Chinua Achebe may be dead and gone to his grave but his novel, Things Fall Apart is still the space setter in terms of what literature can do, does and should do, especially for Africa. The novel is still the subject of diverse contestations. Of course, every novel or every work of art is open to multiplicity of meaning, none of which is permanently right or wrong. And so, in this interview, literary theorist, Dr. Emmanuel Egar comes up with a piercing interpretation of the timeless stuff, Things Fall Apart. It is debatable if there have been such a sustained critical appraisal of the chart topping text as in this interview conducted by Intervention’s Editorial Associate, Adagbo Onoja with the former Literature lecturer for 15 years at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff in the United States of America from where he returned to Nigeria in 2015.
Until recently, Dr. Egar was the Head of the Department of English and Literary Studies at Veritas University, Abuja before becoming the Coordinator of Graduate Studies where he is experimenting with ‘a mother of all modules’. Dr Egar first earned a PhD in Higher Education Leadership from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas in the United States and then another PhD in English Literature and Rhetoric from the University of Texas in Arlington, also in Texas, US. That is where he wrote a PhD thesis “The Rhetorical Implications of Things Fall Apart” in 1999.
Let us begin with this now hidden, now open but interesting debate about which of Literature and Political Science has done better in articulating the African cause in the postcolonial era. The scoring seems to be favouring Literature for now.
Well, I think literature would have got that sort of rating because it is a voice of protest, a voice fighting for an identity and a voice to show us up to people who do not like us. The voice that tells such people we are at their door.
It is like Soyinka talking in Abiku where he was saying something like, ‘I am the suppliant snake coiled up on your doorstep and yours is the killing cry’. So, literature became the cry that will never stop.
Why can’t the dweller in the house kill this snake?
The snake cannot be killed because it is at your door step, it is supposed to protect you but also a mechanism to check your attitude. It is both an enemy and a friend. The message is, whatever you do, don’t ignore the snake.
But why the metaphor of the snake?
The snake is suppliant, gentle but a deceptive mechanism; too diplomatic but also capable of violence.
I mean that the snake has the terrible image of a deceiver which doesn’t rhyme with that of a voice crying for restitution for misrecognition
Well but it is so friendly; it is in that friendliness that lies its potential damaging effect.
So, literature’s power lies in the voice
It lies in articulation of a perpetual cry for attention
But that seemingly inbuilt capacity to draw attention has been shut down
That’s because of the changes in our social communication. There are now movies, the internet and all such sites. So, students are no more as enticed by good literature. The public is so engulfed in ‘give me something to eat’. Literature is about talk, persuasion, raising anxiety, raising doubt, hope and even desire. But the average Nigerian is not concerned about that but with something to eat, with survival. There is another poem I can’t remember the poet immediately but in which an innocent and naïve girl treks to a distance for water every morning. That sort of girl wouldn’t know about Negritude or any grand ideologies, about Aime Cesarie, Senghor, etc. Her quest is with feeding but literature doesn’t supply that sort of feeding. It does so but through intellect but the daily survival challenge has shut the intellect out for now.
You have just mentioned Soyinka and there are others. That means that literature was achieving or had achieved something before the shut down.
That is true. If you take Achebe, for example, he made himself famous from being somebody putting our name on the map. His novel Things Fall Apart (TFA) was so successful but that was because he was playing the noble savage syndrome. In that novel, Achebe was like admitting and even demonstrating that, yes, we are noble savages or that we cannot run away from that. The Western world likes it when we self-abuse. So, TFA comes along and fills that noble savage gap. Okonkwo is a born mad man who was not at peace with himself, his family, community and the colonialists. That is one.
And then Achebe brings up this poem from Y B Yeats: Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ and all that. And Yeats goes on to make a foolish statement in the poem where he said: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
In that poem, he is struggling with what is happening to the world and he has an epiphany: The second coming is at hand. But he hardly finished when a spirit appeared in the desert and this spirit has a blank and pitiless glance like the Sun and all around the beast are shadows of indignant desert birds. That is how he put it.
The question is, what is this beast doing in the desert. And I don’t know how he brought Christianity into it by saying ’20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle but what an awful beast? Its hour comes round at last, slouches to Bethlehem to be reborn’.
The question of what this beast is doing in the desert here is a rhetorical question because, in a rhetorical question, the question is the answer and the answer is the problem. And so, because it is a rhetorical question, it shows TFA was going to be inconclusive.
Achebe follows it up in that as mad as Okonkwo is, he didn’t die outside. He had to die at home but die as a wretched person who could only be buried in the evil forest. This is very abnormal expectation for the end of a hero. Achebe also carried it off till the end of the book. At the end the District Officer or whatever you call him says I am going to London to write a book to be called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. That is Achebe’s afterthought.
An authorial confession?
Yes. An authorial confession that he didn’t write the book he set out to write. It is like saying, sorry, I forgot the book I set out to write. TFA can, in that sense, be said to be an unwritten book.
