The pitfalls of cultural consciousness

Philosophia Africana, March, 2007 by Chielozona Eze

In "The Empire Fights Back," a lecture delivered at Harvard University, (1) Chinua Achebe hints that his novel, Things Fall Apart, was conceived, among other reasons, as a response to the misrepresentations of Africa in some Westerner stories. He mentions Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary, whose stereotypical images of Africa in their respective novels forced him to "fight back." It is therefore the need to take back the discourse about oneself that constitutes, in Achebe's words, the "overpowering urge to tell a story." (2) According to him, F. J. Pedler cautioned Westerners writing about Africa to be aware of the implications of their words. Achebe highlights the most instructive phrases from Pedler's book: "West Africans themselves"; "their own country"; "authentic stories"; "of their own people," etc., and concludes that Pedler was on the "side of the right of a people to take back their own narrative" (HE, 44). In my view, it is this thinking that informs the provocative title, "The Empire Fights Back," which, I guess, is designed to echo the popular introductory postcolonial discourse book, The Empire Writes Back. (3)

Although Achebe's uses of the fighting back metaphors are not to be understood in any militaristic way, underneath the title of his lecture is nevertheless the thought of gaining power and control over one's own fate. The idea of fighting back could therefore be understood in Marxist terms: an expression of readiness on the part of hitherto oppressed people to assume control of the instrument of oppression in order to stop the oppression. To write or tell about a people is to claim knowledge about them; it is also, narratively, to shape their destiny. Hence, Achebe realizes that when Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary defined and denied African personhood, they attributed to the African an ontological status that does not properly belong to the African. This ontology, moreover, has long-range antecedents in the European modernist discourses, especially in the philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment. (4)

It is in this light that we welcome Neil ten Kortenaar's argument that Things Fall Apart was written chiefly as a response to Hegel's assertion that Africa has no history. It is as if in Things Fall Apart Achebe returns to the African a humanity Hegel had discursively denied her. Ten Kortenaar specifically argues that Things Fall Apart is "an example of historical narrative," (5) and he couched one of his observations in James Olney's interpretation that "Okonkwo is an 'ideal' standing for the characteristics of a whole people." By this reading, and just as Spirit or Idea is supposed to function in orthodox Hegelianism, Okonkwo, the African, "is a sort of abstraction: Ibo-man incarnate." (6)

It has indeed become common sense to suppose that Okonkwo is representative and typical of his fictive Igbo society, a society that, in turn, is symbolic of Africa in the world community. (7) Thus, metonymically, Okonkwo stands as Africa, and his story becomes Africa's history. These observations are, of course, in line with Frederic Jameson's critique of third world writing as largely allegorical. (8) The third world allegorical writings, Jameson argues, ignore among other things the job of probing into the specificities of the lives of individual persons. People are treated only as symbolic of the group, and the group is almost always presented as an answer to some political questions. But it is precisely in the contriving of a story to provide answers to political questions arising from any society that I wish to locate some key problems with not only Achebe's Things Fall Apart, but also with his Arrow of God.

An Ethics of Ressentiment?

I will argue that Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God may not be the anti- or post-colonial intellectual panaceas many critics have come to assume they are. It seems to me that the worlds of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, to the extent that they can be read as responses to Africa's colonial problems, constitute at best rubber stamp answers to the historical problems that Africa discovered in its brutal encounter with modern imperial and colonial European cultures. Is it possible to imagine that Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God initiate, extol, and promote--even in their challenge to European discourse and the demands of national allegorization--an ambiguous cultural existentialist ethic: an ethics ressentiment?

Of course, I understand that to raise this question is to side-step other, and perhaps more expected, points of view on the novels discussed. For example, instead of deploying Nietzsche's hermeneutics of suspicion, the echo of which is intended in my choice of the word resentment, one could easily appeal to Fanon or Hegel, specifically to the dialectics of Master and Slave. In this latter view, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are indeed dialectically in conversational struggles--struggles over meaning--with racialized and racist modern European history and philosophy. It is therefore in the spirit of an experimental reading--What if?--that I have privileged here a hermeneutics of suspicion.