The volume of three essays from Oxford University Press seems so simple: 105 pages, not much these days when writers write long and editors don't have time to edit them down. Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe. So deceptively clear, like the clarity of morning light that cajoles you into thinking reality is right before your eyes. Achebe's text makes you blink and look again.
Manhattan disappears as the train follows the Hudson upriver. The world of purple hills and green pastures is speckled with small towns in need of jobs and a lick of paint, dotted, too, with leafy weekend houses for well-off urban refugees. The taxi drivers, idling at the Rhinecliff station, squabble over who shall have the fare. The winner drives the final 15 minutes to the house tucked up a path beyond Bard College's main entrance. Achebe, in his 70th year, has come to know as much about home and exile as any man can, much more than he would have wished. How far from bucolic Annandale-on-Hudson is his hometown of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria, home to the Igbo people who once, briefly, endeavored to found a republic called Biafra.
In 1958, Achebe opened outsiders' startled eyes to the Africa of Africans in Things Fall Apart (Heinemann; Anchor edition in U.S.), the first modern novel written by an African in English to enjoy large-scale success. More than eight million copies have been sold worldwide. A dozen works followed: fiction, short stories, essays, children's books.
But mention Achebe's name outside college classrooms and for many it rings only a faint bell. Home and Exile (Oxford) is the first solo work to come from the father of modern African literature since Anthills of the Savannah was nominated for the Booker Prize 13 years ago.
A niece, over from Nigeria, opens the door. (Achebe's own children are scattered: one defending a doctorate in history at Cambridge, another doing the same in California; a third completing a medical residency in Texas; a fourth in graduate school at Columbia.) The sun-filled room is in many ways quite ordinary. Yes, there are several African sculptures, carvings with beads, the latest plaques from one of many universities wanting to honor a great man. But also a china closet stuffed with dolls and nondescript knickknacks, a fax machine, a photo of a beautiful daughter in a white wedding gown.
A quarter of an hour elapses before Achebe rolls in, in his chair. More than a decade ago, he was traveling to Lagos airport en route to a semester at Stanford. The car never made it. After the accident, he was flown to a London hospital and, despite months in rehabilitation, he was left paralyzed from the waist down. Then the invitation came from. A place was created for him, a refuge from the chaos unleashed in his homeland and within his own life.
Speaking about his new life, he says, "The day is shorter by the time I go through my routine. I don't lament the fact of fewer hours. If you want to accomplish certain things, you have to give them more time." Later, he adds, "I'm a novelist and there is always a novel hovering. This is like clearing the table for it. I've started in the way I do. "
Achebe has not written overtly about his own life until now. Home and Exile began with three lectures he gave at Harvard in December 1998. The first essay, "My Home Under Imperial Fire," recalls the African stories of his childhood, looks back on his school and university days, and provides quietly devastating examples of everyday European cultural imperialism and African cultural dispossession.
The second essay, "The Empire Fights Back," tells how Africa's story came to be reclaimed by Africans. The final essay, "The Balance of Stories," delves further into notions of dispossession and reclamation, home and exile, through memories as well as razor-sharp critiques of other writers.
Achebe agrees when it's suggested that the essays convey a fundamental message to any writer: know yourself; be yourself; explore your own stories; share them with the world and we'll all learn something. Does that mean that someone who is white cannot or should not tell the story of someone who is black? "No, not at all," Achebe replies. "What it means is to ask anybody who's dealing with someone else's story to walk softly, as Yeats said, because you walk on my dreams. People dream their world into being. If you're a visitor, remember that, and you can write as strong a story as anybody else."
Later, he tells a story about his friend the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. Some years earlier, she had been invited to participate in a conference of African writers that Achebe was also asked to attend. Shortly before the conference, Gordimer phoned him, extremely upset, having been "disinvited," no doubt because of the color of her skin. Achebe shakes his head. "She's more than paid her dues as an African writer. I agree with Ben-Gurion: wh ver wants to be a Jew is a Jew as long as you pay your dues."
"We should set out," he announces in the pukka yet remarkably warm English that characterizes his generation of intellectuals schooled under British imperial rule. It's hard to remember the language he's speaking is far from his mother tongue.
He sits upright in the motorized chair, jauntily sporting a navy blue beret. While we make our deliberate progress, following the path to the college building where he'll conduct his undergraduate seminar, he talks about the five weeks he spent in Nigeria in 1999, his first trip home in so many years. "It was a tremendous experience," he says carefully. "The time I return to live depends entirely on how quickly things return to some kind of normal. I'm talking about safety in the sense of dealing with armed robbers, yes, but also in the sense of having a hospital that works.
"This doesn't mean I'm thinking of 20 years from now. If sufficient movement normalization were to occur... I'm under great pressure from within to go." As he trundles along the wooded path, notions of what too early a return might cost a man in need of a hospital that works--and what every day of not returning costs a 70-year-old whose inspiration has always been his home--play silent counterpoint to the birdsong of the hot spring day.
