Riding on the crests of the success of things crumble: the international celebrity of Chinua Achebe

Nigerian writer Chinua’s book Achebe Things Fall Apart, first published by William Heinemann in 1958, was well received by the British press with positive reviews from critic Walter Allen and novelist Angus Wilson. Three days after its publication, the Times Literary Supplement wrote that the book “really manages to present tribal life from the inside out.” The Observer called it “an excellent novel”, and the literary magazine Time and Tide said that “Mr. Achebe’s style is a model for hopefuls.”

Initial reception in Nigeria was mixed. Hill’s attempts to promote the book in West Africa were met with skepticism and ridicule. The faculty of the University of Ibadan was amused by the idea of ​​a student writing a valuable novel. Others were more supportive. A review in Black Orpheus magazine read: “The book as a whole creates for the reader such a vivid picture of Ibo’s life that the plot and characters are little more than symbols representing a life form irrevocably lost in memory. live”.

An instant event in Nigeria, but slightly revised in the United States when first published (initial New York Times review was less than 500 words)

No book by an African has been so deeply discussed or so influential. “There were books by Africans before ‘Things Fall Apart,’ but this is the one they all go back to,” says Kwame Anthony Appiah, a prominent African scholar who wrote the introduction to Everyman’s Library edition of “Things Fall Apart.”

Things Fall Apart has become one of the most important books in African literature. Its publication is often cited as the birth of modern African literature and, since its publication, the book has sold more than 12 million copies in 50 countries. It has been translated into more than 50 languages, making its author the most translated African author of all time. It has appeared on numerous lists of the 100 greatest novels of all time, including those published in Norway (Norwegian Book Club), England (Guardian and Observer), United States (Radcliffe Publishing Course list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century; Time Magazine) and Africa (The best African books of the 20th century). It remains required reading in schools and universities around the world and is one of the most widely read and influential books ever written. He has generated a great deal of literary criticism dealing with Achebe’s unsentimental representations of tradition, religion, manhood, and the colonial experience. His immediate success secured Achebe’s position in both Nigeria and the West as a pre-eminent voice among Africans who write in English.

The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that for Americans it is “the quintessential novel about Africa.” In fact, it is the basis of the introduction to the continent of tens of thousands of university students and forms many of our ideas of the place even today.

In 1992, Achebe became the only living author represented in the prestigious Everyman’s Library collection published by Alfred A. Knopf. His 60th birthday was celebrated at the University of Nigeria by “a Who’s Who in international African Literature.” One observer noted: “Never before has anything like this happened in African literature anywhere on the continent.” The work that, like Shakespeare’s plays, lends itself to multiple layers of interpretation that are revealed with each new reading, is now anthologized in Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Many writers for generations to come acknowledge that this work paved the way for their endeavors. One of the most famous young Nigerian writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says that she read Things Fall Apart when she was around 8 years old and has reread it periodically. “I found that I liked the same things each time: the familiarity with him. I had not realized that people like me could be in a book,” he explains.

Many others, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who once called “Things are falling apart,” an “important education” for me, to Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist, have cited Achebe’s remarkable feat. Achebe himself recalls some letters he received about a decade ago from students at a women’s university in South Korea:

“It also surprised me in the sense that I realized that people in different places would read it from totally different positions, positions that I didn’t think I knew,” he says.

“They (the students) told me, many of them, that this was like their story. And I said to myself: ‘Korea? I don’t know Korea. And I don’t know what his story is. ‘ They explained that they too were colonized, by the Japanese, that simple fact of colonization was enough for someone so far away to quickly accept this story.

Subsequently, Achebe wrote several novels that span more than a century of African history. Although most of them deal specifically with Nigeria, they are also emblematic of Africa’s “metaphysical landscape”, a view of the world and the entire cosmos perceived from a particular vantage point. Achebe, 78, has written five novels, including Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), five non-fiction books, and several collections of short stories and poems.

Although Achebe encourages Third World writers to stay where they are and write about their own countries, as a way to help achieve balance in storytelling, he himself has lived in the United States for the past ten years, a reluctant exile. .

