Glenwood Morris Ms. Crooks English 113 4 December 2001 Chinua Achebe: Coming Together and Falling Apart.
When posed with the question "How has a writer's life influenced his or her writing?" one cannot find a truly logical place to start when it comes to Chinua Achebe. His writings, specifically Things Fall Apart, are read and studied around the world. He, along with several other African authors in the 50's, brought to light the literature and history of a continent that had been washed over with stereotypes and hearsay. How then would someone writing about the past, be influenced by the present? In ways that are too numerous to even list here, let alone discuss. This paper will cover how Achebe's past influenced him to write about the past of his people, and how he discovered that "[He] was not on Marlowe's boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness.
A spiral stack of copies of the 1994 Anchor Books ...
English: Chinua Achebe speaking at Asbury Hall, Bu...
English: Market scene in Ibadan[He] was one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the river bank, making horrid faces" (Chinua, http://www.nhmccd.edu/contracts/lrc/kc/achebe.htm).
Chinua Achebe grew up in the Ibo village of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria. His father was a Christian missionary, but many of his relatives still practiced the more traditional tribal religions of the area (Achebe, Home 8-9). Because it was forbidden to him, Achebe had a certain facination with the traditional religions of his people. Learning the parables that went along with it later provoked Achebe to make the remark that "proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten" in his famous book Things Fall Apart (Wachtel, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servletâ¦). In college Chinua Achebe began to realize that much of the history of Africa, and the history of Nigeria itself, had been twisted and manipulated by European powers and authors so they could justify their rule. He...