Flashback to Chinua Achebe’s THINGS…(Fall Apart) and ARROW (of God).
SIXTY EIGHT years ago, precisely June 17, 1958, the novel, THINGS FALL APART was officially launched. It took the literary world by storm. They couldn’t believe it that Africa had such a history of culture and social harmony to cherish about before the advent of the whiteman with his strange religion and ways of life. They saw virtually anything African as fetish and primitive. and which should be discarded with.
Chinua Achebe sought to present Africa to the world from the prism of art in his first novel, THINGS FALL APART. It was a huge literary success and it became so popular it had to be translated into over twenty different languages of the world.
Wow!
Its sequel, NO LONGER AT EASE, had a seeming “collateral good reception” though not as much as THINGS FALL APART did. The “koko master” of it all was ARROW OF GOD (1964), another novel with a “wild wide world”, www, review too.
The trilogy, today, is the mainframe of the legacy left behind by Achebe, the IROKO tree in the literary jungle of African Literature. Father, grand father of authentic African prose and flavour.
The literary flashback you are about to read is a piece written by me in 2014 after I had stopped writing the OPILOGUE column due to some pressing personal challenges. (That’s a story for another day.)
Luckily enough God seems to be warming and revving up the (Devine?) engine for me again, hence the recent reappearance of the tip of the once submerged iceberg of Opilogue.
So why this?
Good question.
Opilogue is first and foremost a blatantly entertaining (not serious?) type of writing that is heavily laced with humour of the African variety and occasionally it comes and smells of local (spicy?) aroma.
Yes I do smell that, but why bring in a serious matter like this Achebe thing and THINGS on the lively, ever bubbling Opilogue platform?
Remember Zainab Alkali’s THE STILLBORN?
Yes, what about? No be novel too?
Good.
It is this quote I remember very well and which better illustrates the point I have been labouring to make.
And what’s that?
Here it goes:
“Life is a drama of pain and happiness is but an interlude”.
That’s one saying I already have deep etched in my “medula opologanta”.
Ehn ehn?
We already derive happiness in Opilogue, what else? Abi you wan kuku kill us with laughter?
That’s the crux of the matter.
Opilogue is a drama of “satirico-comical” exposition and seriousness is but an occasional (?) interlude, the composite of Alkali’s.
Meaning you are importing and smuggling in pain to “dabaru” our joy?
Dabaru ke?
Why should I make a stillborn of your joy and happiness?
No, I mean once in a while we may have to “open sesame” for some seriousness LIVE or ARCHIVAL to stem the tide of monotonous “fehin e” (laughter) episodes.
Na you sabi.
Enough of this “so long an intro”. Can you bring it up a bit?
Sure, I will before the end of June, the month of Achebe and his THINGS FALL APART.
No be tomorrow be that?
Spot on!
END
