Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
He is a brilliant narrator. He can say anything and he will captivate you and you will listen. He is a great performer. Here he is writing about the confrontation between Western culture and the traditional culture and he gives you a historical framework in his essay.
Your last two choices are both by Chinua Achebe. Let’s start with Home and Exile, which is based on three lectures he gave at Harvard.
He is a brilliant narrator. He can say anything and he will captivate you and you will listen. He is a great performer. Here he is writing about the confrontation between Western culture and the traditional culture and he gives you a historical framework in these essays – but he does it in a very personal way. One of the titles of the essays is ‘My Home under Imperial Fire’ where he talks about the advent of the colonial administration in Nigeria and how this aided, and indeed rode on the back of, misrepresentations of the African in literary accounts of early European travellers, etc. He particularly singles out Conrad and Joyce Carey as being the latest manifestation of that long tradition. And in another essay, ‘The Empire Fights Back’, he talks about the emerging literary works from former colonised territories, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, etc – leading towards what he calls a balance of stories. These are recurring themes in all of his writing. Even in his latest collection of essays, The Education of a British Protected Child, he returns to those themes. But, such is his genius for narrative he never bores. He is a brilliant essayist.
With everything going on in Nigeria at the moment including the death of the president and the unrest in Jos there must be lots of fresh writing coming out.
Yes, things are always happening and you have to write about them to make sense of them. We have some younger writers coming through. It is hard for me, being based in the US, to be on top of it all. But one follows what is going on in the papers. I know that a young lady, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, just won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature. She wrote about the notorious Nigerian email scams. I haven’t read the book yet. And other people are writing about the Niger Delta troubles. These are topical issues that people living there are trying to make sense of. Nigeria is a society in transformation. It is changing politically and sociologically and that, of course, has its effect on the people.
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Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, won the Caine Prize in 2001. In 2002 he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His writing has won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. In 2005-2006 he was the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He is contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review and in 2006 co-edited the British Council’s anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time was published in February 2007 and his latest novel, Oil on Water, is out soon. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and children. He says Nigeria has a tradition of storytelling. ‘Before we were over taken by TV and video games it was very much part of our culture to tell stories. And this tradition still persists on the streets… you will see people spend hours just talking to each other!’
