Home and Exile

From "Home and Exile" by Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist and poet, among Africa's finest, and author of Things Fall Apart:

There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever they need them...

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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.

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For me there are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you have an overpowering urge to tell a story. The second, that you have intimations of a unique story waiting to come out. And the third, which you learn in the process of becoming, is that you consider the whole project worth the considerable trouble -- I have sometimes called it terms of imprisonment -- you will have to endure to bring it to fruition.

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The new literature that erupted so dramatically and so abundantly in the 1950s and 1960s showed great variety in subject matter, in style of presentation and, let's face it, in levels of skill and accomplishment. But there was one common thread running through it all: the thread of a shared humanity linking the author to the world of his creation; a sense that even in the most tempting moments of grave disappointment with this world, the author remains painfully aware that he is of the same flesh and blood, the same humanity as its human inhabitants.

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Man is a story-making animal. He rarely passes up an opportunity to accompany his works and his experiences with matching stories. The heavy task of dispossessing others calls for such a story and, of course, its makers: oral historians or griots in the past; mere writers today. Repossession, if and when it does occur, needs also its enabling stories and the singers and writers to compose them. But as we can all appreciate, there will be a wide gulf of difference between the story put out by the first group to explain or camouflage their doings and the reconstitutive annals made up by those who will struggle to reclaim their history.

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For as Dylan Thomas himself wrote in 1953, "There is only position for an artist anywhere; and that is, upright."

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...those who inhabit the world of proverbs do not spend sleepless nights worrying over provenance. They know a good proverb when they hear it and simply add it to their stock.

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...strong language is in the very nature of the dialogue between dispossession and its rebuttal. The two sides never see the world in the same light. Thus, the British might boast that they had the first empire in history on which the sun never set; to which an Indian would reply: Yes, because God cannot trust an Englishman in the dark!

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An erosion of self-esteem is one of the commonest symptons of dispossession. It does not occur only at the naive level such as we have alluded to; even more troubling is when it comes in the company of sophistication and learning. It may then take the form of an excessive eagerness to demonstrate flair and worldliness; a facility to tag on to whatever the metropolis says is the latest movement, without asking the commonsense question: later than what?

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Well, it is not true that my history is only in my heart; it is indeed there, but it is also in that dusty road in my town, and in every villager, living and dead, who has ever walked on it. It is in my country too; in my continent and, yes, in the world. That dusty little road is my link to all the other destinations.

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And so it is, again, ultimately a question of balance. You cannot balance one thing: you balance a diversity of things. And diversity is the engine of the evolution of living things, including living
civilizations."