Jackie Kay, 'Things Fall Apart'

Não tenho ambiçôes nem desejos 

Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha 

É a minha maneira de estar sozinho.

Fernando Pessoa ('O guardador de Rebanhos' in "Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro")

I don't have ambitions or desires

Being a poet isn't my ambition,

It's my way of being alone.

Fernando Pessoa ('The Keeper of Flock' in "Alberto Caeiro: The Complete Poems")

I never speak about poetry in my blog and I don't know why. I don't know if poetry works on the internet, where people come into a blog like this and read quickly a post in multitasking mode, hardly reaching the end of it. I'll try anyway.

I'll start with a poet some of you may not know. My intention is not to post Wordworth's "Daffodils"; for that you can go everywhere on the net. I want to post something that I find interesting, slightly different from the poems we are used to read in literature classes, and then write something about it.

The first poet I’d like to talk about is Jackie Kay. She was born in 1961 in Scotland, from a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother. She was adopted by a white couple and raised in Glasgow. She has written poetry ("The Adoption Papers", “Off Colour”, “Life Mask”), novels for both adults (“Trumpet”) and children (“Strawgirl”) and, more recently, a memoir (“Red Dust Road”). Some years ago she went to Nigeria to meet her biological father and had written a piece for the Guardian whose copyright is now expired. To know that story I guess you’ll have to read her memoir (I’m eager to, by the way, as I’ve read her novel “Trumpet” some years ago and loved it). Alternatively, you can read this poem:

Things Fall Apart

My birth father lifted his hands above his head

and put the white mask of God on his handsome face.

A born-again man now, gone were the old tribal ways,

the ancestral village - African chief's nonsense, he says.

I could see his eyes behind the hard alabaster.

A father, no more real, still less real - not Wole Soyinka.

Less flesh than dark earth; less blood than red dust.

Less bone than Kano camels; less like me than Chinua Achebe.

Christianity had scrubbed his black face with a hard brush.

'You are my past sin, let us deliberate on new birth.'

The sun slips and slides and finally drops

into the swimming pool, in Nico hotel, Abuja; lonely pinks.

I knock back my dry spritzer, take in the songs

of African birds. I think he had my hands, my father.

                                                                                (From "Life Mask", 2005)

I have chosen this poem, over several others by Jackie Kay, because it is highly resonant with names and tropes of postcolonial literatures: two great Nigerian writers are named, not to mention that the title immediately takes us back to the atmospheres of Achebe’s most important novel, “Things Fall Apart”. The discordance between expectations and real events is the main focus of this short poem. The old tribal ways swept away by the religion and the customs of the colonizers, as it happens in Achebe’s novel, are paired to her disappointment at a father she has long imagined and now that he is in front of her, in flesh and blood, looks like dark earth and red dust to her. Unable to reconcile her father with the figure of the Nigerian intellectuals she knows, she is finally left alone in the hotel and thinks of his father’s hands, so similar and dissimilar from hers, those same hands that were lifted above his head to take God's white mask and to put it on his handsome face (Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” is the obvious reference here).

I like this poem for its simplicity, its refusal of the idea that poems use difficult words and complex figures of speech. It blends the narrative intent and the lyric moment, lending words in a most crystalline way to an emotion that we have all felt: disappointment and disenchantment.

40. “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of first publication: 2009
Genre: collection of short stories

Country: Nigeria (but some stories are set in the USA and one in South Africa)

What it’s all about: This is a collection of twelve short stories, set in Nigeria and in the USA. The protagonists are all Nigerians, but their backgrounds and lives s are very different, ranging from experiences of war and riots in the author’s home country to the immigrant experience in America. Adichie’s stories often feature young women and their everyday epiphanies, tackling themes such as the brutality of war, colonialism, family relationships, the immigrant experience and the miscomprehensions between husband and wife.

