Chinua Achebe Draws Large Crowd In Final “Princeton Reads” Event

Ellen Gilbert

Chinua Achebe, often called the “father of African literature,” engaged a standing-room-only crowd at the Nassau Presbyterian Church last Wednesday in the culminating event of “Princeton Reads,” a month-long celebration of his book, Things Fall Apart.

In her opening remarks, Princeton Public Library Director Leslie Burger lauded the third anniversary of “Princeton Reads,” which she described as the “collective act of reading the same title.” She noted that over ten million copies of Things Fall Apart, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, have been printed and it has been translated in over 50 languages. The 125 copies owned by the library, she noted, were all out on loan, and copies of the book had been available throughout the month at various Princeton eateries.

Princeton University English Professor Simon Gikandi introduced Mr. Achebe, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 in honor of his literary career, as “a cultural institution.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, was Mr. Achebe’s interlocutor for the event.

Introduced by Mr. Gikandi as “one of the most perceptive students of African culture,” Mr. Appiah said that he remembered interviewing Mr. Achebe in Cambridge, England for an article in the Times Literary Supplement in 1982. He was struck at that time, he said, by Mr. Achebe’s belief that “we have the capacity for diverse identities,” each with its own inherent responsibilities.

The 77-year-old writer, who was paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident in 1990, playfully declared that it was only recently that he understood the passage he was about to read from Things Fall Apart. He realized, he said, that it was “relevant to everything we say about Africa and the African condition.” He observed that since it was his first book, he was “not fully aware” of what he was doing. He did, however, describe his strong feeling of responsibility to write it, in the face of the complete absence of African books in the world he grew up in. “There was a gap on the bookshelf,” he observed. The British novels he and his community were given “weren’t quite what I was looking for. If you don’t like the stories being told about you, they are not acceptable.” While Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness claimed that Africans’ language had been taken away, Achebe said, he “knew better.”

After Mr. Achebe’s reading, which described a village elder addressing the family of the “flawed hero” who had been banished from his own community because of an accidental murder, Mr. Appiah wondered how the author, who was only in his twenties when he wrote the book, was able to speak so convincingly in the voice of an older man. Mr. Achebe responded by describing the “double life” he lived as a youngster whose family had converted to Christianity in a community where not everyone else had converted. Feeling “the difference” in his life, he said, he “wanted to know what was going on in the village,” so he always hung around old men, who impressed him as orators. An older sister also instilled a passion for narrative tradition in him.

When Mr. Appiah asked about the difficulty of “writing in English about that which had not been written about before,” Mr. Achebe responded by saying that it had not been “a struggle in the sense of something unpleasant. I was aware of the struggle between two languages being used simultaneously. English is profoundly different, but I found that it was possible for the two languages to hold a conversation — to talk to each other. It struck me that this was what I should do: use language with respect.”

Asked about Nigerian politics today, Mr. Achebe declared that “Nigeria is a great disappointment to me. I can’t say that too strongly, or too frequently.” He said that he is hopeful, however, about the future. The country is “well-equipped with human resources, antiquities, and petroleum,” and although they are not being used right now, it is possible that there will be change.

Of the future of African literature Mr. Achebe said that he expects the next generation “to have a really strong body of writers,” adding that, “I think something is cooking.” As for his own writing experience, he said that he “cannot believe my good fortune in writing that book. Sometimes I say, ‘That book wrote me; it taught me what to do.’”

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