Promotion of Igbo Culture in Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories (Published)
This paper shows that Chinua Achebe promotes Igbo culture by producing a short fiction marked by an Africanized English and an Igbophilized thematics, which reveal at best Achebe’s preoccupations about the preservation of the Igbo traditional values threatened by the white man’s civilization. The “Africanization” of English and the thematic “Igbophilization” make the author into a language “reinventor” and an “ancestor worshipper”.
Keywords: Achebe, Africanized English, Igbo culture, Igbophilized thematics, Promotion
The Image of Women in Chinua Adchebe’s Novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease and Arrow of God (Published)
This paper explores and discusses the image of women in Chinua Achebe’s novels: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. In Things Fall Apart (TFA), there is a great marginalization of women in Nigerian society. Although there are many tasks undertaken by women such as educating the children by narrating folk stories to them, upbringing their daughters, and serving as priestesses of gods (e.g. Chillo). The reader of such novels can effortlessly internalize the image of women in Chinua Achebe because it is very obvious. This Image has been improved through the development of the society in TFA. The citizens are ignorant, but are educated in the second novel No Longer at Ease. When a girl was asked to fulfill an application form and reaching to sex activities item, she wrote twice a week. It is the same case in Arrow of God, when Ezulu wants to send his son to the church in order to enable him to learn the lifestyle of the white This was evident when his mother asked him “Why do you send my son ?” and his a answer is that ” How does it concern you while I do with my son”. Regardless of his changeable Image from time to time, we have to acknowledge that Chinua Achebe, belittles, scorns, and underestimates women in his early and modern novels.
Keywords: Achebe, Nigerian, Scorn, Women, belittle, image
REFERENCE AS A TECHNIQUE OF SUSPENSE IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S ARROW OF GOD (Published)
Chinua Achebe’s literary texts have no doubt, provided interacting confluences of opinions and comments from both African and non-African critics. Not only from the tributary of literary criticism, scholars from other fields and persuasions, language, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and so on have also enjoyed the fertility of the texts of this writer who was adjudged the greatest prose writer of African extraction. Perhaps, however, no other aspect of Achebe’s writing skill has received greater attention more than his narrative skill, his telling techniques, especially his masterful blend of Igbo and English rhetoric strategies. This paper further examines the language techniques of Achebe in one of his novels, Arrow of God. It examines Achebe’s exploitation of reference in the creation of suspense in the novel. Suspense is a popular literary technique, usually realised as an inter-episodic linking device. But this paper examines it from a different pattern of linking strategy and in this manner uses it to characterise Achebe’s literary idiolect. The theoretical framework adopted in the study is Discourse Analysis, a linguistic theory that examines how the various parts of a text are cohesively united as a whole. In applying this theory in the study, it examines how Achebe’s unique reference patterns help in reading the novel as a text
Keywords: Achebe, Arrow of God, Reference, Suspense, Technique
HOW THE ISSUES OF SECESSION AND CONFEDERATION COULD HAVE PREVENTED THE NIGERIA – Biafra War: A Review of Achebe’s There Was A Country (Published)
The book There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe published shortly before he died has taken a central place in the list of political literature of Nigeria. Written in lucid prose and boldly addressing the gargantuan issues that brought down the nation’s first republic, Achebe pointed accusing fingers at those actors who brought untold hardship on his people, Ndigbo for which he has been severely criticized. Carefully crafted and well researched, the book is not one to be wished away. The book challenges the West, particularly Great Britain for the ugly roles they played during the war. This article takes a different look at the unfortunate event and other ways that could have prevented the civil war
Keywords: Achebe, Biafra War, Confederation, Nigeria, Secession