Chinua Achebe: A Literary Diaspora Toasts One
of Its Own
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
[A] NNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, -------------
N.Y., Nov. 4 — [Image]
Considering the stature of
the two literary lions Will Waldron
sitting onstage for a for The New
historic dialogue, the York Times
question seemed so Chinua
pedestrian that the host Chinua Achebe
and interrogator was at his
apologetic. If you were 70th-birthday
stuck on a desert island, celebration
Leon Botstein, president of at Bard
Bard College, asked his College.
guests, Chinua Achebe and
Toni Morrison, what book -------------
would you take with you? Related
Articles
He got a look of disbelief • Books
from Ms. Morrison, winner
of the 1993 Nobel Prize in [Image]Forum
literature. • Join a
Discussion on
Then came this response Books
from Mr. Achebe: "Beloved," -------------
he said. He was referring [Image]
to Ms. Morrison's novel Will Waldron
about a mother who kills for The New
her child to save her from York Times
slavery. And no, he told Chinua
the audience, which was Achebe, the
murmuring its collective Nigerian
approval, he was not saying author, and
so to be "precious." Toni Morrison
at Bard
"I think she's the only one College on
who is probing the African Friday.
conundrum: the question of
what happened to us in the -------------
continent and in the
diaspora," said Mr. Achebe, the Nigerian author
widely regarded as the patriarch of the African
novel. "How could it happen? We have not dealt
with that question on the continent. I think
Toni Morrison has the courage to deal with it."
He singled out "Beloved," he said, because in
the abominations of that story — the
abomination of slavery and the abomination of a
mother murdering her child — lay the most
haunting question facing the black world. "This
daughter you kill will come back; and when she
comes back, it's not going to be pleasant," Mr.
Achebe said in his slow, considered voice. "A
similar question will come up on the continent:
`Is it true that you sold your own brother?' "
Ms. Morrison, clutching a hankerchief in her
right hand, sat absolutely still. No matter
what the explanations of European conquest and
greed, Mr. Achebe went on, the question still
gnaws. "It's a frightening conundrum we have to
deal with, we black people," he added.
Those hushing words came at the end of a
conference in celebration of Mr. Achebe's 70th
birthday at Bard, where he has taught for a
decade.
For two days, wearing the traditional Nigerian
red cap reserved for important men, Mr. Achebe
sat in the front row with his wife, Christie,
listening to the paeans onstage. The president
of Nigeria, Olesegun Obasanjo, sent a cabinet
minister to deliver a birthday salute. Jimmy
Carter sent a letter. Nelson Mandela sent
birthday greetings in which he recalled the
books he had read while imprisoned in South
Africa. "There was a writer named Chinua
Achebe," Mr. Mandela wrote, "in whose company
the prison walls fell down."
The birthday party brought some of the most
influential black writers and scholars to Bard,
a campus of 1,200 students snuggled in the
Catskill Mountains, where only 4 percent of the
students are black. Men in traditional West
African brocade suits walked around the campus,
crunching red and yellow leaves underfoot. As
if to accommodate all the Southern Hemisphere
natives who had arrived for the weekend,
temperatures were unseasonably warm.
Among the participants were many who might have
been wearing the literary equivalent of Mr.
Achebe's traditional red cap. Wole Soyinka,
another Nobel laureate who, like Mr. Achebe,
has been an outspoken critic of dictators in
their native Nigeria, described him as a writer
of courage and commitment. John Edgar Wideman
credited "Things Fall Apart," Mr. Achebe's
groundbreaking 1958 book about a Nigerian
village before colonialism, with teaching him
about the power of gesture — "primal language,"
he called it — in the telling of a story.
The Kenyan playwright and novelist Ngugi wa
Thiong'o brought his grandchildren, who at one
point climbed onstage to give Mr. Achebe a
birthday card. The Princeton historian Nell
Irvin Painter sat in the audience knitting.
Ms. Morrison spoke of how Mr. Achebe's writing
had not only induced her love affair with
African literature more than 30 years ago, but
also helped her think about her own tussle with
English, a language, she said, at once rich and
deeply racist. What she gleaned from Mr.
Achebe's work, she said, was not simply to
write against the "white gaze," but outside it,
so as to "postulate its irrelevance."
She described her debt to Mr. Achebe as one
that was "very large, had no repayment
schedule, and was interest-free."
So on this afternoon, it was Mr. Achebe's turn
to flip the script. To be sure, he was grateful
for the praise, he said privately, but he found
it all a little odd, too.
"It's a funny feeling," said the author, who
has written five novels, five books of
nonfiction and numerous short stories,
children's books and poems.
"I am pleased. But it's not intended to be that
way — to be sitting in the front row and
everyone's singing your praises — unless you're
a third world dictator."
But as improbable as the site seemed to some
("Dutchess County is one of those places you
avoid instinctually," Mr. Soyinka said), they
praised, and he listened.
For Mr. Botstein, the birthday, which Mr.
Achebe's family was planning as a private
event, offered an opportunity to celebrate the
writer's presence on campus. "It's a
celebration of the power of literature, the
power of the imagination, the power of the
significance of Africa," Mr. Botstein said
later.
The intellectual wrestling matches that once
divided many of these African writers and
thinkers — whether to write in a colonial or
native language, for instance, or whether a
writer was political enough — were noticeably
absent. After all, it was a birthday party.
So Mr. Ngugi, who once famously fought Mr.
Achebe over his choice of English as the
language of his novels, mentioned none of that.
There were not even any verbal fisticuffs
between Mr. Soyinka and the historian Ali A.
Mazrui, whose decadelong argument intensified
recently over a documentary that Mr. Soyinka's
friend Henry Louis Gates Jr. made of his trip
to Africa.
"Wole Soyinka and I will be on our best
behavior for his birthday party," Mr. Mazrui
declared.
But a few of the new questions swirling around
African letters bubbled up. Mr. Mazrui
catalogued some of these in discussing his
effort to compile the 100 best books of 20th-
century African literature: Is a writer African
because of citizenship or the content of the
work? Does African literature include works by
writers in the African diaspora — does Toni
Morrison or Alex Haley count?
Perhaps the most salient fact about African
letters today didn't have to be articulated.
That Mr. Achebe's birthday was being celebrated
here, on the banks of the Hudson rather than
along the Niger itself, spoke volumes. From Mr.
Soyinka, who now teaches at Emory University in
Atlanta, to Mr. Ngugi, a professor at New York
University, many of the writers gathered here
had been forced to leave their countries. They
were all exiles, what Mr. Achebe's colleague
the Romanian writer Norman Manea called
"displaced dreamers and messengers."
For her part, Ms. Morrison declined to name the
one book she would take if she were exiled to a
desert island. Instead, she said, she would
want reams of paper and some pencils. "I'd like
to write the book I'd like to read," she
offered.
"I would write between the lines," Mr. Achebe
softly responded.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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