacks the power to assert any kind of prerogative, and their decisions are no decisions at all, except with ratification by the deity Ulu, who can not only block them, but may also inflict punishment for disobedience, not sparing even the ten who stand for Umuaro itself. The tribal system still works at the family up to the village level, but it is hindered at the confederacy level, where Ulu reigns supreme, and only has in his sights Idemili, one of the old tribal deities ‘whose envy [according to Ulu] seeks to destroy me that his python may again come to power’ (192). Idemili is the deity of Umunneora, the village of Ezeulu’s great rival Ogbuefi Nwaka, and a functional deity in its early evolution. As his priest Ezidemili explains to Nwaka: Every boy in Umuaro knows that Ulu was made by our fathers long ago. But Idemili was there at the beginning of things. Nobody made it…. Idemili means Pillar of Water. As the pillar of this house holds the roof so does Idemili hold up the Raincloud in the sky so that it does not fall down. (41) As the deity of an ancestral group, Idemili’s ‘envy’ can only be mollified if Ulu should be disestablished; thus would the old village deities that have been forced to a secondary position and obliged to do a pilgrimage to Ulu’s shrine annually on the New Yam festival regain their former pride of place. The tensions threatening the survival of Umuaro are being immediately felt at the human level, but Ezeulu has been granted the knowledge that things are even more heated up at the level of the divine beings. Processing his encounter with his deity, we read that: New thoughts tumbled over themselves and past events took on new, exciting significance. Why had Oduche imprisoned a python in his box? It had been blamed on the white man’s religion; but was that the true cause? What if the boy was also an arrow in the hand of Ulu? (192) Not only is there a realisation that the struggle between the gods may be multidimensional, and taking place in ways that may befuddle reason, but Ezeulu also feels certain that he is on the right side of history, so to say. The thought that in the struggle, he ‘was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god’ would intoxicate the Chief Priest ‘like palm wine’.

A New Language’s Reference Index  83 The situation is still more complicated in No Longer at Ease. In Lagos, according to the old man’s kola invocation, there is a government running institutions like the ‘senior service’, but there is also ‘the land’, with its own gods, who are capable of threatening human safety, and may have to be placated. In old Umuofia, the government is less in evidence, but the old gods are there, and ranged against them, in the contest for space, the Christian church. In all this, the individual’s footing appears to be less sure than ever before. Obi, who is determined to go it alone, as if familiar with the terrain, appears to the men of Umuofia as most disruptive, and a kind of lightning rod. His actions are either threatening their organisational solidarity reflecting their collective adaptation to life in a pluralistic modern society or threatening their sense of connectedness to the ancestor community, or else he is getting them publicly embarrassed as their only occupant of a European post who is unable to play the role in peace and quiet, nor learn how others in his position supposedly take bribes without being caught, but would do so ineptly and get caught, and so on. He has also insisted on striking out on his own, discarding the protections that solidarity with the men of his clan are supposed to provide. He, as the lone ‘palm fruit’ of Umuofia detaching from the outpost of the tribe, could well evoke the lamentation of the Mother of the Spirits in Things Fall Apart, weeping ‘for a great evil that was coming – its own death’ (132). However, for the old man at prayer, there is no question of settling an existence where one is a stranger. There is even a limit to the practice of religion in this foreign land. Given that habits of thought founded on their ancestral theology remain too deeply ingrained to be influenced by their urban exposure, it is their understanding that only the local people may know how to reach the gods of their own land. Obi, of course, has ceased taking serious interest in religion, even the Christian religion of his father. The hymn about brothers sitting in darkness and in fear which had poured into Nwoye’s soul as a young man has apparently never lost hold of him. As to Obi, we do not see his crisis of faith, but from his arguments with Christopher, it is clear that he needs certain certainties as a centre of gravity; and his not having found any is a great lack that impinges upon his personality, leaving him without what has been called a ‘moral compass’. At his father’s proposal for church service for him upon his return from England, there is an exchange between them, the most telling part of which left unspoken: ‘But is it necessary, Father? Is it not enough that we pray together here as we prayed this night?’ ‘It is necessary,’ said his father. ‘It is good to pray at home but better to pray in God’s house.’

84  A New Language’s Reference Index Obi thought: ‘What would happen if I stood up and said to him: ‘Father, I no longer believe in your God?’ (51) He also knows that ‘Sometimes a lie was kinder than the truth’ (51). It is not clear whether it is only his father’s God that he no longer believes in. His religious sensibility may be dead altogether. But he might still say Amen with everybody else to prayer deeply set in the sensibility of the old tribal religion, without its meaning anything to him. He does not seem to have got over his nostalgia for Umuofia first felt while in England. But having re-experienced it after his return, he knows he can no longer feel at ease there. Nor is he at ease in Lagos – quite unlike his friend Christopher, who seems to be incapable of seeing anything ‘as something to be taken care of or to be brought to its being through concern’, a capacity and quality that defines authentic human being (Heidegger). Paradoxically, care which he cannot follow through to its ultimate demands is precisely what tears Obi apart in his inward being. For ‘resoluteness’ is part and parcel of being in the world where there is authentic human being (Being and Time 343–344). Obi, in his fight with the men of Umuofia over Clara, may create the image of resoluteness, especially where he announces his withdrawal from the group: ‘I take back my request. I shall start paying you back at the end of this month. Now, this minute! But don’t you dare interfere in my affairs again. And if this is what you meet about,’ he said in Ibo, ‘you may cut off my two legs if you ever find them here again’. (75) But one is not to ignore his silences and his very strong opinions prefaced by ‘what would happen if I stood up and said…?’ This is a modality of thought that he shares with Odili, who, however, is often forced by reality into action. As Heidegger expresses it: The disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a conscience, is thus constituted by anxiety as state-of-mind, by understanding as a projection of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and by discourse as reticence. (Being and Time 343) Discourse is clearly reticence where Obi mentally exercises his dilemma: ‘what would happen if I [had] stood up and said…?’ He is irresolute. It may in fact be noted that in his uproarious break up with the men of

A New Language’s Reference Index  85 Umuofia, it is what he will stop doing that carries the emphasis, not what he will begin or continue to do. But the resoluteness of being-human (roughly Dasein) is caregiving Obi appears to fall short here, and thus experiences being guilty as a personality trait. Some of his past personal history that comes up in the narrative underscore this being guilty, like his letter to Hitler in the midst of World War II, and ‘wanting to have a conscience’ thereby; like his rusty blade that cuts up her mother’s hand: in regard to her, in fact, ‘anxiety’ is for him a ‘state-of-mind’. The great disclosure of his lack of resoluteness is in his walking away from his marriage proposal to Clara because his mother would curse rather than bless it. We have also seen that in A Man of the People, the narrator takes advantage of his control of the word and the viewpoint to launder what was originally a revenge quest into a ‘clean’ fight to try and salvage the country from the rapacious political class, erasing his idea of using Edna as a means of revenge against Nanga and substituting a pure and innocent lady of a romance quest, who would not be out of place in a convent (14). It turns out that in this work Edna, who is dominantly in the object status in the subject–verb–object structure of discourse, is the real subject of care and resoluteness. Odili is the one to notice this, despite the fact that at the moment he is being brutalised and battered by Nanga and his thugs: Immediately hands seized my arms, but I am happy that he got one fairly good kick from me. He slapped me again and again. Edna rushed forward crying and tried to get between us but he pushed her aside so violently that she landed on her buttocks on the wooden platform. The roar of the crowd was now like a thick forest all around. (140) In Edna here, spontaneity is the output of resoluteness, and marks the authenticity of her being-in-the-world, her being-in-the-midst-of-things. Her care is expressed not in words, but in spontaneous and resolute action. In Max, by contrast, who, although lyrical about Poor Black Mother, is unable to sustain ‘clean’, resolute action on her behalf, care is introverted and caught up in itself, instead of being-beyond-itself (Being and Time 236), which, in simple terms, is sentimentality. Tragic Loss: New Beginnings Before being taken out of the world of action by the colonial authorities, Obi Okonkwo’s existence is divided between two worlds – even more so than Chief Nanga and Odili Samalu in A Man of the People. Nanga is able to use the old tribal instincts and loyalties in a most cynical way to serve his own personal interests, in terms of access to power and public assets to

86  A New Language’s Reference Index appropriate. But despite the fact that the tribal ideology does not appear to be front and centre in the world of A Man of the People, it is in fact not far from the surface and comes out most tellingly in the C.P.C. rally at which Max introduces Odili as the party’s candidate for the constituency seat because Max has earlier self-presented as belonging to the urban intelligentsia: Towards the end of his speech Max made one point which frankly I thought unworthy of him or of C.P.C. but I suppose I am too finicky. ‘We all know,’ he said, ‘what one dog said to another. He said: ‘If I fall for you this time and you fall for me next time then I know it is play not fight.’ Last time you elected a Member of Parliament from Anata. Now it is your turn here in Urua. A goat does not eat into a hen’s stomach no matter how friendly the two may be. Ours is ours but mine is mine. I present as my party’s candidate your own son, Odili Samalu…’ He walked over to me and held my hand up and the crowd cheered and cheered. An elderly man who I believe was also a local councillor now stood up…. ‘I want to thank the young man for his beautiful words,’ he said. ‘Every one of them has entered my ear…. There is one word he said that entered my ear more than everything else—not only entered but built a house there…. That word was that our own son should go and bring our share.’ There was great applause from the crowd. ‘That word entered my ear. The village of Anata has already eaten, now they must make way for us to reach the plate. No man in Urua will give his paper to a stranger when his own son needs it…. But I want to tell our son one thing: He already knows where to go and what to say when he gets there; he should tell them that we are waiting here like a babe cutting its first tooth: anyone who wants to look at our new tooth should know that his bag should be heavy. (125–126) The old councillor’s comment is in line with Ezeulu’s attitude in Arrow of God when he instructs the son he is sending to the mission school if there is anything worthwhile there to bring home his own share. It seems to be quite impossible on the basis of knowledge of the ways of the tribe to understand how a nation state works and what its demands. The situation recalls Jesus’ parable of new wine and old wineskins. The gap is simply unbridgeable. Tribal ideology ventures for the profit of the venturer and his immediate relations. Max does not seek to bridge the gap, nor is he showing a way to the unknown through the known. By calling up tribal sentiments in this political rally, he is overturning Obi Okonkwo’s idea of serving the country ‘well and truly’ (No Longer at Ease 29), as well as his

A New Language’s Reference Index  87 own youthful aspiration in favour of Black Mother. But it is in the ambient of service to the country that Odili wants to function, and is disappointed with Max for what amounts to self-reversal. He had wanted a ‘clean fight’, and perhaps also a focused ideology. Max compromises the posture of the Common People’s Party on both grounds. There is obvious continuity between the world of Things Fall Apart and that of No Longer at Ease, but it is thanks to Nwoye who, in becoming a Christian, had disowned Okonkwo as his father. Ogbuefi Odogwu would attempt a symbolic reconnection of Okonkwo and his grandson Obi past the disavowed son, Nwoye/Isaac, who, however, still bears the surname Okonkwo. There is at the same time a recall of old Okonkwo from the infamy of suicide to the grandeur of ‘one of the lords of the land’, perhaps the greatest ever, apart from the founder of the clan himself: ‘He is a son of Iguedo,’ said old Odogwu. ‘There are nine villages in Umuofia, but Iguedo is Iguedo. We have our faults, but we are not empty men who become white when they see white, and black when they see black.’ Obi’s heart glowed with pride within him. ‘He is the grandson of Ogbuefi Okonkwo who faced the white man single-handed and died in the fight. Stand up!’ Obi stood up obediently. ‘Remark him,’ said Odogwu. ‘He is Ogbuefi Okonkwo come back. He is Okonkwo kpom-kwem, exact, perfect.’ Obi’s father cleared his throat in embarrassment. ‘Dead men do not come back,’ he said. ‘I tell you this is Okonkwo. As it was in the beginning so it will be in the end. That is what your religion tells us’. (48–49) In his inward glow at Odogwu’s words, Obi is silently identifying with the heroic memory associated with his grandfather. In the novel’s exordium, however, where Obi is the captive of the judicial authorities who have tried and convicted him for taking a bribe, we see the picture of the caricature the colonists had aimed to make of his grandfather, which he had avoided by his suicide. Publicly humiliated and degraded, Obi could never arouse wonder and awe like a hero. His story belongs to a different order of importance than that of the heroes. He is one harshly dealt with by ‘life’, and is, according to the governing norms, fully deserving of his humiliation and degradation. But never content to picture life, as many would like to believe, literature would in such a case make ‘decent’ men of personages who have come to grief due to extremes of weakness, as long as they are not morally repugnant. Aristotle draws attention to this in discussing

88  A New Language’s Reference Index sequences based on what he calls the ‘traditional stories’ – traditional, because the main lines are already in the public domain: the poet, while showing irascible and indolent people and those with other such character traits, should make them nonetheless decent, as for example Homer made Achilles good though an epitome of harshness. (Poetics, chapter 16) In the same way, Unoka of Things Fall Apart is rendered ‘decent’, even though he falls short of the exacting standards for men in Umuofia. This is a dimension of poetic discontent with the real that Ricoeur appropriates into his humanist hermeneutic, although acknowledging ‘the artificial character of the art of narrating’: the priority given the as yet untold story can serve as a critical example for every emphasis on the artificial character of the art of narrating. We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative. (Time and Narrative 42–43) In a special way, Things Fall Apart is about saving the stories of the lost and defeated. For Unoka is not alone the one lost and defeated in that narrative. In terms of the ancestral ideology, the one utterly lost is Ikemefuna. He is killed in a forest unclaimed by any clan and dumped there, a pure victim of the ancestral system. In terms of this ideology, Okonkwo and Nwoye are also lost: the hero is presumably redeemable, after, according to Obierika, ‘we will [have done] our duty by him’ (68). Ogbuefi Odogwu’s encomium to Okonkwo already cited shows that more than just redemption; he has in fact emerged a legendary figure. Furthermore, by being the Umuofia champion in single combat with the colonist, whose death marks the end of Umuofia’s sovereign independence, his legend links him directly to the founder of the clan, who had had to engage ‘the spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights’ (Things Fall Apart 1). Okonkwo marks the end of an age, an end that is not the result of weakness and infamy, but despite heroic struggle. In tragic terms, the turn of events was inexorable. The suggestion in Ogbuefi Odogwu’s ‘Remark him…. He is Ogbuefi Okonkwo come back’ is that in the grandson, a new legend is in the offing. His sense is that Obi is to mark the real beginning of new Umuofia. Obi, however, is defeated in the very first action he is undertaking that would have challenged and perhaps forced reordering of the old,

A New Language’s Reference Index  89 inward-looking tribal lifeworld. With this defeat, all aspiration in him is at an end, and he has become a shadow of his former self. When he was himself, he had confidence that he and his fellow educated Africans would force the Europeans to abandon their views about Africans based on the ‘so-called experienced men at the top’ (No Longer at Ease 17). Whereas his grandfather had aspired to be one of the lords of the clan, and his father only to escape the tribal world and its troubling disregard for the human lives of those it deemed not to belong, his aspiration may be seen based on the fight over marrying Clara as attainment of personal values. But he has an older, and wider, aspiration, namely to help build a new society, as he himself put it, to serve his country truly. Odili Samalu in his turn will also be defeated and his power to aspire subdued. The difference is that his quest object is external – electoral success; whereas Obi had been dealt a blow in his spirit. A comeback is even possible for Odili if the political field should open again; in any event, there is probably for him a certain satisfaction that corrupt Nanga has been taken out, presumably, from any future fight. As to Nwoye, who has deliberately broken away and cast his lot with the new religion, he must hope, notwithstanding his disinclination to commit to ‘the mad logic of the Trinity’, that ‘the hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear’ will answer fully and permanently ‘the vague and persistent question’ that had rendered him ill at ease in the tribal world of Umuofia (48). Arrow of God, for its part, is in equal measure a story of suffering and a narrative of loss and defeat: the first tracks Ezeulu’s fate, the second, the failure of Umuaro confederacy to generate a coherent political discourse, and its becoming assimilated into a worldwide phenomenon; the first personal and cathartic, the second communal and diffuse. Both Ezeulu and Umuaro physically survive what they have been through, but profoundly changed. The priest’s mind is permanently cracked, while Umuaro has launched itself irrevocably on the path of negotiating its own survival with the newly arrived Christian church, which now names its price. In simple terms, what narrative here saves is loss of sovereignty. The double thread of action is also observed in No Longer at Ease, where the loss is of a person, but also, and simultaneously, a communal loss. Obi, metaphorised as Umuofia’s lone palm nut, has indeed been lost in the fire. As in the old man’s kola prayer, ‘Many towns have four or five or even ten of their sons in European posts in this city. Umuofia has only one. And now our enemies say that even that one is too many for us.’ Once upon a time, ‘Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country.’ The criteria for measuring greatness have now

90  A New Language’s Reference Index changed, and Umuofia is at the starting point, whereas some other clans have covered a good measure of ground already. With Obi’s debacle, it appears to have lost its place in the line-up for the race of leadership in the new world. At the personal level, what narrative is called to do is to save the story of this loss as the story of ‘one who falls into adversity not through evil and depravity, but through some kind of error’ (Poetics, chapter 13). Part of this story is of course Obi’s passage with his parents over the proposed marriage to Clara, an osu in Umuofia’s designation, which, in their vision of existence, threatens disruption ‘in the reproduction of the lifeworld’, as Habermas would call it (Justification and Application 148). For in Umuofia’s tribal system, no one belongs whose ancestry is not part of the hallowed entity that is ‘the soul of the tribe’. The direct effect of marrying an osu would be stoppage of the ancestral line, as his father’s bluntly puts it to him: You will bring sorrow on your head and on the heads of your children. Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry? Think of that, my son. We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters. (120) In becoming a Christian at Mbanta, Nwoye had opted to return to Umuofia and attend the mission school there (Things Fall Apart 50), and he had become a catechist there. He does not seem to have shaken off or grown out of the inward-looking character of the tribe. Thus, the questions he is putting to Obi are from deep within Umuofia’s lifeworld. As if for this reason, there is an introductory passage, a prologue, as it were, from the depths. When he had told his story about Clara: His father laughed. It was the kind of laughter one sometimes heard from a masked ancestral spirit. He would salute you by name and ask you if you knew who he was. You would reply with one hand humbly touching the ground that you did not, that he was beyond human knowledge. Then he might laugh as if through a throat of metal…. Obi’s father’s laughter vanished as it had come—without warning, leaving no footprints. (No Longer at Ease 120) Therefore, Obi’s inward glow at Ogbuefi Odogwu’s characterisation of him as ‘Okonkwo kpom-kwem, exact, perfect’ does not signify identification with the grandfather’s lifeworld. All he could be is an effigy of the great Okonkwo, and his mental world is totally different to that of Okonkwo.

A New Language’s Reference Index  91 The Clan: Continuity and Change In Isaac Okonkwo’s remark, ‘dead men do not come back’, the tribe, with its ancestral sustaining ideology, is rejected. Ogbuefi Okonkwo’s world endures in his grandson’s story through the agency of people like Odogwu, and taboos like osu. But the present of Umuofia to which Obi’s world is configured is a world that has been turning into a melting pot. There are presumably traditional houses, as well as ‘Christian houses’ which have a room ‘called pieze’ (50). We see Obi’s father’s unease over the prospect of kola ritual being performed in his house by Odogwu who is not a Christian. But in performing the ritual, Odogwu’s concession to the new Christian form is observed, as he blesses the kola ‘in the name of Jesu Kristi’. The language and ideology of the Christians are clearly making their way into the ritual life of Umuofia people; and Jesus Christ has been naturalised in Umuofia Igbo as Jesu Kristi. Similarly, we read of ‘a band of young women who had been making music at a funeral [and] passing by Okonkwo’s house when they heard of Obi’s return … decided to go in and salute him’. Obi’s father considers their music as ‘heathen’, and is ‘up in arms’, refraining from driving them away because Obi rather wanted to receive them: ‘It was ominous the way he gave in without a fight and went and shut himself up in his room’ (116). Their performance reflects new levels of interaction between Igbo and the invading language English. A letter came to me the other day. I said to Mosisi: ‘Read my letter for me.’ Mosisi said to me: ‘I do not know how to read.’ I went to Innocenti and asked him to read my letter. Innocenti said to me: ‘I do not know how to read.’ I asked Simonu to read for me. Simonu said: ‘This is what the letter has asked me to tell you: He that has a brother must hold him to his heart, For a kinsman cannot be bought in the market, Neither is a brother bought with money.’ Is everyone here? (Hele ee he ee he) Are you all here? (Hele ee he ee he) The letter said That money cannot buy a kinsman, (Hele ee he ee he) That he who has brothers Has more than riches can buy.

(117)

92  A New Language’s Reference Index Letters have also become part of the social realities of the new world postOgbuefi Okonkwo. It divides those who can read from those who have no education. But when blockage is broken through, this particular letter turns out not to be about division, but about solidarity. It is clear, however, that this solidarity is on the old tribal grounds, not about universal brotherhood. The social practice the letter blesses is caregiving within the world of the tribe, and membership in the tribe is what entitles one to care and concern, rights and obligations. Names from Isaac Okonkwo’s Christian faith are now serving as proper names in the folk song. Unlike Jesu Kristi, which is both a person and the Christian faith itself that may be accepted or not, with the effect of substituting one lifeworld with another, Innocenti, Mosisi, Simonu are now names of clansmen, and do not necessarily connote literacy as would conceivably have been the case in Umuaro of Arrow of God. These names have not only been borrowed into Umuofia’s Igbo, they have also been naturalised, receiving a terminal vowel in each case as required by the rhythm of Igbo. Ogbuefi Odogwu acknowledges both the existence and the culturetransforming impact of Christianity by explicit citations as part of his kola ritual: in the name of Jesu Kristi. As it was in the beginning it will be at the end. Amen. (47–48) With this acknowledgement, Even Okonkwo could not help joining in the cheers. ‘You should become a Christian,’ he suggested.

(48)

There is no concession whatever at the level of ‘for the preservation and reproduction of [tribal] identities’ (Cronin xvii). Both the Christian catechist and his wife, Obi’s dying mother, will find themselves reinforcing the processes of self-reproduction of the tribal lifeworld in their staunch opposition to his marrying the osu Clara. Obi, as has been noted, prevails on his father to allow what the old Catechist calls a heathen dance to perform in his compound. Obi is thoroughly entertained but the message of their song about caring for the kinsman is another matter. This is the value the men of Umuofia in Lagos live by, and although the message has come in a letter and the names of Innocenti, Simonu, and Mosisi are invoked, that message expresses the core aspirations of the tribe. The men of Umuofia have not learned it in

A New Language’s Reference Index  93 Lagos; they have brought it with them to Lagos from Umuofia. It is a value system that Obi Okonkwo angrily rejects as unwarranted interference when they try to save him from marrying an osu. In rejecting their interference and breaking with them, he is rejecting the circle of care to which he belongs by membership of the tribe – the very message the women had been singing about, as if awareness had been dawning in them that the tribal world and values were facing dissolution. Obi will also immediately start repaying the loan of ₤800 they had provided him for his studies in England. And so, henceforth, speaking to them in the vernacular, ‘you may cut off my two legs if you ever find them here again’ (75). The men of Umuofia will rally together on his behalf when he is in trouble with the law, but as far as he is concerned, the time of the tribe with its circle of care is over. For some reason, the gap between the language of the uneducated villagers of No Longer at Ease and that of the narration is much reduced unlike Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God where the gap is often glaring, and marked by literal translation (called transliteration, questionably, by some). There are forms like Ogbuefi Udeozo’s directive to Ezeulu: go and eat those remaining yams today and name the day of the next harvest. Do you hear me well? I said go and eat those yams today, not tomorrow. Here it is more the rhetorical forms of Igbo adult speech than the literal rendering that is probably highlighted. Nwafor’s mother’s sharp rebuke to her son is heavily literal: let me see you come back from the stream with yesterday’s body and we shall see whose madness is greater, yours or mine. (Arrow of God 123) Here both the rhetoric and the literality are in focus. ‘The talk of men who made a great art of conversation’ (No Longer at Ease 45), which engages Obi’s attention at his homecoming to Umuofia, could have provided much opportunity for such linguistic play. There is some, but not in such sharply marked forms as seen in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Part of the conversation that Obi is listening to is his father debating his old neighbours who would not accept Christianity: ‘You have heard our elders say that thunder cannot kill a son or daughter of Umuofia. Do you know anyone either now or in the past who was so killed?’

94  A New Language’s Reference Index Okonkwo had to admit that he knew of no such person. ‘But that is the work of God,’ he said. ‘It is the work of our forefathers,’ said the old man. ‘They built a powerful medicine to protect themselves from thunder, and not only themselves, but all their descendants forever.’ ‘Very true,’ said another man. ‘Anyone who denies it does so in vain. Let him go and ask Nwokeke how he was hit by thunder last year. All his skin peeled off like snake slough, but he was not killed.’ ‘Why was he hit at all?’ asked Okonkwo. ‘He should not have been hit at all.’ ‘That is a matter between him and his chi. But you must know that he was hit in Mbaino and not at home. Perhaps the thunder, seeing him at Mbaino, called him an Mbaino man at first’. (No Longer at Ease 4) African traditional religion is sometimes called animism because of the habits of thought reflected in ‘Perhaps the thunder, seeing him at Mbaino, called him an Mbaino man at first’. Perhaps this is the ‘art’ that Obi is talking about, as ‘seeing’ and ‘called’ in the old man’s comment may be not related to belief but to personification. However, the much-reduced gap in translations gives the sense of the two linguistic systems, the Igbo and the English, settling in comfortably as neighbours. In such an environment, ‘letter’ may be borrowed with all confidence into the song of the women, as well as the Christian names. In A Man of the People, and playing up her lack of self-confidence, Edna, who is undoubtedly literate, would say, ‘I don’t claim to know book’, whereas the Igbo word literally translated as here book may equally translate the word letter. In fact a new language does emerge which functions as a happy mean between English and the vernacular; and it seems to mark a half-way point where the speakers are neither here nor there. This is pidgin. In No Longer at Ease, Chief Nanga is able to speak it, and so are his cabinet colleagues, and their servants. One such servant confronts Odili when he first arrives at the house of Chief Nanga in Bori: ‘Who you want?’ he scowled. ‘Chief Nanga.’ ‘He give you appointment?’ ‘No, but…’ ‘Make you park for outside. I go go haskam if he want see you. Wetin be your name?’ Fortunately the Minister, who was apparently relaxing with his family in the lounge came to the door, and on seeing us rushed outside and threw his arm round me. (31–32)

A New Language’s Reference Index  95 Pidgin has its history, of course, but as far as the novels we are dealing with are concerned, the beginnings are in the interactions between the colonial personnel and their African servants. The following interaction between Tony Clarke and his Cook suggests that the local functionary is at the very early stages of acquiring a vocabulary to give his employer basic information: He went into the kitchen for the tenth time that evening to see how Cook was roasting the chicken over a wood fire…. The look on Cook’s face seemed to say that Clarke was coming into the kitchen too frequently. ‘How is it coming?’ ‘Ide try small small,’ said Cook, rubbing his smoke-inflamed eyes with his forearm. (Arrow of God 105) In its very early development, pidgin will serve these Africans in the employment of the colonial officials as a status symbol to be used to flaunt their importance before their less lucky countrymen. The two policemen that come to Umaro to arrest and bring Ezeulu to the white district commissioner at Okperi arrive when Ezeulu had already left for Okperi, taking his son Obika with him. At this news: The two policemen conferred in the white man’s tongue to the great admiration of the villagers. ‘Sometine na dat two porson we cross for road,’ said the corporal. ‘Sometine na dem,’ said his companion. ‘But we no go return back jus like dat. All dis waka wey we waka come here no fit go for nating’. (Arrow of God 153–154) The language has achieved more refinement in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People. In No Longer at Ease, it is mainly used by lower-class workers. But it seems also to be in use as a sort of lingua franca in multiethnic Lagos. At the scene of what was nearly a horrible auto crash involving Obi, the driver and his passengers in a lorry that stopped by were solicitous towards Obi: ‘Na Lagos you de go?’ asked the driver. Obi nodded, still unable to talk. ‘Make you take am jeje. Too much devil de for dis road. If you see one accident way we see for Abeokuta side—Olorun!’ The women talked excitedly, with their arms folded across their breasts, gazing at Obi as if he was a miracle. One of them repeated in broken English that Obi must thank God. A man agreed with her. ‘Na only by God of power

96  A New Language’s Reference Index na him make you still de talk.’ Actually Obi wasn’t talking, but the point was cogent nonetheless. ‘Dese drivers! Na waya for dem.’ ‘No be all drivers de reckless,’ said the good driver. ‘Dat one na foolish somebody. I give am signal make him no overtake but he just come fiam’. (127–128) Pidgin seems not to be in common usage among the educated class, but Christopher, Obi’s friend, is a notable exception. We read that ‘Whether Christopher spoke good or “broken” English depended on what he was saying, where he was saying it, to whom and how he wanted to say it’ (100). Linguistically, he is unpredictable and to the extent that language also has to do with who one is, and where and how one is settling one’s existence, Christopher has no affiliation, his belongingness as fleeting as the moment in which he is functioning. Chief Nanga is also a man drifting in the linguistic field, impossible to pin down by virtue of linguistic affiliation. In every sense, in fact, he is an opportunist; and this is what defines his involvement in the social, cultural, and political worlds. That he and his cabinet colleagues use it freely suggests openness to a multiethnic, multicultural society out of the mixed bag that the colonists had left behind, that is, a political entity holding together based on something other than the soul of the tribe of pre-colonial times. Although their posture is open to a multi-ethnic, multicultural society, they do not seem to be trying to build one or to have some idea of a social system or political culture. There are no values discernible in their practice. This ruling class appears to be adrift in every possible sense, but slowly enough not to have any sense of danger either for themselves or the state they are supposed to be overseeing. In fact, it may have to be conceded to the embittered narrator that their regime is nothing but an ‘eat and let eat’ one. They come to power almost fortuitously, and their interest is to retain it at all costs. Perhaps it is among the class of lower-class workers at the scene of Obi’s accident who have low levels of education that this mode of communication is called ‘broken’ English. It seems that the well-educated are hesitant about it in A Man of the People. However, language is a very important marker in all Achebe’s novels. In Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the characters are mainly tribesmen, and speak their tribal language which the narrator often translates literally, highlighting their difference from the medium of discourse of the outsiders. Some of the outsiders are missionaries from other parts of the colony, and this is occasionally seen in their language. The official language of both novels is established by the narrator, of course. It is the Standard English. The colonists also speak this form, with occasional officialese, idiolect, academic diction, or homely or

