Nigerian writer (1930-2013)
What really worries me is that those who are in positions of power are not really affected by what we are writing. In the moral dialogue you want to start, you really want to involve the leaders. People ask me: "Why were you so bold as to publish A Man of the People? How did you think the Government was going to take it? You didn't know there was going to be a coup?" I said rather flippantly that nobody was going to read it anyway, so I wasn't likely to be fired from my official position. It's a distressing thought that we cannot engage our leaders in the kind of moral debate we need.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Sunday Nation, Jan. 15, 1967
Now I think I know why gods
Are so partial to heights--to mountain
Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees
And thorn-guarded holy bombax,
Why petty household divinities
Will sooner perch on a rude board
Strung precariously from brittle rafters
Of a thatched roof
than sit squarely
On safe earth.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
The eye is not harmed by sleep.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
The books are, in fact, the story of the country of my birth, Ogidi, in eastern Nigeria. In the first, I tell of the village traditions and the hopes and fears of all the inhabitants at the time when the first contacts with Europeans are taking place. In the second book, which is in fact the third of the trilogy, the story is about my generation. In the missing book, the story will be about my father's generation, those who were Christianized. The theme of it will be the conflict of the head priest with the rest of the village during the 1920's. But I can't write it yet, because I haven't yet got far enough back into the problems of that period. It is too easy to discredit the former generation. In reality, that generation is very important and I must still pay attention to it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Afrique, 1962
Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Sunday Nation, Jan. 15, 1967
It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Okike, 1990
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
If one finger brings oil it soils the others.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree--the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
In his long evolutionary history, man has scored few greater successes than his creation of human society. For it is on that primeval achievement that he has built those special qualities of mind and of behaviour which, in his own view at least, separate him from lower forms of life. If we sometimes tend to overlook this fact it is only because we have lived so long under the protective ambience of society that we have come to take its benefits for granted.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
I flung open long-disused windows
and doors and saw my hut
new-swept by rainbow broom
of sunlight become my home again
on whose trysting floor waited
my proud vibrant life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
What is modesty but inverted pride?
CHINUA ACHEBE
A Man of the People