Language and Landscape: Conflict in Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah

This paper will discuss Anthills of the Savannah, which, incidentally, has the most pictorial title of all Chinua Achebe's novels, focusing on the relationship between language and the environment staged in this narrative and, in particular, on the very English concept of picturesque landscapes.¹ I shall attempt to trace the trajectory of the picturesque and landscape painting within the English language and address the problems that arise as a result of its subsequent export to the British colonies. Two basic questions underlie the argument. If Achebe believes that the English language can be a useful tool for the African writer to reclaim his ancestral heritage, does he also believe that it can lose enough of its cultural past to be made suitable for the African environment? And does Anthills of the Savannah, his most recent novel and one in which many themes from his other works converge, convey a successful mastery and subjugation of the English language?

The English-language postcolonial writers seem to have inherited a certain pictorial rhetoric from their past. One of the main reasons for this is the imperial fascination with landscape. W. J. T. Mitchell has noted that landscape conceptualization first flourished in China at the height of its imperial power; England's fascination with it likewise began when it experienced imperial success (Mitchell 1994: 9). But, the start of Western landscape awareness has always been attributed to the Dutch, whose mid-seventeenth-century transformation from a rebellious colony to a maritime empire happened to coincide with its export of landscape painting. In the eighteenth century the idea, meaning, and usage of the word "landscape" underwent a very interesting change. According to John Barrell, landscape began as a painter's word that was initially used to describe "a pictorial representation of the countryside," either as subject of a picture or background of a portrait. Later, however, the word was used more broadly to mean a piece of countryside, a visual phenomenon. In fact,

[t]here is no word in English which denotes a tract of land, of whatever extent, which is apprehended visually but not, necessarily, pictorially. The nearest is probably "terrain," but in practice the uses to which this word can be put are very limited. . . . The word we do use, of course, is "landscape": we can speak of the "landscape" of a county, but in doing so we introduce, whether we want to or not, notions of value and form which relate, not just to seeing the land, but to seeing it in a certain way —pictorially.

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The marriage of landscape aesthetics to the English language was a gradual and complex process. The eighteenth-century English interest in landscape and landscape-art manifested itself in many different forms such as painting, gardening, and literature, and increased travel was seen as a reason for its widespread popularity. However, a possibly more significant factor was that it was perceived as a practice of the cultivated.

According to Barrell, to display "a correct taste in landscape was a valuable social accomplishment," hence the principles behind it were "learned so thoroughly that in the latter eighteenth-century it became impossible for anyone with an aesthetic interest in landscape to look at the countryside without applying them, whether he knew he was doing so or not" (5, 6). These artistic principles, which will be discussed in detail later, led to the creation of a vocabulary that reflected a disturbing interchangeability between aesthetic values and social or class norms. The desirability of acquiring an eye for landscapes was compounded by the social connotations of taste, and landscape terms became assimilated into political and social metaphors:

"viewpoint" or "point of view" is an intellectual term, one has "elevated" thoughts by being in an "elevated" position, one's life gains "perspective" as well as the landscape (painted or real), one should accept one's "walk" of life, one ought not to have ideas above one's "station," one's life has "landmarks" if one "surveys" it properly, and to "command" bright "prospects" is more than just having mental...