Close Encounters: : Margaret Laurence and Chinua Achebe

Close Encounters: Margaret Laurence and Chinua Achebe Experience is necessary for growth and survival. But experience is not simply what happened. A lot may happen to a piece of stone without making it any wiser. Experience is what we are able and prepared to do with what happens to us. Chinua Achebe In 1974, seven years after Margaret Laurence had published Long Drums and Ca11no11s, her study of Nigerian writers, she and Chinua Achebe first met. Ten years later, in May of 1984 they met again, on two consecutive evenings. Those three occasions were the only ones when these two writers, whose ideals of the purposes and practices of fiction were so close, actually met. I was present on all three occasions, able to observe and enjoy their sibling-like rapport, an instant empathy that made them almost oblivious to those around them and that obviously renewed in them a mutually supportive creative energy. On the first occasion in May of 1974, as a past president of ACCUTE and member of the current programme committee I had arranged an evening session at the Royal Ontario Museum Theatre during the annual meetings of the "Learneds," that year held in Toronto. Douglas Killam, a former colleague at York and already an Acbebe friend, both personal and scholarly, bad added his influence to my invitation and was to chair an informal conversation between Achebe and Laurence (one of my most lasting regrets is that neither I nor anyone else thought to make a tape recording of the proceedings). Margaret had been back in Canada from England for increasing lengths oftime since accepting a writerin -residence post at the University of Toronto in 1969. That first year back, she bought her "shack" on the Otonabee, and that year she also began writing the novel that was to be published in the spring of 1974. When she and Achebe met at the Journal ofCanadian Studies museum that novel, The Divi11ers, had just been published by Knopf, Macmillan and McClelland and Stewart; at that time Achebe was serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts, one of the first of several such posts that he was persuaded to accept. He had little choice - as a prominent Igbo who had already published four novels and was the respected head of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, when the Civil War following the secession of Biafra broke out in 1967-68, he and his family narrowly escaped the demolition (by bombing) of their home in Enugu, the Biafran capital, and suffered the massacre of friends and relatives. He was and would remain persona non grata in Nigeria, an exile until 1976. From the opening sentences of their dialogue, Laurence and Achebe spoke to each other from positions of trust and admiration in an exchange that lives on in my memory as the most memorable writerly exchange I have ever witnessed. Margaret wore one of the colourful long gowns that I loved to make for her, Achebe a brilliantly patterned and coloured African shirt. This choice of"costume" underscored the prevailing mood, oneofdear friends who hadjustpicked up a recently unfinished conversation . No one who watched and listened was unaffected by the passionate joining of ideals and practices in these two major writers of our time. Margaret had come back to Canadain the midst ofthe great nationalist surge of the late 1960s, and she speedily became appalled at the Jack of teaching ofCanadian Literature in our schools and the neglect of our writers throughout the country. Starting with an article written in the course of a brief visit to Canada in 1966, in which she came down strongly against the taint of parochialism in Canadian literary criticism and for the u·eatment of Canadian as one of the many Commonwealth Literatures, she had by 1973 become one of our most vociferous literary nationalists. One of the founders of The Writers' Union ofCanada, shecarried into all her proselytizing activities the naming ofall Canadian writers as a "tribe," her"tribe," the recipient of her deepest loyalty. Achebe's strong senseofsocial responsibility spoke to her never entirely dormant Social Gospel 163 conscience, so very much a part of her Manitoba upbringing and her...