A New Language’s Reference Index  97 conversational idiom of native speakers as the marker. Between Mr Clarke and Captain Winterbottom, for example: Captain Winterbottom was drinking brandy and ginger ale when Tony Clarke arrived. ‘It’s nice and cool today, thank God.’ ‘Yes, the first rain was pretty much overdue,’ said Captain Winterbottom. (Arrow of God 34) ‘Thank God’ obviously belongs to the conversation of native or native-like speakers; the same with ‘pretty much overdue’. An electoral campaign might be an opportunity to bring what might be the uniting principle to which all and sundry owe allegiance into focus. Something that could have served as this ‘rationalizing mytholog[y]’ (The Conflict of Interpretations 29) does come up between Odili and Max Kulamo, his friend and colleague in Common People’s Convention. It is named in a poem that Max had written seven years before during ‘the intoxicating months of high hope soon after Independence’, called ‘DanceOffering to the Earth-Mother’. The poem is recalled in the context of the formation of ‘Common People’s Convention’. This Mother is something both Odili and Max are passionate about. Using the rhythm of a popular highlife track, Max: sang it like a dirge. And, believe me, tears welled up at the back of my eyes; tears for the dead, infant hope…. I will return home to her—many centuries have I wandered— And I will make my offering at the feet of my lovely Mother: I will rebuild her house, the holy places they raped and plundered, And I will make it fine with black wood, bronzes and terra-cotta. I read this last verse over and over again. Poor black mother! Waiting so long for her infant son to come of age and comfort her and repay her for the years of shame and neglect. And the son she has pinned so much hope on turning out to be a Chief Nanga. ‘Poor black mother!’ I said out aloud. ‘Yes, poor black mother,’ said Max looking out of the window. (80–81) ‘Poor Black Mother’ is a mythological image that already implicates a story – a ‘mythical symbol’ (Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations 29), a story of ancient wrongs that need to be redressed. A mythical image of this sort may well sustain a political party and drive its electoral campaign. Whether this image holds its place as the party’s ideal is not easy to make

98  A New Language’s Reference Index out, except that upon accepting money from Chief Koko supposedly for him to be elected unopposed, without any intention to do so, Odili chides Max with ‘I thought we wanted a clean campaign!’ For Nanga and his colleagues being returned unopposed was the important thing, and its aim was to enhance their influence in the party. There are no ideals of any sort – as if a reflection of their linguistic attitude, simply to communicate. The mythical image evoked in Max’s poem is a big one, encompassing the entire Black world. With it, the old tribe would be replaced by something that it can be assimilated into without friction. And the cadence of Max’s poetry, about rebuilding poor Black Mother’s house, consoling, and giving her dignity in exchange for the abuse and degradation of the past, has an echo in what has become the motto of the University of Nigeria: to restore the dignity of man. Ethics and Politics No Longer at Ease is the story of the testing of a highly trained and supposedly acculturated individual in the value system of the colonial public service about to be handed on to the citizens of a political creation of this colonial system called Nigeria. It is Obi Okonkwo’s test, which he fails dismally, leaving the narrator the poetic duty to answer the call going forth from the history of suffering to save the story of this lost and defeated individual. The narration takes up this duty at the point at which the unhappy individual is being sentenced for his misbehaviour. In a country with striking resemblances to No Longer at Ease’s Nigeria, Chief the Honourable M.A. Nanga has appeared, together with others of his ilk, and taken over the reins of political power during a time of economic crisis. Their only qualifications are being in the parliament at a time to them auspicious, and being able to shout down the government of highly knowledgeable and experienced individuals trying to use planning and policy to deal with the crisis that has overtaken the economy. However, it is not directly the testing of governance by these opportunists that generates the crisis of this narrative, but an electioneering campaign, hopefully, to give them a free hand in governance. This campaign pits the opportunist Chief Nanga against an Odili Samalu, a former pupil of his, who is personally piqued by Chief Nanga stealing a girl from him. On these terms, there is little to choose between the two men, except that the narrator, who is Odili himself, has been able to show himself evolving and turning a public-spirited version of himself in the reader’s direction, while the initially affable and spontaneously generous Nanga is increasingly displaying his inner, selfish, and ruthless self. The internal audience of the novel, however, the electorate, sees little of Odili’s publicspirited version and is suspicious of his motives. He knows this too, and

A New Language’s Reference Index  99 projects their thinking in his interior monologue. So while waiting for Nanga’s speech at the rally he is attending in his own estimation incognito, he begins to exercise his fancy: What would happen if I were to push my way to the front and up the palm-leaf festooned dais, wrench the microphone from the greasy hands of that blabbing buffoon and tell the whole people—this vast contemptible crowd—that the great man they had come to hear with their drums and dancing was an Honourable Thief. But of course they knew that already. No single man and woman there that afternoon was stranger to that news…. And because they all knew, if I were to march up to the dais now and announce it they would simply laugh at me and say: What a fool! Whose son is he? Was he not here when white men were eating; what did he do about it? Where was he when Chief Nanga fought and drove the white men away? Why is he envious now that the warrior is eating the reward of his courage? If he was Chief Nanga, would he not do much worse? (138) Simply, the people are not able to see that they have any good choices. But the odds are against Odili, who is to them an upstart. With the people in effect making common cause with Nanga, as evident when shortly Odili is discovered and beaten nearly to death. There is an ironic confirmation of the wisdom of the ancients enunciated in Arrow of God that ‘no man however talented could win a case against his clan’. In A Man of the People, the two systems, the old, ancestral one still influencing action and mentalities in Anata and Urua, and the modern one of elected governments in far-away Bori, are not settling comfortably with each other, but are working at cross-purposes. There is an example in the peoples’ different reactions when Jonathan, a local shopkeeper, steals a blind man’s stick to make a charm to blind them while he ripped them off and when in his campaign, even in the wide arena of Nanga’s rally, he tried to show them that Nanga had been robbing them blind. For Nanga, political activity and involvement have nothing to rest on, no pedigree. He has not troubled himself to learn and test-run the colonial heritage, nor has he reached back into the one worked by the ancients for possible use in the changed circumstances. His procedure is entirely arbitrary, and undisguisedly for personal profit. It is therefore a dire remark that those who eventually overthrow his party in power do so for no public motive. The breakout from the ethical life of the traditional lifeworld is nowhere more manifest than in sexual morality. Sex outside marriage is encountered in both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, but it does not seem to be just fun. In Arrow of God, we read of Edogo making friends with a

100  A New Language’s Reference Index widow and of her jealousy towards his wife when he marries. In Things Fall Apart, a married woman runs away from her husband and moves in with Okonkwo who, in due course, fulfils the requirements for terminating the first contract and enacting a new one. It is doubtful that Ezinma would have been recognised as Okonkwo’s daughter otherwise. In A Man of the People, however, the dialogue leading to the stealing of Elsie from Odili reads as follows: ‘Tell me something, Odili. How serious are you about this girl Elsie?’ ‘You mean about marriage…. Good lord, no! She is just a good-time girl.’ ‘Kabu—Kabu?’ he asked with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. (59) Between the two men, therefore, Elsie is a plaything, and anyone is welcome to play. However, he rebukes himself in his own interior monologue that ‘it was grossly unfair at that stage in my relationship with Elsie to call her simply a good-time girl’. But he does allow Chief Nanga to keep the misrepresentation – which he may have personally confirmed in his passage with the girl subsequently. However, it turns out that Nanga is well known among some circles in Bori, and that ‘If you put juju on a woman it will catch that old rotter’ (76). Nanga is a category by himself in A Man of the People, although it appears that all that matters for sexual relations to occur is consent. In No Longer at Ease, on the other hand, Christopher, Obi’s friend seems to be leading the way in changing the rules. As he and Obi make plans for a night’s out with their girlfriends, the following dialogue occurs: ‘What are you people doing this evening? Make we go dance somewhere?’ Obi tried to make excuses, but Clara cut him short. They would go, she said. ‘Na film I wan’ go,’ said Bisi. ‘Look here, Bisi, we are not interested in what you want to do. It’s for Obi and me to decide. This na Africa, you know’…. ‘Shall we all come into your car, Obi? It’s a long time since I had a chauffeur.’ ‘Yes, let’s all go together. Although it’s going to be difficult after the dance to take Bisi home, then Clara, then you. But it doesn’t matter.’ ‘No. I had better bring my car,’ said Christopher. Then he whispered something into Obi’s ear to the effect that he wasn’t actually thinking of taking Bisi back that night, which was rather obvious. (100)

A New Language’s Reference Index  101 Christopher is a Nanga type of individual, a type of social animal, spontaneous and direct, outgoing and playful. He is free of inhibitions, but fundamentally amoral; he is easy-going but equally quick to spot his advantage; and, egotistical to the core, he is ruthless in pursuing his interests, and would ride roughshod over people as long as he has what he wants. Being spontaneous and direct may suggest authenticity, but under the ethic of care, this is not necessarily the case. In the above, he invokes Africa. In Africa, men make the decisions, and women have no opinions worth listening to. But it is his own Africa. Right before him, Obi, who was going to express his lack of enthusiasm to continue the night out elsewhere, is cut short by Clara: ‘They would go, she said.’ Similarly, in Umuofia of the Lower Niger, Ekwefi can leave her husband, choosing the man she wants to marry, and no one else’s opinion is sought in the matter. In Arrow of God, Ezeulu’s daughter Akueke leaves her husband temporarily because of ill-treatment – although, according to Ojiugo’s mother, it is because she ‘was headstrong and proud, the kind of woman who carried her father’s compound into the house of her husband’ (10). Eventually, however, her husband had to swallow his pride. Akueke here gives the news to Ezeulu’s youngest wife: ‘What am I telling you?’ asked Akueke, changing the subject. ‘My husband and his people came the other day.’ ‘What did they come for?’ ‘What else would they come for?’ ‘So they are tired of waiting, small beasts of the bush. I thought they were waiting for you to take palm wine to beg them.’ ‘Don’t abuse my husband’s people, or we shall fight,’ said Akueke pretending anger. ‘Please forgive me. I did not know that you and he had suddenly become palm oil and salt again. When are you going back to him?’ ‘One market come next Oye.’ (75) Obviously, Akueke is feeling appeased by her husband and his people, even if they have taken their time in doing so. One of the trends in the new world that now lies adjacent to the tribal one in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People is the commoditisation of things that appear hitherto not to have been commodities with prices on them. This is not seen even in Anthills of the Savannah. Nanga would confide in Odili about a lady lawyer, and married, ‘who came to sleep with [him] for twenty-five pounds a time’ (127). During the campaign, he offers Obi money to buy him out of the race. Of course, it is commoditisation of scholarship recommendations where money and sex may serve as exchange that brings Obi down. The law tracks, catches up with him, and punishes

102  A New Language’s Reference Index him perhaps only because the colonist is still around and in charge. But he is also a hypocrite, according to A Man of the People. Here we learn of the interest of English and American multinationals in the outcome of the elections where Nanga and Odili are vying for votes: Do you know, Odili, that British Amalgamated has paid out four hundred thousand pounds to P.O.P. to fight this election? Yes, and we also know that the Americans have been even more generous, although we don’t have the figures as yet. (126) The idea of anything being of value in itself is much eroded in the space of interaction in A Man of the People, almost completely absent. Thus, Edna takes it that Odili’s interest in her is in terms of the reigning commodity fetishisation, until he proves himself to be genuine. Christopher’s attitude in No Longer at Ease is similarly transactional. Obi, however, has had a strict upbringing that has stuck with him. There are ‘some Ibo words [that] simply would not proceed from his mouth’ for instance (A Man of the People, chapter 5). He even has visions of serving his country truly, and has occasion to speak against the corrupt Africans in top positions in the civil service, and admires the expatriates in the senior service for their dedication despite that the fact it was not their country. But he easily falls prey to a sting operation and pockets marked money as a bribe. No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People have no heroes in the moral sense, only novelistic protagonists. The characters are neither the constricted individualities of the traditional well-made novel nor the expansive and absorptive ones of modernism (see MacKay 149–150). They are incapable of seizing and holding any ground but become part of the general collapse of systems and lifeworlds. In Things Fall Apart, there are multiple visions of the death of the tribe, including the colonial officer’s idea of pacification of the tribes of the Lower Niger and the lamentation of the soul of the Mother of the Spirits. Okonkwo’s friend Obierika puts it schematically: the white man ‘has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart’ (124–125). What Arrow of God dramatises is precisely the inability of the clan to act together any longer. The white man is, of course, ensconced in this plot and helping to heat up and poison relationships. In No Longer at Ease, what is put in place as a replacive is not successfully learned or adjusted to; if this be seen as the underpinnings of A Man of the People, no wonder that social practice encompassed in it is totally chaotic. However, Achebe’s novels work at multiple levels; and there is a mythological level where things are not so bleak. Traditionally, a sequence

A New Language’s Reference Index  103 wrapping up in marriage is comic, the summer archetype where the young hero having overcome obstacles and opposition wins his bride, and the marriage is the crowning victory (Frye, ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ 1455). This means that Elsie is an integral part of this marriage sequence as a metonymical substitute for Edna. In these mythical terms, rarely adverted to in criticism of A Man of the People, Odili had launched his struggle against Nanga over a girl, but the real prize from the beginning had been Edna, whom he had been strongly attracted to at first seeing her. This first sighting of Edna is captured in the imagery commonly used by the feminists about women in African society – to be seen but not heard; in this case, not even to be distinguished by a name: I edged quietly towards the journalist who seemed to know everyone in the party and whispered in his ear: ‘Who is the young lady?’ ‘Ah,’ he said, leaving his mouth wide open for a while as a danger signal. ‘Make you no go near am-o. My hand no de for inside.’ I told him I wasn’t going near am-o; I merely asked who she was. ‘The Minister no de introduce-am to anybody. So I think say na im girl-friend, or im cousin.’ Then he confided: ‘I done lookam, lookam, lookam sotay I tire. I no go tell you lie girls for this una part sabi fine-o. God Almighty!’ I had also noticed that the Minister had skipped her when he had introduced his party to the teachers. I know it sounds silly, but I began to wonder what had happened to the Mrs Nanga of the scoutmastering days. (15–16) Odili here remembers Mrs Nanga, who perhaps should have been in Chief Nanga’s entourage. But if she is not there, but instead there is a very beautiful young lady that Chief Nanga would not introduce, there must be a secret link, which in Odili’s sense should not be. When he sees her again seated on a dais with Chief Nanga, this time alongside Mrs Nanga, Odili is thinking, anywhere, even a convent, but not with Chief Nanga (137). Nanga is an obstacle standing between him and Edna, and he cannot make contact with Edna without getting around Nanga, a figure, therefore, of ‘the senex iratus or heavy father’ (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 172). This marriage is therefore significant. Everything may have collapsed, with ruin everywhere. But this story is not a vision of apocalypse. Looking at the work as the story of Nanga can only yield an apocalypse. However, narration preserves certain characteristics of discourse (Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences 7); and first-person narration having the capacity to create instances of discourse (Benveniste 217): ‘I did x; I observed y’ particularly preserves the aspect of double

104  A New Language’s Reference Index indication – outward to the third person, in this case, the ‘man of the people’, and backwards to the source of the indication, Odili: To the extent that discourse refers to a situation, to an experience, to reality, to the world, in sum to the extra-linguistic, it also refers to its own speaker by means of procedures that belong essentially to discourse and not to language. (The Rule of Metaphor 86) A Man of the People is therefore as much the story of the ‘man of the people’, Nanga, as of Odili the narrator. Both being psychological entities have areas of obscurity, misperceptions and misjudgements. Accordingly, Odili is careful to choose the performative method in portraying Nanga, with independent observers giving confirmation on occasions. Notwithstanding all this, he is also striving to be dispassionately honest, with much self-questioning. For example, when he is caught at Nanga’s rally, he is brought up to the dais and introduced to the crowd by Nanga: I hear some people asking who is he: I will tell you. He was once my pupil. I taught him ABC and I called him to my house to arrange for him to go to England. Yes, I take the blame; he did not just smell his hand one morning and go to my house – I called him. (139) The narratorial comment is: There were loud[] cries of shock at such an unspeakable betrayal.

(139)

Odili is aware of being judged and condemned by the people based on what Nanga has told them, and has no expectations that they would think differently if he should tell them how he himself viewed Nanga. It is also the case in the sequential ordering of incidents in making up the narrative that it is Chief Nanga who, literally recalling Odili from several years from his own past, brings the young man up to notice in a public reception where he is the celebrant. The story, however, is Odili’s initiative, and by rendering it as a dispassionate presentation of facts, leaves all judging to this reader. This initiative is important in another respect; for this means he is able to save a history that might not have merited even a mention in an official history, saving therefore the story of the lost and the defeated. To speak of saving a history really suggests that there was some real history to be saved or lost, and therefore that there must be an original

A New Language’s Reference Index  105 represented by Chief Nanga, and others represented by Odili and Obi Okonkwo; representation either in terms of Parrhasius’s imaging of the visible world (eikastia tōn horōmenōn) or in terms of Alcidamas’s notion of a mirror (katoptron) of human life, or in terms of a device for describing the world, without ‘correlating any name with a particular object’ (Wittgenstein 61). This Wittgensteinian model of fiction underlies much discussion of A Man of the People. Those who are charitable say that it predicted the coup of 1966, which occurred a few weeks after the book’s publication. Those supporting conspiracy theories say that Achebe actually had advance information about the coup. But speculation is never good criticism. As we have seen, Frye calls criticism a science – precisely because it studies and describes the facts before it, namely the text itself, what it displays, its every phase, the logic of its cohesion, but not what lies outside, even when parergonal to it. Osu, the Ancestors, Loss Osu names a fear in No Longer at Ease, and Obi is the only one to master this fear of and commit to living with it. But as his father tells him, marriage to an osu is eternal loss. He puts the case in graphic terms to Obi: You will bring sorrow on your head and on the heads of your children. Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry? Think of that, my son. We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters. Obi’s father is probably not able to think through the contradiction of the position he is projecting here, for the scenario he has sketched draws its power from the ancestral lifeworld. He would not be excluded from the tribe by marrying an osu, but his and the osu’s offspring would be lost absolutely to the ancestral world; and this is something the potential suitors of his daughters would be wary of. In No Longer at Ease, therefore, the clan and its denizens are putting on a new façade, but the soul of the tribe is still intact – unconverted, one might say. This façade remains on the outside, prevented by the ethics of this lifeworld and its wisdoms frozen in proverbial discourse from settling in and blending into the base. Ogbuefi Odogwu saying that Obi is old Okonkwo kpom kwem asserts the element of reincarnation, which can help explain the self-identity of the clan over time. This is something Obi’s father instantly counters with the counterdoctrine of Christianity, that dead men do not come back, only to be brought up short by an appropriation from the Christian repertoire of frozen sayings: as it was in the beginning, so it will be in the end. Apparently,

106  A New Language’s Reference Index in Odogwu’s vision, Christianity is confirming the insights already available in the traditional lifeworld, and Mr Okonkwo is a little ridiculous in having to go to Christianity to discover what was already known! In like manner, there is much drawing from the ethics of the traditional lifeworld and its frozen discourse for arguments and justifications relating to struggles for power in A Man of the People. At an exhibition by young writers, the Minister of Culture, Chief Nanga, for instance, draws from the proverbial repertoire in reminding: us young people that we were the future leaders of our great country. ‘I don’t care if you respect me or not,’ he said, ‘but our people have a saying that if you respect today’s king others will respect you when your turn comes’. (63) Officially, the political culture is based on election, and not on any kind of right, but for Nanga, there is a ‘right of kings’, so to say. He is the king at the present, and entitled to the loyalty which the younger citizens have to pay if they may hope someday to succeed to his rights. He himself, meanwhile, has no obligations – this is conferred not by tribal practice, but by his opportunist mindset. Nanga’s rights include the right of arbitrary exercise of violence against a political opponent after a one-sided account of the hostility between them. The people are well disposed and readily serve as his enablers, as they flow with his rhetoric: having taught Odili ABC, he is entitled from the younger man the loyalty a child owes his mother; by inviting him to arrange to send him to England, he was going to ensure for him what is called in No Longer at Ease a European post, and so forth. But his interest is somewhere else: his aspiration is to break into his house to carry away his greatest valuables, his women. Down to their language and discourse strategies, Nanga is ‘a man of the people’, but all in the service of his own personal political interests, not theirs. For playing up the discursive strategies of Odili’s townsmen in a similar way to benefit Odili’s and the C.P.C. campaign Max does earn Odili’s unspoken censure. The language of the people is intimately bound up with the clan world and its values. Hence the thief taking enough for the owner to know does take effect in Anata rural community, where Josiah the shopkeeper steals a blind man’s stick to make a charm, but not with Odili exposing Nanga’s wrongdoing as a government functionary (109). Apparently, freedom with the local language and its discursive practices has not bridged the gap between the two systems, but rendered it difficult to mark the distinctiveness of the former colonist’s system as something to learn and adjust to, or to reject and substitute.

5 Resemblances, Refigurations

Chinua Achebe’s timeline shows a break of twenty-one years between the last member of his first wave of literary productions, A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). But in terms of the dynamics of ‘new’ and ‘old’, or ‘first’ and ‘second’ (Sissy Helff 197n), those two tend to be treated as belonging together under ‘new’, while Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God are seen together as comprising his ‘first fruits’. Kalapi Sen, for example, finds similar attitudes at work in A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah on the question of sovereignty, giving rise to the violent transfer of what properly belongs to the state to the individual. New Critical Discoveries Achebe’s texts are commonly read with an eye on what Edward Said calls ‘social and economic outside facts’, colonialism and imperialism being some of the major such facts. It is argued, however, by Marilyn Adler Papayanis that a novelistic narrator is burdened with a specific task which is owed to his having survived the novel’s crisis: We read the novel as a wholly metaphoric enactment of psychic breakdown and repair. The narrator ‘survives’ and, presumably, re-enters the world to bear witness. After all human endeavour proves futile, the one singular idea that remains crucial to the novel’s vision of redemption is the Self’s foundational responsibility for the Other, a responsibility that is neither reciprocal nor instrumental. (340–341) The futility of human endeavour is apparently what the novel is concerned with, and produces the ‘metaphoric enactment’ as a ‘concatenation of [incidents and] deviations from the norm signifying a progressive creation of metaphors’ (Kristeva 40), a wholly made-up structure, configuring DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-5

108  Resemblances, Refigurations ‘psychic breakdown and repair’. The narrator, having survived the crisis, ‘re-enters the world’ (a real place, outside the novel?), ‘to bear witness’. But a poetic metaphor is itself meaning, not a way of stating a meaning that, according to Derrida, ‘takes us outside of writing toward a psychobiographical signified, or even toward a general psychological structure that could rightly be separated from the signifier’ (Of Grammatology 159). In working with Achebe, remarks like ‘much of Achebe’s work focuses on the themes of colonialism, post-colonialism, and the tumultuous political atmosphere in post-colonial Nigeria’ (blackpast.org) have tended to be far more influential than those that demand to understand the ‘metaphoric enactment’ in its own terms. The account of Achebe’s work as dealing with the themes of colonialism, and so forth, is uncomplex, and often approach­ed as needing no demonstration, with the ‘metaphoric enactment’ translated in a surficial manner to social and political reality. Thus, Achebe is taken to provide a counter to Said’s question, that ‘What we must ask is why so few “great” novelists deal directly’ with these ‘outside facts’ (The Text, the World, and the Critic 176–177). Strictly, it is hard to understand the first surge of novels as dealing with the theme of colonialism, for this is not an ‘outside fact’ to these novels: in each, the enactment of colony colliding with a self-subsisting tribal system in its own patch of earth indwelt by its ancestors is the action itself. In Aristotle’s terms, colonial collision is a possible name for this muthos, being the ‘synthesis of the action’ (tês sustaseôs tôn pragmatôn (Aristotle 1453b)). There simply would be no Things Fall Apart if the expansionist colonial and Christian religious systems had not entered, had not encountered resistance in Umuofia (not a trope for anything, any country, but Umuofia, whose history and geography are totally comprehended in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease). It is an encounter and a clash in this place in a book that is narrated, producing one unified act that has been given the name Things Fall Apart, and colonialism is not a theme in it. This is said on the premise that these two are artworks, not lectures or treatises. As artworks, they are bound by one basic rule, that of probability, that is, ‘what makes coherent sense in the dramatic [or narrative] depiction of human life’ (Halliwell 10). This quality makes all the difference, rendering a literary production therefore ‘more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history’, for instance (Dorsch translating Aristotle’s dio kai philosophôteron kai spoudaioteron poiêsis historias estin (1451b)). In the same light, it may need evidentiary demonstration that the novels whose actions configure a period and incidents where the management of the polity has shifted from colonial officials to local people actually deal with ‘the tumultuous political atmosphere in post-colonial Nigeria’. The desire to give the action anchor in a real place and a real time is not in itself proof that it is indeed so.

Resemblances, Refigurations  109 Whether the novel be seen at the integrational level after having followed all its movements from beginning to the end, or it be considered as a movement of scenes succeeding one another, it makes up an organised body of incidents. There is a hierarchical structure, with individual incidents strung together to make up episodes a number of which make up the story, that is, the novel itself. This hierarchical format could be taken down to the minimal level of structural analysis, but the point is that the entities and narrative units, together with all ideas and words that are found in a literary narrative are constituent elements, and belong to it in the same way as the words of a sentence belong to and constitute that sentence, and the sentence exists by virtue of those words existing together in their specific order. If the words change, it is no longer the same sentence, but the whole sentence as a unit creates a specific meaning or sense. The analogy of sentence and literary text limps on the matter of meaning: where that of the sentence has to be specific for the sentence to succeed as a well-made proposition, the literary work of art is apt to yield different readings from one encounter to another. Thinking of a literary narrative, Achebe’s or any other, as containing things, themes, messages, and so forth is by setting aside their artistic nature in place of a communicative utterance, that is, to falsify its nature. The work of art may be a make-believe world, but if it gives us Ezeulu and Akuebue or Odili and Max as individual intelligences with speaking parts, as well as a narrator, they are entitled to recognition within that world. They are not to be ignored, while all speaking is credited to a certain individual with an address outside the book. Coleridge explains this phenomenon by reference to an operation that is performed by the critic, namely ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ (88). But modern critics tend to see the phenomenon as an entailment of textuality. Chinua Achebe, and critics like Georges Poulet (55), recognise that a literary work comprises a universe all its own. Accordingly, Achebe highlighting the textual existents speaks of Tutuola’s ‘fictive universe’ and ‘the extraordinary but by no means arbitrary universe of Tutuola’s story’ (‘Work and Play’ 74). Yet another approach is by way of construction of meaning. In this regard, Jonathan Culler refers to ‘the text itself as semantic universe’ (99). A major contribution of structuralism in the study of literary phenomena is, in fact, the explanation of the internal networking of literary texts that endows them a self-contained nature. That the text is composed of incidents with a beginning, a middle, and an end, making up an action that is whole and complete, we already know from Aristotle. But structuralism brings out that a story has vertical and horizontal functions, both analyzable to the minimal level of individual units. It is normal to associate the literary work with meaning. But we must also recognise meaningfulness in

110  Resemblances, Refigurations the minimal units: ‘in differing degrees, everything in it signifies’ (Barthes 89). Furthermore, each signifying unit connects to others to yield ‘different levels of meaning: some units have as correlates units on the same level, while the saturation of others requires a change of levels’ (92). In other words, a literary work is a system of interdependency, in both hierarchical and horizontal levels, and, according to Barthes, ‘since the Russian Formalists, a unit has been taken as any segment of the story which can be seen as the term of a correlation’ (89). It is a system of interconnected units; and since the question of meaning may always arise when language takes place, this meaning enquiry is circumscribed within the given textual network. We can take a sentence as such a segment. To take a striking example: But her body has not been hers since the beginning of the rainy season. This is a remark in one of Achebe’s novels we are dealing with. But it would be incorrect to prefix to it ‘Achebe said…’ ‘The narrator said…’ would not be correct either. It is what Julia Kristeva calls ‘a citation’, an ‘utterance [transferred] from one textual space (vocal discourse)’­to another, that of writing (46). It is syntactically well-delineated, but a semantic analysis would probably not be able to bring out why this utterance is a part of this system – and this has little to do with the lexical structure, which comes from literal translation of the speaker’s vernacular. A whole body of text is needed to give it context. It is ‘an instance of discourse’ (Benveniste), which means that it implies the existence of participants who, if this should be practical discourse, would be attempting to ‘reach an understanding on which goals and norms lie in the equal interest of all’ (Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (241)). This segment must therefore be a move in trying to attain the aim of the discourse. When we know who these participants are, that they are Odili and Mr Odo, the father of Edna, ‘Nanga’s intended parlour-wife’, whom Odili has come away from his clash with Chief Nanga in Bori to seek out ‘and give her the works, good and proper’ (A Man of the People 76), and when we realise that Mr Odo is a kind of obstacle that Odili is trying to circumvent to reach his target, a realisation necessarily follows that there can be no question of reaching ‘an understanding on which goals and norms lie in the equal interest of all’. Such an understanding applies only in practical discourse. In others, such as the one in which Odili and Mr Odo are presently engaged, the interaction is being used – by both parties, in fact – to play past each other to reach self-serving goals. Mr Odo’s ‘But her body has not been hers since the beginning of the rainy season’ has an immediate precedent. It follows Odili’s inquiring about his wife, after he has falsely claimed that he has brought a message

Resemblances, Refigurations  111 from Chief Nanga, which instantly changes his status and serviceability in the old man’s eyes. A kolanut would even be presented, even though the house-owner had previously apologised that he was unable to afford it. Given further instances of discourses that follow, some of which involving Edna, it comes out that in that remark he had only been whining in the hope that this indirect messaging would filter back to Nanga to make him give out money, as his aim is that during the interval before the marriage is consummated, ‘[his in-law] will bring and bring and bring and I will eat until I am tired’ (91). So, close reading is a very complex operation, and part of the function of literary discourse analysis is to lay bare what is happening in the close reading of a literary text – which is quite different from other forms of discourse analysis concerned with the information that is transferred, and how the transfer happens. With A Man of the People, literary analysis has already begun by giving each one of those participants their due, as Achebe would say. The incidents may allow room – they usually do – for individual or common opinions, where characters express themselves based on the very incidents that bring them into interaction with one another, but literary art is not determined by the opinions and thoughts of the individual characters, whatever these may be, or ideas carried along in some sort of baggage since these cannot be part of its internal constitution. Longinus emphasises the organic nature of a work as follows: Since with all things there are associated certain elements, inherent in their substance, it follows of necessity that we shall find one factor of sublimity in a consistently happy choice of these constituent elements, and in the power of combining them together as it were into an organic whole. (On the Sublime, chapter 10) In A Man of the People, for instance, where the narrator literally ‘survives and reenters the world to bear witness’ (Papayanis), we see political and electoral malpractice take place, and we read of Chief Nanga’s corruption presented from the perspective of people like Odili and Max. We also learn from Odili’s narrated consciousness that ‘No single man and woman there that afternoon was stranger to that news [of Nanga’s corruption]—not even the innocent-looking convent girl on the dais.’ But instead of being put off by this, he is to them ‘a man of the people’, which is why Odili thinks them ‘contemptible’. They would even join Nanga in beating him unconscious when he is discovered at that elder politician’s rally. The narrative makes an organic whole despite the contrasts between fact-based expectations and outcomes and the proving futile of all human endeavour (Papayanis).

