LITERATURE AND ETHNICITY: Is literature shaped by the cultural contexts of the authors?
Being keynote address presented in Port Harcourt , Rivers State by CHINUA ACHEBE at the 2011 Garden City Literary Festival
ETHNICITY is a somewhat problematic word. The great American
anthropologist and poet, Stanley Diamond, used such words as ethnic with
complete and disarming respect, unlike most of us.
Chinua Achebe
Our use tends to be coloured by guilt, condescension, or just
awkwardness because this word and others in its category have suffered
from cultural and racial politics and the politics of scholarship.
I looked up the word ethnic in my daughter’s Random House College Dictionary. It had five definitions as follows:
1) pertaining to or characteristic of a people, especially a speech or culture group
2) referring to the origin, classification, characteristics etc. of such groups
3) pertaining to non-Christians
4) belonging to or deriving from the cultural, racial, religious or
linguistic traditions of a people or country especially a ‘primitive’
one: ethnic dances
5) U.S. a member of an ethnic group especially one belonging to a
minoritygroup that is not part of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
tradition.
Protestant tradition
This is clearly a word loaded with problems. Being the keynote speaker I
could not evade drawing attention to this. Being first has its
drawbacks. An Igbo children’s chant says that the child who walks in
front is the eye that spots evil spirits, the child in the rear has
twisted fingers (I don’t know why!); the middle child is the happy one.
Having spotted this evil spirit I shall simply step aside to the edge of
the pathway and let it pass. I shall use ethnicity in the way I know
Stanley [Diamond] intended it. I shall use it to mean those elements of
history andculture which distinguish one group of people from their
fellows. Put a little differently, ethnicity would comprise all those
significant qualities of apeople’s character – qualities of mind and
behavior which they acquired in their long struggle to domesticate the
wilderness and make it their world; their physical and spiritual
landscape.We are talking then about deep, not surface issues; we are not talking
about this morning’s gossip but about matters which reach back to the
beginnings of a people as a people. We are talking about their earliest
memories which they consider important and wish to preserve and so
recount in well-chosen, pleasing and memorable language. Finally we are
talking also about the beginnings of literature. That is what ethnicity
suggests to me.
Needless to say that these origins did not involve pen and paper or
their ancestors of clay and papyrus. We may imagine some ancient poets
making fun of those of their guild who were adopting the new-fangled
habit of reading from heavy clay tablets intended for royal edicts and
land measurements. This may be no idle imagination. Several years ago I
had invited a seventy-year old illiterate minstrel to recite his epic
poetry atthe University of Nigeria. His story of the exploits of the
hero, Emeka Okoye, began, to everyone’s surprise, with paper playing a
singularly sinister role.
Paper floating down from the sky one morning carried a commandment from
the demi-god Enunyilimba prohibiting the eating or drinking of anything,
however, small for seven markets or twenty eight days. The reason: this
demi-god was going to feast above for one month and all the inhabitants
of the world below must, therefore, honour him with starvation, on pain
of instant death!
The notion of oral performance as serious literature is still received
with suspicion or reluctance in many quarters, or at best perceived as a
form that ended long ago, perhaps in the age of Homer. But that is far
from the truth. The Somali, a pastoral/nomadic people in the Horn of
Africa must be accounted among the world’s most poetic people. Their
life is permeated by the composition and recital of poetry ranging from
simple domestic discourse about the superiority of the camel over goats
and cows to the intense anti-colonial poetry directed against the
British; the Italians and the Ethiopians.
Sayyid Muhammad Abdille Hasan whom the British called the “Mad Mullah”is
revered to this day not only because of his twenty-year struggle
against three colonial powers, but primarily as the greatest poet in the
Somali language. Now this language was first written down as recently
as 1972. It is important that we admit the category of oral literature
with respect in this literary festival or else we shall have little to
talk about beside already very-well-talked-about matters. For myself I
am taking my bearing from oral literature.
