Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels (review)

Reed Way Dasenbrock refers, in his recent review of one in the spate of the celebrative volumes that have been devoted to Achebe, to criticism that "recycled fairly familiar theses, arguments and trajectories" (RAL 24.2 [1993]: 145). It is in order to help revamp future scholarship on Achebe that Dasen-brock proposed two main "routes" that, in his view, critics could follow to solidify their efforts: "a reading of Achebe in the light of contemporary post-colonial literary theory," and "a more complexly contextual criticism in which the African, specifically Nigerian, more specifically Igbo, context of Achebe's work and art would be explored more intensely" (145).

Although Dasenbrock does not say so explicitly, it is implied in his remark that one of the special attractions of a contextual approach to art and work is arguably the fact that it can assist readers to make a map of how a writer responds to a publicly shared experience in light of his or her cultural situatedness. In readings of writings by Africans in general (e.g., historical documents, political speeches, philosophical treatises, and anthropological accounts) and of the contemporary works of literary expression in particular, sources serve as a starting point for measuring ideological positions, personality, or psychological states of being because utterance is embedded narrative.

It is regrettable that Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu's book does not follow any of the two leads provided by Dasenbrock. Though she is an Igbo scholar—from the same village as Achebe, according to the foreword—who should have the range and experience to address especially the second of the two concerns raised by Dasenbrock, Okechukwu does not take advantage of her ethnic background by focusing on the largely unexplored Igbo context of Achebe's oratory in order to supply the still missing (and perhaps surprising) ways in which Igbo expression has energized his fiction. Instead, in Achebe the Orator, her plan is to help readers understand Achebe's art through the Greek notions of debate by analyzing the rhetorical tropes—sentence structures and patterns as well as metonymy, hyperbole, and pathos—of Achebe's narratives. Drawing on her considerable knowledge of European public address tradition stretching from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine and Locke to Shakespeare and Bakhtin, she organizes her material around a chronological discussion of each of Achebe's five novels in an effort to support her assumption that Achebe conceives of fiction as a forum for argumentation. While omitting to make reference to Achebe's short stories and poetry, her presentation is the product of painstaking if not always lively research.

Okechukwu starts her study, in a way not unusual in commentaries on Achebe's works, by describing Achebe as the father of African Literature and as someone who sees his role as that of a teacher, summoning the facts of Achebe's education and career as a writer to support her claim that Achebe's novels "are a forum for arguing his theses and for disseminating knowledge to his audience [about] the debate between white and black over black humanity" that was "occurring all over the world [. . .] before he wrote his novels"—a debate that, in Okechukwu's view, still rages "in this new millennium" (6). But if all Achebe's writing is, as Okechukwu states, intended as a contribution from the African point of view to "the debate on black humanity," then, why convey it through another's idiom, using the detractors' mode of expression? It is a problematic, which Okechukwu's present study does not help to address.

Okechukwu's greatest mistake is to naively accept Achebe's view that writing in an imported language like English does not essentially pose an inherent problem of cross-cultural communication for an African author—a problem that Okechukwu compounds by not giving a systematic...