Review of Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe

'The Empire Writes Back' will have been a fitting title for this essay collection. (especially since Achebe doesn't fail to pay a tribute to Salman Rushdie's essay of the same name published in 1982). Because that is what the running theme here is - a reclamation of a land and a culture that was wrested away with brutal force and made a part of an 'Empire' which still insists on viewing that period as one of glory and not characterized by the most despicable human rights violation ever and a heralding of the arrival of the African voice in the world literary scene.

Achebe is slowly turning into my personal literary hero. His wry humor, elegant prose, mildly sardonic tone and passion for social justice exude a quiet confidence that's hard not to respect. His writings continue to make me question certain pet notions and ideas that are so deeply entrenched in each one of us that they seem like indisputable facts and consequently elude further introspection. My penchant for unconsciously comparing Latin American, South East Asian and African writing to the style, technique and language of the Americans and Europeans I admire and immediately pronouncing judgment on them on the basis of said parameters has to go away now I realize.
It doesn't matter if African, Asian and other writers of the Commonwealth have the same degree of grammatical precision and structural integrity to their prose as their European and American counterparts. It matters that their voices be heard and universally acknowledged and the overlooked truths their narratives highlight be analyzed without bias.

Although this collection consists of 3 essays titled 'My Home Under Imperial Fire', 'The Empire Fights Back' and 'Today, the Balance of Stories' it should be considered a single body of work or discourse intended to dispel certain flawed notions about African people who are often derogatorily referred to as 'tribes' and automatically assigned a lesser status than their white counterparts.
Achebe reminisces about his early years as a young university student in Nigeria, reading literature based on Africa authored mostly by British and European scholars who, of course, liberally manufactured painfully offensive 'facts' regarding the intellectual and anatomical inferiority of his fellow brethren and propagated the theory that European acquisition of their land and sphere of existence was for the sake of their own personal benefit.

This is what Achebe says about the interlinked natures of inherently racist literature of the time (he is sophisticated enough not to use the word 'racist' even once though) and the Atlantic slave trade:-
"I will merely say that a tradition does not begin and thrive, as the tradition of British writing about Africa did, unless it serves a certain need. From the moment in the 1560s when the English captain John Hawkins sailed to West Africa and 'got into his possession, partly by the sword and partly by other means, to the number of three hundred Negroes,' the European trade in slaves was destined by its very profitability to displace trade in commodities with West Africa."
Achebe directs his suppressed ire at Anglo-Irishman Joyce Cary who was regarded as one of the finest novelists of his time and his creation 'Mister Johnson' which Achebe systematically breaks down and interprets as a text strewn with viciously hateful commentary on Africans. Another renowned novelist and translator who had considerable first-hand experience of Africa, Elspeth Huxley, isn't spared either as her criticism of Amos Tutuola's 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' as a 'folk tale full of queer, distorted poetry, the deep and dreadful fears, the cruelty, the obsession with death and spirits, the macabre humour, the grotesque imagery of the African mind' comes off as an insidious denouncement of all African literature in general.
Joseph Conrad, predictably, is his next victim. But his criticisms are hard to brush off coldly in light of the near infallible arguments he presents.
Quote from 'Heart of Darkness' -
"Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman."
Achebe's deconstruction-
"A more deadly deployment of a mere sixteen words it would be hard to imagine. I think it merits close reading. Note first the narrator's suspicion; just suspicion, nothing more. And note also that even the faint glimmer of apparent charitableness around this speculation is not, as you might have thought, a good thing, but actually the worst of it! And note finally, the coup de grace of double negation, like a pair of prison guards, restraining that problematic being on each side."
Next on Achebe's hitlist are the ever controversial V.S. Naipaul and his lecture titled 'Our Universal Civilization' delivered at the Manhattan Institute and his caustic and downright obnoxious comments on Asian and African readership and cultures. Achebe puts into focus the difference in attitudes between the Indian-origin Naipaul and the famed Indian writer R.K. Narayan by stating how Narayan saw 'a million stories' every time he looked out of his window and not a 'million mutinies’ like Naipaul did.

He ends by hailing writers like Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola who have lent enormous credibility to the African literary landscape and have led readers all over the world, to take into account the complementary points of view of the people who had been, so far, deprived of a voice.
"Despite the significant changes that have taken place in the last four or five decades, the wound of the centuries is still a long way from healing. And I believe the curative power of stories can move the process forward."