During the European Middle Ages a succession of empires rose and fell
inthe West African grasslands or the Sahel. One of the most remarkable
among these empires was Mali as remarkable as its founder, Sundiata.
Islam had penetrated into this part of Africa for at least one thousand
years and had slowly superseded the indigenous African polytheistic
religions.
Polytheistic religions
The creation story which I will now tell you quite obviously predates the coming of Islam to Mali:
At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk.
Then Doondari came and he created the stone.
Then the stone created iron;
The iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.
Then Doondari descended the second time.
And took the five elements
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud.
Then Doondari created blindness and blindness
defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep, and sleep defeated
blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry, and worry defeated
sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death, and death defeated
worry.
But when death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time,
And he came as Gueno, the eternal one
And Gueno defeated death.
There are many things one could say about this wonderful story but I
will settle for only one – the constant battle the Creator wages, to
maintain the integrity of his world in the face of insidious threat from
pride. Four times Doondari has to create an agent to defeat pride. And
four times it rises and fights again. And it was man’s pride that began
it all.
The Fulani people who made this story before the coming of Allah were
obviously concerned about pride. The theology behind the story is not
concerned about seven deadly sins, but only one. In the 1950s after one
thousand years of Islam, a young Fulani from Senegal who had received
the best education the French could give to a brilliant colonial subject
wrote a novel about the plight of his people after their defeat and
subjugation by French arms and policies.
One of the major characters in the novel has this to say:
If it were still only a matter of ourselves, of the conservation of our
substance, the problem would have been less complicated: not being able
to conquer them, we should have chosen to be wiped out rather than to
yield. But we are among the last men on earth to possess God as He
veritably is in His Oneness…How are we to save Him?
The point being made here may elude anyone who has not read Cheikh
Hamidou Kane’s novel: Ambiguous Adventure so I will summarize it:
“We the Diallobe people,” it says “would have had no excuse to continue
living after our fathers were defeated by French arms; we would have had
every justification in committing suicide. But we are among the few in
the world who truly understand God. If we should die what would happen
to God then?”
Now that is hardly a declaration of modesty. In fact it is pretty
arrogant. It would seem that the pride which the Diallobe people
meditated upon is a living problem still with these people in spite of a
thousand years of Islam,in spite of a history that has experienced
imperial grandeur of their own making as well as the ultimate
humiliation of defeat and colonialization by strangers.
We are thus talking about qualities at the core of a people’s character.
Something which survives time and events and can ferry across from oral
poetry in an African language to modern fiction written in French. We
are not talking about transitory fads and fashions.I take my second example from my own people – the Igbo of South-Eastern
Nigeria, and a very different kind of creation myth. Unlike the Fulani
story which takes place in a remote, ethereal setting, the Igbo
storylike the Igbo themselves, is very much down to earth.
The crux of this story is that one morning Chukwu, the Creator, looks
down and beholds the king of Nri and the King of Adama sitting
disconsolate on an anthill surrounded by marshy ground ( It is not clear
whether there are two kings or one king with two titles: for simplicity
I shall assume only one.) Chukwu asks him what the matter is and the
king replies that the soil is too moist to plant the yam which Chukwu
had directed him to plant during an earlier discussion. As a result of
this failureof the crop, the story tells us that people are wandering
through the bushlike wild animals. So Chukwu sends Eze Nri to Awka, the
town of blacksmiths to invite one of them to blow on his bellows and
make the soildry.
This is an unusual creation story. It is not the drama of creation that
it is concerned with. The world is already made and functioning somehow.
But it is not perfect. Man complains to God about this and holds
conversationswith him to bring about changes and improvements,
specifically the tremendous transition of mankind from wanderers in the
bush to settled agriculturalists using iron tools.
The Igbo people who made this story are famous (or notorious
according to one’s point of view) for their belief in conversation even
with God. Unlike their neighbours, they do not care for kings and
kingdoms. They were not easy to colonize; the British described them as
argumentative. Why the British would consider the Igbo habit of arguing
as surprising, is the real surprise.
