The Language of Immortality

   Today the dawn brought with it dark news. Chinua Achebe was dead.
    When I was young, I prided myself on reading books adjudged to be too mature for my reading. I read Doris Lessing's Nine African Stories just as often as I read Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun. The people I hung around with, as well as older family members of similar mind, suggested I read the work of Chinua Achebe. I neglected to do so. Again, in secondary school. In 1999, while watching BET, I saw the Roots had released an album called Things Fall Apart. Again, I neglected to read. Finally, in university, I had no choice. We had to read it for class. I took it home and felt regret soaking through my brain. This work was excellent. So too his other books, Arrow of God etc. Today, he is dead. Yet, I would argue, he is not lost to us.
    He remains with us because of the questions he posed with his work. The eternal conflicts of old traditions and principles meeting with the new. The positive and negative effects exposed at such meetings, and a person's willingness to adapt or hold firm formed the basis of a lot of his work. We dare ask questions now about communication between races, between religions, between ethnicities. This man did it at a most unfriendly time.Africa in the 1960's was not the safest time for an intelligent Black man to be writing thought provoking literature that hit so close to home. In doing so, he became a banner under which intellectuals and the average man could both draw inspiration and knowledge from.
    Today, you will hear the names of countless prominent Black artisans and academics. You will hear them all praise the name of Chinua. The man who mentally shuddered in disdain at references to Africa as the "Dark Continent" and went to intellectual war with any and all who would refer to his people as savages. When no one else would, he went to very public war with the images presented in Joseph Conrad's Heart of  Darkness book. A direct (If lengthy) quote:


Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer's mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.
Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language." And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities.
   
     Today, you will hear many people laud this man. You will probably read about Maya Angelou praising him. Nelson Mandela once said that when he was imprisoned, he read Achebe and "...the prison walls seemed to fall away." You may not hear about the opposition he met when he published his books in English and was at first reviled by his peers for using the "language of the oppressors". Though he recognized the argument, an issue for non English literary figures worldwide, he persevered, and the widespread appeal of his work bore out his decision.

   The man was filled with golden quotes. Asked about the fact that he never won a Nobel prize among his many accolades, he responded "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize, not an African prize..." The one that stays with me the most is this. "The man that would hold his brother down in the mud, in order to achieve this, has to stay in the mud himself."

   Today, Chinua Achebe is dead. His work, his tireless spirit, his philosopher's attitude to life and its inner workings....these things may never die. So long as his teachings, his trailblazing for literary figures in Nigeria and worldwide live on, his legacy cannot fall apart.