Chinua Achebe's Home and Exile (2000) is certainly life writing, but it fits into a separate category from the ones I mentioned in class today. His book is made up of three essays that began as lectures at Harvard. These essays touch on not only his life but also his opinions about literature. One cannot call these essays "simply" memoirs.
The first essay, "My Home Under Imperial Fire," begins in a way that makes the reader believe that he or she is about to read a traditional memoir. Achebe recalls his entry into his home village, Ogidi, the home that his father, a missionary, had chosen to retire to. Ironically, as Achebe later observes, the relative who had been watching the family home for Achebe's father still worshipped the village gods. In fact, the relative built a shrine in the home that the former missionary had planned to retire to. Achebe's father destroyed the shrine; however, overall, in his recollections of his home village, Achebe emphasizes the persistence of Igbo values and culture. He underscores their influence on his own life and work.
[The first picture above is from a Catholic newspaper in Sacramento, CA. The girls in the procession are part of an Igbo parish there. The second picture above is from the library at Southern Illinois University and depicts a man playing a drum in an Igbo ritual.]
In the next section of "My Home Under Imperial Fire," Achebe moves on to a discussion of European writing about Africa and mid-20th century African literature. He recalls his classmates' recoiling from Mister Johnson, an Englishman's novel about an African. (As you can see, the book was later made into a film with Pierce Brosnan.) Achebe's English professors had thought that the students would be interested in reading a novel set in Nigeria.
In the next essay, "The Empire Fights Back," you see that Achebe's criticism of Conrad is part of a cultural context. It is amazing but not surprising to see the criticism that an early work of African literature, Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), received...from a Englishwoman who wrote a number of works set in Africa...and whose works have appeared on Masterpiece Theater! Ironically, maybe not so ironically, as Achebe later notes, Nigerian students also complained about Tutuola's novel due to its lack of style and resemblance to a "folk tale." Achebe then reveals that these students had not read the book!
However, Achebe also mentions authors and reviewers who were sympathetic towards African literature. One was the poet Dylan Thomas who gave The Palm-Wine Drinkard a glowing review. Another was F.J. Pedler who encouraged Africans to write about their continent.
In the last essay, "Today, The Balance of Stories," Achebe contemplates the current state of African and other post-colonialist literature. He praises writers such as Nadine Gordimer, Ama Ata Aidoo (an author from Ghana), and R.K. Narayan for the clarity of their vision and their willingness to avoid stereotypes. On the other hand, he criticizes V.S. Naipaul and Buchi Emecheta for their eagerness to assimilate into mainstream British culture. In particular, Achebe encourages writers to...in a way...cultivate their own garden--to depict what they have seen and experienced rather than to be ashamed of it and strive to write stereotypically.
This study guide will be the first of three or four that I will put up before our midterm on March 5 and 7. To begin with, I will focus on the genre of life writing, a form of history that focuses on individuals' lives and a form of literature that provides evidence about individuals' real lives. This genre is non-fiction, unlike plays, poems, short stories, or novels. Documentary films that narrate a person's life story could be considered in this category, but life writing generally consists of autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, letters, and diaries. Novels may take on the form of life writing, but this is simply a device to intrigue people or perhaps even to further mimesis (the imitation of reality).
One genre that we'll be studying in EN 202 and that may seem new to you is life writing. Life writing includes autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and even letters. Although, at first glance, this genre seems to belong more to history or sociology, reading life history can shed light on the ways that literature shapes how we think and feel as well as influences on literature itself. Some of the earliest novels like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders even represent themselves as memoirs or autobiographies. (A memoir covers a part of one's life whereas an autobiography treats the whole of one's life.) And some life writing like Harriet Jacobs' Incidents and Samuel Pepys' Diary is not only fascinating but well-written and worth studying as literature. For example, how does Harriet Jacobs tell her life story in such a way that it appeals to her audience?! How does she depict herself, Dr. Flint, and her grandmother? (Note that although Pepys did not want people to read his diary, both Incidents and the Interesting Narrative were written to be read *and* to change people's minds about slavery.)