Those of us who consume literary materials are often proud to listen or read from Professor Charles Nnolim. He has rare learning. And to this, he adds a bull’s courage. So of him, you often get two for the price of one. And as someone addicted to profit and the pursuit of gains, Nnolim as a literary asset is a bargain.
The other season, in a not too distant past for instance, he raised some dust on the sources of Arrow of God, one of Professor Chinua Achebe’s key works. The dust was in our well-considered opinion unnecessary. The point was that Professor Charles Nnolim was correct. But somehow Professor Achebe and his partisans, unnecessarily came up arms in hand. They wanted Nnolim’s head on the platter that he wanted to show a dent in a rather shining armor.
And we gave our sympathies and solidarities to the professor and literary critic and not to the creative mind Achebe. The reasons are simple, he proved his case beyond reasonable, perhaps all literary doubts. The amount, time and provenance of evidence showed that Achebe must have read the story or heard it as it circulated in all Oru na Igbo. Simply, that part of Arrow of God, was not Achebe’s invention. But that did not detract from the superlative work Achebe did. It is common course that authors, borrow, purloin and rob incidences and other people’s stories or histories to write their masterpieces. It is not plagiarism, and is not a known literary sin or crime. Shakespeare is already famous for the dramatic/fictional culling of extant Roman histories [books], including in his masterpiece, Julius Caesar.
Additionally we were bound to give support and solidarity to Nnolim, because truth is more important than country, than any constituency. And we are most preserved, in search, support and founding of truths, than in anything else. This is because truths outlast nations, epochs and empires. Somehow, truth once established, manages to hang on, never knowing death. Meanwhile change like a merciless creditor forecloses on virtually all other beings and things. So, to be a partisan for the truth is life-giving and life-preserving.
But like all reasonable persons, we thought that warfare need not be eternal, not even for the victor. After the incident of which Nnolim came out the hero, he need not raise a false and needless charge against Achebe or anybody else for that matter. Perhaps, the professor-critic was hanging on the logic that since he was correct the last time, he would still be correct the next time. And now logic, and even his own self, have betrayed him.
In a recent interview, with The Sun 02-05-15, he charged that sublimity will continue to elude African writers in English. In his own words: ‘’The sublime is a critical term…. The word sublime or sublimity is rather difficult to define. But any work that is of very high quality and raises the reader’s admiration may be approaching the sublime.’
‘… Sublimity or excellence…. All these are possible only when a writer writes in his own language whose idioms and proverbs and myths, he speaks from infancy. For example, had Chinua Achebe written Things Fall Apart in his native tongue, Igbo, he might have achieved sublimity. But he wrote in English which he had to ‘bend’, and twist and transliterate. That is why I still hold that sublimity will always elude African writers who continue to write in European languages.’’
First of all, let us make the following observations. That Longinus did not define sublimity, does not make it undefinable or un-categorizable. We too are by the way familiar with Longinus and the rest of the triplets – Aristotle and Horace, who make up classical criticism [Penguin books]. Now the point is that language, unlike physics or mathematics is a soft science. Its terms by necessity lack definitional precision. But there has always been a way around it. The matter is simple. If you can’t define it and you can’t categorize it, then you can’t work on it or use it as a term.
Today, the word sublime has been for all practical and category purposes been replaced by the word cannon. The cannon at least in the European tradition are those central works upon which their civilization has been built and is maintained. So, all the body of works that constitute the cannon are considered sublime. Yes, there are contestations here and there, but there are a few indisputable works that have made the cannon, whether it is in literature, mathematics or science.
What is self-evident is that not all of these cannons were written in the ‘own’ languages of their authors. The example of the bible is universal. The New Testament which bears the gospel of Christ was written essentially in Koine Greek. And Koine Greek is the language of the conquerors of the Jews. What was worse even is that Koine Greek was not Attic Greek or the Greek Aristotle, Plato wrote and spoke. Its equivalent is our own Warri or broken English. In fact Friedrich Nietzsche, a German classicist, made a joke that the authors of Christian scriptures wrote in impure Greek.
