Afterword: Arrows of Achebe

Chinua Achebe is one of the few African authors whose work is dwarfed on the library shelves by the criticism it has inspired. Indeed, the corpus of Achebe criticism has become too large for many scholars to master. And, as this special issue on Arrow of God at 50 proves, there is no sign that the critical output is slowing down. Ranka Primorac even suggests that Achebe sucks up all the air and has stymied the reception of other African novels. She is right. Why is that?

Scholars have accounted for the impact of Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart, by pointing to its representation of precolonial African village life, its narration of the colonial encounter, and the inflection of its style in the direction of orality. Achebe's classic answered the needs of the international literary market for novels to represent Africa in ways that could be received outside Africa. It is realist, making precolonial African characters accessible to readers of novels anywhere. It is a tragedy, a mode that provides a powerful paradigm for registering the impact of colonialism. And it is a village novel, ideal for staging the conflict between local tradition and a modernity that comes from outside. Things Fall Apart first posed the questions that would be asked of African fiction for the next fifty years and proposed the first viable answers. Simon Gikandi has said that Things Fall Apart invented African fiction, and Stephanie Newell admits as much when she wonders what West African literature would look like had Things Fall Apart never existed.

Achebe's third novel, Arrow of God, although also realist, a tragedy, and a village novel, is not taught in African high schools nor in many undergraduate courses in African fiction outside Africa. While Achebe's first novel is ideally suited to the pedagogical needs of the academy, Gikandi admits that Arrow of God feels "belated" by comparison. It has not had the broad impact of the earlier novel, but is nonetheless the work to which scholars of Achebe seem the most devoted. As the examples of Gikandi and Jago Morrison, contributors to this special issue, show, critics have returned to Arrow of God over the course of scholarly careers and revised their understanding of it. Life is short. Books are many. Why reread a book and find new things to say about it? Only some books reward such rereading: Arrow of God is a book to measure one's understanding of the world by.

Arguably, Arrow of God refines the realism and tragedy of Things Fall Apart to the point of oversaturation, upsetting the balance achieved by the earlier novel and precipitating something new. The characters and the action in Arrow of God are hopelessly overdetermined. The protagonist, Ezeulu, does what he does because he was traumatized as a child by his mother's madness, because of his Oedipal resentment of his father or sibling rivalry, because of the competition for authority within Umuaro and the uncertain weight of the colonial administrative power in that struggle, and because of his insecure need to put his god to the test. Every explanation that would account for the overdetermination emphasizes Ezeulu's singularity. As Mpalive Msiska says, Ezeulu is not an African essence but the product of his own personal experience. His motivations exceed his tragic role. They also exceed any allegorical function or historical explanation such as we critics of African literature inevitably seek. Yet the novel is at the same time a historical novel concerned with colonization and something called modernity that involves literacy and school, the rule of law, the integration of the village into a larger history and a world economy, and, perhaps unexpectedly but, Stephen Morton argues, not coincidentally, the mass conversion to Christianity. The different levels of the narrative, the personal and the historical, cannot be reconciled.

Critics come back to the novel because we do not know what to do with it, and we sense that the difficulty has to do with depth that needs to be plumbed and complexity that needs to be analyzed. Critics oscillate between trying to explain Ezeulu and...