A Postcolonial Child: Achebe's Chike at the Crossroads

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the French-trained Antillean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon finds the locus of European neuroses, in orthodox psychoanalytic fashion, in familial relationships. The neuroses of the colonized subject, however, do not have their source in the family: "A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world" (143). This abnormality occurs before actual contact with Europeans, Fanon continues, and assumes complex forms. The Antillean child, for example, was taught to refer to "his" early antecedents as "our ancestors the Gauls" and to identify totally with France. Such a child read children's books and comic books "put together by white men for little white men" and in which

the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.

(146)

Fanon calls such texts an aspect of collective catharsis, which works as a release for collective aggression.

According to Fanon, the solution to the problem of such a destructive influence is not the equal distribution of evil between black and white but "the establishment of children's magazines especially for Negroes, the creation of songs for Negro children, and, ultimately, the publication of history texts especially for them, at least through the grammar school grades" (148).¹ Chinua Achebe clearly participates in Fanon's project by writing African stories for African children; by offering them a "utopianized" space (the term is Simon Gikandi's) in which to create themselves; by modeling physical courage, integrity, and imagination. Achebe's work also suggests that children flourish when they see themselves and others in works of art that offer them not only satisfying, rounded images but also the gift of language itself. Language, in the work of this postcolonial author, integrates the colonial and colonized cultures in a specifically Igbo spirit.² In this article, I propose to examine Achebe's Chike and the River (1966) within the context of Achebe's articulation of the Igbo aesthetic and his personal responses to colonialism and its legacy.

Ideologically, Achebe is not of the party of African cultural nationalism, whose most radical representatives are Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. These three Nigerian academics declare that "African literature is an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literature. It has its own traditions, modes and norms" (4). In his approach to language, Achebe also differs from another cultural nationalist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, an artist and critic who began writing in Gĩkũyũ while in prison (without being charged, under the post-independence government of Kenya), and continues to do so, but who either translates his own work into English or has it translated.³ One cannot deny the validity of Ngũgĩ's famous question: "Where would English Literature be now if Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had written in Latin?" (Address). He believes that the responsibility of African writers is to develop African languages and African cultures; if they want a larger audience, let them translate their works into other languages. Ngũgĩ calls the writing of Africans using European languages "Euro-African" literature.⁴

But as Achebe makes clear throughout his work, his position (and Kwame Anthony Appiah's a bit later) is that both African and European literatures are always already entwined as a result of the centuries-old Euro-African embrace. By his own account, his first novel is a response to the representation of Africa and Africans in the work of Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. That novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), the most widely read book of African fiction, is written in English, like all of Achebe's fiction; uses part of a line from Yeats for its title; and contains a buried allusion to Tennyson. Indeed, the modern genre of fiction itself is a Western, middle-class construct. In addition to establishing...