Why would people who argue with the Creator of the world be
intimidatedby white district officers some of whom were in their
twenties? The Igbo did not care for Empires; they preferred small-scale
village communities where every adult male was the king of his own
household and could takepart in decision-making and every adult woman in
(admittedly less frequent) women’s decision-making.
I hope you will not expect me to demonstrate in detail how the world of
Things Fall Apart and the world of Arrow of God derive their substance
and ambience from these primordial conversations between the first Igbo
people and their Creator.
When the British colonized Nigeria they had a lot to learn- some of them
did, but some of them, unfortunately, did not. It was bad enough that
the Igbo had no kings and no horses, but to also demand a hearing was
just too much! What the uninitiated members of Britain’s imperial
service did not realize was that the Igbo got away long ago talking back
to God Himself. That is a major element of their ethnicity and it will
be present in their life and literature.I want now to address briefly the question posed in what appears like a
sub-title to the main subject: To what degree is all literature shaped
by the cultural contexts of the authors?
The creative enterprise is a magical space onto itself – the mind in
mutual collaboration with the world and its elements to produce
something of aesthetic value. Creative writers are like painters, using
words to paint a literary tapestry. I think that words have a magic,
that human situations- one’s environment, culture, ‘ethnicity’ as we
have spent time re-discovering – can be unburdened to join other factors
wordsmiths use to create literary magic – that extra dimension that the
writer can conjure up by placing ideas about the human condition side
by side on paper.
I suppose that cultural contexts is another name for what we have so far
been calling the factors of ethnicity. Quite clearly these factors do
shape literature. The cultural context within which a writer finds
him/herself is relevant in so far as it brings something of literary
value -contributes to the world story – and does not claim superiority
over, deny, obscure or jaundice, even oppress other perspectives or
stories. But having said thatlet me now admit that there are other
factors and not least among them isthe genius and free-will of the
author.I left this factor out of account until now, for a purpose. Good
literature, whether oral or written, will bear the marks of the author’s
culture as well as his or her own personal signature.
Culture is a shared commodity. It implies community. The behavior of one
person is not called culture; but the action of one person can
influence the culture of the group, and even change it.
Western literature played a central role in promoting the ideal of
individualautonomy. As Lionel Trilling tells us Western literature has
in the last one hundred and fifty years held “ an intense and adverse
imagination of the culture in which it has its being.” It has promoted
the view of society and of culture as a prison-house from which the
individual must escape to findfreedom and fulfillment.
If this is so then it seems to me that a real parting of the ways may
have occurred between Western literature and its own origins, to say
nothing of other literatures.
The father of Western philosophy says: I think, therefore I am. The
unknown formulator of the great Bantu assertion says Umuntu, Ngumuntu
Ngabantu: a person is a person because of other persons. TheIgbo put it
proverbially: if a person feels an itch in the back he calls his fellow
to scratch him; an animal scratches itself against a tree.Georges Braque, co-founder of cubism, once described perspective as “a
ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.”
Perspective is important but it is also a one-eyed view which can
degenerate into meredraughts-manship. Perhaps the celebration of
individualism, another one-eyed view of the world, can now use a little
redressing in Western literature.
The story of Nigeria is one steeped in ethnic and religious tensions and
complexity. ‘Ethnicity’ in the Nigerian context has not evolved,
through ‘a post-primordial civic nationalism’3 into a blissful, common
national identity,as seen in say Switzerland. Until the day “the
Swissification of ethnic conflict”4 arrives, Nigerians, particularly
its writers, should not be satisfied with sweeping the matter ‘under the
rug.’
For those who are not proficient in Nigeria’s recent political history
it mightbe useful to point out that the word ethnic was not always ‘the
ugly girl that many took to bed at night, but denied during the
daytime.’ My generation remembers a Nigeria that was once a land of
great hope and progress, a nation of immense resources at its disposal –
natural resources, but even more so human resources. Nigeria possesses a
greatdiversity of vibrant peoples who have not always been on the best
of terms, but those of us who are old enough remember periods in our
history when collaborations across ethnic and religious divides produced
great results.