How did you arrive at that?
Because the book he set out to write has still to come and he is thinking backward. Instead of writing the book he set out to write, he wrote bullshit about what the whiteman had come to do, about the conquest of the black culture. That is why I compare Achebe’s afterthought with the story of the French poet, Mallarme, one of the French literary figures of the 17th century France. He started off by hoping to write a book that is beyond the book. So, he wrote on scraps, on the pillow sheet, toilet tissue and so on. But, at the end of the day, he didn’t write a book. As Maurice Blanchet would say, Mallarme had written a book by not writing the book.
Given the popularity of Things Fall Apart, where does this leave the scoring debate on Literature and Political Science on the African crisis?
As I said, literature came to fill the wailing, the anxiety, the frustration, the doubts that Africans had not written much before Achebe. And here comes Achebe to say, more or less like, let me present the world with the syndrome of the noble savage and he presented TFA, filled it with brutal savagery and bestial images and the West took it. He gave them the raw meat and they cheered.
In other words, Achebe’s TFA has been more of a disservice than anything else
Yes. I can tell you that. Five students once walked out of the class when I taught the novel. They just couldn’t absorb the savagery, the brutality beyond the brutality, a situation in which a father had become a murderer.
So, the question now is how could Achebe moderate a fight between his and another culture and allow the defeat of his by the colonial culture in TFA?
The book that got Achebe to snap and reply to it by showing that Africa was not a void before the colonialists came to feast on it
You are suggesting that the author could have varied the story
He could. He didn’t and the only reason was he was dancing too much to the taste of the consumers, to prove the capacity of Africans for savagery
But he said he wanted to show up Joseph Conrad as a racist
That is not there in the novel. And it would have been a very weak attack because Conrad didn’t create the darkness. He didn’t create the darkness. In the book that Achebe was replying, Mr Kurtz, the leader of the campaign, went to the place to harvest mineral resources. That made him complicit in exploitation. It is worse when, feeling threatened, he killed the suspects and put their skulls on display. I imagine he did so to make himself feared by all those opposed to him. There are all sorts of terrible things in Conrad’s book but the darkness was in Mr. Kurtz himself. And there is something interpretively significant in Conrad’s novel because it is an African who was the hero of the novel. By showing a dying Kurtz the humanity of the African, he showed the very opposite of the savage. Little things that matter. So, Achebe did not have to write TFA the way he wrote it because of the way Conrad wrote his own.
In TFA, you had a father, Okonkwo, killing his son, Ikemefuna. The novel could be censured for that. If that happened, Achebe would have been out of business. But here was Achebe advocating censorship against Conrad’s book because the book doesn’t favour his taste. Yet, TFA has a very troubling story in Ikemefuna. Censorship has a dangerous precipice. It goes down and down until you fall and never wakes up. It was a bad campaign because censorship works in two ways. Why don’t you leave posterity to pass judgment? Are we supposed to write books to please people? Writers write to instruct and to please.
How much of that is a consensus in the literary world?
Well, people are beginning to see it because a culture has to be really, really weak for another culture to crush it the way the Western culture crushed African culture in TFA. Nobody wants to write about the weaknesses of any culture like that. Look at New Zealand where there are two national anthems. There is the national anthem of the Maoris and that of the white people. That is a culture that could not be broken. In our case, Achebe says these people came to crush us, with the colonial DO going to write about his feat.
So, to answer your question, I think people were probably not bold or intellectually equipped to see the damage that Achebe had done to Africa. When Soyinka raised the voice that Achebe was too predictable, there was outcry that it was jealousy. In Nigeria, we bring ethnicity to everything.
But Achebe and Soyinka are all products of the University College, Ibadan as it was then. How did it happen that Soyinka could see what Achebe couldn’t see?
Well, Soyinka is a man who sees things in two ways and he never surrenders to any. He is never blinded by events and he is into political agitation. If he didn’t see the weakness in Achebe’s work, all his agitation would have been useless because his critics would say he keeps silent when it is in his African backyard.
So, what would be your essential distinction between the two?
In what way?
Let’s say in literature, first
Soyinka is a writer who doesn’t crave to be read. He is all for the avant-garde, far away out there, with his own audience or group that will read his works. I think Soyinka won the Nobel prize for his political agitation more than for his poetic talent or theatrical creativity. Who understands his poetry? He writes like like Ezra Pound, very much contrary to Dr. Johnson’s point that good poetry should instruct and entertain. Soyinka comes hard, caustic language that is not friendly at all, rather repelling and avant-gardist. I wouldn’t be surprised if he entertained the old colonial idea that the writer should not be writing for everyone.
That is your portrait of Soyinka of literature, what of Soyinka, the politician, the agitator?
I think Soyinka did Africa much good by his agitation, in creating issues. The Western world enjoys it too but differently. He is seen as standing up against the damage to his people.
What are those issues, specifically?