Things Fall Apart is being celebrated, according to the organizers of events to commemorate 50 years since its first publication, due to several distinctions it has won, including the following:

o It is the first authentic African story told in the original authentic African style.

o Answered some critical socio-anthropological questions posed by earlier non-African writers

o It opened the great door for Africans to write about Africa, which has led to what it is today, African literature and is leading the way some thirty years after the book was written, for Achebe’s compatriot , Wole Soyinka, will win the Nobel Prize. by other Africans.

o The book has been translated into more than 50 languages.

o Has more than 12 million copies in print.

o The book has over 50 awards to its credit and it keeps counting.

o Mainly because of the success of this book, the author has been counted as one of the hundred most intelligent men of the last century.

o The book clearly represents excellence in quality writing as well as the undying power of value in a creative work. It also speaks to the power of hard work and the cousin that goes with it, success.

At the age of 78, Chinua Achebe lives in grace and in exile, housed in a cabin built just for him on the Bard College campus. Achebe came to Bard in 1990, shortly after a car accident in Nigeria left him paralyzed from the waist down.

On March 22, 1990, Achebe was traveling in a car to Lagos when an axle suddenly collapsed and the car overturned. His son and the driver suffered minor injuries, but the weight of the vehicle fell on Achebe, seriously damaging his spine. He was airlifted to a hospital in Buckinghamshire, England, where he received treatment. In July, doctors announced that although he was recovering well, he was paralyzed from the waist down and would need to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. While recovering in this hospital, he received a call from Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, offering him a teaching job and a house built for his needs. Achebe thought she would be at Bard, a small school in a quiet corner of the Hudson River Valley, for just a year or two, but the worsening political situation in Nigeria, especially during General Sani Abacha’s military dictatorship from 1993 to 1998, with much of Nigeria’s wealth going into its leader’s pocket, and public infrastructure like hospitals and roads, the weakening led him to extend his stay. Achebe’s concern for the state of his country is seen in his refusal to accept one of Nigeria’s highest honors: Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR). However, he is waiting for healthy and hopeful signs for him to return.

Shortly after being released from the hospital, Achebe became the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages ​​and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; position he has held for more than fifteen years. As a longtime language and literature teacher, he speaks warmly of students who seem to know his work well, but Achebe hasn’t completed a novel in over 20 years as he has no desire to set any fiction in the US. UU., Saying that it would not be “the most important thing for me, because there are a lot of people doing it.” While he is currently working on two or three projects, nothing is close to completion and acknowledges that “certainly a novel is overdue.” In October 2005, the Financial Times reported that he planned to write a novel for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of short novels in which contemporary authors reinvent and rewrite ancient myths from a myriad of cultures. Achebe’s novel is not yet scheduled for publication.

A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize Achebe won last year In June 2007, the International Man Booker Prize for his career in fiction. Achebe, often referred to as the father of African literature, has received numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award; the Margaret Wrong Award; the Nigerian National Trophy in 1961; and the Nigerian National Merit Award, Nigeria’s highest recognition of intellectual achievement, in 1979. Achebe is an Honorary Member of the Modern Languages ​​Association of America (1975); member of the Royal Society of Literature of London (1981); and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982). He has been awarded the prestigious German Book Industry Peace Prize. Most recently, in November of last year, he received the prestigious National Medal of Honor for Literature from the American National Arts Club.

Professor Achebe has also received forty honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United States, including Dartmouth (1972), Harvard (1996), Brown (1998), Southampton, Guelph (Canada). , Cape Town (2002) and the University of Ife (Nigeria). In 1982, when he received an honorary degree from the University of Kent, Professor Robert Gibson said at the ceremony that the Nigerian author “is now revered as a teacher by the younger generation of African writers and it is to him that they regularly turn for of advice and inspiration. ” Its impact resonates strongly in literary circles. Novelist Margaret Atwood called him “a magical writer, one of the greatest of the 20th century.” Maya Angelou praised Things Fall Apart as a book in which “all readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents, friends and themselves along the roads of Nigeria.” Nelson Mandela, recalling his time as a political prisoner, once referred to Achebe as a writer “in whose company the prison walls collapsed.”

In June 2007, when Achebe received the International Man Booker Award, the judging panel included American critic Elaine Showalter, who said it “lit the way for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies “; and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who said Achebe has accomplished “what one of her characters brilliantly defines as the writer’s purpose: ‘a newfound expression’ to capture the complexity of life.”