Despite all these, it is generally admitted that if there be excellence, if there be sublimity, if there be literary wonder, it is to be found in the words of St Paul as anywhere else. That is to say that Paul writing in the language of his conquerors, as Achebe did, achieved sublimity, an entry into the European cannon.
In more modern times Lolita the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian, is taken stylistically and thematically as one of the peaks of the perfection of the novel, since Tolstoy, in any language. Yet the guy wrote in English, an acquired language. And as if that was not enough, Samuel Beckett, a Brit, and the author of Malone Dies, wrote in French and translated himself into English. Of course there are several others and we need not add to the list.
So on a general note, it is clear that the professor’s axioms are proven false, if not forged. And if one is wrong in the general he can’t be right in the particular.
Perhaps what props the professor and a lot of others are the specific cases of Alighieri Dante and the Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese female author. The point is clear. No matter how numerous a case and or incidences are they do not constitute a proof until logic, causal logic is provided. That these two cases happened does not constitute logic, a self-subsisting logic. They only constitute incidences. But that the reverse happened is proof enough that logic does not preclude it happening.
Now the truth is that we are not professors of English. But we are consumers of literatures in English. We can say without fear of any contradictions that Things Fall Apart is a sublime and canonical work. It not only has a charming style, its subject matter, which is wrongly classified as culture clash, is actually the epic of man against the elements. Culture clash was a frame upon which Achebe hung his real epic and narrative.
In fact if Things Fall Apart is properly understood, it can be described as one of the ten key works, of which whatever else is read must be read. In fact we had canvassed and we still so hold, if General Chukwumeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, had read Things Fall Apart and understood it well, he would have fought and delivered Biafra to us. Things Fall Apart, not known to many, and this I suspect includes its author, Achebe, is a supreme text of strategy, in parts superior to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Its inner 7 chapters, which are hidden to profaning eyes, can lead to the recapture of Sambisa Forest in just 17 hours. The point is will the Generals listen? If they do, we will teach them.
Perhaps one last point needs to be cleared. The professor charged Achebe of ancestor worship. That sounded not just unsubstantiated but rather exotic. The professor is wrong on context, is wrong on facts and is wrong also conceptually.
The details are as follows: Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart, in 1958. That means he must have written it earlier. Now in the 1950s, culture clash – that is the alien ruling present invading our traditions and past was okwu akpu na onu, the talk of the town, if one liked. This fact is reflected in the various aspects of our existence: independence struggles/political reactions, and religious nationalisms/ the founding of cherubim and seraphim, the African church where polygamy was tolerated as African and the Christianized ogboni supposedly godly and not anti- Christian. Things Fall Apart and several other works, and one remembers F.C. Ogbalu, who by the way was an economist, were the literary attempts to compliment or fight the same cultural clash wars that Azikiwe/politics, Moses Orimolade Tunolase/religion, Ojukwu/business were at. So Things Fall Apart was one theatre in a mix of the cultural war, to regain our moral and existential turf.
And that war was the currency of the day. There was no more urgent matter. So Achebe’s so called recourse to the past – to alleged ancestor worship – was like a Zik demanding self-governance, shouting go white man go, go home. That is contextually, the past, the ancestors, they wrote about was present, it was not recalled. What Achebe did is the moral equivalent of the Igbo all saying pervasively in the course of their conversations, ‘’before the war or after the war’’. The Biafran war is not past, is not history. It is real for the Igbo even as incomprehensible as this fact is to other non Oru na Igbo Nigerians. We are one country, we are not one people, so we feel different strains of pain. So, the Igbo reiteration on and of Biafra is real and human, all too human. It is akin to the Jewish leitmotif of genocide and final solution. It is not historical. It is real for Jews in a way Aryans and gentles may never understand. And non can canvass us or the Jews out of it.
Additionally facts show that Achebe also moved on novelistically. Achebe was never stuck in the past, he moved with the masquerade. In all, one can say of Achebe as it was once said of Proust: He has faults, but he is un-criticizable. His errors, so called, constitute fecundities, and we can all mine those to our greater glories. Ahiazuwa.
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