Human rights, political corruption, checking local despotism. I think he got those ones right but again, his biggest weakness is throwing stones and then standing at a safe corner. That could be problematic. Because, by steeping back, he destroys whatever he created
I think Soyinka has this contempt for the power elite in Nigeria. He said he took a look at them in London at the dawn of independence and concluded that they were up to no good whatsoever
It is easy enough to stand at a distance and throw stones. That is the Soyinka problem. Obviously, he thinks a writer’s job is to raise problems but not to solve them. But that is wrong. In fact, you could create more problems if you don’t provide solutions. That’s the terrible weakness of his philosophy of politics, of his agitation.
He once threatened to contest as a Councilor
Did he contest?
No, he didn’t. Let’s return to Achebe. Achebe had also created the African Writers Series. How do you rate the works in that camp?
All these are novels of protest but Senghor, for example, had divided loyalty. A French citizen married to a French wife and then fighting for freedom for Senegal. He cut the figure of someone sleeping with the enemy or who wasn’t being sincere with himself. Most were in Achebe’s corner and that is what he was doing in his No Longer At Ease where an educated, young, independent minded and sober African could not escape darkness. Obi Okonkwo got stuck, fell in to corruption.
So, what message do you read Achebe as passing?
He was suggesting that nobody could fight corruption, that corruption kills any person fighting it
I thought he was speaking to the poverty of leadership, trying to show that even an educated, promising young person like Obi Okonkwo could not hold out against corruption?
If he was saying so, did he consider whether they had the artillery to fight the system? It is okay to have read all the philosophers – Hegel, Marx, Derrida, but does education solve the problems? I am not sure destroying a hero is the way to answer that question. Yes, we must admit that, at the end of the French Revolution, the middle class used the challenge of being kicked out of the system to re-insert themselves by creating the standards in a unique educational system, turned the arts, music and culture into their own spaces. And that ours was the opposite. We have not been able to do that. Rather, we are like the story in Saint Mathew, ready for the crumbs from the master’s table. The middle class has not been able to energise the society. Here, it is people in government or people with money that are the masters. And that is why the middle class is not respected because they have not done anything to change the system. But, does admitting so justify destroying a hero? How do you build confidence in the people if you destroy the hero?
You don’t want the hero destroyed. Perfect, but how might we understand the crash of the collective?
Just the sheer weakness of the spirit to stand against a powerful force. The poverty that results from that is such that you cannot confront the rich and the powerful.
So, we are not able to create our own paradigm and live by it, right?
Yes. We didn’t although we should have done so. We don’t have the power, the military but if we created education, theatre, popular culture, music and all of that, it would have helped us. We would have been making our own money and wouldn’t be so confused. We just didn’t create a world after our own image.
Now, you are the Coordinator of the graduate programmes of the Department of English and Literary Studies here at Veritas University, Abuja. Are you creating something distinct?
I am nurturing something, trying to start something which would enable our graduate students to read Roland Barthes, Hegel, Foucault, Derrida and all those voices. It is going to be a reading course.
What is the message intended?
Well, this is a university and it must have something distinct to offer here and there. But it is also to show that life is not about ‘yes Sir’ all the way but about questioning the question. The hope is that something good and ‘bizarre’ will come out of it. When I say bizarre, I don’t mean anything untoward but that all those who pass through the course will appreciate ‘the thingness of the thing’.
Generally, our students are not adequately equipped to question the thingness of things because they have not been brought up that way. Rather, they are trained to think that A is A and B is B. But where has that left us? So, we have to do something by way of academic content.
Education in Nigeria is still a confluence of the British and the American. Where is this problem of relative emptiness coming from?
More from the British because, in the British system, you go to school, graduate, get a job, get married and live your life. You don’t even know how to change the bulb because the educational system told you that such is for the bricklayer or someone else down there. And that planting a garden is for petty servants. In other words, our educational system doesn’t give students Plan B.
Are you then absolving the American system of the blame?
Yes. The American educational arrangement gives you the capacity to think. A student was asking me one day. He says Dr. Egar, you are teaching literature, literature, literature. What if Literature doesn’t put food on the table for me. That is thinking. And I had to answer. Why wouldn’t Literature put food on the table. Why wouldn’t a good Literature graduate think of setting up an office and give all those who bring a manuscript a price to pay? After all there is no better expert than the good Literature graduate in proof reading, speech writing, newspaper stuff or the entire writing enterprise.
What if someone says yours is the opinion of a recipient of American education?
What is wrong with that? I would only have been saying that British philosophy, the psychology of the system, British empiricism and so on are out of fashion. Critical thinking is what is selling.
That is absolutely correct but critical thinking is continental philosophy which the British have a share as Europeans even as they are no more in EU
But Oxford still teaches British empiricism, what Plato said and all that, forgetting that there was battle between Socrates and Plato
I would perhaps let Oxford respond to that.
General laughter!
