Chinua Achebe

As much as I respect Achebe (which is a pretty good amount of respect, considering he’s pretty much a better writer then I could ever hope to be), I’ve got to disagree with what he says in An Image of Africa. Not the “Joseph Conrad is crazy racist” bit. I mean, I’ve never read Heart of Darkness and know very little about it outside of what I had to learn in order to understand and explicate “The Hollow Men” back in High School- which is to say, not very much- but I’m sure it’s terribly racist and offensive, just going off what little I do know and Achebe’s comments. What I disagree with, however, is the foregone conclusion that because it is racist, therefore it cannot be good literature, an idea which Achebe clearly opposes with his dislike of the classification of Heart of Darkness as “among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language.”

First of all, Heart of Darkness was written (correct me if I’m wrong here) at the end of the 1800s. Is anybody really  surprised that it’s racist? I mean, really? It’s a book written by a noble (in the aristocratic sense, not in the good person sense) white guy in the 1800s and it’s considered some huge revelation that it’s racist? REALLY? To be fair, Achebe’s own essay was only written in the 1960s, so I can imagine that there were still quite a few people around who didn’t get that Conrad’s depiction of the indigenous people was just a tad offensive, but at this point in time, you really kind of have to look at Achebe’s argument and say “well DUH.”

That little rant aside and getting to the crux of my argument, just because a book is racist that doesn’t mean it’s bad literature. And, okay, I may be a middle class white girl who grew up in southern Ohio, so I might be the last person who has any right to defend racist literature, as the ideas espoused don’t really offend me on the same level they would Mr. Achebe. But let’s consider sexist literature instead. If we were to say “only literature that portrays men and women as being equal can be considered great literature!” I’m fairly certain we would no longer have about 90% of what we consider good literature. Including Achebe’s own work, depending what definition of “sexism” you’re working with.

Take Shakespeare for example. Even if you argue that he himself wasn’t sexist (which is pretty debatable from sheer lack of information), his plays were. And I’m not even talking Taming of the Shrew which, once again, has been debated as being “tongue in cheek”. But Twelfth Night? Sexist (you cannot read Viola’s monologue at the end of Act 2 and convince me that play is not sexist. You just can’t). Romeo and Juliet? Sexist. Midsummer Night’s Dream? Oh my God, so freaking sexist. Doesn’t mean they’re bad plays. In fact, I love two of the three I just listed. But they are at least somewhat sexist. Do I go around freaking out over the teaching of Shakespeare because his writing is kind of an insult to my status as an ovary-possessing individual? No. I don’t. I understand that he was writing at a time when pretty much everybody thought women kindda sucked and move along.

And, while we’re on the subject of Shakespeare, he was also pretty racist and anti-Semitic in his writings. Would Achebe have us excise him from the English canon on those grounds? Or does he get a pass because he’s at least writing about black and Jewish people in Europe, while Conrad is writing about Africans on their home turf?

Seriously, you can’t say something isn’t good (or great) literature because it’s racist. In the end, it comes down to being an ideological difference. And yeah, it’s a pretty big ideological difference, and yeah, pretty much everybody who is sane at this point would more or less agree that racism = bad, but that wasn’t always the case and you really just can’t say that something shouldn’t be considered a valuable contribution to the English language because it goes against what you believe. You’re free to like or dislike it as you please, but it is (in my mind) as stupid as saying nobody should read Harry Potter because it doesn’t go along with Christian beliefs. Which is to say very, very stupid indeed. Maybe I’m over simplifying, or maybe I just feel like being contrary, but in my opinion, you just can’t have it both ways. You can’t put clauses like that on things. You can’t say “We should read about all sorts of points of view so that we can have a wide understanding of how the world works and what our history is and why certain things happened*”

“*Except for the things written by racist people. They suck, and therefore, we aren’t going to listen to them, we’re just going to shove it under a rug and act like people didn’t (and don't) think that way… or something?”

So now that I’ve harped on for nearly one thousand words about why I do not agree with Achebe, I suppose I should probably address his other two pieces we’ve read. I promise, the discussion of those won’t be nearly so long.

Full disclosure, this is not my first time reading Achebe. Like many other unfortunate high schoolers, I was forced into reading his first novel, Things Fall Apart, a few years ago. And, as most people my age will agree, pretty much anything you have to read in high school is automatically classified as pure bile for the sheer fact that you are being forced to read it- not because you don’t like reading necessarily, but because you are a teenager and liking things you read in class is simply not cool.

So when I saw that Achebe was on the schedule, I wasn’t really looking forward to it. At all. But luckily, as I have found with other authors that I first came across in high school, I found his writing to be not nearly as horrific as I remember it to be. Mainly because I no longer have the threat of oral group presentations hanging over my head, which are particularly terrifying when you’re the first group to go and you have no idea how to pronounce Ikemefuna. In fact, I found that I might actually kind of sort of like Achebe’s writing- still not my favorite author, or even honestly in the top 100 or so, but I really don’t hate him. As I said at the beginning of this super long blog, he’s clearly a good writer.

Of the two short stories, I prefer “The Madman” over “Girls at War”. For one thing, the topic was more interesting to me personally. I mean, who doesn’t love stories about crazy people? Also, I liked the dark humor aspect of it. Stylistically, it was enjoyable. At first, he annoyed me with his switching of view points between the two characters as it was jarring and kind of confusing, but I think once you know the whole story, his reasons for making that rapid switch between the two are pretty clear.

As for “Girls at War”, it was kind of one of those stories that I feel like I should like but just don’t really. Kind of like how I’m constantly told by my other English major friends that I should read more Tolkien (on the basis that I like fantasy books I suppose?). I understand why it’s good. I get that it has interesting themes and enough irony to maybe teach Alanis Morissette what irony actually is, and it’s an interesting depiction of the class struggles in Africa at the time. I get that, I do. But I just… I still don’t like it. Or at least, not as much as I feel like I should. I don’t dislike it. I’m just not as interested in it as I am “The Madman”, or even “Image of Africa”.

So my over all Achebe experience was much better than I expected it to be. But I’m probably not going to reattempt Things Fall Apart anytime soon.