Through African eyes

[muckefuck]

monshu and I were so relieved to have an actual relaxing weekend for a change. Yesterday, we each did something we haven't in ages: I laid in bed in the afternoon reading and he cooked dinner. It's a bit bizarre for me to realise this hasn't happened in nearly a month, but that's how crazy the house situation has made us.

As a consequence, I was able to finish Achebe's A man of the people. It's a slim novel--almost a novella--and an easy read. More than anything, it reminds me what I was really missing in Naipaul was a touch of humour. Of course, for humour, you need self-awareness and that's something Naipaul's narrator in A bend in the river is way too self-absorbed for.

I deliberately chose Achebe's novel because of similarities in plot, characterisation, and structure, so were I more ambitious, I could churn out a hefty compare/contrast essay like I used to for English class. No one's grading this, so I'll cut to the chase: Yeah, Salim is a tool, and it doesn't even take Achebe's narrator Odili to make you appreciate just how much of one. At the end, Odili is nearly speechless with shame because of a nasty letter he writes to his would-be girlfriend (who is engaged to another man). Salim, as we recall, beats his paramour black and blue and then unapologetically whines about how bad this makes him feel. He even complains about how sore his hand is!

Of course, Salim would be the first to point out that Odili is in a privileged position vis-à-vis him: At least he's African, with a tribe and a vocation to build the new Africa. In comparison to Salim's status as a barely-tolerated member of a foreign trading caste, the fact that Odili's father was a despised collaborateur in the colonial government is nothing. This makes all the difference in the two novels, since Odili drives the action with his need for revenge against a former teacher, whereas Salim is maddeningly passive.

This is probably my greatest disappointment with Salim. He could've used his outsider status as a vantage point from which to examine the different factions contesting for control of the newly-independent country he's in. Instead, his distance dehumanises everyone around. Odili shows more sympathetic understanding of people he wishes to destroy than Salim shows of those he claims as friends.

So why did I finish Naipaul's novel? I'm still wondering that myself. It can't be just that I was hoping for an apotheosis because mollpeartree's review made it pretty clear there wouldn't be one. It certainly wasn't for the style which is what I think gets politely described as "workmanlike". I thought I saw a hint of promise when he introduces the metaphor of trampling on the past; one character says of it, "at first it's like trampling on a garden, then it becomes like walking on the ground". Unfortunately, in place of equally poetic turns of speech down the road, he just trots out this one again and again until he's run it into the ground. Achebe has a powerful central metaphor, too, that of a house in the rain with local politicians as those who have taken shelter there. He elabourates this in one brilliant paragraph and then doesn't explicitly mention it again. He doesn't need to--he's got a lot more where that came from.

Perhaps, as mollpeartree says, it comes down to the fact that he is describing a very interesting and tricky time in the history of a newly-emancipated nation, and with an eye for telling details. Achebe's chosen the same period, but he's more concerned with the bigger picture. Not that he becomes didactic, but I imagine his insights were much more startling back when the events were still fresh and not well understood in the USA. For someone who's been following, say, the war in Congo or the collapse of Zimbabwe, all you really learn is that the political ecology of Subsaharan Africa hasn't changed much in forty years' time.

Comments

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

And here I was thinking you could easily get what it's like to be African just by putting on blackface and doing song-and-dance numbers about corn pone and being afraid of white people.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

It certainly wasn't for the style which is what I think gets politely described as "workmanlike".

Woah, harsh! I really liked Naipaul's writing style myself (but de gustibus, I guess; I thought about looking up and quoting a few nice passages to "prove" you wrong, but what's the point? If you were going to like it you would have noticed that the first time through ...)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I would totally love to see some cites whenever you feel up to mentioning them. Just give me page numbers and I'll look them up--I really do want to find out why I liked this novel as much as I did.