Some thoughts: Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I’m not particularly fond of short stories. There is not much time to develop the characters in a story, consequently only good writers are able to say something really clever in just a few pages. Adichie is one of them: the stories are cleverly constructed, involving and offer a wide range of complex characters. Without any doubts, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most talented young African writers around. However, my favourite works by Adichie remain her two novels, Half of a Yellow Sun especially.
In “A Private Experience” an Igbo girl is sheltering from a riot among her people and Hausa people in a shop. She befriends a Hausa woman, demonstrating the inconsistency of ethnic conflicts at the personal level. The one described in the story is an episode of religious and ethnic friction that seems to be quite common in Nigeria but also scary and dangerous. In “Ghosts” the setting is the beloved university campus of Nsukka where Adichie grew up. The main character is a retired university professor of mathematics enquiring about his pension that never comes in, just like “el coronel” Buendía in García Márquez’s El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel). Floating in the darkness there is not only the ghosts of people he believed to be dead, but also the ghost of the Biafra war, which features prominently in her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. There are also stories concerning the experiences of Nigerian immigrants in America, such as “The Shivering”, about a young Nigerian woman in an American college and her gay friend Chinedu who is also very religious. As my blogger friend Nana wrote in his blog, homosexuality is sort of a taboo subject in Africa, but Adichie touches on it in two stories (the other one being “Jumping Monkey Hill” about a creative writing workshop in South Africa, but I would also suggest a strain of it in “On Monday of Last Week”). By doing this, she shows her “open-mindedness” and her sensibility on the matter. Other important themes are the relationship of Nigerian wives with their husbands, especially relating to distance and immigration (“The Arrangers of Marriage”), and family relationships (“Tomorrow is Too Far”, “The American Embassy”). The last story, “The Headstrong Historian”, can be considered a follow-up of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because it relates the colonisation of a village in three generations’ time. The traditions of the village and their animistic religion are swept awat by Christianity and the white man in a bitter way. This story demonstrates that Adichie can deal with traditional Nigerian lifestyles just as well, but it’s also a sort of reminder that Adichie takes on from Chinua Achebe in order to continue a tradition of excellent story-telling. Some people argued that it was pretentious for Adichie to write such a story, but I don’t think so. Adichie shows her admiration for Achebe without boasting about a comparison between her and the most prestigious of Nigerian writers.

About the author: see this post

Read my reviews of other works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie here and here.

Writing about Africa and not for Africa

How many occasions do we have for celebrating famously inflation-racked Zimbabwe, a country run by somebody defined by many as a tyrant? Well, now we have at least one. Petina Gappah’s collection of short stories about her home country, Zimbabwe, has won the Guardian First Book Award. An Elegy for Easterly has been praised by many critics and I’ve read a great deal about it. Even though the country is living in a permanent economical depression, life still goes on there: people are falling in love, getting married and having children. We should think more often about that.

The author is a Zimbabwean lawyer who now lives in Geneva, Switzerland, and was partly educated in the UK. She said that she doesn’t want to be labelled as “the voice of Zimbabwe” and that she doesn’t write for Zimbabwe but about Zimbabwe. I really want to read this book. Maybe for Christmas I could have it posted from the UK…

By the way…

Some weeks ago an article appeared on The Guardian website telling us that Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian writer, had rejected the definition of “father of modern African literature”* on the grounds that “there were many of us”. Now a new article, written by Ghanian author Nii Ayikwei Parkes, has some interesting thoughts on the matter. Apart from the fact that it is obvious that there cannot be only one father of African literature as African literature is diverse and written in many different languages, he reflected on the meaning of the expression “father of modern African literature”. Immediately after reading the piece, he googled “father of European literature” and “father of primitive African literature”, thus underlining the eurocentric undertone of the aforementioned expression!

This made me wonder at the way we still "patronize" Africa, we consider it as a whole, even when we are sponsoring what we call "postcolonial literature" (without thinking that this label also implies an eurocentric point of view).

* This expression was coined by Nadine Gordimer in a completely different context. The original sentence was "Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature".

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

I am currently reading The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Needless to say, I'm enjoying it very much. Everything that this young Ningerian novelist writes is a blessing.

As a quick snack, I would like to share this video with you. Adichie speaks about the danger of falling into stereotypes if you have only one story as reference.

By the way, Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie has been chosen for this month's Guardian book club and there is a beautiful article by John Mullan, the man behind this book club, about the crossing of Igbo and English in the novel. Make sure you click on the links provided!