112  Resemblances, Refigurations These notions, colonialism, postcolonialism, turbulent politics in Nigeria are some of the themes that guide readers in dealing with literature in Africa and Nigeria, and comprise the content inculcated in so-called teaching of literature in Nigerian schools. It is important to highlight this now that literary scholarship is increasingly issue-focused and using the literary work as reference material, and sometimes as an instance in a ‘case study’, because if ever there was a ‘dead end in African literature’ (and criticism), as prognosticated by Obi Wali in 1962, that point may already have been reached. The presuppositional model in which it is known beforehand what the text is committed to bring about or portray can only find in the literary work what it has set out in search of; anything else is ignored. Textual facts may even be forced into a mould where they do not belong. Worse still, for foundational texts like Chinua Achebe’s novels – foundational to the Nigerian/African literary tradition – these presuppositions are so drummed into the learners that once they have got them, they are certain that they know what these works are ‘all about’, and they no longer have any need to read the texts themselves. Although these learners may pride themselves as ‘students of literature’, they can have no idea what Roland Barthes calls ‘the pleasure of the text’. Let it be acknowledged that Barthes’s concern is not with people who would not trouble themselves to read a book, but with those who read poorly, who are thus admonished, if the reading matter is a literary text, ‘not to devour, to gobble [it], but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover – in order to read today’s writers – the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers’ (13). In our case, the learners have been told in effect, that there is no need to read; all they need to do is to hold firm to what the teacher has told them about the book, which is either the ‘message’, model to identify with, or the target of attack. Not even the experience of language in the instance of its self-revelation as a text needed for improving the student’s mental and language skills of ideation and creativity is allowed the student. This key language learning resource ought not to be left to go unexploited in the Nigerian educational system, especially given the incessancy of complaining about falling standards of English language usage. The students raised under these circumstances bring to their university English programmes poor attitudes towards their learning tasks, and especially literature, which are useless to build on, and quite difficult – if not impossible – to unteach. It is one thing, however, to pass up the opportunity afforded by actual engaging with the literary work as a linguistic event for the purpose of learning the language in its very theatre of operation, where it is engaging objects, addressing other intelligences or plying past them, as the case may be, opening up and turning meaning over, and constructing new thoughts. It is quite another to attempt to discover what Heidegger calls

Resemblances, Refigurations  113 the ‘workly character of the work’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 27), which entails the capacity to grasp it as a composite, organic being. What is therefore recommended instead is the reading strategy used in this study, as it opens the literary work as ‘an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries’ (Frye 17). We note, however, that whereas Obi Wali was expressing concern about the language, that is, the signifying structure which unfurls as the artwork itself, the debate he had ignited quickly was taken up by the ‘subject matter’ and about African features of the work. According to him, What I am advocating here … would force some ‘leading’ critics to go in for the hard school of African linguistic studies, a knowledge of some of the important African languages, before generalising and formulating all kinds of philosophical and literary theories. Literature in Africa would then become the serious business that all literature truly is, reaching out to the people for whom it is meant, and creating a true culture of the African peoples that would not rely on slogans and propaganda, nor on patronage of doubtful intentions. (web) He is advocating for a literature that African people(s) can read, without necessarily being learned in the European literary traditions. The cost, should this African-language literature fail to emerge, is that no ‘true culture of the African peoples’ would ever come into being. For him, literature creates, rather than naively representing a culture (or something else) already in existence. There is a marked contrast in the phenomenology of language in poetry and communicative action. In poetry, the self-revelatory power of language is most in evidence, as language becomes literally tied down and rendered visible in text construction, at the same time constituting an object that Longinus says has ‘organic form’. Where the function that exercises language is information communication, language moves in the atmosphere of transparency, and the language learner has to deliberately break, and stand down this communicative function to let the language come to the surface, where it can be taken up for analysis. The contrasting relationships of use objects with the material elements being used for their making, on the one hand, and, on the other, art with the material element it needs to achieve unconcealment are presented by Heidegger as follows: In fabricating equipment—e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause

114  Resemblances, Refigurations the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the lighting and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word. (Poetry, Language, Thought 44–45) Language has functions which influence its behaviour patterns. Poetry is the function in which by naming, and by that fact bringing into existence what it names, language exercises its very own being, as it is ‘poetry which first makes language possible’ (Existence and Being 307). This is quite unlike its serviceability in a communicative function, wherein it perishes. I have called this perishing transparency. Undoubtedly, Anthills of the Savannah has references that suggest a real place, Nigeria – the Igbo proverbial wisdom is much in evidence. In one proverb, for example, we read ‘that power is like marrying across the Niger; you soon find yourself paddling by night’ (45). But criticism must be aware that what it is given is fiction. The work of criticism is not about translation – whether of fiction into reality or of textual disharmony, the disharmony of Kangan and Niger, for instance, into a harmony in which ‘Niger’, by virtue of a referential ‘outside fact’, enables Kangan to be understood as a fictional name for another outside fact. The procedure in this study is to capture as many of the recurrent patterns, patterns of coexistence, and the incidents in their connections and interactions as possible, and as the words for the first time speak (Heidegger), listening for the key to enable plotting of an argument that would house the identified patterns and incidents, and simultaneously rest on them as a firm foundation. This procedure has yielded in the present instance the argumentative structure in which No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People may be read together as transitional between a ‘first’ group, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, and the latest member of the oeuvre, Anthills of the Savannah. With this, there is an overall movement from Things Fall Apart to Anthills of the Savannah. First, there is the reconstructing or enactment of a tribal world, transitioning in the second phase to an existence relocated in vastly expanded geographical and political spaces, with accompanying re-­ orientations to new-encountered realities, and a third phase that enacts a work-world in which the decision who man is, and where he is settling his existence, is by faithful commitment to what one is called to do. In short, the action is the entry point used here to track the history of a specific value system, the tribal system, which Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God intercept, as Aristotle would say, in the midst of things (in medias

Resemblances, Refigurations  115 res). This system is seen to suffer de-constitution in the later works, as it is overtaken by other social systems backed by a system of force that the tribe could never muster or withstand, but a system that was hollow at the core where a lifeworld might have been ensconced. In the words of the narrator of A Man of the People, following a political struggle which lacked a life-giving principle on either side, ‘in the affairs of the nation there was no owner, the laws of the village became powerless’ (148). It seems inevitable, if the centre cannot hold, that things fall apart. In Anthills of the Savannah, we seem to be seeing the after-effects of what Papayanis above calls a ‘psychic breakdown’, with the old tribal ideology having been swept away and the space for some cohesive and binding principle disclosed. The political leader in this narrative appears not to want an organised society. Apparently, he had found his hero in his first Organisation for African Unity (OAU) meeting, who is the picture of aloofness: ‘the old emperor who never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what was going on around him’. General Sam in fact offers ‘wistfully, his thoughts obviously far away’: ‘I wish I could look like him’ (52). Still there are threads of resemblance between Anthills of the Savannah and the earlier novels, suggesting that there is no absolute break between them. An example is Idemili, which occurs in Arrow of God and Anthills of the Savannah. Notwithstanding that the texts are all self-contained and self-sustaining, and that the threads may call up conflicting associations, they may still offer exploration of a deeper illumination of their functional roles in the different texts where they occur, and offer a deeper understanding of the characters and their situations. Mythical Action Like A Man of the People, there is a double thread of action in Anthills of the Savannah. In this last novel of Chinua Achebe, one line of action is driven by men and ends in death and destruction, while the other is driven by the woman Beatrice, where life and hope are nurtured and endure. The split in perspective is traceable to Chapter 7, where the air is the conventional and unproblematic assumption that there is really one story, but which can be made more complete by bringing out ‘the woman’s angle’. In Beatrice’s brief interaction with the American journalist for whom His Excellency has thrown a party in the Presidential Retreat, the word gets dropped from her. Being the only Kangan female at that party, she had wondered: Why was I there then? To meet this American girl and arrange to give her the woman’s angle. That was it! I had been dragged here to wait upon this cheeky girl from Arizona or somewhere. Fine. We shall see! (80)

116  Resemblances, Refigurations For Beatrice, ‘the woman’s angle’ is nothing but a distortion. The nearest she comes to characterising this story, which is not part, but a full story of its own is as part of her interaction with Ikem Osodi, the Editor of the Gazette, the official newspaper of the government of Kangan, and a longtime friend: In the last couple of years we have argued a lot about what I have called the chink in his armoury of brilliant and original ideas…. he has no clear role for women in his political thinking; and he doesn’t seem to be able to understand it. Or didn’t until near the end. ‘How can you say that BB?’ he would cry, almost in despair. And I understand the meaning of his despair too. For here’s a man, who has written a full-length novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929 which stopped the British administration cold in its tracks, being accused of giving no clear political role to women. But the way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough. (Anthills of the Savannah 91) She might have cited as instance of Ikem’s having no role for women in his political thinking his choice of a soul mate in the petty trader Elewa, whose horizon is limited to basic survival and family life, leaving him within this circle as the one solely in possession of the big story, that of the nation. This girl had come up in a conversation in caustic tones between Chris and Beatrice: ‘She seems so young. And so illiterate. What can he possibly be saying to her?’ I asked. ‘Ikem doesn’t say much to any girl. He doesn’t think they have enough brains.’ ‘Good for him, the great revolutionary’. (65) His best friends all think there is something particular about Ikem, which renders him so ill at ease with the world he finds himself in, but also as if on a mission to cause the world to conform to his ideals. Here, Beatrice calls him a ‘revolutionary’; elsewhere Chris would refer to him as ‘an artist who has the example of Don Quixote and other fictional characters to guide him’ (119). This is part of the reason for the friction with Chris. In Anthills of the Savannah, moreover, traditional society is remote, and a vanishing memory. Very little of its infrastructure is visible. But the sense of Beatrice’s position in her passage with Ikem where ‘a chink in his armoury of brilliant and original ideas’, according to her, is unveiled is that

Resemblances, Refigurations  117 its value system is still working in some like this poet and journalist at the level of the unconscious; and its political infrastructure is discernible as the framework of his novel and play on the Women’s War of 1929. The implied habit of thought is something Beatrice would not want preserved or condoned. Some of the tension in the older novels – admittedly, not usually the main issue of conflict, except perhaps in the case of No Longer at Ease – is owing to the ideology and infrastructure of traditional society. For example, what turns Nwoye away in Things Fall Apart is that although all share ‘the “everydayness” in which the “self” exists together with its fellowbeings’ (Werner 45), still traditional society contrives to exclude some without a sense of false consciousness. Rather the ‘self’ existing ‘together with its fellow-beings’, Dasein, as Heidegger calls it (Being and Time), cannot really be itself if it excludes some who are within its world, for care is characteristic for Dasein. But Nwoye finds that Ikemefuna and twins, for instance, are excluded from traditional society’s network of care – to say nothing of his grandfather Unoka and other such unfortunates who develop the swelling disease and are carried away to the evil forest (Things Fall Apart 5). In Arrow of God, even a fully recognised member may still forfeit his life, because the community determines that they ‘have reached the very end of things and … know that neither a cock nor a goat nor even a bull will do’. Such is the case in the making of the ‘medicine’ that has come to be known as Ulu (133–134). And a big source of tension in A Man of the People is the political ideology of the system which people like Chief Nanga are adept in reaching into and manipulating to their own advantage. Beatrice remaining the bearer of the values of traditional culture in Anthills of the Savannah despite of the above rejection of elements of its political infrastructure recalls Rudolf Bultmann distinguishing in the good news between the kerygma, the kernel, and the accretions (9). In the light of the above, what needs telling is the story of Kangan, ‘our story’, as the old man of Abazon calls it: Kangan, where everyone has a role, and everybody’s individual story is relevant, and to leave any out is not to tell the full story. That is to say, Kangan is the people, all the people; as a geographical expression, it is utterly meaningless. Those who obligatorily seek Nigeria in Achebe’s novels, including No Longer at Ease, where the word is mentioned, may be missing a very important point, namely that these stories are about people, human personages, not geographical collectives. General Sam knows himself as the Head of ‘a military government in a backward West African State called Kangan’ (143), a pattern of thinking in which he may have privileged a geographical space over human beings. Thus, he makes the fatal error of imagining that Abazon, that is, the people, are irrelevant. But they would insist by their physically appearing in Basa, like the ‘visitor’ in Mann’s Doctor Faustus (281), that they are

118  Resemblances, Refigurations real. There is one story, but no single telling of it can do it justice or exhaust it, because, as Chris admits, it actually comprises ‘twenty million stories’, including Elewa’s and Braimoh’s in their circumscribed horizons, though ‘we tend sometimes to forget that our story is only one’ out of so many (66–67). Not only that the story may begin to come out in multiple telling, multiple writing, but also it is a story with multiple heroes, not just multiple perspectives: it may have many versions, none of which is necessarily more correct than any other, but all together comprise the story of Kangan. Chris goes wrong, in fact ‘all three of you’, as charged by Beatrice, in that ‘the story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you’ (66). She, however, is complicit in telling the story of all three of them, plus herself. But she presumably does not mistake this as the story of Kangan. It is principally the story of General Sam mismanaging the responsibility of leadership of Kangan entrusted to him, the telling of which is initiated by Chris. What is understood is that there is one common task facing the men and women of Anthills of the Savannah, and that is Kangan itself – the wellbeing and quality of life of its people, although it is charged especially to General Sam, which is what sets him apart as ‘the sacred symbol of my nation’s pride’ (80), as Beatrice puts it. Here again there is a resemblance to A Man of the People, where the storyteller thinks he is telling a very important story comprising the doings of a highly placed individual, but is inadvertently telling the really important story, in which, as we shall see, he himself is the real hero. In the telling of the story of a mismanaged social responsibility in Kangan, there are multiple perspectives because the story is taken over by Beatrice as Chris is no longer there to tell it to the end. Also being in possession of Ikem’s papers on the same issues – being also a witness, like Chris, she incorporates them, but ultimately yields to the third-person narrator who, as it were, gathers together the depositions of all the witnesses. Traditionally, narratives have a unitary voice, whereby they are followed with minimal effort. This is part of the poetic of the ‘well-made story’. But Anthills of the Savannah is an experimental text; not only that, it builds into its story framework the plurality and manysidedness of the total story of Kangan. At the same time, a split male/female perspective is preserved in the overall structure, and with this ‘a dyadic figuration’ of action, each path having ‘its deviations and their concatenation’ (Kristeva 38). Thus are the men and the women on opposite paths, but having political roles in the story. Men’s definitions of the task yield struggle, each with a very strong sense of self, while women’s – or, to be strict, Beatrice’s –definition yields selfrestraint and cooperation. It is pertinent that the three men with a high profile in Anthills of the Savannah are friends from their school days.

Resemblances, Refigurations  119 While Sam goes to the military and becomes Head of State of Kangan after a military coup, Ikem and possibly Chris had also come back to Kangan after they had begun to settle their existence in Europe, having been persuaded by their friends to come home ‘and join them in nation-building’ (91). Being able to settle one’s existence almost anywhere is an entailment of multiculturalism. On the other hand, being invited by ‘friends at home … to return and join them in nation-building’, which affirms free upward mobility in a Kangan nation state that runs on principles other than tribal affiliation, means that where one settles one’s existence can also be negotiated. At all events, these three individuals are available at the time of the change of government and are regrouped as role players in the succeeding government, Sam as head of state, Chris as the commissioner for information, and Ikem as the editor of the National Gazette. Chris himself is singlehandedly responsible for the appointment of almost half of the cabinet. At the start, therefore, and by virtue of the nature of nation-building, cooperation is the name of the game. In Beatrice’s report, ‘In the early days of his coming to power I had gone fairly often to the Palace with Chris and sometimes Chris and Ikem. But then things had changed quite dramatically after about one year’ (70). In his own narration, Ikem has more specifics on this change. It is not because of what any of his friends may have done wrong, but rather owing to what the Head of State has come home with after his first OAU summit: I think that much of the change which has come over Sam started after his first OAU meeting. Chris and I and a few other friends called at the Palace to see him as we used to do quite often in those days. I noticed right away that it was not the same Sam who had left Bassa only a week before. Everybody remarked on the change later—Chris, Mad Medico and the others. He spoke like an excited schoolboy about his heroes; about the old emperor who never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what was going on around him. (52) What was to become most consequential for the narrative from his experience at the OAU meeting was advice from President-for-life Ngongo: Your greatest risk is your boyhood friends, those who grew up with you in your village. Keep them at arm’s length and you will live long. (23) Thus, being the president of Kangan quickly becomes interfused in his mind with holding out against and overcoming his boyhood friends, Chris

120  Resemblances, Refigurations and Ikem, and perhaps, more importantly, living long. He wants to have less and less to do with these friends. At first, he would make allowances for the demands of duty; for instance, he would still meet with Chris as long as he is part of his cabinet, albeit that he apparently sings a different tune than all the rest. However, his denial of access to his former friends does not make them turn away. He is still the ultimate decision-maker. So they need him to be able to contribute constructively in the nation-building they are supposed to be involved in, for their best intentions towards Kangan in their specific roles to gain traction. But it is increasingly a struggle to gain his attention, and since he is determined to deny them access to himself, they themselves strive meanwhile to help him, convinced that he ‘can still be saved if we put our minds to it’ and fearing that he lacks the intellectual capacity to handle things on his own (as Ikem ruminates: if he ‘were stronger or brighter he probably wouldn’t need our offices’ (46)), he can only see their efforts in the worst possible light. To Chris, who persists in pushing the case – for both political reasons and common decency – for a presidential visit to be made to Abazon, the president fires back in exasperation: ‘Why do you find it so difficult to swallow my ruling. On anything?’ (1). Ikem, for his part, has occasion of what he considers a breakthrough to him by means of his ‘crusading editorials’. But that is not nearly enough for him: ‘I have shown what light I can with a number of controversial editorials. With Chris I could do much more’ (46). He is only thinking of doing more to help when the man himself wants only to see the back of him. Ikem’s misreading of the president’s intentions recalls Ezeulu in Arrow of God imagining based on early probes by Winterbottom for a gateway into Umuaro in which he features as a contact point that this colonial administrator would treat him as an equal or with respect. But he is the one who, albeit unknowingly, would set the stage for his destruction – not that it would have mattered to the white man if he knew; and, being destroyed, he is denied the courtesy by the narrator of ‘the one singular idea that remains crucial to the novel’s vision of redemption [—] the Self’s foundational responsibility for the Other’ (Papayanis 341), the only one of Achebe’s tragic heroes to be sentenced in the last word of his mocking enemies. But Ikem ‘with that small-boy smile of his’ (Anthills of the Savannah 222) misreads people not based like Ezeulu on ‘the ego ideal’, with its ‘narcissistic satisfaction’ (Lacan 61). He is fully committed in what he believes he is called to do, and presumes the same of everyone else, particularly the avowed leader of the nation-building effort. He cannot bring himself to doubt this of General Sam; and so, if Sam is failing, it must be because those he has brought near to himself are not helping him. He would not have needed them after all, if he had been brighter or a stronger personality (46). He simply has no idea of the depth of his former friend’s

Resemblances, Refigurations  121 depravity – or perhaps the extent of his (re)education at the feet of the old emperor, and the president-for-life Ngongo, as we recall that ‘His major flaw was that all he ever wanted was to do what was expected of him especially by the English whom he admired sometimes to the point of foolishness’ (49). The old emperor and Ngongo have now replaced the English as his heroes. But what would further come out about the man is that he would do away with him on a whim. His animosity rather is towards Chris, again by misreading the other’s intentions. Tribal Non-Affiliation: Sam Finds a Vacuum Conflict within what had been previously a close-knit team has not come about without a personal pique. Sam having taken his eyes off the ball, so to say, which is the management and development of Kangan, and the channelling of the tribute of labours of fellow citizens to that one purpose, now figures in his own mind as the object of importance and that being who he is, is the sufficient reason why he is the Head of State of Kangan. He now seeks confirmation for these delusions from the people by inviting them to vote him president for life. He is unable to get over the disastrous outcome and takes to lashing out at his close associates and old friends as being part of a conspiracy against him. Although he makes out that he is above superstition, he may have come to see the drought in Abazon, the very region that voted against the idea of a life president as nature or heaven taking his side against them, and totally rejects the idea of paying them a solidarity visit – if not taking his side, at least what is happening serves them right! It is just like the famine, occurring right in the harvest season, being seen from Ezeulu’s viewpoint as punishment from the deity because while he is in detention in Okperi, ‘two new moons came and went and there was no one to break kolanut to him and Umuaro kept silent’ (Arrow of God 208). There is apparent deliberation in the decision not to go to Abazon; for ‘when Chris was last at the palace the Big Shot had said quite categorically that he would pay a visit to Abazon. Chris came away and began dutifully to relay the news to everyone.’ Clearly, the change of mind by the Head of State is an afterthought. The failed plebiscite is a turning point for General Sam, as it brings him face to face with the goal he had unconsciously assigned for himself since his first OAU meeting, namely to ‘live long’. It poses for him the kind of moral alternatives that launch Shakespeare’s Hamlet on his great soliloquy: ‘To be or not to be’. This event is a ‘narrative moment – or function – ­giving rise to a set of different possible resolutions, the actualization of anyone of which in turn produces a new set of alternatives’ (Barthes 82). Lashing out and blaming and taking it out on people of his entourage is the alternative that General Sam chooses. Retaliating against them is a next

122  Resemblances, Refigurations stage on that path, and the handiest targets are his former close friends, Chris and Ikem. Here is his showdown with Chris: ‘At last! But God knows I did not ask for it. It’s you, my oldest friends, you and Ikem who swore for reasons best known to you to force a showdown. What more can I say except: So be it… While investigations continue into Ikem’s link with the Abazon agitators he cannot continue to edit the National Gazette…. There is some indication that Ikem might have colluded with these same people to sabotage the presidency referendum two years ago. I don’t mind telling you that your own role in that fiasco was never cleared up satisfactorily either and may well come up for further investigation.’ ‘What on earth are you talking about…?’ ‘So I sincerely hope – and pray – that you will not make your own position… you know… more difficult at this stage’. (143–144) Things have taken a deadly turn all of a sudden, and the instruments of coercion and repression of an authoritarian regime are being rolled out. These had been heard of in an earlier crisis when the military members of the cabinet had been retired and Sam had given himself appointment as President. Then there had been ‘unconfirmed rumours of unrest, secret trials and executions in the barracks. But His Excellency rode the storm quite comfortably’ (14). So, apparently, the well-tested means of social control are being rolled out again, presumably with expectations of a similar outcome. The sense of insecurity the Head of State is now exhibiting in lashing out at senior public servants and members of the government and his general suspiciousness affords some of his cabinet members opportunities for ingratiating themselves at the expense of colleagues and others who previously had enjoyed the Head of State’s confidence. The above encounter between the Head of State and Chris is in fact an opportunity being offered him to ingratiate himself at his friend’s expense, with a possible offer of a tiny little window to save his own skin in exchange for helping to destroy his friend Ikem and become forever burdened with the guilt of such a betrayal, which simultaneously would hand the boss a handle to blackmail him at will. That is to say, he is being afforded a last chance to transit to an instrument of his authoritarian state, like the chief of the secret police Colonel Ossai, who would unreflectingly execute orders issued by one who was unveiling, in addition to his role as head of state and government, the accuser of suspected opponents to his rule, their prosecutor, and judge. The regime had become totalitarian, and General Sam ‘a ruthless dictator’ (Anthills of the Savannah 3); right before him, Sam had begun to ‘shed his

Resemblances, Refigurations  123 pretended’ niceties (119). Not to succumb to this ploy and blindly choose his boss’s side must be final proof to the Head of State that he cannot be trusted. There are others besides the chief of secret police who are willing to do exactly what he is asking of Chris. But this commissioner will not only not offer blind cooperation, but here intervenes to slap down attempts in a cabinet meeting to ingratiate the Head of State at the expense of Ikem: ‘But you, I beg pardon, I mean Your Excellency, cannot break a word you never even said. The nonsense about one hundred per cent was only the machination of a newspaper editor who in my judgement is a selfseeking saboteur.’ ‘No obligation, Your Excellency, to keep faith with heretics,’ boomed the Reverend Professor Okong’s voice. ‘On point of order, Your Excellency.’ He glares at me now, and then nods to the Attorney-General, who had been interrupted by Okong and myself, to continue. ‘Your Excellency, three provinces out of four is a majority anywhere.’ More applause. ‘Your Excellency I wish to dissociate myself from the Attorney-General’s reference to a saboteur and to appeal to my colleagues not to make such statements against public servants who are not present to defend themselves’. (5) This is General Sam’s cabinet conducting serious government business, and it boils down to ego massaging for the Head of State whose life presidency bid had failed. When matter with substance is raised, such as the drought in Abazon, he instantly takes offence at impertinent Chris who has raised it, who thereby proves that he finds it ‘difficult to swallow [the Head of State’s] ruling. On anything’. In the above he has the bad grace not to be participating in this ego massaging and casting about for a scapegoat, and moreover is trying to shield someone who has been called a saboteur. When the Attorney-General is alone with the head of state and expresses doubt about Chris’s loyalty to him, there is no one to cover his back: I am sorry, Your Excellency.… To speak the truth, Your Excellency, I  have no evidence of disloyalty on the part of my honourable colleague…. But lawyers are also human. I have a personal feeling which may not stand up in court, I agree, but I hold it very strongly and if Chris were here I would say it to his face. I don’t think Chris is one hundred percent behind you.…

124  Resemblances, Refigurations Why? The reason is not far to seek. Two of you were after all classmates at Lord Lugard College. He looks back to those days and sees you as the boy next door. He cannot understand how this same boy with whom he played all the boyish pranks, how he can today become this nation’s Man of Destiny. (23–24) This is precisely the point at which the head of state recalls the monitory remark of Ngongo. Professor Okong has also had the opportunity to make his own allegation, all adding up in the mind of the Head of State as mounting evidence. So everything now must be making sense to him in respect to Chris, including his continuing to raise the case of Abazon. Indeed his intervention on behalf of Ikem where the Attorney-General had called him a ‘saboteur’ may now even sound to the Head of State as conclusive evidence of a conspiracy. His suspiciousness fully awakened, and on the lookout for conclusive evidence, he quickly takes hold of the coming of a delegation from Abazon without an appointment to the presidential palace – in the real world, outside the suspicious mind of the Head of State – a newsworthy event that needed to be covered by the national Gazette. It is the commissioner for information that communicates this information to the editor of the Gazette: Chris called Ikem on the telephone and asked him to send a photographer to the Reception Room of the Presidential Palace to cover a goodwill delegation from Abazon. ‘That’s a new one. A goodwill delegation from Abazon! A most likely story! What shall we hear next?’ ‘And for God’s sake let me see the copy before it goes in.’ ‘And why, if one may have the temerity to put such a question to the Honourable Commissioner?’ ‘You’ve just said it. Because I am the Honourable Commissioner for Information. That’s why.’ ‘Well that’s not good enough, Mr Commissioner for Information. Not good enough for me. You seem to be forgetting something, namely that it is my name and address which is printed at the bottom of page sixteen of the Gazette’. (26) A personal feud is in evidence here between Chris and Ikem – not being narrated, but performed. This powerful method of storytelling has its costs, namely that one has to be present to see what is performed. It privileges the reader, but the participant in the sequence who needs

Resemblances, Refigurations  125 information, some of which may have travelled as non-verbal communication, for his own moral decision is in the dark as to what the real facts are. In Anthills of the Savannah, this information deficit has disastrous consequences, with the friend treated as a foe, and the impostor as a friend. But there is not only information deficit; there is also excess, as Chris references the Abazon visit ‘a goodwill delegation’. He is attempting to guide Ikem’s reportage to be politically correct. That the Head of State’s antipathy towards Abazon has become public knowledge is a subtext Chris would like to keep out of the official newspaper of the state, but then only draws the editor’s fury by this effort: ‘That’s a new one. A goodwill delegation from Abazon! A most likely story! What shall we hear next?’ The kind of advice that General Sam is receiving, which he delights in receiving – a personal flaw, results in his watching his own back, so to say, taking his eyes off the business of governing. The dynamics transfer to his own work team, destabilising it. With the members of the work team undermining and disabling one another, there is general forgetfulness of the task in hand: all are now focused on the self, following the example, and, in fact, the invitation of the presumptive leader of the team. What is now totally lost is ‘the averageness of the way in which the “self” is together with others in daily life, the sway which these others hold over it and the resulting levelling tendency’ of corporate existence (Werner 45). At a deeper and more personal level, there is an unconscious competition between the three most important members of the team as far as the story is concerned, which is brought out by Chris in interaction with Beatrice: ‘Oh, you exaggerate. But you are right about the resentment. And I think it is quite natural. Especially since the coup and Sam’s elevation and to a lesser degree mine. Literally Sam is now my boss and I am Ikem’s boss.’ ‘Do you mean Ikem is jealous of you two?’ ‘Yes, why not? But I resent him just as much. Perhaps more, for his freedom.’ ‘I don’t understand you people.’ ‘Very simple really. It goes back, you see, to our first days at Lord Lugard College. Ikem was the brightest in the class—first position every term for six years. Can you beat that? Sam was the social paragon… He was the all-rounder—good student, captain of the Cricket Team, Victor Ludorum in athletics and, in our last year, School Captain. Captain. And girls worshipped at his feet…. But strangely enough there was a kind of spiritual purity about Sam in those days.’ (65)

126  Resemblances, Refigurations The ego issues highlighted here are substantially what the Attorney General had been speculating, based on malice, should be the case but while Chris is here ‘carrying out an exercise in satirical self-scrutiny’, as Cavaliero would say (147) and ‘self-parody’ (175), an instance of ‘the great thing … about those two, Chris and Ikem [that they] could laugh at themselves and often did’ (Anthills of the Savannah 231). However, Chris’s remark nevertheless has some truth content; and it means that the task of nation-building which had attracted them home from where they had been settling their existence abroad is doubly prevented: there is much going before it (Latin prae venire – to come before, hinder), than going for it. In short, the effort to reconcile their conflict in order to re-instigate joint effort between them cannot go anywhere. But even if Ikem and Chris should work together, they would still need the cooperation of General Sam to be really effective; that is, Sam as a head of state, not Sam who had substituted himself for the state. All that this new Sam aspiring for the ‘imperial We’ (191); all he craves, with the encouragement and connivance of people like the Attorney General and Professor Okong, is loyalty to himself. Sam, Ikem, and Chris have erroneously been called Beatrice’s ‘trio of lovers’. No doubt, she has the capacity to exercise sexual attraction on all three. But she draws the lines not to be crossed. Sam is the sacred symbol of her nation’s pride; as to Ikem, ‘Damn it, the fellow was a brother to me!’ (92). The lover is Chris, and she is engaged to marry him. Having taken to one another in a school where their distinctive and individual aptitudes had room to flourish, the sense is as if they were subjects of three strands of narrative fitting together as one intelligible bundle so that they were a threesome. This early bonding had sustained their friendship into adulthood. But they were three individuals with their own individual ways of looking at life. As to Sam, who was to become ‘the sacred symbol’ of Beatrice’s nation’s pride, there was something of the sacred about Sam even in those early days: he had ‘a kind of spiritual purity’. Beatrice undertakes effort to re-forge a working relationship between Ikem and Chris especially in the service of the task to carry on more effectively their different responsibilities in the team. She has also had opportunity and attempted to draw the head of state away from the distractions that are endangering the task, only to be roughly rebuffed by him. The other two take what she thinks of as her intervention as a point of conversation on which they can bare their minds, but they do not seem to have the will to shift ground. It is clear from what we have seen that Ikem and Chris do have reasonable grounds for their positions, as each believes in his own vision, and is therefore unable to see the other’s viewpoint. The history of their friendship and the present interrelationships in public affairs have disclosed the strong functioning of the self in each man. This self is a medium in their

