Product Description

Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer. His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in "Home and Exile", Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work. This work is an extended exploration of the European impact on African culture, viewed through the most vivid experience available to the author - his own life. It is an extended snapshot of a major writer's childhood, illuminating his roots as an artist. Achebe discusses his English education and the relationship between colonial writers and the European literary tradition. He argues that if colonial writers try to imitate and, indeed, go one better than the Empire, they run the danger of undervaluing their homeland and their own people. Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55505 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
Chinua Achebe is one of the most prominent African novelists writing today, and in this book he turns his attention away from fiction to examine the effect of colonialism and entrenched racist attitudes on the culture of his country. The volume consists of three essays based on a series of lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1998, which analyse how the European perspective of African culture has resulted in a debasing of Africa's cultural heritage. He does not only lay the blame at the door of Western writers - he also berates his fellow Africans who sing the praises of Western authors while belittling the achievements of their fellow countrymen. However, he reserves his most stinging criticism for writers such as Joyce Cary, whose novel Mister Johnson is held up as a supreme example of a writer with autocratic control over his subject. Cary manipulates his characters to portray a Nigeria which Achebe fails to recognize from his own experience, and thus calls into question the very integrity of fiction writing: 'It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious, it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item, but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity.' The international standing of a writer is no guarantee that they will be safe from Achebe's scathing observations; V S Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Elspeth Huxley are all condemned and found guilty of trading on stereotypical ideas of Africa to promote their own agendas. In a perceptive discussion of Naipaul's A Bend in the River, in which he draws parallels between that book and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he remarks that 'all literature reflects its creator's beliefs and prejudices'. Yet Achebe is not vilifying Western culture in these essays, merely asking for the right for Africans to write about Africa in their own way, and to view their own country from an African perspective. Despite Achebe's asperity, these essays are leavened by a droll, self-deprecating humour, and above all his contention that only through the power of a country's own narrative tradition can a true impression of that country's culture be conveyed to the rest of the world. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Born in Nigeria in 1930, CHINUA ACHEBE has, in a long and distinguished career, published novels, stories, essays and poems. His most famous book is Things Fall Apart, a novel that has now been translated into over 50 languages.