Narrative and Culture

I accept that Achebe is writing for an English audience, partly because of his introduction of the Igbo language, complete with a vocabulary list. What Professor Shingavi called "info dumping" also seems to corroborate with the idea of introducing English readers to a foreign culture.

Debt to his own culture aside, though, I wonder if these piecemeal introductions create a debt in the mind of readers. To me, inserting an Igbo word into the middle of an English sentence with its English syntax, connotation, and vocabulary creates an action similar to that of colonialism. It disrespects the boundaries of cultural knowledge and uses a familiar apparatus of cultural meaning to come to grips with foreignness. Umuofian culture may be respected with the repeated "info dumping" sessions, but this respect is, again, superficially introductory.

If Achebe wants to create emotional complexity and strange heroics which make us question our index of morality in a foreign context, then he has succeeded. But he has not brought us into greater understanding or appreciation of that foreign context. Where our knowledge of a culture seems to exist, there is only knowledge of something different from our own culture, and where some familiarity with a language is established, it’s not done in any meaningful way.