Resemblances, Refigurations  127 interactions, and goes before the official and public responsibility of nation-building for which they are included in the government. Chris has illumination as he is trying to escape the manhunt for him by General Sam who has at last put away all niceties and unleashed his totalitarian state’s machinery of murder and repression: Chris was almost certain that Emmanuel’s Gazette story must be more than marginally responsible for thus putting the law off their guard. He was something else, that boy Emmanuel. Why did we not cultivate such young men before now? Why, we did not even know they existed if the truth must be told! We? Who are we? The trinity who thought they owned Kangan as BB once unkindly said? Three green bottles. One has accidentally fallen; one is tilting. Going, going, bang! Then we becomes I, becomes imperial We. (191) The ‘three green bottles’, a metaphor used by Beatrice for the three friends, ‘the trinity who thought they owned Kangan’, are falling down one by one, beginning with Ikem who has been hunted down by General Sam’s operatives and destroyed. In this piece of gallows humour, Chris sees himself in line to follow. Then there would be nothing between General Sam and imposition of his will on Kangan. In this scenario, there is but the prospect of the will of a certain individual dominating Kangan. All thought of building up the nation is long gone. Chris has also realised that there existed talents like Emmanuel who ought to have been cultivated and engaged to advance the task. These are people whose stories are needed in order to begin to see Kangan in the round. Not to have realised the existence and relevance of people like this is probably to be explained by loss of sight of the task, else the driving force of the whole effort should have been expanding and bringing in more and more people as the task progressed and complicated. As to the Head of State, after appointing his cabinet which he appears to wish to be one in name only, the most consequential act he performs is the creation of the secret police, dubbed the State Research Council, which he does in behalf of his own personal interests of personal security and totalitarian control of Kangan: His Excellency’s deep anxiety had been swiftly assuaged by his young, brilliant and aggressive Director of the State Research Council (SRC). He proved once again in his Excellency’s words as efficient as the Cabinet was incompetent. Every single action by this bright young man from the day of his appointment has given His Excellency good cause for self-congratulations for Major Johnson Ossai had been his own

128  Resemblances, Refigurations personal choice whom he had gone ahead to appoint in the face of strong opposition from more senior officers. (14) So the ground had indeed been prepared and the infrastructure put in place for the imposition of General Sam’s will on Kangan. He has worked for this and, at his own chosen time, he has begun eliminating the individuals who might object. His efforts, however, unleash the terrors of the apocalypse in which a history is brought to a close, and another resumed. For those who serve him, there is also a problem of how to be in the world. And there are two kinds. The Attorney General, Professor Okong, and the like serve by sacrifice of will – which is what he expects from people of his social class. As the Attorney General puts it, they ‘have no problem worshipping a man like [him]’ (23). The other kind comprises the pure instruments – base instruments as Renaissance drama would call such. Major Ossai, soon to be given enhancement by promotion to the rank of full colonel, is the perfect example. But there are others also, like the people who presumably carried the campaign for the life presidency plebiscite to Abazon. Their message, as narrated by the leader of the Abazon delegation, had been that: the Big Chief himself did not want to rule for ever but that he was being forced. Who is forcing him? I asked. The people, they replied. That means us? I asked, and their eyes shifted from side to side. And I knew finally that cunning had entered the matter. And I thanked them and they left. (128) The maximum approach to General Sam, therefore, is along one of those paths – that of the high officials who willingly sacrifice their will and the ‘base instruments’ – which means that he is not part of any network of solidarity. He is a solitary figure, and looks down in contempt upon those who willingly or mechanically serve his purposes. Thus, Colonel Ossai fulfilling his ‘base office’, as The Duchess of Malfi would call it, is cause for selfcongratulation by the Head of State. He hardly notices the agent himself, as he has in fact paid the officer for everything up front by appointment as a director over the objections of more senior officers and accelerated promotion to a full Colonel. In heedlessly pursuing his vision of dictatorial rule to self-destruction, two histories resume, of which one is set to repeat the cycle of the apocalypse, that of General Ahmed Lango who has taken over as Head of State. Of him:

Resemblances, Refigurations  129 the gullible people of Kangan, famous for dancing in the streets at every change of government, were asking where this loyal officer was hiding in the first twenty-four hours after his Commander was kidnapped from the Palace by ‘unknown persons’, tortured, shot in the head and buried under one foot of soil in the bush. (218–219) Of him, the people of Kangan have no illusion; still less the survivors galvanising around Beatrice. No one is dancing in the streets to celebrate his accession to power, for they know what to expect of him. With respect to the Director of the State Research Council, for example: Colonel Ossai was last seen going in to see the Head of State and has not been sighted ever since. You remember Idi Amin? Well, according to unconfirmed reports he used to strangle and behead his rivals for women and put their head in the fridge as a kind of trophy. So perhaps Colonel Ossai is in the cooler, somewhere. (221) General Sam has failed in his ultimate goal, to ‘live long’, and it is not for failing to keep his boyhood friends ‘at arm’s length’. But his successor has placed himself on the path of repeat of misrule and arbitrariness, readily settling into the mythology of self-gratification of which Idi Amin is an exponent. There are reminders here of the army takeover in A Man of the People, with the state funeral in honour of Chris standing in parallel to the murdered Max Kulamo being declared in A Man of the People Hero of the Revolution. The coup makers think they have enacted a revolution, and being on an optimistic plane, they set about trying to restore order and the rule of law. For instance, they order the ‘trial of all public servants who had enriched themselves by defrauding the state’ (147–148). In Anthills of the Savannah, there had been a huge clamour, by students and taxi-drivers’ unions for instance, for the investigation and prosecution of Colonel Ossai following the killing of Ikem. But the new regime is not interested in the rule of law and due process. Hence there is summary action against Colonel Ossai, who is not seen again after going in to see the Head of State. Ahmed Lango’s coup has got rid of a dictator, but the people are not deceived that this has been done for the purpose of getting rid of a dictator. It is rather to put in place a new one: in doing this, as A Man of the People concludes, there was ‘no public reason whatever’ (144). Tragedy in Anthills of the Savannah is at the level of the individuals who dedicate

130  Resemblances, Refigurations themselves to the telling of a story; at the official level of the powers that be, there is but an apocalypse of ‘ends [] consonant with origins, and in concord … with their precedents’ (Kermode 5). There are trends with a positive attitude of ‘care’ (Sorge, Heidegger, Being and Time), in all of Achebe’s five novels, but these trends ultimately become distorted in Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease. They break out in A Man of the People, taking the personages involved by surprise almost, and in Anthills of the Savannah, the colonial creation where input by the locals was not sought is lacking the mooring for care that tribal society or even old states provide. But it is here precisely that care profiles as an appurtenance of Dasein, being a consequence of his being in the world, in the midst of things, together with others. It divides the characters between those who are capable of exercising it, and therefore have authentic existence, and those who are incapable of it, and exist in inauthenticity. In these terms, a country is a context in which Dasein is thrown into a care network. Obi Okonkwo finds himself in such a context in No Longer at Ease. He finds, moreover, that the very country itself needs caring for. According to him, the colonial creation is to be served well and truly; and he is enormously impressed that the expatriate colonials soon to go back to their own countries habitually overworked themselves for it. Concerning his boss, for example: no matter how much he disliked Mr Green, he nevertheless had some admirable qualities. Take, for instance, his devotion to duty. Rain or shine, he was in the office half an hour before the official time, and quite often worked long after two, or returned again in the evening. Obi could not understand it. Here was a man who did not believe in a country, and yet worked so hard for it. Did he simply believe in duty as a logical necessity? He continually put off going to see his dentist because, as he always said, he had some urgent work to do. (No Longer at Ease 96) Although a colonial creation, Mr Green does not believe in this country, but still he gives himself totally in working for it. The sense of having ‘some urgent work to do’ is in Heidegger’s terms ‘conscience manifest[ing] itself as the call of care’ (Being and Time 322). Conscience/care in the handling of the things appertaining to the public (Akwanya, ‘Nanga, Odili, and res publica’) is a big thing in the Post-Tribal world’s No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah. Thus, Obi Okonkwo’s tears at his sentencing are an important sign. His conscience had been pricked: there is a conscience. He had been trying to repress it in the face of his material need, as he merchandised

Resemblances, Refigurations  131 appurtenances of the public held in trust. The worst that could be said of him is that he failed after having aimed high, a tragedy of hamartia – ­missing or falling short of the mark. The same could not be said of his friend Christopher, who is completely amoral, conscienceless. In A Man of the People, Odili makes a kind of apology for converting public funds to his own use, calling it borrowing. According to him: I had already decided privately to borrow the money from C.P.C. funds still in my hands. They were not likely to be needed soon, especially as the military regime had just abolished all political parties in the country and announced they would remain abolished ‘until the situation became stabilized once again’ (147) The money entrusted to Odili to advance the party’s political activities is not appropriated and made his own merely because the party is not able to function for the time being owing to military intervention. One like Chief Nanga would not even have quibbled about it, but would simply have swallowed it up. ‘The call of care’ is altogether foreign to this former cabinet minister. His career, just like that of General Sam in Anthills of the Savannah, shows how self-destructive is care as a distorted structure, where instead of being oneself-in-the-world-alongside-others, there is oneself alone, and the world and others are part of oneself. In the pecking order projected in Anthills of the Savannah, Chris and Ikem are ranked second and third, respectively. Chris as a member of the cabinet is positioned to receive and transmit heat directly from the head of state; he also ought to be able to exert direct influence on the head of state. But the head of state secures himself against influence from that source, sending down only heat; and it is Ikem, who is farther off, who is the one directly exerting influence, through his editorial pieces in the Gazette. He is the one actually reaching the people. He becomes the manifestation of care as, in the hackneyed phrase, the conscience of the nation. As General Sam initiates the pattern of harassment that would culminate in the murder of Ikem, a police constable seizes his vehicle particulars. The superintendent has altercation with his men over this: ‘You no know who this man be? But how you go know? When you no de read newspaper. You pass standard six self?’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘Na lie! Unless na free primary you pass. This man is Mr Osodi, the Editor of the National Gazette. Everybody in the country knows him except you. So you carry your stupid nonsense and go and contravene a

132  Resemblances, Refigurations man of such calibre. Tomorrow now if he takes up his pen to lambast the Police you all go begin complain like monkey wey im mother die… Go and bring his particulars here one time, stupid yam-head.’ (132) Ikem regards the abolition of public executions as one of his great achievements in exercising moderation on the government, as he had campaigned for this (43). Therefore, his ‘crusading editorials’ are a service to both the people and the government. Nevertheless, there is a pattern of disconnect. Everybody in the country knows and respects Ikem for his work, but General Sam views him as an enemy and a threat. Chris is equally regarded as unfriendly for offering frank and honest advice in the direction of moderation and responding to need, which would be government heeding the call of care in the populace. In his resistance to the call of care, Sam has enablers within the government itself, people like the Attorney General and Professor Okong. For these, neither the law itself nor the moral imperative can have any effect on him. As we already saw, they had assured him he owed no obligation to the people. If there should be a social covenant, it would be ‘not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign’ (Hobbes 116). Seeing himself as a Hobbesian ‘sovereign’ is one thing, but being human in the strict sense entails recognition that one is in the world with others, and cannot do without them – which imposes a reciprocal obligation. But General Sam cannot conceive that ‘he is the person who he is for others’ (Gadamer 139), or, as in Papayanis, having ‘the self’s foundational responsibility for the Other, a responsibility that is neither reciprocal nor [crucially] instrumental’. In addition, Sam also has minions, especially in the State Research Council. In both cases, care is distorted. Their mode of being in the world is being on the right side of the head of state. They cannot work for a country they do not really ‘believe’ in – in fact, for them, there is no longer any country in their field of vision. This is also the case for His Excellency, the Head of State. It comes out in his showdown with Chris: ‘Well, Your Excellency, for once I am turning you down. I will not carry out this instruction and I hereby tender my resignation.’ ‘Resignation! Ha ha ha ha ha. Where do you think you are? Westminster or Washington DC? Come on! This is a military government in a backward West African State called Kangan…’ ‘We wouldn’t be so backward if we weren’t so bent on remaining so…’ ‘Some day you will have a chance to change all that when you become the boss. Right now this boss here won’t accept resignations unless of course he has taken the trouble himself to ask for them. Right?’ (144–145)

Resemblances, Refigurations  133 The ‘awareness of [the] need for real independence’ expressed by Chris here is an important postcolonial theme (Scafe 130). Much undoubtedly depends on the Head of State and his mode of being in the world, which is also tied to ‘the possibility of authenticity and inauthenticity’ (Being and Time 236). In General Sam’s case, it is being in it for oneself, which is contradictory inasmuch as ‘Being towards one’s ownmost potentiality-for-­ Being means that in each case Dasein is already ahead of [beyond] itself’ (236). Sam cannot be himself in the proper sense if his being is not in virtue of being-in-relation to others. The argument above between the Head of State and Chris has echoes. Against the background of Westminster and Washington DC, ‘a backward West African State called Kangan’ highlights its insignificance. To the Head of State, his country is not worth standing up for. In all probability, he thinks of it merely as a geographical space about which there is no call to do anything. For Chris, there is a call to do something, because it is people; and there is responsibility for not doing something about its backwardness. His we, which is repeated (‘We wouldn’t be so backward if we weren’t so bent on remaining so’), is, in the discourse of engaged criticism, an indictment. But in spite of the we, there is no doubt that a specific individual, the Head of State, is the one being indicted. To Max Kulamo and Odili Samalu in A Man of the People, how the country has come into being is of no importance: what they see before them is Black Mother herself. But service to this black Mother by her black children had failed in No Longer at Ease. Neither Obi nor his friend Christopher, to say nothing of the Umuofia union, stands up for her – although they do not see her clearly in mythical terms, but rather as a country. In A Man of the People, not even Max, who during ‘the intoxicating months of high hope soon after Independence’ had penned his emotionally charged ‘Dance-offering to the Earth-Mother’, proves able to hold on to his ideals under pressure. In Anthills of the Savannah, the one who is officially the sacred symbol of the nation’s pride is the one most notoriously to betray the sacred trust. As has been shown, however, Beatrice is one of those who knows what is right by this nation: she exercises care, answers the call of care, being authentically rooted in care, existing in ‘the “circle” in understanding’ (­Being and Time 363). Heidegger’s ‘existential formula for the structure of care as “ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (a world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)”’ (364) captures the self-perception and mode of functioning of Beatrice, who spontaneously exercises care towards the nation she feels so passionately about – as expressed in ‘the sacred symbol of my nation’; care towards other entities and persons encountered within-the-world, exercising care as conscience in her interventions to try and get those who

134  Resemblances, Refigurations exercise power and influence to do so in a moral and responsible manner, conscious of the role their position assigns to them. Something about her which appears to be essential for the exercise of her being and situatedness as care, and shared by the three other central characters in the story is tribal non-affiliation. In fact, General Sam himself appears to be the most de-affiliated. Apart from the bantering mention of his ‘semi-literate uncle [who] was right all the way when he said that we asked the white man to pack and go but did not think he would take with him all the utensils he brought when he came’, little can be traced of his roots in Kangan. What makes it impossible to carry out his sacred mandate is that, like Nanga, he is an opportunist and considers whatever he can turn to his account a natural right, which confers in the same movement the duty to secure and promote. The evidence, however, does not suggest material acquisitions like Nanga. What he craves is power, total power. This attitude goes with using other people mindlessly to serve his purposes, as he does with Colonel Ossai, the Director of the State Research Council. Those who do not serve with Colonel Ossai’s sort of blind devotion are simply enemies to be destroyed. Accordingly, there can be nothing more damning for his former friends, Chris and Ikem, than their being accused of disloyalty. He neither needs hard evidence nor cares to know the motives of the denouncers. Chancing into the ‘enormity’ of Head of State, as Ikem puts it (46), he had seized it as a means to absolute power, to be exercised exclusively for his own self-glorification, with no responsibility whatsoever. High-Souled Individuals Checked against their old relationships together back in Lugard College, with Ikem top in academic performance, Sam in the lead as the socialite, and Chris somewhere in the middle, Sam would be tops when it comes to tribal non-affiliation, Chris not far behind, while Ikem’s consciousness has the most retention of tribal culture, for this is the well-spring of his poetry. With their privileged background, followed by ‘Lord Lugard College where half of your teachers were Englishmen’, as the Attorney General puts it to the Head of State (24), and post-secondary education in England, Sam and Chris have both early and most sustained exposure to European culture, and the effect is clearly manifest. The absolute contrast among the elite would be the Attorney General himself who comes from the ‘bush’, attends a ‘bush grammar school’, and goes to Britain for law studies at the age of thirty-one. Ikem, with a background in Abazon, may have been able to attend Lugard College due to his sheer brilliance. Chris is undoubtedly transformed by his exposure, albeit in terms of consciousness; this means that his education and experience have heavily overwritten the imbibed

Resemblances, Refigurations  135 tribal culture, without utterly deleting it, for the ideas which seem to have no role in his daily life and activities do come to the surface in certain states of consciousness and are recognised as part and parcel of the authentic self, and (momentarily) re-appropriated – although absent the capacity to ­re-connect to its former lifeworld. For example, when the student leader Emmanuel seeks him out ‘for protection’ after Sam’s security establishment goes after and destroys Ikem following his lecture in the university, Chris has a laugh: Do your people have a proverb about a man looking for something inside the bag of a man looking for something? Emmanuel laughed in his turn and said no they didn’t… but wait… they did have something that resembled it: about digging a new hole to get sand to fill an old one. (189) The crisis of the story in fact gives Chris opportunity to re-encounter and reconsider long-disused idioms of his people, and to acknowledge where in Kangan the ancient roots of his people might be sought. For Ikem, being a poet is the defining characteristic. It is his person identity. His being a poet is thus more about the constitution of his mind and how it works than the fact that he has written a full length novel and a play about the Women’s War of 1929. That mind is alive with mythological images and symbols capable of surging in creativity quite autonomously. A poet in this case is therefore a capacity that actualises in productions that are self-contained and self-sustaining. He has this remarkable reverie: The sun in April is an enemy though the weatherman on television reciting mechanically the words of his foreign mentors tells you it will be fine all over the country. Fine! We have been slowly steamed into well-done mutton since February and all the oafs on our public payroll tell us we are doing just fine! No, my dear countrymen. This is Brigadier Misfortune of the Wilting 202 Brigade telling you you are not fine. No my dear countrymen, you will not be fine until you can overthrow the wild Sun of April. Later tonight, fellow countrymen, you will hear the full text from General Mouth himself—I am only a mouthpiece—you will hear the words direct from him after the national anthem shall have been played backwards. Until then, beloved countrymen, roast in peace. (27–28) This is a complete story irrupting in Ikem’s mind unbid, a vision of the apocalypse where the sun is unleashed as a destroying plague. There are elements, however, which hold tenuous links to past, present, and future

136  Resemblances, Refigurations incidents in the narrative itself all interwoven with mythical entities. There is more than one sense of ‘beyond-itself’ in the capacities of this mind: on the one hand, a capacity to walk in ‘that Between, between gods and men’ (Existence and Being 312), and, on the other, the ‘beyond-itself’ of being in relation to others – ‘taking care of things and concern’ (Being and Time 181), as projected in his ‘crusading editorials’ and his personal frustration at the ‘failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being’ (141). This sense of ‘beyond-itself’ is visible in Edna trying to force herself between Nanga and Odili in the scene of Odili’s catastrophe. It is still more dramatic at the scene of the murder of Max. This event affords his girlfriend Eunice the disclosedness of what Heidegger writes as the ‘for-thesake-of-which’ (Being and Time 181), but not necessarily the disclosedness of ‘what can be taken care of’. With the killing of Max, she has been bereft of her particular object of care: Eunice had been missed by a few inches when Max had been felled. She stood like a stone figure, I was told, for some minutes more. Then she opened her handbag as if to take out a handkerchief, took out a pistol instead and fired two bullets into Chief Koko’s chest. Only then did she fall down on Max’s body and begin to weep like a woman. (A Man of the People 143) What comes out here also is her resoluteness. Her reaction is not by reflex, nor is it something on which she can look back with a bad conscience. Far from it. Thus, when Odili visits her after her release from prison by the new military government, he finds that she has ‘no interest in anything ̶ including whether she stayed in jail or out of it’ (148). On the matter of authenticity of Dasein, she is one of the strongest of Achebe’s characters, with Obi Okonkwo at the opposite pole who, since knuckling under to his mother’s opposition to Clara, is utterly indifferent to the disclosedness of either ‘the for-the-sake-of-which’ or ‘what can be taken care of’. There are echoes here of the abused, despoiled, and degraded Black Mother of A Man of the People, with all her hope pinned on ‘her infant son to come of age and comfort her and repay her for the years of shame and neglect’ in what Ikem denounces as the ‘failure of our rulers to ­re-establish vital inner links … with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being’. And so, there is no reason not to think of the shots fired by Chief Koko as having been fired on behalf of Black Mother – by none other than her very emanation. The mythical dimension of existence is at work in both Ikem and Beatrice; with Beatrice, it seems to belong to her unconscious, whereas in Ikem it probably comprises the ‘second handle on existence’ which, in Achebe’s

Resemblances, Refigurations  137 ‘The Truth of Fiction’, provides art its ratio and springhead (Hopes and Impediments 96). For both, it is an unconscious source of strength in their exercise of care, but their object of care is a totally different one than that envisaged in the tribal context. The object is a plural society: it is not even particularly about Kangan – for Ikem, Kangan is no more than a point of concretion of the real people ‘the poor and dispossessed’. So it is in the great realisation by Chris at the moment of death which Beatrice faithfully interprets: in this vision, care is to serve as a golden rule in the post-tribal, multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multicultural society, for: This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented… (232) It is possible to state the catastrophe of Anthills of the Savannah as an outcome of failure of leadership, with Beatrice giving the required one which is ignored. In that case, however, Beatrice is much better grounded and configured into the role than the men, high-souled individuals, who draw from their intellectual training, their acquired skills, experiences, and being with conscience, the ‘higher court for Dasein’s existence’ (Being and Time 248), whereas she is configured to forces of morality and moderation in myth from which flow powers she is not even aware of having at her disposition. According to the anonymous third-person narrator of her tranche of the narrative, she did not know these myths of her people. ‘But knowing or not knowing does not save us from being known and even recruited and put to work’ (105). Therefore, she is not acting at a purely human level. That means, there is no real comparison with the men. But the teaching of the daughter of the Almighty about ‘the moral nature of authority’ and personally giving witness to this is to advantage not just a tribe or even Kangan alone, but the whole world. She, with Ikem and Chris, are the high-souled individuals of the narrative. But she has no real counterpart among them. While the men are working out the logic of their decisions and actions, all the help she can render is advice. And she does offer this help in turn to the head of state and to Chris. The opportunity does not arise with Ikem, as ‘Ikem always avoided complaining about Chris’ to her (95). But they do stumble upon the misdirected quarrel between him and Chris, with Beatrice revealing the Head of State’s grievance towards him and Chris over the failed plebiscite, which stuns him: No no, BB…. If Chris had reported this to me at the time I should have insisted that we both resign there and then and we would not be in this mess today. You see what I mean? (148)

138  Resemblances, Refigurations The fact that nothing can be done about this now renders this communication from Beatrice a moment of tragic discovery for Ikem. She would also dare to seize the only opportunity she has during the action of the novel to offer advice to the Head of State, he brusquely dismisses her on ground of her choice of words, but at the same time also the substance of her intervention: Don’t be a bloody racist! For his part, Chris is caught up in wonder for a dimension of reality the existence of which is just being unveiled to him. But the matter of cooperation with Ikem he processes on rational grounds, and concludes it would be a hopeless undertaking.

6 Involvement under the Ethics of Care

In the time scheme of Anthills of the Savannah, Kangan is in its early years on independence. Although the narrator remarks that ‘the gullible people of Kangan [are] famous for dancing in the streets at every change of government’, it would appear that the coup that has brought General Sam to power is the outcome of the first military coup – or at least that his is the first military government to seize and retain power after a coup. We read that: His Excellency came to power without any preparation for political leadership…. Therefore when our civilian politicians finally got what they had coming to them and landed unloved and unmourned on the rubbish heap and the young Army Commander was invited by the even younger coup-makers to become His Excellency the Head of State he had pretty few ideas about what to do. (12) The conditions in terms of political history are roughly similar to those prevailing at the point of closure of A Man of the People. But the social development is strikingly different, as it presents three or four characters who, notwithstanding that their education up to the secondary level was within the country, are in different degrees tribally de-affiliated. We have seen the Head of State’s very distant reference to his ‘semi-literate uncle’, while Chris, taking his seat in the bus for his journey north, is in a selfcongratulatory mood having successfully deciphered the ‘archaic tongue’ of the inscription Ife onye metalu, which was ‘the indigenous language of Bassa’. It assures him that the ‘unaccustomed bus in which he now sat nervously was actually his father’s property’ (202–203). Sam’s and Chris’s situation of de-affiliation causes no surprise to their fellow nationals, but in the Attorney General contrasting ‘poor dullards who went to bush grammar schools’ and ‘bush people like me’ (Anthills of the Savannah 24), it does seem that at least Sam and Chris are of privileged DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-6

140  Involvement under the Ethics of Care pedigree. This distancing from tribal roots has much to do with the values of Anthills of the Savannah. Beatrice is the one who appears to have enacted this distancing in a conscious way. She is the only one of whom something is told of her immediate family, beginning with those who had made straight her way (109). She has, or had an older sister, Alice, who is neither seen nor heard from in the story. Beatrice’s remembrance of her father is with some shock: And my father—wonders shall never end as he would say—was he then also among these early morning road-makers-into-the-jungle-of tongues? What an improbable thought! And yet all those resounding maxims he wielded like the hefty strokes of an axeman. Cleanliness is next to godliness! Punctuality is the soul of business! (A prelude this, she recalled with a smile now, to the flogging of late-comers to school on rainy mornings.) And then that gem of them all, his real favourite: Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology! A maxim of mixed mintage, that; half-caste first-fruits of a heady misalliance. Or, as Ikem would have said, missionary mishmash! (109–110) Her father is a schoolmaster, and possibly a catechist, and her early ­upbringing must have been in some degree similar to that of Obi Okonkwo of No Longer at Ease. For both, ‘filiation … is problematic’, as Edward Said would say, but in different ways. For Obi, it is ‘mindlessly automatic’ (The World, the Text, and the Critic 115), and helps in destroying his moral fibre – or whatever had sustained his sense of right conduct before the moment of crisis. In the case of Beatrice, being herself seems to dictate dissociation from filiation. Hence it seems to have no role in her processing of events and decision-making. Filiation references ‘history as the form of human existence’ (116), and it is therefore incapable of being abolished. As something that no one is able to choose, filiation marks what Heidegger calls Dasein’s ‘thrownness’, and always directs Dasein back to ‘its thrownness and its submission to that world which is already disclosed with its own Being’ (178). This is what Beatrice wishes to break with; and she has gone as far as it is possible to go in detaching oneself from it. From now onwards her link to that dimension of her psychological history is in rare moments of remembrance. This detachment has been enabled by a new affiliative network, which she herself has participated in constructing. The central human figures in the network are first of all Ikem, who is ‘a brother’ to her, who she has known longer than any other in her network, and later Chris, her fiancé. These two are to be snatched away from her in the murderous despotism of the Head of State who was also in the network as a friend of her friends.

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  141 Psychologically, therefore, she is the sufferer of the tragedy of Anthills of the Savannah, and the one who has to do the most to recover; and her recovery of equipoise is largely by her being thrown into the building of another affiliative network, one based on solidarity and care. Whereas the first network is intimate and personal, the new one is rather ecclesial in character, and recalls Jesus to Peter at the Last Supper: Simon, Simon! Look, Satan has got his wish to sift you all like wheat; but I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail, and once you have recovered, you in your turn must strengthen your brothers. (Lk 21.31–32) Beatrice’s group, unlike Peter’s, is not a religious one. It is a group of people who are willing to learn from the catastrophe that has befallen Kangan and to strive for the values that being human imposes. In this survey, Chinua Achebe’s five novels have been read in effect as forming a series in the pattern of Greek trilogies. A connectedness struck some early on; and, according to Menon, this author’s ‘first three novels are together called “The African Trilogy” by critics’ (22). The relationship among the three is in the time schema, where the colonial penetration and transformation which are just beginning in Things Fall Apart have reached the stage of appointing of warrant chiefs for the purpose of indirect rule in Arrow of God, where it has already produced unintended bastardisation in figures like ‘His Highness Ikedi the First, Obi of Okperi’ (58). In No Longer at Ease, colonialism in the strict sense is coming to a close, and its successor, called neo-colonialism by some, has not yet appeared. A deeper level of relationship holds between Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, as the latter ostensibly follows the heritage of Okonkwo, the hero of Things Fall Apart, through to his son Nwoye, who had abandoned Okonkwo with the tribal system and defected to the Christians. It centres on his grandson Obi Okonkwo, using a narrative strategy that opens with Obi in the dock being found guilty for corrupt practice, and back again to the same spot, after a tour de force telling the story of his fall, a closed circuit that has the air of a seal upon the family’s history. Obi may have a physical resemblance to Okonkwo, as is suggested in Ogbuefi Odogwu’s exclamation: ‘Remark him…. He is Ogbuefi Okonkwo come back. He is Okonkwo kpom kwem, exact, perfect.’ But he is probably more like his great-grandfather Unoka in flimsiness of will than the famous grandfather, whose will in opposition to the white man is unbending even to the point of risking for his community the fate of Abame, which had been wiped out by the white man (Things Fall Apart 45). What Things Fall Apart shares with Arrow of God is a tribal society in a state of disintegration under pressure from a twofold menace: colonisation and

142  Involvement under the Ethics of Care Christianity. The two tribal societies appear to be more or less contemporary. At the level of the story matter, therefore, a parallel exists between Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Where a transition occurs is from Things Fall Apart to No Longer at Ease. For the scholars who treat the three as a trilogy, A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah are unrelated to each other and also to the trilogy. But Idemili, which occurs as a story that is present in three of these novels, may be considered a shared feature. There is perhaps a tenuous link to the honorific title ogbuefi and ozo, the title that ogbuefi celebrates, and is mentioned in Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and Anthills of the Savannah, but not in No Longer at Ease. But Idemili, according to Anthills of the Savannah, the owner of the ozo title, is directly mentioned in Things Fall Apart, where it doubles as a god belonging to Umuofia’s pantheon and as a title, ‘the third highest in the land’ (2); is a complicating factor in the Arrow of God sequence, where its priest is locked in a rivalry with Ezeulu; and, paradoxically, as a stabilising force in Anthills of the Savannah. In fact, it rises from the mythic space and asserts its presence in Beatrice as a genius not to be left out of play in the world of the narrative where the traditional mainstays of society are all but forgotten by the elite. In Anthills of the Savannah, although this is maintained as not being the ‘story of Kangan’, the most active characters who are shaping at least the political history of Kangan are all citizens who are de-affiliated or whose tribal affiliations are historical facts only but do not affect their decisionmaking or serve as motives for action. Yet the key to leading the people of Kangan out of their quagmire resides with this very principle. Idemili is the daughter sent by the Almighty ‘to bear witness to the moral nature of authority by wrapping around Power’s rude waist a loincloth of peace and modesty’ (102). Although the men of the story have all de-affiliated from the tribe, they are not able to work together in the interest of Kangan as the self stands in the way. Beatrice has no conscious knowledge that she has been designated to carry the story and ministry of Idemili into a time and place where the tribe is but a relic of the past. Her demeanour seems to change in a way that reflects the Idemili consciousness after the apocalyptic clearing of the people of her first affiliative network, her old world. In her new world, her influence is more palpable, the group around her more attentive. The apocalyptic event has not left her untouched. There is some ‘personality change’ befitting one who is a living relic of the old world, of all that had happened in it, and all that she had known in it. This is in addition to the feeling like ‘Chielo in the novel’ (114), which had broken to the surface in the lead-up to the crisis of the story and become experiential knowledge.

