Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in English so that his characters and motifs in the story would reach a western audience whose perceptions of Africa were based mostly on the savage depictions of European perspective. This doesn’t mean that it was easy for Achebe to neglect his mother tongue, he realizes, like Ngugi, that language is a serious point of contention for the future of African culture and society. However, as Achebe attests himself, he had “no other choice” but to write the novel in English. Achebe provides a window into Ibo culture and infuses the language, proverbs, and speech patterns peculiar to these people while doing it in the tradition of a Greek tragedy that is familiar to his western audience. His aim isn’t merely to humanize and repair the image of these people for the western eye, but to stand their culture up against European culture and reveal how they are both limited and both susceptible to savagery. The story doesn’t hide from the brutality of some of the Ibo rituals, but Achebe reveals a socially conscious people that were adapting, advancing, and discovering where there own culture needed change and progress. Colonialism was not the answer.
Ngugi, although critical of Achebe for writing the novel in English, admits to his own struggles with writing fiction in African language and finding the appropriate ‘fiction language.’ I had trouble buying the argument in class that Decolonizing the Mind is throwing the middle finger at the English language, Ngugi’s stance has more depth and complexity to it then this. I feel like he’s calling out to his fellow African intellectuals and writers, Achebe included, and asking them not to abstain from taking the English form altogether, but instead to be cautious and realize that it is important to not put English on a pedestal as superior and to make greater efforts to reach the working classes through literature in their own languages. Otherwise, as his colonial education would put it, “The ‘Great Tradition’ of English literature was the great tradition of ‘literature’!” (Pg. 91)
I really like your take on how Ngugi is encouraging his fellow African intellectuals and writers. Your opinion about not putting English on a pedestal can be supported in many second/third-generation households all over the world, as well. Here's the stereotypical situation: When the kids come home from school and want to speak English, the parents reprimand them and remind them of where they came from and how they learned another language before English. To a point, I think Ngugi could be characterized as a protective parent - he isn't dead-set on destroying the efforts of future writers, he simply would like to preserve the past. Your post jogged my mind to the some of the Amazonian tribes that don't even have a language and speak through a series of guttural tones and hand signals. They have culture without necessarily involving language, so can we have language without involving culture?
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