Some more literary news!

* The Guardian, which had completely forgotten about Kamala Das's death (!), has made up for it with an obituary (here). From the article I learn that she wrote an autobiography in which there is much fiction, a book that could be described as a "biomythography". I wish I knew this word or Das's memoirs when I wrote my graduation thesis on Janet Frame's Autobiography! Now I want to read this book, it sounds so interesting (it must be all about freeing herself from domestic and sexual oppression).

* Marilynne Robinson's Home has won the Orange Prize for Fiction. It was quite expected, as everyone who read all the novels shortlisted for the prize agreed (here the reviews of a blogger friend, Lizzy). When I chose from the plots which books I'd like to read (here and here) I didn't consider Home, but other titles (for example Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction youth panel's award, anyway). Well, I don't know, I might give Home a try after all!

* Here's an interesting interview with Helen Oyeyemi, the young author of a novel called White is for Witching. The novel involves ghost stories, gothic literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Dracula, Wuthering Heights etc.) and Caribbean and Nigerian supernatural traditions. Very, very interesting. Oyeyemi is a British writer of Nigerian origin, but she is also interested in the Caribbean region (her second novel The Opposite House is about the Cuban Santeria religion!). Here's the link.

8. “Things Fall Apart” di Chinua Achebe

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1958
Genere: romanzo

Paese: Nigeria

In italiano: Il Crollo di Chinua Achebe, edito da E/O nella collana I Leoni (2002), € 14

Sull’autore: Chinua Achebe è nato nel 1930 in Nigeria, da genitori protestanti. Ha studiato sia in Nigeria che a Londra, diventando poi professore emerito alla University of Nigeria. Ha scritto più di 20 libri, tradotti in oltre 50 lingue. Things Fall Apart (1958) è il suo libro più famoso ed ha avuto una grossa influenza nello sviluppo della letteratura post-coloniale non solo della Nigeria, ma di tutto il continente africano. Achebe ha vinto, tra gli altri premi, il Commonwealth Poetry Prize per il suo libro di poesie Beware, Soul Brothers and Other Poems (1971). Ho parlato di Chinua Achebe anche in occasione della recensione di Heart of Darkness di Conrad (qui), perché l'autore nigeriano ha scritto un bellissimo saggio sul perché secondo lui Cuore di Tenebra è un romanzo razzista (concordo, anche se Conrad era un uomo del suo tempo, come Kipling d'altronde).

Trama: Okonkwo è un grande guerriero: la sua fama si è estesa in tutta l’Africa Occidentale ed è uno degli uomini più potenti del suo clan. Purtroppo ha anche un brutto carattere: determinato a non essere come suo padre, si rifiuta di mostrare segni di debolezza – anche se l’unico modo in cui può mostrare i propri pensieri è con la forza. Quando degli stranieri, dei bianchi, minacciano le tradizioni del suo clan, Okonkwo usa di nuovo la forza. L’orgoglio pericoloso di Okonkwo lo porterà alla rovina.