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  143 The human person is a favourite of the novel from the very beginning; it is something all the arts delight in, with the exception of music, which Nietzsche calls ‘the imageless art’ (14): it makes a great deal rather of the human voice. However, Raymond Williams highlights, in his The Individual and Society, that the novel perceives the individual only within the social context, and according to MacKay, ‘self versus society … devolves into self-definition within society’ (37). But the European novel does not commonly treat society as something that needs looking after. There are some counter examples, such as Joseph Breitbach’s Report on Bruno. There is rather more of this in the Soviet novel. In Chinua Achebe, both the individual and society are issues of deep concern. For some, it is in fact more the story of society than the individual; and the telling of his own story or the story of his people is very commonly used to characterise his fiction, and, in large measure, African fiction too. Hence whereas the story of an Okonkwo would always be considered worth telling, that of an Obi Okonkwo may not be what people call inspiring. But this individual has a novel dedicated to his history and experience in Achebe’s oeuvre. It is even more important that as the story of each character unfolds, that of his society is also, and equally sharply profiled. And we see in his work, with equal highlight, society which the individual members own as theirs, for which they are unafraid to make sacrifices, and another where they are still members, and in all the cases highly placed members, yet reluctant to own, to say nothing of making sacrifices for. Rather manipulation and exploitation are the frequent responses where care and concern are called for. But a most important narrative function which can be seen as having nodes in all the novels is marriage. Marriage is, of course, a frequently occurring feature in the novel. In the nineteenth-century novel, it is said to be ‘the primary way to maintain or achieve one’s desired place’, and for this reason, ‘a key issue for both male and female characters’ (MacKay 37). In Achebe, marriage rarely works for the individual; it is quite the other way around. It is successfully enacted in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, where it configures the individuals for tribal self-reproduction; it fails to come off in No Longer at Ease – to the effect that there is failure to break the hold of tribal society as a drag factor preventing the successor society from freely taking off. It yields a clearing in A Man of the People where its mythical possibilities give resonance and, moreover, determine the significance of the action. In Anthills of the Savannah, marriage figures as a promise which, however, fails to come about as the bridegroom is slain in General Sam’s persecution of the ‘witnesses’ to ‘the moral nature of authority’ (102). With this there is deferral of hope of fruition of the ministry of Idemili, who would wrap around the rude waist of power peace and modesty.

144  Involvement under the Ethics of Care Solidarity: The Call of Care Chapter 6 of Anthills of the Savannah is headed simply by the name ‘Beatrice’, but she may be accounted the ‘Third Witness’, after the ‘First Witness – Christopher Oriko’ functioning as the dominant voice in chapters 1–3, and the ‘Second Witness – Ikem Osodi’, chapters 4 and 5. Not only are they eyewitnesses to the events they narrate, but each also does ‘bear witness to the moral nature of authority’, as against the Head of State, the ultimate figure of authority in Kangan, who abuses it. Whereas this individual is accumulating power to the point of absolute monopoly, the three witnesses share an attitude in which power commits one ‘to taking care of things’, as Heidegger would put it. The Head of State’s career already launches him into the kind of action known as ‘struggle for power’; and so, he sees everyone who is not subservient to him as either secretly or potentially his antagonist in the struggle for power. He suspects this of Ikem and Chris, who, in Hegel’s terms, are rather characterised by ‘having something higher in them because they are not seriously tied to the finite world with which they are engaged but are raised above it and remain firm in themselves and secure in face of failure and loss’ (Aesthetics 1221). Each in turn, and according to the opportunities afforded them, tries to pull him up short in his heady career and stop him from wreaking disaster on Kangan and himself. Chris is driven to retort to him upon an occasion that Kangan ‘wouldn’t be so backward if we weren’t so bent on remaining so…’ But this is a signal to him that the man has an eye on his job, so he fires back: Some day you will have a chance to change all that when you become the boss…. Right? This may sound strange to you I know because up until now this same boss has allowed you and others to call the shots. Not any more, Chris. I will be doing the calling from now on and I intend to call quite a few before I am done. (Anthills of the Savannah 144–145) Not only does this struggle for power, in which he has no visible antagonist, blind him to anything including wise counsel, but in a sense it is already too late for him to turn back. In the case of a children’s mask performance it may happen that the mask’s restraining rope comes undone and instead of ‘a wild rampage and loss of life and property… the Mask tamely put his matchet down, helped his disciples retie the rope, picked up his weapon again and resumed his dance’ (A Man of the People 97). They had all been thinking that General Sam had meant well all along. And so Chris confesses: looking back on the last two years it should be possible to point to a specific and decisive event and say: it was at such and such a point that

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  145 everything went wrong and the rules were suspended. But I have not found such a moment or such a cause although I have sought hard and long for it. And so it begins to seem to me that this thing probably never was a game, that the present was there from the very beginning only I was too blind or too busy to notice. (Anthills of the Savannah 1–2) So they are only discovering that the Head of State’s exercise of authority is utterly devoid of morality; and this discovery of the man’s amoral nature happens to the three of them in turn, and independently. It is a ‘change from ignorance to knowledge, leading… to enmity’, as Aristotle shows (Poetics, chapter 11), which is a key element in tragedy. Despite there being something ‘pure’ about him, Chris and Ikem had always known their friend Sam to be in moral terms a hollow man (Eliot 79). Ikem, for instance, puts it down to the man not being very bright, or even a half-wit (46). On top of this, he notes that: He is basically an actor and half of the things we are inclined to hold against him are no more than scenes from his repertory to which he may have no sense of moral commitment whatsoever. (Anthills of the Savannah 50) They condone his behaviour and consider him ‘enormously easy to take’, as long as he is not doing harm to anyone. But things do become tricky of a sudden (119), as Chris realises in a passage with the Head of State, and mentions to Beatrice that ‘The thing is no longer a joke’ (115). The witnesses are also tellers, but different kinds of narrators. Ikem’s part is more like narrated consciousness throughout. For example: With Chris I could do much more. If Sam were stronger or brighter he probably wouldn’t need our offices; but then he probably wouldn’t have become His Excellency in the first place. Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities. Chris has a very good theory, I think, on the military vocation. According to this theory military life attracts two different kinds of men: the truly strong who are very rare, and the rest who would be strong. (46) It is a first-person narrator and a full participant in what is happening – not an action in Aristotle’s sense, for his recollections are person-centred. He is thinking about Sam and Chris, and following them throws up incidents in which some aspect of the character of the particular friend comes into focus. As narrated consciousness often works like a daydream, where the ego has ample room and does not disguise itself, in Ikem’s narration,

146  Involvement under the Ethics of Care ‘we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of every story’ (Freud, ‘Creative Writers and DayDreaming’ 150). Chris’s narration, on the other hand, is more focused on the action, and people are involved because of the action. The narration is mainly in the third person, even though he is an eyewitness. In this narration, there is little interest in probing and judging the personages, for they are not the object of focus. In a brief comment which suggests how his mind works, a theoretical turn of mind, perhaps, and how gradually it has been changing as events are bringing him out of himself – out of his ‘scientific objectivity’, Beatrice remarks: ‘Chris was sending us a message to beware. This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented…’ ‘And particularly absurd when it is not even talented,’ said Abdul. ‘It was the same message Elewa’s uncle was drumming out this afternoon, wasn’t it? On his own crazy drum of course. Chris, in spite of his brilliance, was just beginning to be vaguely aware of people like that old man’. (232) It is interest in recording exactly what is going on with the cabinet and government of Kangan that has kept Chris ‘still at this silly observation post making farcical entries in the crazy log-book of this our ship of state. Disenchantment with them turned long ago into detached clinical interest’ (2). The narrators tell the parts of the story of which they are witnesses. But being a witness, especially for Chris, constrains him in the action, so that he is already doomed when things become tricky of a sudden. The ‘third witness’ rather stands back from the politics of Kangan, except indirectly by observing Chris and Ikem, and when they are both killed, ‘lost contact with everything else’ (218). Unlike Eunice, Max’s fiancée, Beatrice achieves some kind of recovery. What restores her is the call of care, triggered by the threatened miscarriage of Elewa, Ikem’s girlfriend. Henceforth, she can care not only for the fragile new life brought forth by Elewa, but also for the memory of the ones rudely cut short. In terms of public events, General Sam has laid out an example which his successor, General Ahmed Lango, is already following. But regression into a path that had already proved ruinous is hardly likely to lead to daylight. Rather a whole new orientation different from Sam’s and Lango’s is needed, and, as far as the narrative goes, it is up to Beatrice to supply what is needed. Hence, she is the dominant presence from chapter 6 to the end, and the voice is now that of the third-person narrator, now hers, just as in

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  147 her own personal life she is not always the master of her consciousness, but must yield it to the Other who at will may take it over for prophetic utterances, or other actions. This is something that Chris has been privileged to witness: he asked languorously if she slept. ‘Priestesses don’t sleep.’ He kissed her lips and her nipples and closed his eyes again. ‘You called me a priestess. No, a prophetess, I think. I mind only the Cherubim and Seraphim part of it. As a matter of fact I do sometimes feel like Chielo in the novel, the priestess and prophetess of the Hills and the Caves.’ ‘It comes and goes, I imagine.’ ‘Yes. It’s on now. And I see trouble building up for us. It will get to Ikem first. No joking, Chris. He will be the precursor to make straight the way. But after him it will be you. We are all in it, Ikem, you, me and even Him. The thing is no longer a joke…. You and Ikem must quickly patch up this ridiculous thing between you that nobody has ever been able to explain to me.’ ‘BB, I can’t talk to Ikem any more. I am tired. And drained of all stamina’. (114–115) Things are late here too. And it sounds from Chris’s exasperated retort as if the personal rivalry between him and Ikem can no longer be contained. However, the characters cannot help themselves; and so the disaster coming upon them is inexorable. With her, ‘knowing or not knowing [the powers that be] does not save us from being known and even recruited and put to work’. But she knows what it means to ‘feel like Chielo in the novel’. In that state, there is not just a heightened state of consciousness, but being seems to multiply in her, and quite unlike Hölderlin’s poet who is ‘cast out ̶ out into that Between, between gods and men’ (Existence and Being 312), the priestess here bears the deity upon her person, is ‘possessed by the spirit of her god’ and is invested with the power of the deity. In the above scene with Chris, she is not being told things; she sees a whole history about to take place. In the last chapters she is witnessing in the presence of devoted disciples from a variety of social, cultural, religious, and educational backgrounds, communicating the values of modesty and peace. At the narrative level, a relationship of succession holds between Chris who begins the story and Beatrice who takes it over, incorporates Ikem’s story, and blends hers in, in a great amalgam. But the narrative focus will shift from General Sam to herself. Whereas Sam is a self-centred and

148  Involvement under the Ethics of Care solitary leader, as he knows nothing of the values of peace and modesty in public affairs, she is a force of attraction, where there are no distinctions of high and low, male or female, young or old, educated or illiterate, traditional or modern, and so forth, but there is conversation and truthful seeking for knowledge and understanding, and mutual affirmation and encouragement, and, above all, grounding in their thrown situation and the ‘beings [that] are accessible in the surrounding world which in themselves do not need to be produced and are always already at hand’ (Being and Time 66). Whereas the Head of State is incapable of connecting to ‘the bruised heart’ of the nation, Beatrice finds herself thrown… into a defensive pact with a small band of near-strangers that was to prove stronger than kindred or mere friendship. Like old kinships this one was pledged also on blood. It was not, however, blood flowing safe and inviolate in its veins but blood casually spilt and profaned. (218) Human solidarity within this group entails not only a commitment that the group will hold together as one, but that it will move forward as one. There is in fact a pledge: ‘This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented…. It was the same message Elewa’s uncle was drumming out this afternoon, wasn’t it? On his own crazy drum of course…. Remember his prayer? He had never been inside a whiteman house like this before, may it not be his last.’ ‘And we said Isé!’ said Abdul. ‘We did. It was a pledge. It had better be better than some pledges we have heard lately.’ ‘Isé!!’ Housing is an important marker of inequality in Kangan. The single room where Braimoh, the taxi driver and Ikem’s friend, lives with his wife and five children is portrayed close up, as Chris takes refuge there for one night before commencing his journey by bus to try and escape the manhunt against him by the government. It is in a slum, vastly overcrowded, impoverished, disease-ridden, and dismal, and calls to mind both Jacob Riis’s How the other Half Lives to which must be contrasted the Head of State’s presidential retreat that was rumoured to have cost twenty million to refurbish after it had been built at a cost of forty-five million by the overthrown civilian administration. While some see those sums as ‘irresponsibly extravagant in our circumstances’ (73), others consider it a waste of public resources, as

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  149 they do not see the need for a ‘retreat’ in the first place. Ikem, for instance, is outraged by the whole scheme. To him it is nothing but a retreat: From the people and their basic needs of water which is free from Guinea worm, of simple shelter and food. That’s what you are retreating from. You retreat up the hill and commune with your cronies and forget the very people who legitimize your authority. (73) The distance between the government of General Sam and the people is absolute in that there is no interest whatever to ascertain what their needs are, much less to do something about them. General Sam’s dwellings, the Presidential Palace, which in his language is ‘stormed’, violated, by a delegation from Abazon visiting without first of all obtaining an appointment, and the Presidential Retreat, with its artificial lake and ‘brightly lit avenue taking you slowly skywards in gigantic circles round and up the hill, on top of which [it] perches like a lighthouse’ (Anthills of the Savannah 73), both signify the way in which, by means of horizontal and vertical distanciation from the things at hand in the surrounding world, he has shielded himself from glimpsing what may need to be taken care of and the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ which call for him to go beyond himself. These dwellings signify a wilful throwing back of himself upon himself so that all that can ever disclose itself to him is himself. Ensconced in this indifference, and the moral distance not to be breached, the suggestion that he should pay a solidarity visit to drought-stricken Abazon is an affront to be answered with all the force at his command. The drought in Abazon is a ‘real’ event, of course, and affects the ‘real’ human beings of the story personally. But it has significance also as it echoes one memorialised in the mythology of Idemili. This myth centres on idemili, a ‘pillar of water’ rising from a lake which also bears the name right up to heaven. It is down this pillar that the daughter of the Almighty had travelled to the earth for the purpose of bearing ‘witness to the moral nature of authority’. Thus, moderation (sophrôsune), a value relevant in tragic characterisation, is the central value of her cult and pertains to human affairs as well as nature. She is the patron of the ozo title, and requires that those who buy ‘admission into the powerful hierarchy’ should also imbibe this value of moderation, and any aspirant she finds ‘unworthy to carry the authority of ozo she simply sends death to smite him and save her sacred hierarchy from contamination and scandal’ (103–104). Similarly, in the natural phenomenon of drought, she intervenes to impose moderation. In the drought of this mythology, she had travelled ‘through the country disguised as a hunter, saw … and on her return sent a stream from her lake to snake through the parched settlements all the way to Orimili’ (103).

150  Involvement under the Ethics of Care The mythology of Idemili in Arrow of God has a ratio quite different to that in Anthills of the Savannah as the pillar of water here holds up the waters of the sky to prevent a deluge. In Anthills of the Savannah, it has a double function, first, an aetiological one, to explain the origin of a stream which, in line with mythic ideation perceiving under the aspect of hope, must have a life-serving significance to the human community around it, and secondly, to assign the ‘history’ of the Idemili deity, together with its ceremonials and taboos. These ceremonials and taboos apply across the region through which the stream snakes on its way to Orimili, creating not a political entity but an area of shared religious belief and practices. In all these places, the central carrier of meaning the pillar of water, is capable of being captured in symbolism, and may be ‘a mere stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl containing fingers of chalk’ (103). Boreholes being dug in Abazon were to serve the same function as the Idemili stream, imposing a moderating effect on the drought. But they had been stopped after Abazon voted against the life presidency desired by General Sam. They understand this; and so in the unbearable situation of the drought, they send a delegation to the Head of State with a mandate to withdraw their earlier vote and: to say our own yes and perhaps the work on our bore-holes will start again and we will not all perish from the anger of the sun. We did not know before but we know now that yes does not cause trouble. We do not fully understand the ways of today yet but we are learning. (127) The fear of perishing from the anger of the sun recalls Ezeani in Things Fall Apart charging Okonkwo to the effect that ‘The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall perish’ (9). The earth goddess’s ‘increase’ is presumably in crops. But rain is another factor of increase, as fundamental as the earth, and, of course, sunshine (7), everything in measure, and at the proper time. When Okonkwo starts sharecropping, he prepares his farm early, sows one-half of his loan-yams with the first rains. Then drought resumes and kills the yams. When the rain starts again, it went from day to day without a pause. The spell of sunshine which always came in the middle of the wet season did not appear. The yams put on luxuriant green leaves, but every farmer knew that without sunshine the tubers would not grow. (7)

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  151 Traditional life activities were opportunistically synchronised to the convergence of these natural phenomena, and everything is at hazard if any of these natural elements failed to appear when expected. Modern technology available in Kangan could be brought into play to improve the chances of survival when the agricultural cycle and the natural cycle failed to synchronise. In the present case, with the failure of the rains, General Sam flatly refuses to deploy for the benefit of the people the available technology which he controls, becoming thereby an agent of death to pay back the people for exercising their franchise in an unapproved way. Although the Head of State had distinctly told Chris that he had no wish to become a life president, he nevertheless pins the ‘disgrace’ of the failed plebiscite on his two old friends, on the ground that ‘the moment it was decided upon you had a clear responsibility, you and Ikem, to see it succeed’ (147). This grievance is neither allayed nor softened by the passage of time; rather his sense of offence heightens, and he becomes more embittered. Thus, Chris repeatedly bringing up the idea of a presidential visit to Abazon only makes things worse. The Abazon delegation to him, since he would not go to them, he dubs ‘hoodlums [who have come to] storm the Presidential Palace’ (9). General Sam has no sense of a system to which the individual is affiliated and owes allegiance. In his thinking, all allegiance is owed to him personally. Care Structure in the Lifeworld’s Native Soil The division of labour under the ancestral system persists through No Longer at Ease to A Man of the People. It is in Anthills of the Savannah that the process of dismantling this division of labour is enacted. In the earlier novels, there are roles assigned to men and women in the overall functioning of the social system supported by the ancestral ideology. Warriors are held in very high esteem in Umuofia because they defend the human community, with their territory. Umuofia’s past history of war faring is already credible deterrence to its neighbours that may otherwise covet their territory or other value; and the sending of one of its greatest warriors Okonkwo to Mbanta in the face of provocation by a member of that clan is both a reminder and a show of force in itself. Mbanta complies without a quibble. The man, the pater familias, also signifies by virtue of the positioning of the living facilities within a walled compound the protective and defensive function for the immediate, basic, and most intimate community. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s obi directly faces the entrance into the compound, and behind it the huts of his three wives ‘formed a half-moon’. The building and maintaining of this wall was a

152  Involvement under the Ethics of Care core male function, and part of his defensive responsibility. Here are Okonkwo and his boys in maintenance work on their compound wall: Okonkwo and the two boys were working on the red outer walls of the compound. This was one of the lighter tasks of the after-harvest season. A new cover of thick palm branches and palm leaves was set on the walls to protect them from the next rainy season. Okonkwo worked on the outside of the wall and the boys worked from within. There were little holes from one side to the other in the upper levels of the wall, and through these Okonkwo passed the rope, or tie-tie, to the boys and they passed it round the wooden stays and then back to him,- and in this way the cover was strengthened on the wall. (17) The compound wall is what both protects and is defended. It is the most direct expression of the patch of the earth that is home to the tribe and therefore a thing of highest value. Thus it behooves a man to manage his affairs in such a way that this home is not exposed to danger: indeed, whether he has made something worthwhile of his life might be judged on this one function. So it is highly instructive that Ezeulu should caution his son Obika in these terms: It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, my son, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live. The man who has never submitted to anything will soon submit to the burial mat. (Arrow of God 11) A disaster of this kind befalls Okonkwo’s compound after the accidental killing of a kinsman, as his compound is stormed and destroyed as soon as he departs and sets his face on the path of exile. But it would prove a dry run for the ultimate one in the closing movement of the story. However, in losing hold of this enclave by reason of being exiled in Mbanta, he feels literally cast out ‘like a fish onto a dry, sandy beach, panting’ (43). The wife as mother and nurturer is also symbolic of this patch of the earth. Okonkwo not only committing violence during the week of peace, but doing it against his wife and the mother of his children is a heinous violation and deeply symbolic. Despite that her indiscretion includes failing to make provision for her children’s midday meal, there is a sense in which this act betrays his failure as a man of the tribe: he is ‘one of the greatest men in Umuofia’, Obierika is right in observing (68), but he is also the one who brings the tribe to the brink of self-destruction in almost provoking a vastly unequal fight between Umuofia and the colonial

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  153 administration. His accidental killing of a kinsman, therefore, sets off reverberations in the dimension of symbolism. The man also feeds the family. In Things Fall Apart, yam is the ‘king of crops’, and a man’s special contribution to the family nutrition; that is to say, it is a male function to sustain the food security of the tribe. The skills and regulated chores in yam production have to be inculcated in the male children by the father. Thus, in a scene leading up to the planting season: Okonkwo spent the next few days preparing his seed-yams. He looked at each yam carefully to see whether it was good for sowing. Sometimes he decided that a yam was too big to be sown as one seed and he split it deftly along its length with his sharp knife. His eldest son, Nwoye, and Ikemefuna helped him by fetching the yams in long baskets from the barn and in counting the prepared seeds in groups of four hundred. Sometimes Okonkwo gave them a few yams each to prepare. But he always found fault with their effort, and he said so with much threatening…. Inwardly Okonkwo knew that the boys were still too young to understand fully the difficult art of preparing seed-yams. But he thought that one could not begin too early. Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed. (10) Okonkwo’s remoteness from his immediate dependents shown in his harsh language and violent behaviour towards them is here underscored to be an outward show. This is a studied way of enacting the myth of ‘manliness’. Inwardly, he is something else. This contrast between the inward man and the outward is also seen in his relationship to his favourite child Ezinma, but also, crucially, in the episode of Chielo’s visitation to take Ezinma to the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves (chapter 11). But preparing the seed-yams is prefaced by a highly symbolic act, the cutting down of forests for the making of yam farms. It recalls the founder of their clan engaging the spirit of the wild seven days and seven nights. Unoka’s failure as ‘a man’ is rooted here: he is not able to re-enact the foundational act out of which the tribe has arisen. The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves gives him this answer when he comes to enquire about his poor harvests: You, Unoka, are known in all the clan for the weakness of your machete and your hoe. When your neighbours go out with their axe to cut down virgin forests, you sow your yams on exhausted farms that take no labour to clear. They cross seven rivers to make their farms, - you stay at home and offer sacrifices to a reluctant soil. Go home and work like a man. (5)

154  Involvement under the Ethics of Care Contrarily, his son Okonkwo proves himself ‘a man’ in the traditional sense. Therefore, it is a winning argument when he comes to Ogbuefi Nwakibie that he has cleared his farm but has no yams to plant. Nwakibie’s heart is touched: It pleases me to see a young man like you these days when our youth has gone so soft…. But I can trust you. I know it as I look at you. As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look. I shall give you twice four hundred yams. Go ahead and prepare your farm. (6) Okonkwo is, in every way, a man of the tribe, and a creature of the tribe. In the above scenes, he is involving his two older boys in the rituals and tasks associated with the family’s, and the tribe’s security in food and defence. The women alone train their daughters in the female roles in the all-important task of self-reproduction of the tribe – self-reproduction in the large sense of producing young, nurturing, and communicating the knowledge, skills, and roles whereby the community endures as one and the same from age to age. They also give their male children a sense – and, in fact, the basics of the roles they would ultimately be fulfilling. Okonkwo is deliberately starting early to initiate his boys in their masculine roles in the ancestral system, even in things they can as yet hardly understand: he would rather err in overdoing than underdoing his own part of the training of his male children to finish them off for their role in the all-important matter of tribal survival and self-identity. The women in their huts fanned out behind the obi provide nurturing and basic training for the young members of the tribe until they attain maturity for assuming their gender roles in the ancestral system – which is probably why endogamy is preferred, even though not a requirement. The sense of its being preferred is present where Okonkwo suggests to his daughters while in exile in Mbanta not to accept suitors there: ‘There are many good and prosperous people here, but I shall be happy if you marry in Umuofia when we return home’ (122). In any event, the two instances of marriage outside the clan in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are from nearby clans. Even the role of defence by the males is inculcated in the mother’s hut. In the story of Obiageli breaking her water pot on the way from the stream, Ikemefuna plays an important defensive role: Nwoye’s younger brothers were about to tell their mother the true story of the accident when Ikemefuna looked at them sternly and they held their peace. (13)

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  155 Obiageli has told a lie to avoid punishment. Ikemefuna would let this lie stand so that Obiageli would not be punished, and dares the younger children who are on the point of blurting out the truth to gainsay him. The marriage function gives a sense in which Arrow of God is a continuation of Things Fall Apart; thus complementing the marriage event in Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God presents a young man beginning to assume his full role in the tribe’s self-reproduction, with the dimension of defence and protection of an immediate family group. Obika starts his own family, but his own walled compound, his obi and his wife’s hut, and other structures are in place before the arrival of his wife. So, together, he and his wife start their family in a newly build compound. Obviously this is the traditional best practice; hence Ezeulu crushes Obika with irony when he suggests that a barn that was not to be put to immediate use upon the wife’s arrival could be done afterwards at leisure. The father addresses himself to his oldest son, apparently not deigning to notice Obika’s fool’s talk: Edogo, instead of working for me tomorrow take your brothers and the women to build the barn. If Obika has no shame, the rest of us have. (Arrow of God 13) For the man of the tribe, the question who man is and where he is settling his existence is finally laid to rest in contracting of marriage. As Mbiti suggests, marriage is what one does when one comes to the right age, not whether one likes to or not. In Umuaro, it requires appropriating a specific patch of the tribe’s territory, going through the process of choosing a bride, and being granted one by obtaining ratification of one’s choice from the entire community, and moving in and taking possession of the new compound. In doing this one is fulfilling a responsibility owed to the tribe, as the key to the tribe’s self-reproduction. This approval is what obi Okonkwo fails to obtain for his proposed marriage to Clara. Marriage and the associated settling of existence for the tribesman is the pathway through which the tribe of Umuofia exercises its hold on Obi, the catch to leverage and pull Obi back and away from the consuming fire; for it is their view, echoed in their Amen to the old man of Umuofia Union’s aphorism that ‘An only palm fruit does not get lost in the fire’. They want to be part of the new world, but in terms of what they can get out of it – as in the same old man’s kolanut prayer, without that new world affecting them so as to alter their tribe-based self-understanding. In trying to prevent Obi’s getting lost in the ‘fire’ (or ‘the jungle of tongues’, according to Beatrice) of Lagos, they start a crisis in which the prized object is drifting away from them, finally to be lost to them. Even more

156  Involvement under the Ethics of Care importantly, however, he seems to have lost his own way or lost himself altogether. Obi’s marriage to Clara, should this occur, would either force rethinking and restructuring of the tribe or cause a breach in tribal solidarity and care network. But the crisis resulting from the disapproval and truncating of the process would plunge him into disaffection and alienation, and this signifies a crack in tribal solidarity. Tribal self-reproduction is also a succession plan: it aims to provide for numerical increase, while perpetuating the line through the father to the remotest ancestor. This is given physical expression in planning Edogo’s accommodation, which was much less elaborate than his younger half-brother’s: Edogo’s homestead was built against one of the four sides of his father’s compound so that they shared one wall between them. It was a very small homestead with two huts, one for Edogo and the other for his wife, Amoge. It was built deliberately small for, like the compounds of many first sons, it was no more than a temporary home where the man waited until he could inherit his father’s place. (89) The first son, therefore, inherited with his father’s obi, ‘faceless okposi of the ancestors black with the blood of sacrifice’ (6) from generations past. This is presumably also the case with Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, himself a projection of the self-image of the tribe, thanks to his great personal achievements in war and peacetime activities. But it appears that all could turn to ashes if this ancestral succession plan fails to come off for him, or, if there is succession, but with the element of sameness missing: Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation. (50) In looking at these issues of marriage, construction of compounds, repair of compound walls, and succession, we are also looking at the incidents in their configuration into a muthos: It is the muthos, not culture portrayal, ‘that incorporates them within the text’ (Kristeva 37). Tied together in this intelligible bundle in a chain-like structure, with a beginning, middle, and end, we have an action of a certain kind – and we have seen that the cardinal functions, the incidents, do appear in other formations in other members of the oeuvre, where they set off other possibilities and bring them to closure. It is equally true of the marriage function, which will be unfolded, for example, in its mythical dimension in A Man of the People.