The Nigeria-Biafra war changed the course of Nigeria. One can summarize
the conflict as one precipitated by the bile of ethnic hatred. It was
such a cataclysmic experience that for me it virtually changed the
history of Africaand the history of Nigeria. Everything I had known
before, all the optimism had to be rethought. For me, this traumatic
event changed my writing for a time, which found expression in a
different genre – poetry.
Since the war, Nigerians have been subjected to a clique of military and
civilian adventurers and a political class that have exploited the
ethnic divisions in Nigeria. This group, unfortunately, has been
completely corrupted – spearheading the enormous transfer of the
country’s wealth into private bank accounts, a wholesale theft of the
national resources needed for all kinds of things – for health, for
education, for roads. The result has been that the nation’s
infrastructure was left to disintegrate unleashing untold suffering on
millions of innocent people.
This development has been made easy by Nigerian academics who have
presided over the liquidation of the university system and the rise of a
culture of anti-intellectualism in Nigeria. One of the ways we have
done it is our obsession for office.Twenty-five years ago, university professors were held in very high
esteem. Today, I don’t think anybody thinks very much of them, and
quitefrankly, I think it is our own making. What happens when a
university Vice-Chancellor in Nigeria is about to leave office? You
ought to see the trips made up and down to government houses in Abuja,
begging for cabinet positions.
What upsets me is that this entire mess Nigeria finds itself in was
quite avoidable. The leadership appears not to really care for the
welfare of the country and its people. If a political class—including
intellectuals, university professors, and people like that, who have
read all the books and know how the world works—if they had based their
actions on principle rather than on opportunity, Nigeria would not be in
this predicament.
But Nigerian leaders, beginning with the military dictators, looked
around and saw that they could buy intellectuals. Anybody who called
himself president would immediately find everyone lining up outside his
home or his office to be made minister of this or that. And this is what
they have exploited—they have exploited the divisions, the ethnic and
religious sectionalization in the country. You have leaders who see
nothing wrong in inciting religious conflict between Christians and
Muslims. It’s all simply to retain power. So you find now a different
kind of alienation.
In the past in Igbo land, if something kept happening and happening, or
ifsomebody kept failing and failing, the people would go and consult an
oracle. They call it Iju Ase. In the modern world, the systems that
cause these failures are examined. But frankly, I would suggest that
Nigeria has decided to put merit aside and bring up whatever
considerations, and thatis one of the things that happened to us. And
the modern world has not been created on considerations outside of
merit.
I despair over Nigeria daily. On the missed opportunities of Nigeria:
the fact that nobody has had the imagination to say, ‘Look I’m going to
transcend all this ethnic pettiness and become the leader of modern
Nigeria’ because this is important for Africa, this is important for the
world.So, let’s stop all this nonsense about religion, about tribe and
so on. Let’s organize Nigeria and make it a working entity so that it
can fulfill its mission in the world.
There is a great deal of work for the Nigerian writer- indeed all
writers. If the society is healthy, the writer’s job is limited – which
is not the situationin Nigeria. On the other hand, if a society is ill
the writer has a responsibility to point it out even if it produces
headaches in the halls of power!
The role of the writer in a society such as ours besieged with many
pathologies -ethnic bigotry, political ineptitude, corruption, and the
cult of mediocrity – is not an easy or rigid one. Nigerian writers can
choose to turn away from the reality of Nigeria’s intimidating
complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. I hope we all
choose the latter.
1 Ulli Beier (ed.) The Origin of Life and Death, London, Heinemann
Educational Books, 1966, In Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, New
York, Anchor Doubleday, 1989, P.135.
2 Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1962, p.10.
3 Alexandre S. Wilner “The Swiss-ification of Ethnic Conflict: Historical Lessons in Nation building
– The Swiss Example”, Federal Governance Vol. 6, (2007/8), 1-27.
4 Ibid
Achebe was David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies
Brown University, Rhode Island, USA
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