Alcuni pensieri: Sulla copertina della mia versione di Things Fall Apart c’è scritto “The writer in whose company the prison walls fall apart” – Nelson Mandela. Fa un po’ impressione sapere che Nelson Mandela leggeva questo romanzo nella cella durante la sua prigionia e mi fa capire quanto questo libro sia importante per la storia della letteratura africana. Nel mio percorso di lettura personale questo libro fa parte dei capisaldi di letteratura africana che voglio leggere (ho anche appena finito Une si longue lettre di Mariana Bâ e a breve intendo comprarmi Nervous Conditions di Tsitsi Dangarembga).
Il libro in definitiva mi è piaciuto parecchio: è affascinante leggere delle tradizioni nigeriane prima dell’avvento del cristianesimo. Ho sentito in questa intervista per BBC World Service che lo scrittore ha fatto delle ricerche per descrivere questo tipo di società che ovviamente lui non conosceva per esperienza diretta. Una delle forze del libro, a mio parere, è l’assenza di un punto di vista monolitico riguardo all’arrivo degli europei e del cristianesimo in Nigeria: alcuni pregiudizi, per esempio, l’abbandono dei gemelli nella foresta perché ritenuti spiriti maligni, vengono ovviamente ripudiati da coloro che abbracciano il cristianesimo, mentre altre tradizioni e rituali che avrebbero potuto portare ad un sincretismo religioso particolarmente interessante vengono spazzati via senza pensarci due volte. Chinua Achebe non giudica il cristianesimo o l’animismo come religioni, ma piuttosto descrive l’invadenza di una cultura e di una religione altra in un villaggio che forse non è pronto.
Okonkwo, a mio parere, si avvicina molto all'Eugene di Purple Hibiscus (un romanzo di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, una giovane scrittrice nigeriana, vedi qui la recensione). Infatti mi sembra di ricordare (credo sempre da una di queste interviste per la BBC) che lei si sia ispirata a lui e abbia cercato di riprodurre l’atmosfera del libro. Certamente Chinua Achebe è una grossa influenza per tutti gli scrittori nigeriani, essendo tra i più importanti scrittori del paese insieme a Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri e Christopher Okigbo. Okonkwo ha le stesse debolezze di Eugene: se da una parte è un uomo che è riuscito a diventare ricco lavorando sodo e partendo da zero ed ha ottenuto il rispetto di tutto il clan per questo, dall’altra non è capace di condurre una vita familiare serena. Okonkwo è infatti dispotico e violento in casa, sia con le mogli che con i figli, in modo molto simile a quello del padre di Jaja e Kambili.

E’ ovvio che la letteratura africana degli anni ’50 (il libro è stato pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1958) era ancora un po’ acerba. La narrazione infatti è delle volte - come dire - un po’ piatta, ma in definitiva è un bene che sia diversa da quella di un comune romanzo inglese o americano dello stesso periodo o precedente.

"Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of publication: 2003
Genre: novel
Setting and time: Nigeria, just after a military coup (as Junot Diaz would put it, I skipped my mandatory three seconds of Nigerian history back at school)

Themes: religious extremism, childhood, family life, education, political commitment, everyday life in Nigeria

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa

About the author: see this post

Plot: Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is lived under his shadow and regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. When Kambili is sent to her aunt’s house in Nsukka she discovers love and a life -- dangerous and heathen -- beyond the confines of her father's authority.

Some thoughts: A wonderful book! There are many novels that try to analyse the problem of religious extremism in the Muslim world, but this is the first time that I read something about Catholic extremism. It’s quite scary, actually. I never thought that people like Kambili’s father (called Papa or Eugene in the novel) could exist. It is disturbing how he can be despotic and violent at home while he is generous and brave to the outer world. At home he uses violence and fear to punish his family for what he sees as sins (like visiting his “heathen” father or coming second-best in the math class), but at the same time he is a benefactor, paying for the educations of dozens of children and giving money to charity. Furthermore, he is one of the few people who has the courage to speak up about the political situation of the country: he publishes pamphlets against the military regime. Obviously, his commitment will have disastrous consequences on his life and on that of his family.
The whole idea of writing a novel from the point of few of a fifteen-year-old girl is quite good: Adichie manages to depict the reality surrounding Kambili in a simple way. For example, there are no detailed explanations of the political situation of Nigeria. In fact, I could not even understand in which years the novel is set (1980s-90s, maybe?). While for other novels this could be considered a flaw, in this case it is quite appropriate, because the political and socio-economical deterioration of Nigeria is not the main topic of the novel, but it serves as a purpose to highlight Eugene’s contradictions.
One thing I really loved about this novel is the use of Igbo in the dialogues (so now I can say “kedu”!) and the portrayal of everyday life in a Nigerian compound. However, it was quite impossible to live up to Half of a Yellow Sun, the other novel by Adichie (my review here). I didn’t find in this book a character that I loved as much as I loved Ugwu, the houseboy in Half of a Yellow Sun, or expressions that stayed in my mind for a long time such as Odenigbo’s “you are such an ignoramus!”.

In conclusion, I love this writer and I really look forward to reading another of her wonderful novels.

