Novelists From Nigeria

"I rank Achebe very highly, especially his Arrow of God, and I consider it a tragedy that he has had to live under such disturbed conditions and writes so little."

"Achebe is a great writer. He is the father of our English literature. You can't take that away from him. His work is highly original. When I was doing my degree here, I used Arrow of God, which I think is his best work. But the critics seem to think everything should be like Things Fall Apart. Everytime you want to read Achebe, you feel you want to study it as literature. You don't pick it up as though you want to enjoy the literature. That is why for a very, very long time, if you went to the African Writers Series, you had the feeling that this is not for the common people."

"When I read Things Fall Apart which is about an Ibo tribe in Nigeria, a tribe I never saw, a system-to put it that way or a society, the rules of which were a mystery to me, I recognized everybody in it. And that book was about my father. How we got over I don't know, we did!""

"I do reread novels I love, like Chinua Achebe’s “Arrow of God,” to remind myself of what fiction can do."

"Camara Laye’s The Dark Child and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because they gave me a glorious shock of recognition. Until I read them, I was not consciously aware that people who looked like me could exist in books. I grew up in a Nigerian university town, and all the books I read before then were foreign children’s books with white characters doing unfamiliar things."

"There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had ever witnessed."

"The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations."

"Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world."

"Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform."

"People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience."

"People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories."

"My people have a saying which my father often used. A man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof."

"As the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth-living."

"Don't disparage the day that still has an hour of light in its hand."

"The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight, they will always prosper!"

"[W]hatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism. (p. 154)"

"A number of very young people in Kenya have adopted the Marxist analysis of society. And I cannot quarrel with that. But I can't help feeling at the same time... that my own aesthetic definition, which I gave earlier on, would be a little uneasy about the narrowing of things to a point where we no longer accept the truth of the Ibo proverb that "Where something stands, something else will stand beside it," and that we become like the people we are talking about the single-mindedness which leads to totalitarianism of all kinds, to fanaticism of all kinds. And I can't help the feeling that somehow at the base, art and fanaticism are not loggerheads. And so I don't dismiss the Marxist interpretation. I think it is valid in its way. But when somebody says "I am the way, the truth, and the light.... "Now my own religion, the religion of my people says something else. It says, "You may worship one god to perfection and another god will kill you." Wherever something is, something else also is. And I think it is important that whatever the regimes are saying that the artist keeps himself ready to enter the other plea. Perhaps it's not tidy perhaps we are contradicting ourselves. But one of your poets has said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well.""

"Well there is an assumption there that Conrad's...Heart of Darkness is great art and I don't accept that. Great art flourishes on problems or anguish or prejudice. But the role of the writer must be very clear. The writer must not be on the side of oppression. In other words there must be no confusion. I write about prejudice; I write about wickedness; I write about murder, I write about rape: but I must not be caught on the side of murder or rape. It is as simple as that."

"we are not gladiators. But there is something we are committed to of fundamental importance, something everybody should be committed to. We are committed to the process of changing our position in the world. This is what our literature is about. There is a certain position assigned to me in the world, assigned to him [Baldwin] in the world, and we are saying we are not satisfied with that position. This is important to me-to everybody. I think you see it is important to me. You may not see that it is important to you but it is. We want to create the new man. Mankind tries all kinds of ways, all kinds of solutions; some of them leading that far and no farther and it is wise that we try something else. We have followed your way and it seems there is a little problem at this point. And so we are offering a new aesthetic. There is nothing wrong with that...Picasso did that. In 1904 he saw that Western art had run out of breath so he went to the Congo-the dispised Congo-and brought out a new art. Don't mind what he was saying before he died: that much is entirely his business. But he borrowed something which saved his art. And we are telling you what we think will save your art. We think we are right, but even if we are wrong it doesn't matter. It couldn't be worse than it is now."

"What art tries to do is domesticate whatever is around and press it into the service of man. Morality is basic to the nature of art."

"The total life of man is reflected in his art. And so when people come to us and say, "Why are you... you artist so political?" I don't know what they are talking about. Because art is political. And further more I'd say this, that those who tell you "Do not put too much politics in your art," are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is. And what they are saying is not don't introduce politics. What they are saying is don't upset the system. They are just as political as any of us. It's only that they are on the other side. Now in my enthusiasm, art cannot be on the side of the oppressor."

"A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days."

"We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet."

"Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth."

"The earth seemed unearthly."

"It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know."

"The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art."

"A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril."

"In his mind, he could see the ravages of war: destruction, suffering, hunger, and the grotesque faces of men turned beasts by the bitterness of combat."

"War is war. The strong will always crush the weak. The only difference is that in the process some have made a lot of money and others a lot of misery."

"When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool."

"I don't believe anybody will be so unlike other people that they will be unhappy when their sons are engaged to marry."

"We did not ask him for money yesterday; we shall not ask him tomorrow. But today is our day; we have climbed the iroko tree and would be foolish not to take down all the firewood we need."

"They led and he followed blindly, his heavy chest heaving up and down in silent weeping ... it was the worst kind of madness, deep and tongue-tied."

"Lame foot in the air."

"He warns them not to become “disinherited”."

"He calls the ground where men return in death a place of “safety” and “strength” ."

"Lying in wait for the people’s land and resources."

"A dead end nor total loss."

"Measure out / [their] joys and agonies / too, our long, long passion week / in paces of the dance”"

"By immediately identifying his people as “men of soul” ."

"Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil."

"So Chike’s adventure on the River Niger brought him close to danger and then rewarded him with good fortune. It also exposed Mr. Peter Nwaba, the rich but miserly trader. For it was he who had led the other thieves."

"In his joy, he said again, ‘Thank you, sir.’ The man did not reply; he was talking to his friend again, with a cigarette in his mouth."

"Then the stranger went away and Mr. Nwaba retired to his room. Chike did not give much thought to the incident at the time. But he was to remember it later."

"The largest sum of money he had ever had at one time was threepence."

"After the incident of the leopard skin Chike lost some of his eagerness for crossing the Niger. He did not see how he could obtain one shilling without stealing or begging."

"At first Onitsha looked very strange to Chike. He could not say who was a thief or kidnapper and who was not. In Umuofia every thief was known, but here even people who lived under the same roof were strangers to one another."

"That’s all they cared for,’ [Max] said with a solemn face. ‘Women, cars, landed property. But what else can you expect when intelligent people leave politics to illiterates like Chief Nanga?"

"What mattered was that a man had treated me as no man had a right to treat another—not even if he was master and the other slave; and my manhood requires that I made him pay for his insult in full measure."