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  157 Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, with all the incidents, characters, and their struggles, are a variety of the tragic muthos that Akwanya and Anohu have argued are known as heroic narratives. The two heroic narratives (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God side by side on a single canvas – one connected action, therefore) ‘makes public something other than itself’ (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 19). This something other, we may call a tribal lifeworld. Anthills of the Savannah, on the other hand, makes public a post-tribal social system-in-search-of-a-lifeworld as it were. There is deconstruction of the ancestral ideology in the naming ceremony and in the very name given to Ikem and Elewa’s daughter Amaechina, spelt out in capitals. In point of fact, this carries forward a deconstruction already ongoing in Things Fall Apart. Some have noted that the war ‘medicine’ of Umuofia is Agadi Nwanyi. In the light of the defensive role of the men in the ancestral system of this narrative, it is odd that the genius the community relies on for defence is female. Similarly, Agbala, although a common noun denoting a married woman, is the name of the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, who is male. It is noted, for instance in Things Fall Apart, page 33 where Okonkwo pleads with the Priestess of Agbala, Chielo, who has come to take his daughter Ezinma to the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. Chielo ‘ignored what he was trying to say and went on shouting that Agbala wanted to see his daughter’ (35). In Umuofia, the female principle is not just recognised, but it is indispensable. Yet the tribal ancestral system is not only traced through male descent, there seems to be no permanent place or reminder in the tribe for the mother of the tribe – the shrine of the earth-goddess memorialising the universal mother, not that of the tribe. In addition, tribal defence, which is a male function, with the female as the first and visible object and beneficiary of this function, for whom in the last instance the walled compound exists, and therefore the symboliser of the territory of the tribe, at the same time cannot be effectively defended without Agadi Nwanyi, who ‘would never fight what the Ibo call a fight of blame’ (4), that is, will not covet someone else’s territory or natural endowments to the extent of trying to seize it, as Umuaro would attempt to do in their war with Okperi. Of course, Umuofia ‘never went to war unless its case was clear and just and was accepted as such by its Oracle – the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves’ (3–4). A war of conquest is unthinkable in this tribal world, only ones of self-defence. However, there were contradictions, if not in the constitution, at least in the functioning of the tribal ideology. Part of the reason why it holds together in spite of the contradictions is its going without question that there are questions which must not be asked. Okonkwo hushes his wife when she unguardedly asks about the fate of Ikemefuna, who she has been

158  Involvement under the Ethics of Care assigned to look after. But it is the men who exercise the most strict censorship of themselves. Ogbuefi Ezeudu gives Okonkwo advance warning about the fate of this ill-fated lad: Yes, Umuofia has decided to kill him. The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves has pronounced it. They will take him outside Umuofia as is the custom, and kill him there. But I want you to have nothing to do with it. He calls you his father. (18) Ezeudu had not asked why or for what purpose Ikemefuna was to be killed, and the extra information he gives to Okonkwo is from tradition; neither does Okonkwo who, when the official information is delivered by representatives from the nine villages the next day, is deeply affected, and ‘sat still for a very long time supporting his chin in his palms’ (18). Whatever is going on in his mind is not known. What is clear is that none of it is to his liking. His friend Obierika is similarly plunged into thoughtfulness after the storming of Okonkwo’s compound over the accidental killing of Ogbuefi Ezeugo’s son in which he participates. His thoughts comprise a series of whys, which are penned up again in the same mind. Absent a Shared Lifeworld The trouble with Kangan, on the other hand, is manifold. As a product of colonialism, it can have no shared lifeworld. Such a feature needs a deep past for a resting place, captured in what Simon During calls ‘soil’ (126), a shared heritage that an ad hoc assemblage of clans and clan-groups ‘pacified’ by colonial arms simply lacks – for ‘provincial boundaries [were] drawn by all accounts quite arbitrarily by the British’ (Anthills of the Savannah 208). But Kangan has people; Kangan, for the thinking heads among its elite, Ikem, Chris, and Beatrice, is people. And so, these thinking heads are looking at a ‘social contract’ as a principle of cohesion, with authentic role-playing, in both concern and resoluteness. The obliviousness of the Head of State and his government of this factor of cohesion is captured in Ikem’s thinking in terms of ‘the failure of our rulers to reestablish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being’ (Anthills of the Savannah 141). What is lacking in the ‘social contract’ of Kangan – and in the political thinking of the Head of State – is care, which is fundamental in what Heidegger calls ‘authentic existing’ of Dasein; for the very ‘connectedness’ of Dasein is ‘determined in terms of what it is concerned with’ (Being and Time 440), otherwise ‘one’s knowing-oneself gets lost in… aloofness’

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  159 (161). This is in perfect sync with Achebe’s ‘The Writer and His Community’, where he writes that ‘Fulfilment is other-centred, a giving or subduing of the self, perhaps to somebody, perhaps to a cause; in any event to something external’ (36). This vision of life frequently profiles in Achebe’s literary works, with characters ranged on either side. Along with his inauthenticity of aloofness, the lack of care by the Head of State means that there is no ‘social contract’. Under his headship of the state, Kangan has become merely the name of a backward state in West Africa, and ceases to be in any real sense a moral person, to whom rights and responsibilities may accrue, the right to be cared for and to be brought to and maintained in its proper being through concern being the everyday engagement of its leaders, particularly its head of state. The Head of State recognises no engagement or obligations for which he might be held accountable, and there is no limitation on his power. He may simply do as he wishes, and he is answerable to no one. The attorney general in Anthills of the Savannah, in assuring him that he ‘cannot break a word [he] never even said’ and abut the machination of a newspaper editor, who in his ‘judgement is a selfseeking saboteur’ (5), is reminding the Head of State of the rules of operation in Kangan as instituted by the Head of State himself. He was simply the sovereign of Kangan. This affirmation is applauded by the whole cabinet, with the exception of Chris, who, by not applauding with all the rest, provides the Head of State with incontrovertible evidence that he has ‘sworn’, together with Ikem, ‘for reasons best known to [them] to force a showdown’ (143). The construction of a national identity is suggested in some postcolonial discourses as a preliminary task after the shattering of the established identities by colonisation. According to Alan Lawson, however, there is even ‘greater obsession with the problem of national identity’ in Australia and Canada than in ‘most other emergent colonial or postcolonial nations’ (167). At all events, that such an identity has not been constructed in Kangan is echoed in Beatrice’s self-distanciating phrase ‘such as it was’ in referring to the sacred symbol of her nation’s pride. However, she does not withdraw from Kangan because of this lack. Her ‘authentic existing’, her being-in-the-world, necessarily and sufficiently expresses itself as care. This is what is also going on with Ikem and Chris, but also the Taxi Drivers Union meeting ‘“to put their mouth into this nonsense story” of Ikem’s death’ (Anthills of the Savannah 181), and in the Students Union in taking up the story and ‘demanding a judicial inquiry and the immediate dismissal of Colonel Ossai and his prosecution for murder’ (173). ‘Care [, which] is always taking care of things and concern’ (Being and Time 181), is the function that accounts for all of this, and marks the ‘authentic existing’ of the individuals capable of exercising it. The movement of care has its focus on the thing that exercises the summons, and the abstract notion of

160  Involvement under the Ethics of Care constructing a national identity has no place in its ethic. But the nation as something that needs ‘to be brought to its being’ and maintained in its being is another matter, and Dasein cannot turn away from this something. As Heidegger elucidates, ‘the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein… implies the understanding of something like “world” and the understanding of the being of beings accessible within the world’ (11). Care is directed at the things that call for concern, and they are things within a world, whose conditions, therefore, may even have to do with the raising of the call for care. In his aloofness, the Head of State’s interest and labour concern what he calls security, and in pursuit of this, ostensibly, creates a secret police, the State Research Council. In the tradition of Louis XIV’s l’État c’est moi, national security is his own security, and avoidance of embarrassment before the world – which probably means so absolute a control that nothing gets out to the world about the country, except what he approves. Thus, he has advance information of the coming of the Abazon delegation to the presidential palace, and conveys this information to his Commissioner for Home Affairs, Professor Okong, who is made to understand that he has failed signally in not having an inkling of this event. But: ‘It doesn’t matter. You know I’ve never really relied on you fellows for information on anything or anybody. You know that?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘I should be a fool to. You see if Entebbe happens here it’s me the world will laugh at, isn’t it?’ (15) General Sam is being truthful in saying that he does not rely on his cabinet. Working behind their backs with his unofficial machinery of control, and humiliating them for his successful takeover of their work are among the ways in which he has rendered them dysfunctional. Not having anyone to negotiate with, nor views and competing proposals to wend his way through to a compromise, he has established himself the uncontested master of Kangan. By continuing to speak up, however, the commissioner for information has refused to be rendered dysfunctional, and wonders about his colleagues, eleven intelligent, educated men who let this happen to them, who actually went out of their way to invite it, and who even at this hour have seen and learnt nothing, the cream of our society and the hope of the black race. (2)

Involvement under the Ethics of Care  161 The post-tribal ethic of care profiles a new outlook in No Longer at Ease, but is betrayed by those who by training and exposure ought to have most readily adjusted to its demands. It is a function in the battle between new and old in A Man of the People, where new barely escapes final defeat. Odili is heavily battered and bruised but he survives to make new plans, for example, with his ‘new type of school’. Hope for a post-tribal ethic is even firmer at the deeper level where forces ‘more than mortal power’ (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 5) are at work. For there is a symbolic defeat of the tribal instinct that prejudicially favours the father in Edna throwing overboard both the two heavy fathers jealously guarding her, Nanga and her own father on either hand, in favour of Odili. As a service to life, the marriage of Odili to Edna signifies a huge victory against Chief Nanga, whose career is plunging Poor Black Mother into deeper and deeper malaise and debility, a hostage to the powers of death and darkness. The hoped-for values of life are glimpsed in the school, ‘a new type of school’ (148), he plans to establish in honour of Max Kulamo, who, coincidentally, the new government has given the accolade of Hero of the Revolution.

7 Exercise of Ethical Being

Achebe’s characters are always fully rounded, and feature psychological depths by reason of which their actions are unpredictable. Although their actions always flow from within, their decisive moral choices (proairesis) and the ones that attach to them most emblematically do not often strike readers as the most appropriate decisions to make, like Odili’s decision at rupture with Chief Nanga to go and seek out his intended parlour wife and give her the works good and proper, or Okonkwo’s refusal to consider any other way of dealing with the uninvited white man than to try and expel him by force, as if it were a case of ‘If a man says yes his chi also says yes’. But these decisions are partly determined by who the characters are and in part by the situation in which they experience their human ‘thrownness’, normally a highly complex network: we must remember that knowing itself is grounded beforehand in already-being-in-the-world which essentially constitutes the being of Dasein. Initially, this already-being-with is not solely a rigid staring at something merely objectively present. Being-in-the-world, as taking care of things, is taken in by the world which it takes care of…. On the basis of this kind of being toward the world…. of assuming a definite direction toward something…. looking itself becomes a mode of…. independent dwelling together with beings in the world. In this ‘dwelling’ – as the refusal of every manipulation and use [this is when] the perception of what is objectively present takes place. (Heidegger, Being and Time 57–58) Characterization entails that one ‘is grounded beforehand in already-beingissn-the-world’, and the question is the mode and manner this being in the world is exercised. In Achebe, an individual like Unoka, Okonkwo’s father would delight to exercise his only amidst pleasure and relaxation, while a Chief Nanga would exercise it in accumulation and consumption, and would admonish everyone else to stand back and not interfere because, DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-7

Exercise of Ethical Being  163 according to him, ‘our people have a saying that if you respect today’s king others will respect you when your turn comes’ (A Man of the People 63). And both he and his friend Chief Koko show by the brutal and murderous attacks against their political opponents what anyone who fails to heed the warning to stand back and not interfere may expect from ‘today’s king’. Indeed the politicians seem to form a class with common attitudes and lifestyles and sense of entitlement going back to the Honourable Sam Okoli of No Longer at Ease, with his super-luxurious De Soto limousine and reputation as ‘the best-dressed gentleman in Lagos and the most eligible bachelor’, and who with regard to beautiful young ladies, Obi’s friend Joseph would exclaim: ‘Good old Sam! He doesn’t spare them’ (34), and Nanga and Koko of A Man of the People, to the civilian politicians in Anthills of the Savannah, who, after untold excesses, ‘finally got what they had coming to them and landed unloved and unmourned on the rubbish heap’ (12). They are rarely seen in exercise of their ethical being, which would mark them out as individual persons in the disclosedness ‘of primordial being-with-one-another’ (Being and Time 163). For them, to be in politics is to be thrown into a class, not into the world, and in the midst of things. Most of the other characters engage their will and energies, mental and physical, in authentic being-inthe-world and being-with-one-another in the midst of things ‘in [their] average everydayness’ (15). But there are moments of crisis when the ‘everyday of Dasein’ must be surpassed, and no excuses seem to be admissible. To Be Brought to Its Being The call of care is no more demanding than in the character of something ‘to be brought to its being through concern’ (Being and Time 181), since it is a pure summons. We have seen it in the seeking out and telling the story of Obi Okonkwo, which is done largely for its own sake, although it also affords the searcher some satisfaction to have done it. It does not appear, however, that the undertaking (the response to Obi’s silent call on behalf of his story of great expectations and underperformance, of promise and disappointment, of temptation and fall) is for the pleasure. The narrator brings the story to its proper being as an ordered narrative, with beginning, middle, and end, and magnitude. To think of Umuofia’s charge of Ikemefuna to Okonkwo in this light may be too terrible and appalling. Ikemefuna pictures his being where he would want to be brought to in these terms: Once or twice he tried to run away, but he did not know where to begin. He thought of his mother and his three-year-old sister and wept bitterly. Nwoye’s mother was very kind to him and treated him as one of her own children. But all he said was: ‘When shall I go home?’ (Things Fall Apart 8)

164  Exercise of Ethical Being But ‘home’ is where Okonkwo would not bring him. Umuofia defines his being differently, and it is to this ‘falconer’ that Okonkwo is attentive. In the report of the narrator, Ikemefuna ‘belonged to the clan as a whole, and there was no hurry to decide his fate. Okonkwo was, therefore, asked on behalf of the clan to look after him in the interim.’ This charge, Okonkwo passes on to his eldest wife, Nwoye’s mother, with the instruction: ‘He belongs to the clan…. So look after him’ (4). The tribe has no problem with ‘ownership’ of members of the group: each one belongs in one specific branch of the tribe or another, in a lineage traceable to the remote ancestor, and no one decides his or her fate, at least in the ordinary course of things. But one who ‘belonged to the clan as a whole’, his fate, what he is to be is to be decided. Okonkwo and Ikemefuna await this decision. The clan is the one to bring him to his being – if it is so minded. But it will not pay heed to his proper being, reflected in his cry for his own family and home. The clan owns certain material, and spiritual and ritual things it cares for; for example the egwugwu. There are mask suits in the egwugwu house, and one of the masks will be found to walk on springs, just like one of the elders who is missing among the elders watching the proceedings: Okonkwo’s wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. But if they thought these things they kept them within themselves. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. He looked terrible with the smoked raffia body, a huge wooden face painted white except for the round hollow eyes and the charred teeth that were as big as a man’s fingers. On his head were two powerful horns. (29) Egwugwu is not the mask suit stored in the egwugwu house, nor the men who might be among the spectators. These are but implements and accessories which, at the right time and place and circumstance and occasion, meet for the enactment of egwugwu, the appearing ‘of the dead fathers of the clan’. This is a clear case of bringing something to its being. It is the clan as a whole that brings egwugwu to its being for the right cause and right time, which is done in the service of the fathers and ancestors of the clan. There are other shared properties of the clan, like the egwugwu house itself, the square, the marketplace, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, Agadi Nwanyi, the war medicine, and the tribal territory itself which is defended with the help of the war medicine. The clan regulates how these possessions are to be cared for – or the tribal deity itself, as in the case of

Exercise of Ethical Being  165 the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. Of the egwugwu house, for example, we read: The egwugwu house … faced the forest, away from the crowd, who saw only its back with the many-coloured patterns and drawings done by specially chosen women at regular intervals. These women never saw the inside of the hut. No woman ever did. They scrubbed and painted the outside walls under the supervision of men. If they imagined what was inside, they kept their imagination to themselves. No woman ever asked questions about the most powerful and the most secret cult in the clan. (29) Similar kinds of things are publicly owned and cared for in Arrow of God or brought to their being through concern. The idea in Heidegger that ‘In willing, a being that is understood, that is, projected upon its possibility, is grasped as something to be taken care of or to be brought to its being through concern’ has been seen to apply to bringing into being of Obi Okonkwo’s story. But it applies in equal measure to other things, like artistic images. They do not seem to have been made by their makers out of nothing. In sculpting, for instance, there is eidōlopoiōtikē ‘image-making’ (Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis 128). That is, literally ‘idol-making’. According to Hegel, the bringing into appearance of what is by nature spiritual is precisely ‘the task of sculpture’: For through sculpture the spirit should stand before us in blissful tranquility in its bodily form and in immediate unity therewith, and the form should be brought to life by the content of spiritual individuality. (85) Achebe has written that the quintessence of Igbo art is the Mask. It was art, as well as an object of veneration, even ‘knowing who walked within the mask did not detract from the numinous, dramatic presence of a representative of the ancestors on a brief mission to the living’ (‘The Igbo World and Its Art’ 45). In the same way that the egwugwu appears by enactment, there are divine forms encountered in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God that are brought to their being by enactment, namely the ‘war medicine’ of Umuofia, Agadi Nwanyi and the confederacy deity of Umuaro, Ulu. In regard to Ulu, we read of Ezeulu narrating to his friend Akuebue: When we want to make a charm we look for the animal whose blood can match its power. (133)

166  Exercise of Ethical Being By right of the structure of the sentence, the inherent power of the charm is already known before the charm itself is made. Thus, the making of the charm is a matter of bringing it to its being. The deities fitting the specific needs of the clan are brought to their being for the benefit of the clan. For its own part, the clan exists in openness to the dead fathers, and the occasional presencing of these dead fathers expresses their self-understanding as a tribe with a common descent, meaning that the present of the tribe as presently constituted is the same with its past. On the whole, Things Fall Apart does not wish to bring to its being anything that might usher in newness. It wants only to be its old and usual self. In Arrow of God, the will to bring Umuaro to a new state of being is not in response to a call from the thing itself; it issues from Ezeulu, who wants a state of being determined by himself and compliant to him and his deity. This is manipulation, and not an expression of concern. Chief Nanga and his party are doing something similar in A Man of the People. The economy is in distress, and the country itself, because of the collapse in world coffee prices. The potentiality of Dasein in such a situation is the exercise of will to bring the economy to its being, and the country in the same move. But Nanga and his party use the crisis as leverage to bring the government down and take power. The general election in which Odili tries to contest Nanga’s parliamentary seat is expected to be ‘a life and death fight’ (100), with the ruling party looking to gain total power. With that, the party leaders and cabinet members give government contracts to whom they would for kickbacks in cash and real estate. It is therefore a big statement that: Poor black mother [has waited] so long for her infant son to come of age and comfort her and repay her for the years of shame and neglect. And the son she has pinned so much hope on turning out to be a Chief Nanga. (A Man of the People 81) Nanga and his colleagues seeing the state in crisis and in need of rescue to bring it to its being respond by derailing it, sabotaging its business, and turning what they can get hold of to their own ends. In No Longer at Ease, a country has been brought into being; and unlike the tribe which corresponds territorially to the patch of earth inhabited by the ancestors, according to Anthills of the Savannah, the ‘boundaries [were] drawn by all accounts quite arbitrarily by the British’. In line with our argument here, that country was something to be brought to its being. And so it was, by the decision of the colonists. But there remains another matter, to maintain it in its being. This responsibility falls to the subjects, although their prior consent had not been sought. Maintaining it in its

Exercise of Ethical Being  167 being, accordingly, requires the hard work and devotedness of Obi and all the other servants of the state, senior and junior, expatriate and local, educated or half-educated, with the expatriates – Obi seems not to understand the logic of this – transmitting the know-how and self-sacrifice entailed by their own example. Such is the response that would maintain its wellbeing. But this response is what it does not get from Obi Okonkwo and others who demand, offer, or accept bribes to truncate due process or obtain services or advantages they are not entitled to, even when they do so to obtain leave to attend the trial of a kinsman who has been caught in a sting operation with a bribe. In point of fact, the attitude of the generality of the citizenry is one of detachment, as is reflected in a brief dialogue between Obi and the chairman of the Umuofia Union at his reception: ‘Have they given you a job yet?’ the chairman asked Obi over the music. In Nigeria the government was ‘they.’ It had nothing to do with you or me. It was an alien institution and people’s business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble. (No Longer at Ease 29–30) Obi’s response to the address of welcome at his reception sounds like a set of slogans devised to counter this poor civic attitude of detachment, and backhanded exploitation: He told them about the value of education. ‘Education for service, not for white-collar jobs and comfortable salaries. With our great country on the threshold of independence, we need men who are prepared to serve her well and truly.’ (29) In the matter of serving well and truly, Obi’s education has afforded him little, and the notion of ‘our great country’ may mean nothing to him in terms of commitment and attentiveness to its calls and demands. But the situation is different for Odili Samalu and Max Kulamo who see in their newly independent country a huge mythical image, ‘Poor Black Mother’. It turns out that what has been brought to its being by the colonists within ‘boundaries drawn by all accounts quite arbitrarily … sometimes coincided … completely with reality’ (Anthills of the Savannah 208). For all these characters, how the country came to its being does not arise; for Odili and Max, the question is what it wants, what it calls for, but not for Obi whose own everyday concerns command his attention totally. At all events, ignoring the call of care and failing the test of service are one thing, but being the inflicter of harm and the reason why the call of care is sent forth is quite another. We have seen the case of Ikemefuna and

168  Exercise of Ethical Being Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. Something similar is seen in all the novels. Thus, though a leader in Umuaro, ‘the clan which long, long ago when lizards were in ones and twos chose his ancestor to carry their deity and go before them challenging every obstacle and confronting every danger on their behalf’ (Arrow of God 219), nevertheless, ‘after a long period of silent preparation’, following his return from detention in Opkeri, ‘Ezeulu finally revealed that he intended to hit Umuaro at its most vulnerable point – the Feast of the New Yam’ (201). His target is Umuaro itself, his aim to inflict the maximum hardship he could. It is bitterly ironic that the Christian church is the one to advert to Umuaro’s call for care, offering them a way out of the bind where they have their crops ripe for harvest, but would not touch them for fear of Ulu’s retaliation. The taking care of the clan similarly does confront Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, but in a dramatic moment just as at the killing of Ikemefuna. In exile in Mbanta, Okonkwo receives news of the arrival of the Christians in Umuofia, and makes clear his choice of a warlike history and reputation over any form of accommodation. As to the lesson of Abame that was destroyed by the white man, his response is simple: a warlike clan would take precaution. According to him, the people of Abame had ample warning ‘that danger was ahead. They should have armed themselves with their guns and their machetes even when they went to market’ (46). He would learn the hard way. So part of the humiliation he suffers at the hands of the colonial administration is being made a fool of by the administrator and taken prisoner even with his machete beside him. We read that: the six men went to see the District Commissioner, armed with their machetes. They did not carry guns, for that would be unseemly. They were led into the courthouse where the District Commissioner sat. He received them politely. They unslung their goatskin bags and their sheathed machetes, put them on the floor, and sat down…. ‘Wait a minute,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I want to bring in my men so that they too can hear your grievances and take warning. Many of them come from distant places and although they speak your tongue they are ignorant of your customs. James! Go and bring in the men.’ His interpreter left the courtroom and soon returned with twelve men. They sat together with the men of Umuofia, and Ogbuefi Ekwueme began to tell the story of how Enoch murdered an egwugwu. It happened so quickly that the six men did not see it coming. There was only a brief scuffle, too brief even to allow the drawing of a sheathed machete. The six men were handcuffed and led into the guardroom. (63)

Exercise of Ethical Being  169 Okonkwo’s hatred towards the white man is probably birthed here; and it will grow and deepen over the course of the next few weeks, with illtreatment and further humiliations. All in all, he has seen more than enough to think of reviewing his strategy. Care for Umuofia, the need to maintain it in its being is itself the demand for a strategy review. In the face of this demand, he does not make a decision. He is not really able to hear the urgent call for a new strategy, nor see Umuofia’s dire situation. So caught up in his rage, he strikes down the white man’s messenger, a blow that should have triggered off Umuofia’s war of self-extermination. Twice in his life he has heard the call of care addressed personally to him. In the case of Ikemefuna, he would fail because he is dazed with fear; in that of Umuofia, he would again fail, because he is overcome by ‘hate, unable to utter a word’. The civic order of No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah is obviously much more complex than Umuaro or Umuofia, and designed as if to ensure that no single individual could hold it at ransom or threaten its very survival, as Ezeulu does to Umuaro. But General Sam of Anthills of the Savannah manages to do just that in Kangan. In these three novels there is a movement of progression in which the individual goes from having very little power to affect the state one way or the other to the status of a minister with input in national planning, budgeting, and contracts, with the result that corruption of one such one may do significant damage to the state coffers, and governance itself, and finally to the Head of State himself, one who exercises absolute and arbitrary power. General Sam, the Head of State of Kangan, is alluded to by a friend fast falling out of favour as a ‘half-wit’ (46); nevertheless he would prove adept at manipulating state apparatuses to serve his interests of absolute power in Kangan. Within a short space of time, statesmanship comes down for him as looking after himself – his own image, as he himself defines it – and amassing for himself a retinue of worshippers and ‘the cream of our society and the hope of the black race’ (2) to wait on him, and maintain ‘a circus show’ (118), dedicated to his amusement exclusively. National security, as a function of care for the polity, is potentially a factor of cohesion within the leadership team. In Anthills of the Savannah, the function of defence and protection of the polity, which is assigned to men in the ancestral system of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God is not being performed by the Armed Forces of Kangan. This army does not seem to have anything to do. So it forces its way into politics, as if to provide itself a functional role that would justify its existence. The need for defence of Kangan is in fact against the head of this very Armed Forces, General Sam, but no less the men (and women) under arms who terrorize and intimidate the people of Kangan. And the

170  Exercise of Ethical Being vanguard of this defence comprises Chris, Ikem, and Beatrice. There is a sense of the recklessness of General Sam’s army in the following incident: [An] army car drove up furiously, went into reverse before it had had time to stop going forward and backed at high speed into a young man and his clothes who just barely managed to scramble out of the car’s vicious path. A cry went up all round. The driver climbed out, pressed down the lock button and slammed the door. The young trader found his voice then and asked, timidly: ‘Oga, you want kill me?’ ‘If I kill you I kill dog,’ said the soldier with… vehemence. (48) Like its head, obviously, this army does not recognize the existence of a social contract binding on them. The powerlessness of the people to influence this army is clearly seen at the scene itself where Ikem who had witnessed it and had resisted the urge to get involved, ‘watched the ass walk away with the exaggerated swagger of the coward’ – at all events, the swagger of one who is protected by total impunity, and knows he can get away with anything whatsoever. An army has got to be lawless and poorly led for its members to act so irresponsibly. There can be nothing but total social dysfunction where those in power owe no responsibility. Ikem is trying to point the right way by means of what he calls his ‘crusading editorials’. Chris, for his own part, first chooses a non-confrontational approach. Yet the Head of State does not fail to pick up the significance of what he is doing. This is why he charges pointedly at a cabinet meeting: Why do you find it so difficult to swallow my ruling. On anything? (Anthills of the Savannah 1) Chris’s answer on the spot that he had ‘no difficulty swallowing and digesting [his] rulings’ lightens the charged atmosphere somewhat, but it does not mollify His Excellency. Chris’s fellow commissioners, the Attorney General and Professor Okong, at a convenient moment supply the answer that perfectly satisfies him, enlarging on His Excellency’s singular you to include Ikem. According to them, His Excellency presents a complex to Chris and Ikem. The three of them had been schoolmates at Lugard College; and now His Excellency is the Head of State and the ‘nation’s Man of Destiny’: this is something the two cannot understand or reconcile to (23). For her own part, Beatrice’s protective role comes out most strongly in the coda of the narrative, where her house becomes the gathering place of

Exercise of Ethical Being  171 the survivors, and she the presiding spirit in their conversations, where no one is allowed to hurt another and every viewpoint is allowed to air. In Anthills of the Savannah, defence and protection of the polity are not necessarily male functions. These functions pertain to the citizens, and are led by persons who are most socially aware. This is, in fact, what defines their anti-pathetic relationship to General Sam, who does not want to do anything for the nation, but to sit on top of it, and his cabinet, in effect, has willingly conceded him this. They have settled for holding their positions for the sake of holding them, and have given up any pretence of carrying out the government functions attached to the position they hold. Of course, Beatrice does not know from the start that General Sam is the enemy to protect Kangan from. Up to the intervention at the presidential retreat, she thinks of him as ‘the sacred symbol of [her] nation’s pride’. But the scales have been falling from her eyes, so to say. Hence in this encounter, she adds a modifier: ‘the sacred symbol of my nation’s pride, such as it was’. Similarly, Ikem does not know the real enemy. At first, he thinks that the enemy is the group of ‘court jesters’ whom he suspects that Chris has joined. The oracular, disembodied utterance, ‘The Sun in April’, might have served as a warning. But he himself does not know the meaning of it until his sacking from the editorship of the National Gazette and the heat from government persecution begins to hit home. Only then does he realize that the truth he has to offer is of no interest to the Head of State, and that he must have been put there to make the government look good, and to serve as General Sam’s megaphone. Chris, for his own part, is also to be disabused of the assumption that General Sam is interested in leading the country forward in a project of development. It is a slower realization for him, but it makes him rethink his conclusions about Ikem: ‘perhaps like me he meant well, neither of us having been present before at the birth and grooming of a baby monster’ (10). Certainly, the President is not what both men had thought and what they had previously seen as rendering that former friend of theirs ‘enormously easy to take’. Chris has come to the realization that Sam’s l’État c’est moi approach to governance ‘probably never was a game, that the present was there from the very beginning only I was too blind or too busy to notice’ (2). The baby monster of Anthills of the Savannah is characterized by aloofness, and disregard for the call of care. Another kind of baby is Elewa’s child, who sends forth the call of care, to which Beatrice and all the others in her circle readily respond. In Things Fall Apart, Ikemefuna calls Okonkwo father: he is the only one of the men of Umuofia – and the wide world, in fact – who has responded to the friendless and kinless boy’s call for care. Therefore, he must not also be his killer. Voluntarily or not, Okonkwo would fail this ultimate call of care. The boy, however, is doomed from the start by being cast away from the tribe outside of which

