ACHEBEAN ENGLISH AND THE QUEST FOR INDIGENOUS LITERATURE_ BY SUMAILA ISAH UMAISHA

Recently, I read an interesting piece on Facebook by Dr David Iluebe on Chinua Achebe’s writings. What immediately caught my attention was the title: Achebe’s literary English can fail you in WAEC, JAMB & job interviews. At first glance, it seemed to suggest that Achebe was being criticised for using substandard English. But reading the piece made it clear that the argument was quite different. It was drawing a distinction between literary English and the formal English.

The distinction is important. Achebe’s language, particularly in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, deliberately incorporates Igbo-influenced expressions, rhythms, proverbs, metaphors and patterns of thought. These may sound unconventional when measured against standard formal English, but they are purposeful literary choices. What interested me, however, was not this distinction but what Achebe’s Africanisation of English suggests about the larger question of indigenous African literature.

For decades, African writers and scholars have debated the language in which African literature should be written. One position insists that genuine African literature should be produced in African languages. Ngugi wa Thiong’o became perhaps the most prominent advocate of this position, eventually abandoning English for Gikuyu in much of his creative writing. The argument has considerable merit: language carries a people’s history, worldview, memory, humour and cultural consciousness.

Yet there is also a practical difficulty. African languages do not have equal geographical reach, and even widely spoken languages such as Hausa, with its substantial presence across West Africa, do not possess the global reach of English. A novel written in an indigenous language may therefore have a smaller potential readership unless translated. This is one of the realities confronting writers who wish to preserve indigenous expression while reaching an international audience.

This is where Achebe becomes particularly interesting. He seemed to suggest, in practice, that indigenous literature need not necessarily mean literature written exclusively in an indigenous language. One could write in English while making English carry an indigenous consciousness. In other words, one could speak Igbo, or another African language and culture, through English.

That is one of the great innovations of Achebe’s literary practice. His English does not merely translate Igbo words; it frequently carries Igbo patterns of thought into English. For instance, instead of the conventional expression of being too shocked or distressed to speak, Achebe gives us: “I cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story.” The expression is perfectly intelligible in English, yet its structure and imagery carry the imprint of another linguistic worldview.

Similarly, African writers have often employed expressions whose literal forms may appear unusual to an English speaker but whose cultural meanings are clear within their indigenous contexts. Consider the Igbo night greeting, “May the day break,” instead of “Good night,” and “Are you awake?” as an equivalent of “Good morning.” There is a cultural richness in such expressions that a simple dictionary equivalent can easily lose. A greeting is not always merely a social pleasantry. It can embody a people’s conception of life, danger, survival, community and the passage of time.

And the phenomenon is by no means peculiar to Igbo. Every African language contains expressions whose literal translations into English may sound unusual but whose cultural meanings are rich. In some African languages, for example, one does not simply say, “I got caught in the rain”; one may say, “I was beaten by the rain.” 

In my own language, Egbira, the metaphor can go further: “I was pounded by the rain.” Similarly, instead of asking a sick person, “How are you feeling?”, we may ask, “What does the body say?” That expression does more than inquire about a person’s physical condition; it suggests a conception of the human being in which the person and the body can be spoken of almost as separate entities. Whether or not we consciously analyse the philosophy embedded in such an expression, the language preserves a particular way of imagining the relationship between the human self and the physical body.

This is precisely what makes indigenous expressions so valuable to literature. Language does not merely communicate what people say; it preserves how they see.

Achebe himself argued for an English capable of carrying African experience while being adapted to its African environment. This position has generated a long debate about the relationship between English and indigenous languages. But the debate need not be reduced to a choice between English and indigenous languages. There is room for both.

African writers should certainly continue to write in indigenous languages. Those languages must be preserved, developed and given greater literary space. But writers who write in English, French, Portuguese or other inherited colonial languages should not feel compelled to reproduce them in culturally neutral forms. They can Africanise them. They can allow their mother tongues to influence their syntax, metaphors, idioms, rhythms, imagery and patterns of thought.

Rather than lamenting that indigenous-language literature cannot reach as many readers as English-language literature, why not allow the English sentence to bend, where necessary, towards the rhythm of our mother tongues? The result would not be English literature wearing African costumes. It would be something more interesting: African literature written in English, with English itself transformed by Africa.

This, to my mind, is one of the enduring lessons of Achebe. The larger task before African writers today is not merely to write African stories in a foreign language, but to make the language itself bear the imprint of the African experience. That way, we can gain the wider readership offered by English while carrying our indigenous cultures with us. We do not have to choose between reach and roots. We can have both.

Are you awake? 

©SUMAILA ISAH UMAISHA 

-Nigeria