The text Achebe pores over with his students, Distant View of a Minaret, is a story collection by the Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat. He weighs his words as he says, "Each little story looks little to begin with until you really reflect. Her stories seem to take contradictory positions, so at the end of the day you can't say this world is just this or that. It's this as well as that."
The words could equally well describe Things Fall Apart. Contradiction indeed that the tragic story of an Igbo village leader whose world is undone by the coming of the missionaries should have been written by the son of an Anglican minister who, as an orphan boy, was taken in by the church.
Later, back at his home after the seminar, over some very proper tea and biscuits served by his psychologist wife, Christie Chinwe Achebe, the writer admits, "I am fascinated by ambivalence. I don't expect ever to understand what reality is. I expect to nibble at its edges for the rest of my time, and I think that's where we're supposed to be. We learn all the time but sometimes we unlearn. Christianity has a certain truth which persuaded my parents to go over. The society in which they lived was in disarray."
For Achebe--who started university thinking he would become a doctor--it is literature that provides the healing his parents sought in a foreign religion. "Healing, yes, this is why art was made. The need people have for that healing causes them to make rituals and celebrations. It's not for me to say how it does it, but it does. There are things I knew without actually experiencing them, but experiencing them is that much stronger. Some of the people who came to see me in hospital would say, 'Why would this thing happen to you?' I'd always known there was no answer to that question, only now I knew it even better."
Rifaat's book is one of some three or four hundred in the African Writers Series published by Heinemann London, of which Things Fall Apart was the very first title. Its profits paid for the publication of many of the others, and Achebe functioned as the series' editorial adviser for its first 10 years and first 100 titles. In Home and Exile, the writer alludes to the birth of this seminal project and to Alan Hill, the Heinemann director who made it happen. After university Achebe worked as a broadcaster in Nigeria. He journeyed to London in 1957 to attend the BBC staff school, carrying with him the manuscript of what would eventually become his first two novels. One of the BBC instructors, Gilbert Phelps, a Heinemann author, provided an introduction to his publisher.
"Alan Hill took a chance--he was that kind of man, a really great publisher," Achebe recalls. "He loved books and had the energy to get things done. Can you imagine, he'd meet authors himself at Heathrow at 6 a.m.!" Hill's grandfather had gone to Cameroon as a missionary and "he had that kind of interest in Africa."
The people who succeeded Hill "have not been the same kind of enthusiast," Achebe says simply. "He told me when he was leaving the company that publishing had been taken over by accountants. There are some new people who are anxious to go out beyond the known names. The problem is, they're looking for writers who have the same concerns as themselves. I don't think they even know how to reach out for the really unknown. To know where the game will be in five or 10 years requires attention and freedom from preconceived notions, and that is very, very difficult."
Why, after this decade in America, has Achebe not written about the place? "The story of America is so huge it's frightening--you need to have the temerity to deal with it. I wanted to find out how black Americans are doing with their own story, because that is a story that pertains to me, a story we lost completely in Africa.... We allowed the memory almost to fade.
"That's a big problem we have to address in Africa, and we have the task to link up the two stories. What someone like Toni Morrison is doing to recover that story is of vital importance to me. It's almost like the Africans sold their own brothers. We have to find out how much is our responsibility and deal with it; what is somebody else's responsibility is entirely up to them to deal with."
On the subject of America in general, Achebe says, "The time is coming when what the rest of the world thinks of America will be of considerable import to the happiness and security even of Americans... I wish America would look at itself more critically than she is apt to do. I have a feeling, for instance, that anyone who is going to say something useful about human rights must begin by recognizing that human rights are violated all over the world, and begin by looking domestically at a place where numbers of children survive below the poverty line in the midst of such abundance."
But the conversation cannot help turning to the screaming headlines and mutilated images of Africa that fill newspapers and screens so often these days. Achebe is quiet for a moment. "Africa now... Yes, there's disappointment, pain, sorrow. But I say to myself, when was it in the last 500 years that Africa has not been in great pain and sorrow and disappointment? The answer is, very rarely.
There's an Igbo proverb that says of a particular kind of rodent we have--the grass cutter, which when chewing through the grass makes a lot of noise--even if there's only one of them left, you'll hear this sound. That's a rather grim kind of hope, but the alternative is to give up and kill yourself. I don't like that option.
"You celebrate whatever achievement you can. Somebody asked me recently how I could talk about African literature as a celebration in view of Africa's problems. I said that I'm simply basing my attitude on something very old in my culture. We had celebrations where there were carvings of the white district officer, of the earth goddess, of the gods of thunder and of smallpox. If you don't bring terrifying characters into your celebration, they'll be out there plotting something else. You bring them in and keep an eye on them."