172  Exercise of Ethical Being there is for him no settling of existence, nor in any real sense the settling of who he is. The great call of care in Arrow of God, to notice the people who are in danger of famine, notwithstanding their year’s labour, with their crops ripe and waiting for harvest is heard by a man who ‘[b]eneath all anger in his mind lay a deeper compassion for Umuaro, the clan which long, long ago when lizards were in ones and twos chose his ancestor to carry their deity and go before them’ (219). He hears, but holds back from adverting to the call, because he is caught up in a partisan fight for supremacy between his deity and the old tribal ideology. The senior elders go to him, of course, after perceiving the current situation of Umuaro as ‘something to be taken care of’ – but not by themselves, and not by any kind of resolute action. They seem to have assigned themselves the role of the supervisor of the division of labour in Umuaro. But Ezeulu’s refusal to follow their directives is enough to throw them back upon themselves, and all action paralyzed. Depths of Discourse In No Longer at Ease, Clara, in virtue of being an osu, which recalls the ‘resident alien’ of the Old Testament, subsisting with few natural rights within the tribe, signifies the call of care. She is not even entitled to marry whom she would, and volunteers this information to Obi: ‘Why can’t you marry me?’ He succeeded in sounding unruffled. For answer she threw herself at him and began to weep violently on his shoulder. ‘What’s the matter, Clara? Tell me.’ He was no longer unruffled. There was a hint of tears in his voice. ‘I am an osu,’ she wept. Silence. She stopped weeping and quietly disengaged herself from him. Still he said nothing. ‘So you see we cannot get married,’ she said…. ‘Nonsense!’ said Obi. He shouted it almost, as if by shouting it now he could wipe away those seconds of silence, when everything had seemed to stop, waiting in vain for him to speak. (64) Whereas Joseph, Obi’s friend who would report Obi to his parents for the engagement to Clara, despite knowing that she is an osu, and the men of Umuofia Union who seek to interfere and stop the marriage going forward believe that Obi is the party in need of their concern, this is by resuming tribal discourse in which only members are perceived within the care network. As the metropolis, Lagos expresses the Nigeria that has been brought to its being by the colonists in No Longer at Ease, and without the pressure

Exercise of Ethical Being  173 of the tribe from faraway Umuofia and its outpost in Lagos, the relationship of Obi and Clara had reached the stage where relatives and friends could recognize the duty to bring the marriage to its being, which is what is called letting the marriage take its course. That would have been them exercising their ethical being in Obi’s and Clara’s regard, since their consents were assured, and a third party’s personal objections or feelings would have been irrelevant in the matter. At the moment of announcement by Clara, it is the tribal discourse of Umuofia that is awakened in Obi, where, facing the prospect of a life-long commitment to someone from the wrong tribe, or of no assignable tribe, one may well stand back, aloof. This is what causes Obi’s silence at receiving Clara’s information. He would get hold of himself and give his response, shouting it almost. He would even take offence when, much later, Clara tries to reason it out with him, because she has no wish ‘to ruin’ his life by getting between him and his parents (119). But she knows from his return from his conclave with his parents that he is not fighting for her, having clearly seen his lack of resoluteness. Rather, he wants to ease her off by dint of aloofness. This lack of resoluteness is something to do with his nature, and has been seen before in his repeating slogans like ‘education for service’, ‘our great nation on the threshold of independence’, ‘call to serve the nation well and truly’. But these things have no root within himself, and cannot serve as a basis and springboard for action. It is resoluteness that proves the genuineness of care. In the scene where Obi escapes what would have been a terrible accident by a hairsbreadth, he is shown voluble concern by the lorry driver and his passengers. In this case, Obi has no need that might demand action that might put their personal comforts on the line. In the absence of the need for resolute action, there are only reassuring words, which can have a similar effect as the Attorney General and Professor Okong assuring the Head of State that they believe him to be the master of Kangan and that he can do as he pleases. But there is a difference: the commissioners are speaking with a false consciousness, being ‘intelligent, educated men who [become defunctionalized], who actually went out of their way to invite it’, choosing sycophantism instead, whereas there can be no doubt that the lorry driver and his passengers believe themselves. Along the path of moral failing which is more or less familiar ground to him, Obi has made public declaration that his country needs ‘men who are prepared to serve her well and truly’ (27), but contemplating Mr Green who is serving well and truly, although it is not his country, he wonders; he becomes a spectator. The Clara sequence is also to see to the partial dismantling of Isaac Nwoye’s façade of humane values. He who had protested all the way to abandoning the tribe the narrowness of a care network, chartered, as it were, by a lifeworld which seems to him to be incomprehensible and inhumane, is utterly deaf to the call of care in Clara,

174  Exercise of Ethical Being thereby betraying that fundamentally he had not shifted ground. The call of care is portrayed in full symbolism in A Man of the People. Black Mother is the one sending out the call for care. Odili becomes converted, so to say, when he hears it again as Max sings his ‘Dance-offering to the Earth-Mother’ to the tune of highlife music, while Max falls short in the world of action for lack of resoluteness. It is remarkable that at the very point where Josiah who had earlier in stealing a blind man’s stick for a money-making charm enacted his being in the world as being-in-theworld-for-oneself betrays disguised Odili to Nanga, enacting his being for himself one last time, he triggers off a course of events that brings about a disclosure of the authentic being-in-the-world of Dasein in A Man of the People. This point marks the crux of the narrative, the place of meeting of the two adversaries, Nanga and Odili, in the presence of their common object of desire. It is an explosive moment. And there is an overture, with Nanga offering the formal salutation. He probably sees this as the moment come at last for final and decisive action, but its significance is beyond his immediate calculations: Odili the great! So you have come to seek me out again. You are very brave; or have you come to seek Edna, eh? That’s it. (140) This makes way for the tragic pathos – as Whalley explains it, ‘the suffering of the person injured by the terrible deed, and in another (and simultaneous) sense the act on the part of the person who does the terrible deed’ (100). There are many terrible deeds in A Man of the People, including the killing of Max and the havoc by ‘unruly mobs and private armies [who] having tasted blood and power during the election had got out of hand and ruined their masters and employers’ (144). But Odili is the one who has made the ‘moral choice’ (proairesis) that set the action of this narrative going, with incidents following one another in a connected chain, and achieving a ‘turning point’ (peripetheia) at this juncture where it reaches maximum tension. Here changes are also initiated that are ‘of direct consequence for the subsequent development of the story’ (Barthes, Image – Music – Text 94). Such is the overturning of the heavy father’s formerly commanding position in respect to Edna, and Odili becoming ascendant. In the scene, Chief Nanga is retaliating against Odili for making the moral choice that has brought them to this pass. So, abruptly, following the formal salutations, he begins physically to batter his former protégé. Odili has brought himself to a pass where he is utterly alone, and, given the violence that has marked the electioneering campaign, where he stands hardly a chance of getting out alive. It is a moment of crisis, and

Exercise of Ethical Being  175 heavy in symbolism, although the aspect of symbolism has usually been missed in the all-too-often all-absorbing concentration on the surface configuration of A Man of the People and translation to political ‘outside facts’ recorded in Nigeria. Under the aspect of symbolism, perhaps the enactment of the rite of passage is the most readily discernible figuration, since the hero manages to live past his moment of darkness. In this case, we are viewing the sequence from the perspective of the protagonist, who has no idea, in his own words, ‘what put it into [his] head to go to Chief Nanga’s inaugural campaign meeting’ (136). But shortly, he would be plunged into night and darkness, and the last thing he would remember is ‘seeing all the policemen turn round and walk quietly away’, with him at the mercy of a crowd fully incited and primed to use for a blood sport. From this letting loose of chaos by Nanga, Odili would emerge weeks later with a confused sense of: the first time I woke up in the hospital and felt my head turbaned like an Alhaji. Everything seemed unreal and larger than life and I was sure I was dreaming. In the dream I saw Edna and my father and Mama standing around my bed. I also saw, through a gap in the screen, two policemen. But the only thing that was immediate and in focus was that pressure trapped inside the head pounding away in a panic effort to escape. (140) From the world of chaos on the dais in Chief Nanga’s rally, he has passed through a period of unconsciousness to an awakening in a hospital ward where things are, for the time being, random presences. But the situation is dire. His life is still almost being physically barricaded to stop it bolting, as it were. The rite of passage is, in fact, a vision of the diurnal cycle of light and dark, day and night, life and death. Odili’s passage with Nanga and his tumultuous crowd first embroils him in night, and his emergence is in slow stages, first into a nightmarish world where things are mixed up with one another, and later still when the things around him ‘looked more solid’, and he would gradually begin to connect to what he had been through, and becoming lucid. But his passage is not just a movement of rebirth and resumption of lucidity, there are other characters, or personages, in the sequence performing actions each of which could carry the accent of the sequence, like Nanga, Edna, and the crowd. In this enactment of the vision of the diurnal cycle, these individuals all double as symbolic forms. The least that is required for the passage through darkness is that one was previously in the light. But in its full expression, it is the sun itself the bearer of light, that is ushered into a night that cannot defeat and quench its light. In passing into darkness, Odili is figuration of

176  Exercise of Ethical Being light itself. In his own vision of the ‘contemptible crowd’ that would soon have him in their power, we see the Apolline genus (Nietzsche 14), shining a bright light on the misdoings of Nanga – which they all knew already, ‘And because they all knew, if I were to march up to the dais now and announce it they would simply laugh at me and say: What a fool! Whose son is he?’ They would not be interested in clear and pellucid facts, but would seek to confuse everything with Was he not here when white men were eating; what did he do about it? Where was he when Chief Nanga fought and drove the white men away? Why is he envious now that the warrior is eating the reward of his courage? If he was Chief Nanga, would he not do much worse? Nanga, the celebrant at this rally, figures forth the ‘prince’ of darkness, as it were, the heavy father. In his introduction of Odili to the crowd, he would silhouette facts against a background that renders them indistinguishable from falsehood: He was once my pupil. I taught him ABC and I called him to my house to arrange for him to go to England. Yes, I take the blame; he did not just smell his hand one morning and go to my house—I called him. As to overseas training, his motivation is probably tribal affirmation: I want you to come to the capital and take up a strategic post in the civil service. We shouldn’t leave everything to the highland tribes. My secretary is from there; our people must press for their fair share of the national cake. What he is saying to the crowd about his invitation to Odili is not literally what the reader has seen in the space of performative portrayal. But the point of it is that it serves his purpose. In this particular ritual he enacts, things will immediately become mixed up and confused. As Odili reports it: The roar of the crowd was now like a thick forest all around. By this time blows were falling as fast as rain on my head and body. Nanga sets in motion the rites of the night which quickly engulf Odili. In this meeting at Nanga’s rally is where the struggle between Odili and Nanga comes to a head. Odili is beaten and battered to the total satisfaction of the political father Chief Nanga. The police make sure that even though he is lying half-dead in hospital and fighting for his life, he is ‘placed

Exercise of Ethical Being  177 under arrest ostensibly for having weapons in [his] car but really to prevent [him] from signing [his] nomination paper’ (142). So his adventure into politics is over. He has been doubly defeated, having been physically crushed and legally prevented from contesting against Nanga. Nanga and his visionless party have had everything going for them, bringing the young man to the point of extremity, and, as far as they can see, total defeat. It is here, however at this very moment that the decision is made definitively in favour of youth (and hope of new, vibrant life), against the heavy father, the figuration of decline, darkness, and death. Taking Nanga on in the political arena is simply asophos – ‘foolishness’ – not knowing the limit of his strength, in tragic terms hamartia – shooting beyond the mark, and it highlights a quality, impetuousness, which Odili shares with Ikem of Anthills of the Savannah. He is roundly defeated by Nanga, which is almost predictable. But this is a pyrrhic victory, for right in the very act of destroying his adversary and trying to ensure that he will never rise again is decided the meaning of the struggle and what the issues really are: He slapped me again and again. Edna rushed forward crying and tried to get between us but he pushed her aside so violently that she landed on her buttocks on the wooden platform. (A Man of the People 140) Edna is not part of the crowd assailing Odili, and she is not aloof, but had tried to force herself between Chief Nanga and Odili. That means physical contact with Odili, fleeting though it may be. But the heavy father would have none of it. He blocks her, and violently throws her off. Thus, in trying to help Odili, she receives some of the violence destined for Odili in her own body. She is one who has heard the call of care concretized in the coming under the vicious attack from a man who she has previously accused – apparently to Nanga’s advantage – of having ‘no shame’, but sneaks around instead of finding his ‘own woman’ (129). She hears; she spontaneously and resolutely responds, regardless of the cost to herself. In all this, Edna has chosen a man who is not even in a position to resist battering at the hands of Nanga. He would later acknowledge to her: I will always remember that in all that crowd you were the only one who tried to help me. (144) In this magical moment, the ground has shifted, without the heavy father knowing it, and the former political aim had been absorbed into a primal quest for a marriage partner, where the Earth-Mother is the matchmaker

178  Exercise of Ethical Being as well as the celebrant of the sacred marriage, Edna being the votary. Following Odili’s eclipse and re-emergence in the world of daylight – the struggle between the young man and the heavy father is the struggle of life and death, light and darkness – the narrative focus shifts to the clearing of interpersonal obstacles and the initiation of the cultural process for consummation of the marriage. One of the ‘obstacles’ is a certain letter: ‘Will you ever forgive me?’ ‘Forgive you? For what? Everything you said in [that letter] is true.’ ‘Oh please don’t talk like that, Edna. I know how you must feel. But please I didn’t mean to… you know. I was so confused and I didn’t want to… I didn’t want you to go and marry that idiot….’ ‘Marry him? To be frank with you I did not want to marry him… All the girls in the college were laughing at me… It was only my father… I don’t claim to know book but at least…’ ‘Wait a bit,’ I said, something having clicked inside my head…. ‘Are we talking about my first letter or the second?’ ‘Second? Which second letter? Did you write two…? It must be one of those the postmaster handed over to him’. (144–145) Chief Nanga has both the postmaster in his employ and also a powerful ally in Edna’s father, a senex iratus in his own right who, moreover, has his eye on Nanga’s money, as he wants to make him to ‘bring and bring and bring and [he] will eat until [he is] tired’ (91). To this heavy father, Edna is an item of exchange – so also to Chief Nanga, who has laid down plans and is methodically working to acquire her as his ‘parlour-wife’. This is what he is paying her college tuition for. The two, in fact, merge into one in Edna’s remark that marrying Nanga had been her father’s idea, rather than hers. Accordingly, when Nanga leaves the scene with the fall of the government, her father becomes amenable to Odili’s suit (147). However, Nanga’s surveillance strategy over Edna through the postmaster had prevented an insulting and humiliating letter by frustrated Odili from getting into Edna’s hands; and so Nanga’s intention to prevent the couple from getting close to each other had achieved the very opposite, leaving Edna with her sense of Odili’s first letter as his response to the call of care, which even her schoolmates had heard and responded to in their own way. This letter is not Odili’s only secret in respect of Edna. The difference is that this one is written, signed, and put in the mail for Edna, and it is only thanks to what Achebe might call the ‘Powers of Event’ that she has not received it; otherwise she probably would not have allowed herself to visit Odili’s sick bed. The other secret has remained in his own narrated

Exercise of Ethical Being  179 consciousness. For he had first gone to her home to further his plans of revenge against Nanga, in which she was to be given ‘the works, good and proper’. But he may have experience remorse because of this, considering his reaction when he first sees her in her homely environment: I could see Edna as she came into the middle room. I suppose she must have washed her face with a little water tipped into her palm; she was now wiping it, as she approached us, with a corner of her lappa, which she dropped as soon as she saw me. A big something caught in my throat and I tried without success to swallow it down. She wore a loose blouse over her lappa and an old silken head-tie. As she emerged into the front room all my composure seemed to leave me. Instead of holding out my hand still seated as befitted a man (and one older than she to boot) I sprang to my feet like some woman-fearing Englishman. (90) This scene could be part of what aroused B.I. Chukwukere’s censure of ‘Achebe … being a faithful pupil of the school of squeamish true-romance magazines fostered by Hollywood’ (22). However, as a term in a pattern of correlates which include Odili first seeing the young lady with Chief Nanga in the early scenes and beginning to ‘wonder what had happened to the Mrs Nanga of the scoutmastering days’, his return from Bori with a new car following the launching of his party and wanting to drive ‘straight to see Edna’ only that ‘the shining cream-coloured car was covered in a thick coat of red dust and splattered with brown mud from the long journey’ (100), and of course the decision to go and seek her out, as well as others, the scene demands to be seen within the internal logic of the narrative and how from one scene to another Odili’s feelings and attitudes are changing. Edna may also have been undergoing some emotional changes too; in any event, Odili is not a complete stranger to her at Nanga’s rally. Still her trying to throw herself between Odili and Nanga is the result of a decision and a movement of concern: it betokens great courage on her part. Just as with the call of care in the crowd assailing Odili, it is similarly emitted in the unleashing of violence by the state unjustly against individuals in Anthills of the Savannah. It is further complicated in the violence against Ikem, for instance, in that new life is implicated, that new life being, moreover, what Beatrice calls ‘the shining path of Ikem’. In all Achebe, Ikem Osodi is the genuine man of the people. He is the one who has always seen the people, the inner core of this nation throbbing in pain and need: ‘basic needs of water which is free from Guinea worm, of simple shelter and food’. Chris, who like Sam was probably insulated from these kinds of needs throughout his life, has not developed an

180  Exercise of Ethical Being eye for this kind of human situation. For example, in his argument with Ikem over public executions: Chris said I was a romantic; that I had no solid contact with the ordinary people of Kangan; that the ordinary people of Kangan believed firmly in an eye for an eye and that from all accounts they enjoyed the spectacle that so turned my stomach. From all accounts! From one account, mine, Chris never went to the show. I did. And by God he is right about the enjoyment! But, thank God again, also totally wrong. (39) Similarly, Ikem was to become ‘a passionate crusader’ against the public execution of convicted armed robbers after having witnessed one. For Chris, certainly, ideas could be discussed in the abstract, but they were something else when encountered in real life. The narrative is in fact a learning experience for him. For he has the largeness to notice the real human beings of Kangan when he sees them, and is brought up short to think when he encounters Emmanuel: ‘Why did we not cultivate such young men before now? Why, we did not even know they existed if the truth must be told!’ But before this, there is the drought in Abazon, an emergency he is unable to join the rest of the government in turning a blind eye to. This is possibly his first and personal exposure to the people in their need. There is now no question for him; something had to be done about it. Chris and Sam had entered government more or less at the same starting point of tribal de-affiliation. Sam regresses into the ego ideal in its most intensely narcissistic form, but Chris, having a disposition towards other people, even though he is not penetratingly or searchingly looking for them, becomes caught up in the network of care. Henceforth, his horizon is expanding, and populated by human beings. In their concern and response to the call of care, he and Ikem are greater allies than either of them realizes. Also allied in the same ethical circle is Beatrice. These three have Dasein’s authenticity, and respond instinctively, and are drawn irresistibly, towards the call of care. The self may come between them in their own personal relationships and everyday personal concerns, but the call of care is unmistakable to them, whether coming from some entity of the body politic or from one another. In the scheme of Anthills of the Savannah, despite Beatrice coming into prominence in the middle of the narrative, and becoming the nerve centre of the narrative in the closing chapter, there is no question of the women taking over after the men have been put out of action. Her involvement is from the very beginning. There is something similar in Edna, whose great

Exercise of Ethical Being  181 moment of care captures her entire personality. In this scene, she intervenes to her own cost, and is the one setting an example of response to the call of care, although no one would follow her example. As to Eunice, who I have called one of the strongest of Achebe’s characters of any gender, she appears to have lost any interest she may have had in politics when Max is assassinated. No further call of care seems to be disclosed to her from then on, as she has remained in severe shock. In these circumstances, she is not quite capable of self-understanding as ‘a potentiality-for-being toward a possibility of the being “willed”’, as Heidegger would put it (Being and Time 181). Beatrice, however, we see in many tableaux, and in every scene, it is manifest that her mode of being in the world is entirely concerned with ‘the ways of taking care of the “world” [and fostering] of concern for others’ (134). And the individuals she is naturally drawn to are people with a similar disposition of taking care of the world and others. This is why she would work up a quarrel with Chris for apparently failing to hear the call of care when she is summoned to the Presidential Retreat. In their mock showdown, she charges: You come over here and all you say to me is: ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right.’ ‘I never said anything of the sort to you.’ ‘Chris, you asked me, the girl you want to marry, to travel forty miles at night to Abichi…’ ‘To Abichi? You didn’t say it was Abichi, did you?’ ‘That’s not the point. You asked the girl you want to marry to go along and keep all options open. Do you remember that? Well, I’m sorry to inform you I did not take your advice’. (112) Indifference is unthinkable of Dasein in full self-understanding, as such self-understanding entails knowing ‘what he wills to do in the midst of what is’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 65). At Abichi, the Presidential Retreat, we have already seen, she is attentive and quick to respond, in reference to her ‘long-suffering people’, to help and protect ‘the sacred symbol of [her] nation’s pride’, and perhaps get the ‘cheeky girl from Arizona or somewhere’ to understand that Kangan has dignity and selfrespect and is not for sale, and, in short, that it is free from subservience to manipulation. But the Head of State has to be strong and resolute for this information to be effectively conveyed. Since he appears to be deficient in knowledge, he had to be conscientized: If I went to America today, to Washington DC, would I, could I, walk into a White House private dinner and take the American President hostage. And his Defence Chief and his Director of CIA?

182  Exercise of Ethical Being This attempted conscientization is roundly rebuffed: Oh don’t be such a racist, Beatrice. I am surprised at you. A girl of your education! (Anthills of the Savannah 81) It is racism to not see his rollout of the government of Kangan and its entire leadership and security apparatus for the entertainment of a young, foreign journalist as a praiseworthy act of high statesmanship. Not only is Sam making a playboy of himself, but his sense of judgment is in serious doubt. Although Beatrice is play-acting in her passage with Chris, agitating his idea, and rearranging it to suit her purpose in the drama, it is not a negligible charge under the ethics of care that one is living: in the deficient modes of concern, [in terms of] ‘Being for-, against-, and without-one-another, passing-one-another-by, not-mattering-to-oneanother [which entails] the everyday and average being-with-oneanother. (Being and Time 114) Under the ethics of care, one not only recognizes one’s being-in-the-world as being-for-others, one recognizes it as pertaining equally to one’s neighbour. Thus, Sam’s invitation to Beatrice had awakened in despairing Chris hopes of His Excellency, at last, adverting to the cares that his office imposes. He himself had used and used up all opportunities afforded him to prompt him to take care. So he is ready for the possibility that Beatrice might succeed where he himself had failed: ‘Look, BB,’ he said. ‘In any country and any language in the world an invitation by the Head of State is a virtual command even when he does not pick up the phone personally to issue it. So my dear girl you will go and you may do some good. Sam is not such a fool you know. He knows things are now pretty hopeless and may see in you a last hope to extricate himself. You may be able to help.’ ‘How?’ ‘My dear, I don’t know. But let’s keep all options open. It’s never too late’. (73) Chris’s flickering hope of a re-awakening of the imperative of taking care is not by any means redeemed. The Head of State, however, remains aloof, his mode of being-in-the-world the inauthentic being-for-oneself.

Exercise of Ethical Being  183 There may be no shared life world in Kangan, being a colonial creation, but the answer of Chris and Ikem – with endorsement from Beatrice, since this is equally her own rule of life – is to follow the call of care, wherever it may lead, even to the shedding of one’s blood, as dramatically portrayed in the death of Chris. Post-Tribal Sense In Anthills of the Savannah, the time of the tribe is past, a time when at the call, men would ‘rise with racing blood and put on their garbs of war and go to the boundary of their town to engage the invading enemy boldly in battle’ (123). In place now, however, is a civil society, and what they do with their vote in an election has consequences for themselves, as well as for the country at large. The National Gazette is engaged in fostering this civil society, and Abazon is privileged to have their son Ikem Osodi as the editor, publishing reliable information about national orientation reaching a national public; and being keyed in, they are part of that national public. New experiences are happening in this new world and the concepts with which the citizens navigate and relate to the world are changing. With this, who one is, and where and how one settles one’s existence, are questions that are evolving. For example, Elewa’s uncle’s phrase ‘whiteman house’, which probably means no more than a house in the modern style, in contrast to another kind of house, perhaps a traditional homestead in rural Kangan, the ‘round thatched huts’ that Chris sees along the Great North Road (206). He wishes that this first time in such a house will not be his last: this house designates the future, which also means a hope of transiting from the old and traditional. The future holds a strong attraction to the ordinary and the rural populations of Kangan. But General Sam is not the person to lead them there. Indeed, he has no aspiration to go anywhere. The tribal world survives at best as a memory, with traces, for example, in the idiom of the old man of Abazon, whose nominal identifier for the Head of State is the Big Chief. It is also a rich source of metaphor, as in relating the voice of the cock crowing at dawn and the battle-drum sounding an emergency to the Gazette; the first pointing the tribesmen to the farm for productivity and sustenance of the tribe, the second stirring men ‘to rise with racing blood and put on their garbs of war and go to the boundary of their town to engage the invading enemy boldly in battle’ (Anthills of the Savannah 123) for the defence of their common heritage, where they and their offspring are earthed, Achebe would say in another context. In the world now receded into the past, what was being defended was their highest communal value, the clan, as both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God call it. But this traditional inward-looking lifeworld of the tribe has left almost no trace in the value system of Anthills of the Savannah,

184  Exercise of Ethical Being and the people have moved on. Even the Idemili myth may not count as such a trace, bearing in mind that it captures a drainage basin extending from the Idemili lake to Orimili (103), with all the clans in it, and is not like Agadi Nwanyi or Ulu, special deities that exist for the sake a of a single clan, and for the specific function of defence. One of the issues that the plebiscite for General Sam’s life presidency underscores is that in the new world, government is by the consent of the ruled. General Sam appears to honour this fact by calling the plebiscite. But he has apparently misread the people’s mood, thinking that they are sufficiently compliant to his wishes to understand that if he is calling a plebiscite, he has an expected response in view. It is in fact a new political culture of one-man rule that he is trying to impose on Kangan. The people are also learning, that unlike in tribal society, one needed to have one’s wits about one at all times, and to say yes when asked whether or not the matter was understood. Hence in the debate on the life presidency, they search the Gazette to see if the Big Chief really did not want to be a life president. As the Abazon leader narrates it: I told my people: We have Osodi in Bassa. If.… what these strange people are telling us is true, Osodi will come or he will write in his paper and our sons will read it and know that it is true. But he did not come to tell us and he did not write it in his paper. So we knew that cunning had entered that talk. (126) Osodi is ‘their son’, but what they look to him for is not the fulfilling of a goal relevant to the tribe, but rather information relevant to the responsible performance of a civic duty as citizens of Kangan. There are no tribal goals in Anthills of the Savannah; the only goal there is human development. But, as in A Man of the People, some have got fortuitously into power, and are using this position to supplant the human aspiration with their own personal goals and are hijacking the state apparatuses to serve this purpose.

Postscript Optimistic Postcoloniality

Achebe’s narratives are all in the tragic mode, so how can we be talking of optimism? We can also ask, whose optimism, or where may it be sought? In Achebe, or the reader? May it be sought in the corpus itself? It is not possible to know Achebe’s attitude, whether optimistic or pessimistic. As to the reader, suffice it to say that many find the closing movements of his novels rather devastating, this cathartic effect being, as Aristotle would say, ‘the special feature of [tragic] mimesis’ (Poetics, chapter 13). But we are not to forget some of his characters who are overwhelmed with gaiety in the face of personal tragedy. We recall Unoka bursting into uncontrollable laughter when his creditor Okoye asks for his money back to complete his preparations for title taking. There is also Clara’s ‘terrible kind of gaiety’ when Obi initially greets with stunned silence her disclosure that she is an osu and Odili’s wry humour in listing among his injuries at Chief Nanga’s hands a ‘cracked cranium… a… broken arm and countless severe bruises one of which all but turned me into a kind of genealogical culde-sac’ (A Man of the People 140). The attitudes of literary characters do form significant patterns not to be lost sight of. Gaiety in a tragedy is striking; and tragic gaiety may even not involve laughter, as in William Butler Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’, where we read: All perform their tragic play…. Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

(338)

These lines evoke a function in ancient Greek tragedy where some characters are able to undergo apotheosis. A great example is Oedipus at Colonus, DOI: 10.4324/9781003471127-8

186 Postscript where having touched the depth of infamy, a ‘compensation’ follows (Winnington-Ingram 255): the character becomes a hero at last – a demigod. In the epic tradition, it usually figures forth as the hero passing through the underworld, or an other world. In terms of Hamlet and Lear, who are tragic characters in Shakespeare, the gayest of Achebe’s characters is Chris Oriko. In these terms, all Achebe’s heroes come to their fullest realisation in this figure, who is content to do ‘what had had to be done’ (The Plague 287). It defines his manner of participation in General Sam’s government, and he responds without equivocating, like Edna in the face of the crowd attack against Odili – ‘without asking to be paid’, and without anybody’s life serving him for inspiration (A Man of the People 149). Rather he is the one who inspires, particularly in the manner of his death, while doing ‘what had had to be done’: the sergeant would not let up. He dragged her along on the seat of her once neat blue dress…. Chris bounded forward and held the man’s hand and ordered him to release the girl at once…. ‘You de craze…. If you no commot for my front now I go blow your head to Jericho, craze-man.’ ‘Na you de craze,’ said Chris. ‘A police officer stealing a lorry-load of beer and then abducting a school girl! You are a disgrace to the force.’ The other said nothing more. He unslung his gun, cocked it, narrowed his eyes while confused voices went up all around some asking Chris to run, others the policeman to put the gun away. Chris stood his ground looking straight into the man’s face, daring him to shoot. And he did, point-blank into the chest presented to him…. Emmanuel and Braimoh… arrived on the scene as Chris sank first to his knees in a grotesque supplicatory posture and then keeled over sideways before settling flat on his back. Emmanuel went down and knelt beside him and the girl knelt on the other side fumbling with the wounded man’s shirt-front to stop a big hole through which blood escaped in copious spasms. ‘Please, sir, don’t go!’ cried Emmanuel, tears pouring down his face. Chris shook his head and then seemed to gather all his strength to expel the agony on his twisted face and set a twilight smile on it. Through the smile he murmured words that sounded like The Last Grin… A violent cough throttled the rest. (Anthills of the Savannah 215–216) Emmanuel will learn from this that it is possible to die with dignity. In ‘The Last Grin…’ he and Adamma overhear what turns out to be a message to the world about the world belonging to all the people of the world. At last

Postscript  187 the survivors are able to understand his greatness: nothing less than ‘Kunene’s Emperor Shaka, [who with] the spears of his assailants raining down on him…. realized the truth at that moment… and died smiling.’ In terms of the argument of this study, everything, from Things Fall Apart onwards, was moving towards him. And Anthills of the Savannah, despite the twenty-one years that separate it from A Man of the People, is the culmination of what I must call, beginning with Things Fall Apart, work in progress. The finding on which the argument of this study is structured is that the time of the tribe is gone, and there is no negritude nostalgia over that. We see the era of the tribe take a devastating shock it cannot overmaster in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, with tribal lords like Okonkwo who are rooted in the ideology and instinctively live by its code, and in total commitment, but others like young Nwoye, who are ill at ease with certain of its demands, and might have had to find accommodation with it through psychic repression like the warrior Obierika. For although the contradictions and aporias of the ideology frequently assail the sensitive and questioning mind of Obierika, he is obliged to find a way of moving on, leaving the daunting questions unanswered. The colonial-imposed replacement in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People is not sufficiently learned to be able to govern unconscious choices, with consequences in the characters being ill at ease with their environments and with themselves. At last, in Anthills of the Savannah, there are decision-makers whose mental habits are free of tribal ideology. But, as referenced in ‘Beware Soul Brother’, the day of the ‘dance of the future’ may have dawned, only that its moves have not yet been learned. The characters who carry its burden in Anthills of the Savannah are stumbling. General Sam is caught up in his own ego-ideal and essentially gives up the new dance. Ikem Osodi and Chris Oriko, who are committed to playing by the rules, are feuding between them, and in the absence of genuine leadership by the Head of State are unable to achieve much. The truth that Chris realises at his last moment, that ‘this world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented’, is hugely relevant to this study: whereas a tribe has a self-identity tied to a patch of the earth bearing the material relics of their ancestors – and for Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, their spirit as well, Chris’s world is non-territorialised: oriented towards what is called in reggae culture one world, to be sustained in motion by care. A basis exists, therefore, for a case of the unconscious, not just of a single text, as in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, but of an entire corpus. There is a further difference. What we are facing as the content of this unconscious is not the politics of modes of production and their internal tensions, but a transformative process, or even an apocalyptic one in which the old tribal order is swallowed up to give way to a new world that is people-centred.

