Interview with Chinua Achebe conducted by Okey Ndibe, Joyce Ashuntantang, Sowore Omoyele, and Oyiza Adaba

Q: Congrats, Professor Achebe, on the 50 th commemorative year of Things Fall Apart. Let’s begin with a somewhat predictable question. When Things Fall Apart was published fifty years ago, did you ever suspect that it would travel as much as it has throughout the world?

 

Achebe: Of course not. There was nothing like it that I knew about. I did not know very much about writing or publishing. There was no plan. It happened, and thinking back now, I can theorize that the story wanted to be told at all costs, and why it chose me to tell the story, I don’t know. It could have been anybody else, the story would have been different, of course, because every person has his or her story. This is my story, and it wanted to be told.

 

N: It’s remarkable that you should make that point about the story choosing you. On the way here, I was telling Professor Abunaw that Things Fall Apart is the kind of novel one would expect a novelist in his 50s or 60s to write. It’s not the kind of novel you’d expect a young man at 28 to have written—and that’s exactly how she explained it, that the novel must have come to you. It’s intriguing that you speak about this mystical connection, that the story made itself a sort of gift to you. Could you talk about what inspired this novel?

 

A:Well, what you just said about my age; this is itself part of our story. What colonization did to us was to remove power from the elders and pass it over to children. This is what European education meant for us. I don’t know what other place had this experience of having children, because they went to school, giving them power over the elders to determine what was going to be what. And so that’s part of the reason why it was someone very young. My father could not have written it. There were things, many things that he knew that I didn’t know, but scribbling a story was not one of the things he knew. This is one of the major weapons with which, if you like, we were disorganized, or if you prefer, one of the weapons that enabled us to pick up the fight. The generation that should have done the fight had been disabled.

 

Q: There’s a paradox in the fact that your generation was one of the first to be inducted, as it were, into Western education and Western letters. Part of the drama is that the British who colonized us said that Africans had no story, no history. It was conceivably possible for the colonialists to separate people like you from any form of interest in your history. Instead, what contact with Western ideas did in your case—and in the case of many other African writers—was to engender this hunger, this desire to tell your story. Could you speak to that tension between Europe’s impression that you had no history and your insistence that you had a story and you were going to tell it?

advertisement

 

A: Yes, well I’ll tell you another story. James Baldwin and I were invited to speak at an African literature conference somewhere in the South, and what Baldwin said in talking about me to the audience is that “This is a brother I had not seen for 400 years,” and people laughed. And he said that it was not intended that he and I should ever meet. That’s what you asked me. Part of the center of the plan was that we should not know each other. So that’s why our task is, in my view, so very important: that in spite of that intention to keep us apart, there will be some people who would refuse and insist on knowing their brothers and sisters who had been sold away and lost. There are some people who knew that it was important to discover them, and I’m not talking in the past, because the problem remains. There are so many of us on both sides of the Atlantic who do not know the importance of that recognition, that this is my brother, this is my sister, that their story is the same as my story. Whatever variations, it is basically the same story.

 

Q: TFA has become a story in itself, it’s in fact garnered many stories. Could you speak to some of the ways in which the novel has surprised you, some of the stories that it has brought to you since its publication 50 years ago?

 

A: Well, off the cuff, if you like, one of the first comments I had from children reading it, from students, came from students from a girls’ school in Korea. The whole class of 30 plus wrote a letter each to me and their teacher sent it all. I learned that my story was also the story of Korea, at least as these children saw it. Some of them were very angry that I killed Okonkwo and they thought Okonkwo should have been spared to succeed. They didn’t want him to fail. So that’s one sort of way out…I had never been to Korea, I didn’t know their history, it was these children who told me, “Oh, we were colonized by the Japanese.” And so that similar but different incident of colonization was the thing that held us together. And I’ve discovered that the whole life of the world is full of that kind of similarities and that people can use if they want to make themselves brothers and sisters of other people.

 

Q: I do know that TFA has been translated into more than 50 different languages, so it’s clearly a novel that has resonated around the world. Have you been keeping count, do you know how many languages TFA has been set in now? I also understand that there is an Igbo translation that is in the works; could you speak to that as well?

 

A: Oh yeah, unfortunately I have not been very well treated by my original British publishers, especially after the first generation—the people I met—after they passed on or left or retired. The new generation came and took over. I remember my publisher, my old publisher, telling me that we had been taken over by accountants, and so relations have not been very good. This has to do with suspicion about how what I was being told, under-accounting, which they have admitted and made efforts to correct. But then you say well, if there was an error in this one that I saw, what about what I have not seen? Can I send an auditor to your place to go through and find out? Oh no, they will not allow this. So I don’t know [how many translations]. I can only say “They told me.” Or “This is what I heard.” The relationship has not been as good as it should be. In spite of the great success of the novel, which you’ve referred to—you, would think that the relation between the writer of that story and those who published it would be very close. Unfortunately, we live in a world of accountants.

 

N: Could you speak about the Igbo translation?

 

A: Well, the Igbo translation which you are talking about is probably the one I promised to do (laughter). Well, I understand that there have been translations and so on. So I expect that in the end there will be many translations. But the one I promised to do would be my own version, which I expect would justify itself when it comes out. The book is almost like a mysterious presence, and to be able to take back from English to the original language in which the events happened – the events happened in a language – to do that journey back—because I had sort of taken the story from its roots and created a language, a dialect of English. This was my own invention. This I can now see, because I kept worrying about what word would suit what, I kept worrying about how you translate a proverb so that its dignity would be maintained. I have worried about all those things and now I know why. It’s because I wanted English and Igbo to hold a conversation, and see how you can tell a story that happened in Igbo in this dialect of English. Now I want to go back and do it the other way and see what happens. Again like before I have no idea whether it would work or not.