Censuring the Praise of Alienation: Interstices of Ante-Alienation in Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God

A country’s novels reveal its social condition.

—F. J. Pedler, West Africa

Alienation has long been a preoccupation of modern African novels and of critical responses to them, which is as one might expect given the writers of these novels are for the most part those who in one way or another were alienated from their native tongues and cultures through their schooling in the colonizer’s language and culture, at home and/or abroad. But many critical perspectives on these works are circumscribed by the tendency to view alienation as resulting primarily from external forces operating upon natives, and to overlook former detachment. Additionally, a key component of alienation is often overlooked, as if taken for granted: that there needs to have been a former attachment. In this respect colonial alienation is sometimes a meta-alienation, following natives’ prior alienation from their culture. In his landmark essay, “In Praise of Alienation,” Abiola Irele’s broad assessment is correct: “All of our modern expression in literature and ideology has developed from a primary concern with the pathology of alienation as inscribed in our experience as a colonized people” (202). His observation that “the writer who seems, in fact, to have engaged our responses most forcefully upon the problem of alienation is Chinua Achebe” (Irele, “In Praise” 203–4) is also accurate. Indeed, there is an awful lot to agree with in Irele’s groundbreaking work, and even at this late stage he continues to deserve plaudits for his insightful mind and for his courage in taking the road less traveled on this and other subjects related to African and postcolonial experiences, including his decrying African industrial, moral, and intellectual indolence (“In Praise” 212). However, our reverence for the great scholar should not blind us to an important shortcoming in his polemic, which has surprisingly gone unchallenged. That is, he over generalizes when he contends, “What runs through all this literature is the feeling that it is within our traditional culture that we are happiest, most at ease with ourselves, that there is the truest coincidence between us and the world: in other words, that our identity is located” (“In Praise” 204, emphasis added). Moreover, he adds, “The whole movement of mind in Black cultural nationalism, from Blyden to Senghor, leads to a mystique of traditional forms of life” (“In Praise” 205).

In this essay, among other things, I interrogate Irele’s claim about happiness and ease within traditional culture. The “feeling” he refers to is predicated on a static view of Négritude, on what, in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, he calls “a romantic myth of Africa” (Irele 68), or what Gregson Davis identifies in Aimé Césaire as nostalgia for an ideal state located in traditional African culture (181). Irele’s remark of the romanticism of traditional African culture in the style, makeup, and symbolism of Camara Laye’s work is easily affirmed, especially in The African Child (“In Praise” 204). But, his painting of Chinua Achebe with the same brush, albeit with a more tentative stroke—”It [the mysticism] is not altogether absent from Achebe’s novels” (“In Praise” 204)—must be disputed. The overwhelmingly binary focus on tradition versus alienation, or traditional culture as the repository against and after colonial alienation, has its limitations. The following analysis transcends these limitations by re-examining alienation primarily in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, but also in the very work that Irele considers Achebe’s “masterpiece” (“In Praise” 204) on the topic: Arrow of God. This investigation focuses somewhat on externalization following colonial incursions or international travel by the colonized, which engenders ambivalence and psychological trauma stemming from negative feelings about the native culture, or the perceived lack thereof, relative to the colonizer’s culture. But the main thrust of my examination is the subtler and, I argue, equally dangerous agent of externality: ante-alienation, or social alienation within traditional African culture, which precedes racially based, colonial alienation. The ante-alienation in these texts challenges N...