188 Postscript It bears mentioning that of the branches of literary studies, literary theory, literary history, Poetics, narratology, practical criticism, and so forth, practical criticism is the one that suffers the most when the philosophy of literature is ill-articulated – or, at least, that is where the damage is most readily in evidence. Many who study African literature treat it as having a distinctly African character; in other words, they are looking at the matter, the thing that the work has made art out of, while others appear to follow Sartre in the idea that a literary culture passes through the ‘stage of regionalism’ (What is Literature 338n), on its way, probably, to the world stage. But whether it is ‘African’ or ‘regional’ is not as important as the substantive literature. This is the thing that needs to be characterised first of all, before the attaching of an adjectival. Discussion and debate can go on over ‘big’ issues where literature is mentioned generically among scholarly engagements with or without a sound philosophy, but unless there is a sound philosophy, encounters with concrete texts will always veer away from the text to something that may be worth serious attention in itself, something interesting, something beneficial or something demanding our involvement and participation, something to be ignored at our, or the world’s peril, and never touch the question of the nature of the object itself. Practical criticism, however, can only happen when there is a concrete thing to exercise criticism on, a concrete play, a concrete poem, a novel, or some other work of art. It is quite comfortable with scientific investigations, identifying textual facts, collating textual facts, making inferences about the edifice based on the facts collated, especially concerning its nature and identity. Its parent discourse, however, is really philosophy, and shares the same ‘founders’, according to Jacques Derrida, Plato and Aristotle (Margins of Philosophy 157), as well as wheeling away from the speculative method as from the late nineteenth century along with such modern philosophies as phenomenology and analytic philosophy. In consequence, therefore, criticism ceased being about what should or might be, and became about what is. And what is, as far as literary criticism is concerned, is the literary work itself. Some thinkers defend literature on the grounds that it portrays the physical world. And their approach has ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, as Aristotle, for example, notes: ‘This is why people enjoy looking at images, because through contemplating them it comes about that they understand and infer what each element means, for instance that “this person is soand-so”’ (Poetics, chapter 4). But this is not his final word on the matter. He comments that if ‘a description is criticized as not being true [the] answer might be, “No, but it ought to be like that”—[hence] Sophocles said that he drew men as they ought to be’ (Poetics, chapter 25). This really means that, for Aristotle, referencing external reality is the way to error in

Postscript  189 trying to characterise poetry, and art generally. If reality is the way of error for criticism, what other alternatives are there? In other words, if art is not an imitation of life, that is not necessarily the end of the road. Nor are we left with so-called ‘art for art’s sake’ as the alternative. For life may well imitate art. We must note that Aristotle is speaking of the work that has already been created, which for Heidegger is the only one since ‘a work cannot be without being created but is essentially in need of creators’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 64). Even before its emergence, or before it attains ‘disclosedness’ henceforth as ‘something with which one can concern oneself’ (Heidegger, Being and Time 239), the work had waited and longed for the one who would be its creator. This is a capital idea. It means that the work of art can never be contingent, only necessary. It is always already there, whether or not it ever finds a creator. Perhaps the path to understanding this is Hegel, for whom the work of art is a production of the spirit: not an individual spirit such as is said to inhere in a person, the ‘spirit’s existence as soul and body [which] therefore has reality in the human body’ (Hegel, Aesthetics 715), but spirit itself: For this reason the material through which [spirit] manifests itself retains for it only the value of a means (even if an artistically treated means) for the expression of spirit to spirit, and it has not the value of being a sensuous existent in which the spiritual content can find a corresponding reality. (626–627) What he calls ‘the spiritual content’, or elsewhere ‘the spiritual inner life’, is a category apart from the usual distinctions between matter and form. The configuring of matter and form is the poem in its sensuous form as a work of art – an ‘artistically treated means’ – not the thing itself. The spiritual content is the animating principle within, which is ‘the expression of spirit to spirit’. In Hegel, it is a privilege, an uncommon one, for a human to be involved in the work of art, being ‘the expression of spirit to spirit’; it is a privilege to overhear this ‘expression’. And someone who has an inkling what is occurring indeed has a treasure to preserve. It recalls Egbo’s mystic experience at Olokemeji upon Ogun River where on an impulse he cuts short his journey to Lagos and alights from the train and spends the night. He was to leave: with a gift that he could not define upon his body, for what traveller beards the gods in their den and departs without a divine boon. (Soyinka, The Interpreters 127)

190 Postscript Thus, in the same way that a work before its emergence is ‘in need of creators’, the work having attained unconcealment also seeks preservers, ‘such as respond to the truth happening in the work’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 64). And it is not nothing even if it finds no preservers, ‘when it is still only waiting for preservers and only pleads and waits for them to enter into its truth’ (65). There is truth, the knowable, all around us, and people with genuine professional engagements deal with these during some of their time – things like social reality, politics, social morality, social or environmental justice. These are commonly the things literary scholarship veers away into and gets trapped in, when it is not able to attend, or positively despises the text’s truth. But the culture now reigning in our institutions encourages scholars to spend all their professional and quality time – as well as their leisure, like everyone else – on this, settling for the status Dasein in its ‘unauthentic everydayness’, ‘the unauthenticity of the “man”’, which ‘denies to Dasein its… best potentialities, as it were, locking it up from what it genuinely can be’ (Heidegger, Existence and Being 57). If everydayness locks up Dasein ‘from what it genuinely can be’, professionalism does the exact opposite. But professionalism suffers in this discipline of literary studies throughout Africa, a great sign of it being the rate of death and disappearance of professional journals. Many were first published in the early 1970s and were quickly accorded world respectability. But they fizzled out. Yet there are many real works of literary art, African as well as non-African, whose happening of truth were not responded to for ever so long and needed to be recalled from forgetfulness. My reflection on this forgetfulness and inattention by criticism is the impulse for such papers as ‘Literary Studies in Nigeria: An Advanced State of Crisis’, first given at a conference around 2004. Sometime later, there was also another research paper entitled ‘Art-Being and Úrù [Profit]: Use-Value is Everything; or is It?’ There is work here for our critics, ceaselessly to go over the archive to confirm or contest what has been given a place there, to call up for inclusion in the archive genuine art that has not got a place there, but only on the grounds of knowledge of the artwork in opposition to what is not, what may even resemble it. Here the oracle to the church in Philadelphia against those ‘who say that they are Jews, and are not, but lie’ (Rev 3.9) becomes irresistible. Some literary productions only have the outward form of a poem, a novel, a drama, and so on, but their artistic nature is impossible to ascertain. Critics sometimes forget that their defining function is to exercise mature judgement on artistic productions to identify the ones that are genuine art, using the criteria that make up the tool box of the discipline. This is where the Aristotelian tradition concerned with delineating the criteria for judging what is art and what not comes in.

Postscript  191 Having said that, let me return to the question of art’s relation to life, whether art imitates life or the other way around. Being of ancient and of philosophical origin, the discipline of criticism has travelled along with its constitutive questions and their derivatives, and the contrasting responses to these basic questions have divided the discipline up, and kept it divided to the present. The question of first importance is what is art. And the only acceptable answer is the one that gives a total account. Whether art imitates life or life imitates art can yield a very interesting discussion, especially the latter. Art imitating life is a fairly simple matter to be decided at the level of the material properties of the work. But whether it is the other way around can be a much deeper question. We can cite Christopher and his talking and self-operating car in a film serial of the 1980s, I think. Today, self-operating cars are being achieved with advances in artificial intelligence. It is a different matter with what Northrop Frye calls ‘the total dream of man’. According to him, ‘In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man’ (Anatomy of Criticism 119). In his account, it is this total dream first imitated by art that life imitates. Thus, the poet ‘assists the work of his society by framing workable hypotheses, imitating human action and thought in such a way as to suggest realizable modes of both’ (113). Neither the ‘total dream’ nor the ‘workable hypotheses’ are a set of words that one could lift from the work. Everything is to be worked out, with unlimited possibility for creativity, and even error. A great current of opinion, which includes postcolonialism, is to reference ideas as the real content of the work. For Aristotle, ideas are crucial for characterisation, in that: action is conducted by agents who should have certain qualities in both character and thought…. I use… ‘character’ to mean that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents, and ‘thought’ to cover the parts in which, through speech, they demonstrate something or declare their views. (Poetics, chapter 6) In latter times, views and shared beliefs are being used to characterise a text or even whole texts of a tradition, bringing ideological questions into the fore in entire schools of criticism. In postcolonialism, for example, it is taken as read that literature in the ‘new’ nations is necessarily a ‘counterdiscourse’; and the central character is explored to trace out this counterdiscourse as its protagonist. As Ashcroft has argued: The post-colonial discussion of nationalism is extensive because this originary and most strategic phase of anti-colonial politics is invariably

192 Postscript caught in the binarism of imperial control even while rejecting that control. In Derrida’s terms, nationalism reverses the imperial binary without erasing it. Thus the nationalist governments of newly independent states have, time and again, simply inherited both the administrative infrastructure and the ideological dynamic of imperial control. This can often be the most damaging consequence of decolonization: sovereignty is transferred to the colonized without being transformed. (48) Chinua Achebe’s essay entitled ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, where he writes about the need ‘to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement’ (30), is, in Bill Ashcroft’s terms, ‘anti-colonial politics’, and many critics take it as the framework for studying Achebe’s literary works. But anti-colonialism as a platform for Achebe may yield more than one direction in dealing with the colonist. Confrontation is definitely a possible direction, with anger in the heart, perhaps fire in the eyes. However, there is no sign of resentment in the novels whether by the narrator or by a character against the colonists for the colonial states. Rather, Achebe is talking about helping ‘my society regain belief in itself’. It would seem to me that his preferred and dominant attitude is with the back to the colonist, and an affirmative and reassuring face to his society. On this ground, Achebe’s art can be both tragic and optimistic. In this posture, facing away from the colonist, what rises into view is human thrownness in the midst of things to take care of or to be brought to their being through concern, not least of all the human group itself. The demands of care come almost as second nature in the narrow circle of the tribe, with its immediate relationships. Care in the manmade groups in Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease is more problematic when it comes to reaching beyond the tribe or setting aside guardrails tied to the tribal lifeworld. Seeing the state as an entity to be brought to its being through care demands more than averageness; and the exercise is rare. More commonly, those who are positioned advantageously tend to exploit this situation to benefit themselves, with the outward aim of care frustrated and turned back on itself. The challenge of care is stark in Anthills of the Savannah, where the vestiges of the tribe are all gone and human suffering is widespread. But there is optimism here and elsewhere in the repeated appearance of high-souled individuals who buck the trend and resolutely follow the movement of care even at great personal cost. Criticism hived off from philosophy like many another academic discipline. The difference is that it did not cut its links to philosophy. There are many within the discipline who think that it should grow up and address social problems. But while social science collects evidence from the world

Postscript  193 of real human beings in their boundedness in space and time to make inference about that same world, criticism would be trying to make inference about the real world from evidence in books whose relationship to actual things is uncertain. Thus, T.S. Eliot references the textual facts as ‘an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which [comprise] the formula of [a] particular emotion’ (125). The incidents in a literary work are not there for their own sakes, but for the sake of the emotion they immediately evoke (125). The Aristotelian tradition which endures in Heidegger and much of poststructuralism is the critical path which has been followed in this study. Although traceable to him, the ideological and the referential paths of criticism are not considered by him to provide solution to the problem of poetry. His solution is to focus on the object itself and ascertain as a minimal requirement its probability structure, namely that the incidents make a complete whole, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. From one incident to another, however, poetry does not follow predictable lines: it would hardly be worth studying, if it did. One of the early discoveries of the Formalists is that becoming predictable is a hazard that art-making constantly runs, and can only save itself and remain art by resisting this propensity. Poetry-making will both resist predictability and follow its own internal logic in attaining a whole and complete structure; and criticism’s concern is with this totality, the art product itself. It is this product that literary criticism has before it. Derrida puts it perhaps provocatively: One emerges from the book only within the book, because… the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book. [And quoting Edmund Jabes:] ‘The world exists because the book exists.’ ‘The book is the work of the book’ ‘The book multiplies the book’… To be is tobe-in-the-book. (93) The book – the one that is itself art – is the concern of the literary critic; for he is a reader – and more than in the sense of one who appreciates and delights in what he/she reads, this reading as performed by the critic is a production. It produces a text, and the justification of this production is the being of the literary work, the poem. Our findings in the present reading of Achebe’s five novels are textbound. That we are certain of; that alone we can be certain of: we have found things in these books that connect them all together, even though they come from vastly different eras, things that provoke the deepest ‘questions of existence’ (Jaspers 198). There is a movement progressively from a tribe-centred awareness to a new one in which traces of the ‘tribe’ may

194 Postscript occasionally surface in the latest output, but which are quite lost in the consciousness of some of the characters. Is this how things stood in the world as Achebe knew it, the world in which he actually lived and worked? Probably not. Does it matter? Certainly not. To say that it does not matter whether the facts in a novel correspond to the facts in the world may awaken in some minds a perplexity: What then is the point of it? Under the philosophy of utilitarianism, this should be ‘an overwhelming question’, as T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock would have called it. But there is here the thin end of a wedge into a vaster question which philosophy has engaged since the days of Plato and Aristotle, through Kant and Hegel, to Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur. Analytic philosophy has also weighed in especially in America. All the different philosophies have their individual approaches to literature, but I may be permitted to simplify things somewhat, and create a divide among them between those that take literature seriously in itself, as some specific thing that may be studied and accounted for, for its own sake and those that link literature to some other thing in a dependent or as a secondary function; for example, that it is a way of laying bare (x-raying is a popular word here) what is going on in society. It is appropriate at this point to acknowledge the Nigerian National Universities Commission for including in the Benchmark for Minimum Academic Standards for Postgraduate Studies courses in Philosophy of Literature and Aesthetics Theory for literary studies. If those are properly delivered, there will be a notable change in the foreseeable future in the way literature is read and taught in the Nigerian institutions, and reduce the prescriptivist pressures that have been building in the literary scholar community with the ultimate goal of gutting and destroying creativity. And so, for the sake of my discipline, if for nothing else, I root for the philosophies that take the literary object seriously. First among them is Aristotle, who writes that poetry is something philosophical and deserving of serious attention – high praise from a man who believes that philosophy is the ultimate in knowing. It is not a high enough praise, however, for Hegel who rather invokes the world of spirit and religion in characterising art. In art, according to him, we have: the miracle of spirit’s giving itself an image of itself in something purely material. Spirit so forms this external thing that it is present to itself in it and recognizes in it the appropriate shape of its own inner life. (Aesthetics 700) According to Hegel here, not even the effort of the artist in the act of creation may ultimately be explained as a significant contribution. It is ‘Spirit [that] forms this external thing’ with the aim of imprinting ‘its own inner

Postscript  195 life’ for its own contemplation. In art is ‘spirit’s inner self-apprehension and its preoccupation with the sphere of its own circumstances, aims, and actions’ (889). There is something ex-orbitant—‘out of this world; to say nothing of a venturing outside the rut or orbit (ex-orbita)’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology 162) about art. Martin Heidegger extends his recognition where he writes: The poet himself stands between … the gods … and … the people. He is one who has been cast out—out into that Between, between gods and men. But only and for the first time in this Between is it decided, who man is and where he is settling his existence. (Existence and Being 312) And he rounds up with a quotation from Hölderlin: Poetically, dwells man on this earth. The thought is profoundly agitating. We have to go to poetry’s essence to begin to understand this quote from Hölderlin, ‘Poetically, dwells man on this earth’. In its very essence is the word poieō – ‘to make’. Poetry is first and foremost a made thing – and all art, according to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, where we read that: Art, as has been stated, is ‘a certain state of mind, apt to Make, conjoined with true Reason;’ its absence, on the contrary, is the same state conjoined with false Reason, and both are employed upon Contingent matter. (133) Aristotle’s explanation of productions that are like art, but are not is also here: a certain state of mind, apt to Make, conjoined with… false Reason, and… employed upon Contingent matter’. To function effectively, the critic must be able to tell this difference. What results when the aptitude ‘conjoined with true Reason’ acts ‘upon Contingent matter’ is to begin with a made thing. That also is the essence of fiction (from the Latin ‘to form, shape, fashion, frame, make’). ‘Poetically, dwells man on this earth’. It is the basis of all discourse in postcolonialism that there are two cultures to be navigated by the postcolonial to form an identity. But everyone, whether postcolonial or some other, has to fashion for themselves an identity. We construct who we are. ‘Poetically, dwells man on the earth’. It is not of the essence of poetry to manifest this truth. It is a discovery that might well make us look upon poetry, fiction with greater respect. The material elements that are

196 Postscript configured in the poem may be historical, political, religious, cultural, ecological, agricultural, and so on – in each case is where poetry here and now is settling its existence. We know the individual poem together or in the context of these material elements, but poetry itself is other. In postcolonialist criticism, there appears to be an unreflective expectation that the poem of post-colony is, or should be, naturally angry and the notion of post-colony be associated with a negative marking. As we have said, the only should or ought that may apply to literature is to follow the requirements of the art. Its attitudes depend on the conditions of engagement of the characters and what they do following the lights available to them, with the strengths and flaws that make up their character traits as the touchstone. The attitudes that dominate Achebe’s novels may shock on occasions, but they are rarely angry. A Man of the People, for example, is painstakingly objective, as if the guiding principle were ‘to everyone his due’. This is a view of life Achebe praises very highly in ‘The Igbo World and Its Art’. Similar objectivity – bearing in mind the implication of ‘objective correlative’ – is at work in Things Fall Apart, and although it is a kind of story Auerbach characterises as ‘a subject of the utmost importance and the utmost sublimity from the point of view of the author and his audience’ (163), it nevertheless runs with mocking irony. The attitude of high neutrality is most shocking in Arrow of God, especially the last two chapters, where, in his utter destruction, no one takes his side, even though he can claim to be following the will of his deity. Achebe’s five novels are all tragedies. Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and Anthills of the Savannah have classical markings, such as would make them what Auerbach would call ‘sublime tragedies’, while No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People are somewhat weighed down by the antiheroes that sustain their actions. In No Longer at Ease, the narrator quite confesses that, on the face of it, Obi’s infamy is irredeemable, and it is only by going with him to the underside of the events that he can be really seen for what he is – a man overwhelmed by circumstances beyond him, rather than ‘a thoroughly bad man’ (Aristotle). In convicting him, the judge had wondered why a young man of his education and promise could have done what Obi had done; and indeed: Everybody wondered why. The learned judge, as we have seen, could not comprehend how an educated young man and so on and so forth. The British Council man, even the men of Umuofia, did not know. And we must presume that, in spite of his certitude, Mr Green did not know either. (No Longer at Ease 128)

Postscript  197 And so, one might ask, what is the meaning of the learned judge’s finding and pronouncing of guilt, when he is only just beginning to ask the question why ‘an educated young man and so on and so forth’? A Man of the People, on the other hand, is the story of the impostor, who had to be unmasked and cast out – that is to the extent that it really is the story of the ‘man of the people’. But it has a double and intertwined thread of action, the second being Odili’s sequence, which signifies youth’s transgression into the public political stage. In the current dispensation the public political stage has been taken possession of by father-figures, Chief Nanga, the representative of his constituency, being Odili’s former teacher in the primary school. Chief Koko, the holder of a neighbouring constituency whom Max Kulamo attempts to upstage, is basically of a similar social standing as Nanga. Nanga and Koko will take ruthlessly violent action to try and secure their positions against these young men. But what is even more important is that the people concede to the elders these constituencies, and help, as in the case of the manhandling of Odili by Nanga and his thugs to teach as in the discourse of the Chorus of the Bacchae that: ‘all is vain, / The pulse of the heart, the plot of the brain, That striveth beyond the laws that live’ (124). The temporary restoration of the status quo by these father-figures creates a situation of perpetual stagnation and suppression of youthful aspiration. In terms of the values the narrative treats as worth upholding, it is the youth that figure these forth, not the older folk. And it is the defeat of these youths that creates the bleak overhang of tragedy about the narrative. Obi Okonkwo had spoken glowingly about serving his country truly and about a new civil service culture, but he has failed the elementary test of probity for one to lead a moral revolution. Apology has been made for Obi. But he has been taken out of the scene of action. He has been caught up in the tragedy of if only the circumstances had been different. In A Man of the People, the figure of terror had been taken on in his own chosen ground. He has fought back to reassert his unchallenged rule. In his fight back, Odili nearly loses his life, and is almost reduced to a genealogical cul de sac. However, we are speaking of postcolonial optimism. This optimism does not derive from the modes of action; as we have said, they are in each case tragic. But in an overall view of all the five novels together, there is a movement from the constricted and inward-looking world of a tribe rooted in a patch of earth settled by ancestors who give it spiritual value, and, with this, emotive moorings deeply etched, to a widened horizon where the settling of one’s existence may be a long way away from the ancestral place; yet where ‘the umbilical cord, no matter how far it stretched, never did snap’, as we read in Soyinka’s Season of Anomy. Up to No Longer at Ease

198 Postscript and A Man of the People, who one was remained tied to where one’s ‘umbilical cord’ was earthed. There is an infinitely wider horizon in Anthills of the Savannah. Here, there are characters for whom the umbilical cord is a distant memory; and there are some still for whom there seems not to be even a memory of an umbilical cord. Rather, existence has become a whole new experience. It has become much more individualised, its frame of reference based on social class and the competences one has built up, the institutions where one trained or in which one’s services were engaged, one’s workaday concerns, and, most importantly, one’s humanity (Heidegger’s Dasein, which ‘is not – and never is – a ‘mere urge’ to which other kinds of controlling or guiding behaviour are added from time to time; rather, as a modification of the entirety of Being-in-the-world, it is always care already’ (Being and Time 240)). This appears to be the picture of post-colony that Chinua Achebe’s fiction has progressively unfurled – which means that tragedy here, and in all Achebe, is productive: what it produces is a ‘higher outlook’. As Hegel phrases it, ‘the tragedy of conflicts and their resolution must in general prevail only where this is necessary for justifying them in virtue of some higher outlook’ (Aesthetics 1232).

Works Cited

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Index

African literature 7, 18–19, 35–39, 59, 62, 63, 112–113, 188, 190 aloofness 158, 171, 173 ancestry: ancestor community 83; ancestor-based power 65, 70, 72; ancestral ideology 66, 68, 76, 79, 81, 88; ancestral line 42, 43, 46, 52, 54, 55, 74, 91; ancestral spirit 54, 77; ancestral succession plan 156; ancestral system 99, 154, 169; patrilineal descent 67, 69, 90, 164 apocalypse 103, 128, 130, 135, 142, 187 Arendt, H. 10 Aristotle 5–6, 7–8, 21–22, 23, 25–27, 39, 64, 87–88, 90, 145, 185, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196 Ashcroft, B. 191–192 Auerbach, E. 196 Augustine, St. 29 authenticity 11, 13, 85, 130, 136, 180 Bannfield, A. 64 Barthes, R. 17, 48, 49, 57, 112 Baudrillard, J. 56 Benjamin, W. 7, 10, 12, 14, 28, 36 Benveniste, E. 110 Birkets, S. 33 Bodley, J.H. 40, 41 Booth, J. 4, 38, 50 Britton, R. 30 Cassirer, E. 30 Cavaliero, G. 126 Chattman, S. 33, 58 Christian ideology 91, 92

Chukwukere, B.I. 20, 179 close reading 10, 20, 38, 60, 63, 111, 113 Coleridge, S.T. 109 colonialism: colonial creation 98, 99, 107–108; colonial times 37, 56; colonist 96, 192; imperialism 107; post-colonialism 58, 108, 112, 191, 195–198 comparative literature 61 conscience 84, 85, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137 Constance, B. 31 Corbett, E.P.J. 59 Cousin, V. 32 Culler, J. 109 culture: traditional society 116–117; tribal culture 47–48, 70, 117, 135; tribal discourse 172, 173 Derrida, J. 4, 36, 57, 60, 108, 193, 195 division of labour 151, 172 Dorsch, T.S. 27, 64 Eliot, T.S. 6, 193, 194 Emenyonu, E. 34–35 enactment 164–165, 175 ethics of Dasein: being in relation to others 133, 174, 181–182; call of care 131, 132, 146, 167–169, 171–173, 177, 178, 180–181, 192; care/concern 2, 5, 10–12, 71, 72, 85, 92–93, 119, 130, 134, 136–137, 143, 149, 159–160, 164–167; ethical life 99–101; imperative of

206 Index taking care 182; moral failing 173; network of care 117; self-effacement 46; self-restraint 119 Euripides 65 existential moment 47 faction 7 form 60, 63, 189 Formalism 193 Foucault, M. 5, 9, 24, 29 Freud, S. 29–30, 145 frozen sayings 105, 106 Frye, N. 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 28, 34, 36, 62, 103, 113, 191 Gadamer, H.G. 132 Gray, J.G. 23 Habermas, J. 42, 67, 90, 110 habits of thought 67, 81, 83, 93, 94, 117 Halliwell, S. 27, 108 heavy father 103, 176, 177, 178 Hegel, G.W.F. 8, 18, 144, 165, 189, 194 Heidegger, M. 2, 4, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 13, 21, 22–23, 26–27, 29, 34–38, 57, 72, 79, 84, 112–114, 130, 131, 133, 136, 140, 157, 162, 165, 181, 189, 190, 193, 195, 198 Helff, S. 107 Hobbes, T. 132 humanism 6, 31, 35, 62 identity: national identity 159–160, 195; person-identity 52, 135; tribal identity 105, 187; tribal self-identity 47–48, 154 Igbo speech 93–94 impostor 123, 197 interior monologue 99, 100 James, A. 35 Jameson, F. 38, 66 Jaspers, K. 193 Jauss, H.R. 33, 35 Johnson, G. 38 Kanneh, K. 62 Kant, I. 32 Kermode, F. 130

knowledge-seeker 49 Kristeva, J. 55, 57, 61, 107, 110, 119 Lacan, J. 120 Lamb, C. 55 language: communicative language 9, 109; discourse strategies 106; invading language 91 Levi-Strauss, C. 39, 40 lifeworld 36, 42, 90, 92, 105, 115 Lindfors, B. 18–19 literary criticism 57, 60, 63, 105, 133, 188, 190, 193, 195 literary discourse analysis 111 literary object 60, 190–191, 194, 196 literary theory: African solution 3; approaches 4, 28; doing African literature justice 3–4; the poetic object 5, 23, 33 Longinus 111 Lukács, G. 25 Macherey, P. 10, 56 MacKay, C.H. 143 de Man, P. 61 manipulation 166, 169 marker 97; language self-revelation 112; linguistic affiliation 96, 119; literary language 9, 113–114; organic structure 111; practical discourse 110 marriage function 155, 156 matter 50, 60–61, 63, 189 Mbiti, J.S. 67, 155 moral choice 2, 12, 162, 174 Munonye, J. 66 myth: mythic ideation: mythological image 97, 98, 135, 167; mythological level 102, 153, 133; mythology 129, 149–150 narrative: first-person narration 145; functional correlates 179; modernist narrative 64; narrated consciousness 111, 145; narrative function 143, 163; narrative structure 109–110; narrative voice 57–58; performative method 104, 124; third-person mode 59, 119, 137, 146; unreliable narrative 58, 64 Ngara, E. 2

Index  207 Nietzsche, F. 62, 176 Nigerian literary history 14–17 Nnolim, C. 8 Okigbo, C. 21 Papayanis, M.A. 107, 111, 115, 120 Pessoa, F. 31 Pidgin 94–96 Plato 26, 29, 188 poetry 3–6, 8–9, 21–23, 26–29, 33–35, 37, 64 political commitment 3, 38–39 primal quest 177 probability 108, 193 proverb 105, 106, 114 Quintillian 29 reality: reality of novelistic characters 1, 25, 104–105; referential index 188–189, 194 resoluteness 85, 136, 173, 174, 177 Richards, I.A. 33, 62 Ricoeur, P. 1, 8, 9, 88, 97, 104 rite of passage 175–176, 178 Said, E.M. 108, 140 Said, E.M. 18, 108 Sartre, J.P. 11 de Saussure, F. 24 Sen, K. 107 Shakespeare, W. 121, 186 shared lifeworld 158 Sidney, P. 30, 31 solidarity 128, 136 Solomon, R.C. 43 Sophocles 161

Soyinka, W. 7, 14, 59, 189, 197 struggle for power 144 surface configuration 18, 38, 61, 175 symbolism 8, 41, 68, 150, 152–153, 175 tragedy 68, 88, 131, 138, 141, 145, 157, 185, 196, 197 tribal self-reproduction: inward-looking 183; post-tribal ethic 161, 183–184; soul of the tribe 6; tribal affiliation/ de-affiliation 134, 139–140, 142, 151, 180; tribal defence 157; tribal ideology 86, 187; tribal lifeworld 46, 88, 115, 156; tribal religion 84; tribal survival 154; tribal system 82, 114, 141; tribal world 89, 101, 114, 183, 187; tribe 41–42, 44–47, 49, 51, 52, 70, 73, 74, 78, 81, 90–92, 152, 154, 155; tribe-based selfunderstanding 155, 164 truth 4, 23, 25, 26, 31, 33, 34, 36, 190, 195 Tutuola, A. 109 Umezinwa, C. 53 validity claim 24 values: value system 66, 73, 92, 93, 98, 102, 106, 114, 117, 141 Wali, O. 34, 112 Werner, B. 125 Whalley, G. 27, 174 Williams, R. 20, 143 Wittgenstein, L. 105 Yeats, W.B. 38, 64, 185