"Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly," he wrote in his novel Things Fall Apart, "and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." "Proverbs are cherished by Achebe's people as. To repossess descriptions of Nigeria in English, he translated Ibo proverbs and wove them into his stories with Ibo vocabulary, images, and speech patterns. Achebe's transformation of language to achieve his particular ends distinguishes his writing from that of other English-language novelists. Rider Haggard, who cast Africans as beasts, savages, and idiots. He wrote in English because he wished to repossess the power of description from those, like Joyce Cary and H. Unlike Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo and others, who chose to return to writing in their native languages, Achebe judged the best channel for these messages to be English, the language of colonialism. Killam in his book The Novels of Chinua Achebe: "first, with the legacy of colonialism at both the individual and societal level secondly, with the fact of English as a language of national and international exchange thirdly, with the obligations and responsibilities of the writer both to the society in which he lives and to his art."Īchebe's work attempts to recognize the virtues of precolonial Nigeria, chronicle the ongoing impact of colonialism on native cultures, and expose present-day corruption. ![]() As Laurence maintained, "Chinua Achebe's careful and confident craftsmanship, his firm grasp of his material and his ability to create memorable and living characters" put him in the finest rank of English-language writers during his lifetime.Īchebe's "prose writing reflects three essential and related concerns," observed G.D. His achievement has not been limited to his native country or continent by his death in 2013, his work had been published in some fifty languages. Since the 1950s, Nigeria has witnessed "the flourishing of a new literature which has drawn sustenance both from traditional oral literature and from the present and rapidly changing society," wrote Margaret Laurence in her book Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists. Chinua Achebe, who rejected the British name "Albert" and took his indigenous name "Chinua" in college in 1948, was among the founders of this new literature, and over the years many critics have come to consider him the finest of the Nigerian novelists. "Chinua Achebe." World Literature Today, vol. ![]() Achebe served on the 1974 jury for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and was himself nominated for the award by Gabriel Okara, who served on the 2004 jury. In addition to novels, Achebe has published poetry, essays, and a number of children's stories. ![]() His immensely influential first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), has been translated into fifty languages. In addition to being an accomplished author, he has served as an editor and publisher, taught at a number of universities and colleges (including the University of Connecticut and the University of Nigeria), and was appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund in 1999. Born November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, Nigeria, the son of a Christian churchman, Albert Chinuatumogu Achebe changed his name to Chinua Achebe to reflect his Igbo heritage while attending University College in Ibadan.
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