MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY: Essays

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 1975

Many of these essays were written for international symposiums over the last twenty years in which the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was called on to represent the situation of the African writer--a creature who only recently ""broke into the world."" The questions to which Achebe addresses himself are inextricably tied up with the colonial past. He launches a vitriolic attack on ""the colonialist critic"" who has been unwilling to accept the validity of a non-European sensibility and predicated the merit of African writing on a Western dogma of ""universality."" Achebe also finds it necessary to defend himself on the home front from critics who assert that African literature cannot be written in English. Which may be seen as an argument similar in spirit to the one that says there can be no African novel because the novel is an English art form. Finally Achebe apologizes for the ""earnestness"" of his work--a political commitment to create art which will ""help my society to regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement."" The African writer is in a unique combination of circumstances--historic, linguistic, intellectual--and one can't fail to be curiously involved in the implications.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Anchor Press/Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION