Abstract
Pedagogical methods rooted and implemented in a mode of domination, reflecting, indeed, colonial mentalities, contradict the affirmation of equality and dignity projected in global literatures, including the work of Achebe. His writings teach us how to teach him, guiding instructors to reach beyond authoritarian methods. His fiction and essays are the foundations for this chapter’s affirmation and illustrations of classroom dialogue. One Igbo proverb, for example, helps illuminate the power of dialogue between teacher and students as well as the effectiveness of comparison in the study of literature: “Wherever something stands, another thing stands beside it.” Achebe’s varied presentations of this proverb remind us that the world is constructed through complementary and contradictory elements. Placing literary works in a comparative relationship generates insights that often do not arise when the focus is trained on a single work alone.
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Notes
- 1.
Rather in keeping with this aphorism is John Locke’s comment in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts” (28).
- 2.
Achebe mentions in his 1991 essay “Teaching Things Fall Apart” that he has “taught literature in African and American universities for many years.” Although he acknowledges in the essay that “because I wrote Things Fall Apart, I have never taught it,” he also indicates why he has something to offer that is relevant to teaching the novel (Education 124–25).
- 3.
Obi’s concept of tragedy ironically anticipates the fate of Obi himself in No Longer at Ease, as opposed to the tragedy of his grandfather, Okonkwo, in Things Fall Apart, whose life ends in suicide.
- 4.
Similarly, Achebe discusses in The Education of a British-Protected Child (5–6) the Igbo view of duality and its reflection in the proverb (“Wherever Something Stands”) under consideration here (as indicated in Chapters 1 and 2).
- 5.
See Oyekan Owomoyela, who is Yoruba: “Folktales in general…come in virtually unlimited variants…The ‘functions’ that combine to form the particular tale at a particular telling can and do vary widely…In all cases, though, I have attempted to do what the storyteller does in typical Yoruba setting…I have striven to tell the tales in as entertaining a fashion as I could…” (xv–xvi).
- 6.
Damrosch’s view that world literature encompasses both accepted classics and lesser-known works is compatible with that of Verlyn Klinkenborg in the recognition that formerly marginal or unknown authors now rightfully claim our attention: “The canon—the books and writers we agree are worth studying—used to seem like a given, an unspoken consensus of sorts. But the canon has always been shifting, and it is now vastly more inclusive than it was 40 years ago. That’s a good thing. What’s less clear now is what we study the canon for and why we choose the tools we employ in doing so.” For perhaps many world literature instructors, the purpose of studying a canon that now includes many international authors is to understand richly diverse cultures, their storytelling, and their verbal artistry—and to recognize both commonalities and differences between various traditions, including of course the ones the classroom comprises. This too is consistent with a comment by Klinkenborg: “That kind of writing—clear, direct, humane—and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.”
- 7.
Students will find similar points of contact between Okonkwo and Nnu Ego, the female protagonist of the novel The Joys of Motherhood, by Anglophone Igbo novelist Buchi Emecheta. In addition, British colonialism in Nigeria has a powerful impact on Nnu Ego’s life, as it does Okonkwo’s.
- 8.
The enduring value of this statement by Achebe may be gauged partly by its correspondence to a much later view, articulated by Shaobo Xie, of “postcolonialism [as an approach] vindicating and asserting the identities of the formerly colonized…[P]ostcolonialism signifies an attempt by the formerly colonized to re-evaluate, rediscover, and reconstruct their own cultures…” (164).
- 9.
See as well two related statements by Achebe, the first from “The Novelist as Teacher”:
[A self-respecting writer] must remain free to disagree with his society and go into rebellion against it if need be. But I am for choosing my cause very carefully. Why should I start waging war as a Nigerian newspaper editor was doing the other day on the “soulless efficiency” of Europe’s industrial and technological civilization when the very thing my society needs may well be a little technical efficiency? (69–70)
The second is from “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”:
To call my colonial experience an inheritance may surprise some people. But everything is grist to the mill of the artist…We must…accord appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way…We had better learn to appreciate one another’s presence and to accord to every people their due of human respect. (3, 10)
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Lynn, T.J. (2017). Unfolding Dialogue: Teaching Achebe’s Fiction. In: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51331-7_8
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