"L'Africain" by J.M.G. Le Clézio

Year of publication: 2004
Genre: biography, memoir
Setting and Time: Nigeria, Cameroon, France and Guyana, before and after the Second World War

Themes: Africa, family relationships, vocational jobs, colonialism

Nobel Prize in Literature 2008

About the author: read this post

What it’s all about: In this short book Le Clézio remembers his father, who was a “jungle doctor” first in Guyana and then in Cameroon and Nigeria. Here you can find his thoughts about his African childhood and about life in remote places.

Some thoughts: Can you start to understand why Le Clézio won a Nobel Prize by reading this nice little book? Not really. I mean, this is simply the account of the life of Le Clézio’s father as a doctor in various parts of the world, not a full-length novel. Of course, you can learn about his background and understand why he wrote about so many different parts of the world (sort of like Bruce Chatwin I would say).
The childhood of the Le Clézios in Africa is the antithesis of colonial life: they don’t have a big house with many servants (even though they have a “houseboy”) and they are the only white people in their village, so they are not enjoying the kind of life that Doris Lessing or Muriel Spark might recount about their African experience. There were a few fascinating things that he remembers about Africa, for example some of its animals and the life style of the people over there. The most interesting thing is how Le Clézio’s father is changed and shaped by his hard life in remote places of the world: when he goes back to France he is a real African man. There is nothing exotic in Le Clézio’s tale: his father led a lonely life in very isolated places and sometimes he had little human contact. Moreover, he lived with the frustration of not having the right medicines to cure the most common diseases of the villagers.

I’d like to read more about this author, as I’m not really in a position to say if he deserved the Nobel Prize or not. For the moment, I’m happy that I managed to read this small book in its original language and I can say that I quite enjoyed it.

Just click on the tag called Nobel Prize in Literature 2008 for some "musings" on this year's Nobel Prize Award.

“Half of a Yellow Sun” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of publication: 2006
Genre: historical novel
Setting and time: Nigeria, 1960s
Themes: war, love, colonialism, tribalism vs. modernity, ethnic tensions, national identity

Orange Prize for Fiction, 2007

About the author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka ,where she attended primary and secondary schools. She went to university in the USA and now lives between Connecticut and Nigeria. Purple Hibiscus (2003), her first novel, was short-listed for the Orange-Prize for Fiction and won the CommonwealthWriters’ Best First Book Award. Half of a Yellow Sun is her second novel to date.

Plot: In 1960s Nigeria, a country blighted by civil war, three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young beautiful woman, has abandoned her life of privilege to live with her charismatic lover, the professor. The third is Richard, an Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister Kainene. When in 1967 the shocking horror of the Nigerian–Biafra war engulfs them, their lives change forever.

Some thoughts: I loved this novel, it’s going straight to my all-time favourites! I liked everything about it: the characters are developed very well, the story is compelling and the style is superb. It is uniquely African without being ‘burdened’ with traditions and customs that can be difficult to understand for the average western reader. At the same time, it perfectly explains the situation behind the Nigeria-Biafra war without being pedantic. I particularly liked the fact that all characters have their flaws: Olanna is sometimes haughty, Odenigbo too idealistic and Ugwu a bit simple-minded. I loved how they evolved and changed as the story went on. There is no omniscient narrator, which means that you need to make sense of different perspectives by your own. Adichie’s characters are mostly wealthy educated Nigerians who discuss international politics and development economies, as well as poetry and art. There are nonetheless two characters in the novel that are utterly different from everything that Adichie might have experienced in her life: Ugwu and Richard. It must have been a challenge to write about a white Englishman in Nigeria and a poor houseboy, but Adichie achieves her goal. All of them felt so alive that I was thinking of them as if they were real people! The narrative is so compelling that when the characters are engulfed in the civil war you only wish that the war would finish, so that Olanna’s and Odenigbo’s suffering can end.

What makes this book precious is nonetheless the Igbo culture that permeates the story: it was really interesting to read about the reasons that triggers the ethnic conflicts in Western Africa, but also to read about everyday life in Nigeria (habits, fashion, food, education). I look forward to reading Purple Hibiscus!