A Tribute to Chinua Achebe

BlackFeminists

It’s October 2008, and I’m in my first year of an English Literature degree. We are slowly working our way through the great works of the English literary canon- which peculiarly fetishises the writings of dead white men. This week’s book is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It’s a deeply unsettling novel, soaked in white supremacy, by an author dedicated to denigrating blackness in all its forms.

There’s a lot than can be said about the politics of canonized literature. These are the books that are taught over and over again in classrooms across the west. Their elevated status encourages us to accept their content uncritically. This book, set in the year 1899, was predictable in its race hate, but that didn’t make it any less shocking. Black skinned people were violently ‘othered’ and repeatedly reduced to the status of an animal. The novella’s protagonist would stare into black skinned brown eyes and struggle to find humanity. This book painted us as bestial. And there was I, of African heritage, one of two black students in a lecture hall of roughly 100, feeling uncomfortable, feeling ashamed. We were expected to discuss the literary merit of a text that I’d now consider hate speech.

We were encouraged to seek out literacy criticism applicable to the text. That’s when I came across Chinua Achebe’s essay- ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

Every now and then the power of the written word proves itself when you stumble across a writer who speaks to you. That’s why I’ve always liked literature- ideas suspended in time and space are as relevant now as the day the words were written, and they will continue to be long after an author passes away.  There are few writers whose work shapes your understanding of the world, and Chinua Achebe did that for me.

Achebe was one of the greatest literary thinkers of the past century, who contributed greatly to a shifting of the accepted boundaries of representations of race in literature. And that essay was one that rests alongside the legendary status of works such as Orientalism by Edward Said.

The essay was the literary equivalent of sticking his neck out, exposing Joseph Conrad for the racist he is.  ‘Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’’ smashed apart white supremacist, euro centric thinking that was too often accepted as the norm. His work inspired so many influential critical race writers after him. Toni Morrison cites Achebe as one of the writers who inspired her work.

He wrote about the danger of not owning your own stories. Born into an African diaspora I found myself submerged daily in narratives that othered me. We can critique, but to own our own narratives, we must create. With his writing, Achebe achieved this.

We rely on thinkers who came before us to ignite a curiosity about the status quo. That questioning takes courage, because the repercussions can be violently adverse. Writers like Achebe and Morrison walked a difficult terrain that made it easier for people like me to speak about our understanding of race and racism without fear. Last week he died, aged 82. He left a legacy and I for one am indebted to him.