Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

I haven’t always encountered American writers in their home country. John Updike and I met happily in Australia, where at the Adelaide Festival we looked like a comedy duo, he so gangling tall, I so small. Kurt Vonnegut literally embodied a wry American brand of humour at a writers’ get-together in Sweden. I met James Baldwin in France and we talked as if we’d known each other always; perhaps we had, in our experience of racism, he in his country, I in mine — what this means for the transformations of the writer’s imagination.

Some encounters have resulted in precious friendship. At a literary conference there was a woman with a damn-you-all beautiful face and swirling black hair, sitting on a step outside the venue: I recognised Susan Sontag. We fled the deliberations and explored the foreign city; the first of many exhilarating times together. Elisabeth Hardwick lent me Robert Lowell’s den-apartment with library, in New York; gave me the freedom of her rich mind as well as the place where she still lives.

Of course I’d met America through their writings — all of them — along with the America of Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Miller, Hemingway et al . (he more definitively American abroad than at home); had been confronted with the country in this deepest way, before coming face to face.

2001

Things fall apart.

Chinua Achebe’s title, quoted from a poem by William Butler Yeats, seems a challenging declaration: what chaos will the reader be confronted with when taking up the opening pages of this book, first published in 1958?

But the title is a presentiment: Achebe is going to create what was complete before the situation in the title is to come about. Only then can the revelation of disintegration be fully understood. Achebe did not begin this first novel, and does not begin his later ones, with description of the setting of the story. In what country his characters live, what kind of life in what sort of landscape, city, village — he plunges us immediately among the people themselves in their full activity, and their physical surroundings of a region of Nigeria, West Africa, emerge as part of their identity as the reader follows. Okonkwo, the central character, is introduced in the first paragraph as a young man who has brought honour to his village by his fame as a wrestler, never thrown by opponents in any of the bouts of the traditional sport popular in the region. ‘The drums beat and the flutes sound and the spectators held their breath … Amazile was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten … he was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.’

Achebe has the master story-teller’s knowledge that the present — what is happening to his characters now — can be totally meaningful only if (the way it is in our own lives) the past that has formed these people is shown as still within them, directing their lives. Okonkwo’s story is taken up in an actual period not long before Nigeria’s independence from British rule. ‘That was … twenty years ago or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush fire in the harmattan.’ Okonkwo’s father was a failure by the standards of this Nigerian village of the Ibo clan with which we have quickly been made familiar through lively anecdotal exchange. Idle, owing thousands of cowries (the local currency), he had never qualified to take the series of traditional titles which recognise honour and success in Umuofia, and which are marked not by the medals that are presented to dignitaries in the European world, but by special anklets worn by those honoured. Even after his father has been dead for ten years, the driving motive in Okonkwo’s life is to be everything his father was not. Okonkwo has triumphed in tribal battles, he’s a wealthy farmer with three wives, and has taken two titles while still young. But this distinction and success bring about an obligation that Achebe introduces as natural, unexceptional in a close-knit society, yet whose consequences he is going to lead us to discover along with him, without advance warning — such is his power to engage the reader rather than tell a story.

Now an introduction must not reveal too much of what is in the book itself, only arouse anticipation; so I shan’t recount the dramatic warring dispute between Umuofia and a neighbouring village, Mbaino, which results in Okonkwo being given the responsibility of taking into his household Ikemefuna, an Mbaino boy, given as reparation. The child at first is terrified, cannot understand what is happening to him, but he is a lively boy, becomes popular in Okonkwo’s household and a special friend of Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. Okonkwo, who regards the show of any emotion as weakness (the weakness of his father), is inwardly fond of the boy and so treats him familiarly like everybody else — ‘with a heavy hand’. Ikemefuna calls him Father and sometimes has the honour of being allowed to carry Okonkwo’s stool and goatskin bag to village ancestral feasts.

Ikemefuna takes part with the whole family in the planting of the yam. The yam is introduced here as ‘the king of crops’, the beautiful, bustling detail of its cultivation both the cycle of seasons and, as life-sustaining food, the cycle of human existence; from this first novel can be traced further the yam’s compelling emergence, in Achebe’s later work, as a philosophical and political symbol: life and death in the opposition of the yam and the knife.

The Feast of the New Yam is a two-day village celebration with feasting, palm wine and the customary great wrestling match between Okonkwo’s village and its neighbours. It’s a joyful interlude in which Achebe generously, for the reader’s pleasure, uses his gifts of creating a whole community of men, women and children as people we instantly get to know intimately, recognising their individual ways of expressing themselves. The comedy of sharp exchanges and laughter sounds against the drums beating out the wrestling dance; you can almost smell the scents of the cooking. There are delightful conversations to be overheard between the women, half pidgin English, half to be followed as translated by Achebe from the rich imagery of the Ibo language. The undercurrent of the order of life for the Umuofians is revealed in what appears to be ordinary talk, gossip and conventional polite enquiry. Ezinma, Okonkwo’s favourite daughter, comes to our attention. A woman who knows the girl’s mother and has seen a number of her children die early, asks about Ezinma. The mother says: ‘She has been well for some time now. Perhaps she has come to stay.’ ‘I think she will stay,’ says the other woman. ‘They usually stay if they do not die before the age of six.’

Now Ikemefuna has lived in Okonkwo’s household for three years and Okonkwo is pleased that his influence on Nwoye is excellent. He encourages the two boys to sit with him, manly, in his obi — his quarters. He tells them stories of tribal wars and his own bold exploits. Nwoye prefers the folk stories and legends his mother used to tell him, and which enrich this novel with a cast of wily characters — including cosmic Earth and Sky — that make Disney’s pale by contrast. The time of harmony, peace and plenty continues with the arrival of the great sky-darkening horde of locusts — here, not the curse of the biblical locusts but a delicacy everyone turns out to catch and eat.

Achebe’s exploration of life — which is what all literature, all art is — through the wonderful powers of his imagination, reveals in all his writings the particular vulnerability of human beings when they are most happy. It is then that some almost forgotten conflict in the past suddenly raises the knife against the yam. Okonkwo is in his obi with Ikemefuna and Nwoye, crunching locusts and drinking palm wine, when the village elder, Ezeudu, arrives and asks to see Okonkwo outside. There he says something incomprehensible to Okonkwo, presenting Ikemefuna as an outcast who cannot continue to be accepted by the Umuofians. The Oracle of the Hills and Caves has declared he must be killed. The old man says, ‘That boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death … They will take him outside Umuofia as is the custom, and kill him there. But I want you to have nothing to do with it. He calls you father.’