“The Headstrong Historian”: Writing with Things Fall Apart

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian” is a complex revisioning, completion, and extension of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. A narratological analysis employing Gérard Genette’s theories reveals the numerous ways in which Adichie deepens and extends Achebe’s legacy, and, in doing so, complicates his account of African identity and history. With significant repetitions and variations in events, characters, and action, Adichie’s story develops its source text in areas such as gender, religion, and history. The text’s handling of temporality and focalization demonstrates how history involves the future as well as the past. “The Headstrong Historian,” thus, presents what Paul Ricoeur calls “human time” as a shared experience in which the traces left by the lives of past generations can be located and drawn on during our continual move into the future.