articles ACHEBE AND HIS INFLUENCE IN SOME

CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN WRITING

................
African
intertextuality

Chinua Achebe

Igbo curse of Elleke Boehmer

twins University of Oxford, UK
influence

returning baby
motif The influence of Chinua Achebe on African writing since 1958 when Things
Fall Apart appeared is almost incalculable. With that novel he bequeathed a
Things Fall
whole new catalogue of cultural historical stories to readers across the globe,
Apart
................ for whom Nigeria till then was a remote, unimagined space: he gave
‘permission’, as Chimamanda Adichie has anecdotally commented
and did
1 Although it is true so vis-à-vis his own country and the globe (Kessel 2003).1 Though Things
that no story is Fall Apart was not the first anglophone novel by a black African to be
entirely original, that
all writing is published
that honour goes, arguably, to Solomon Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930)

effectively rewriting the book decisively told an African story from within an African frame of
(Tymocsko 2003: cultural reference. Moreover, it did so within a mode, that of tragedy, to
50), Achebe’s novel
was generative in which a range of different audiences both in Africa and the West could
that it seeded a new relate. So it was entirely appropriate that it was this novel, reissued within a
line of stories
of
few years of its first publication, that launched the Heinemann African
generational conflict,
of cultural change
Writers’ Series as its inaugural text (Currey 2008: 2, 27). With Things Fall
to a far wider Apart and the novels that followed in the next decade
No Longer at
audience than had
Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966)
Achebe
previously been privy
AQ to them. offered a way of writing Africa that would prove influential, not to say

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interventions Vol. 11(2) 141
153 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010903052982
i n t e r v e n t i o n s
11 :2 142
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path-breaking, a paradigm shift, for African literature subsequently. This
approach might be characterized as vernacular and idiomatic, embedded in
local myth and oral tradition, yet also involved in two chief concerns: to
explore in the once-colonial language of English the subtle, often fatal
seductions of the colonial project; and to assert a specifically African voice
and historical presence.
As has often been said across the year of its fiftieth birthday celebrations,
Things Fall Apart generated an awareness in writing from Africa and other
regions that it was not only possible but imperative to take on colonial
misrepresentations of others, and the binary supports on which these rested.
It was not surprising therefore that following the novel’s appearance, a
whole new genealogy of writing ramified, most immediately in Nigeria itself,
with the 1960s emergence of the prominent and talented group of writers
that included Nkem Nwankwo, Flora Nwapa, and Elechi Amadi, and
arguably also the poet Christopher Okigbo. These writers, all cultural
nationalists and to some extent organicists like Achebe, and all Igbo, were
interested in telling stories of their communities using symbols of recogniz-
ably local provenance (Boehmer 2005a: 179, 183
4). At the same time,
through these narratives of community travail and overcoming, they traced
trajectories of national emergence, trajectories that were rudely and
tragically cut short by the national emergency that was Biafra. But the
waves of influence emanating from Achebe’s work at the levels not merely of
‘ethnographic’ content, but of oral style, transliterated language, communal
narrative position, and epistemological framing, and of these elements
working together, can be detected in areas further afield. They can be traced
in Zimbabwean writing since the 1980s (think of Shimmer Chinodya’s
Harvest of Thorns); in Papua New Guinean writing of the 1980s and
subsequently, as also in the work of the Samoan Alfred Wendt (Keown 2007:
197
8); and in the novels of the Aboriginal-identified Australian writer
Mudrooroo. A case might even be made for Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children (1981) as representing a further instance of diffused and indirect
influence from Achebe, given that Rushdie’s novel, too, follows a commu-
nity’s coming-into-being through a process of cataclysmic historical change.
As this suggests, the subject of Achebe’s influence, in particular of his most
canonized novel, posits any number of connections and contiguities, at local,
regional and international levels. The transmission of his influence reminds
us, as Partha Mitter has commented, of how diffuse as well as direct,
heterogeneous and uneven as well as smooth, cross-fertilized as well as
copied, the transmission of influence can be (Mitter 2007: 7
13). Standing at
the head of a tradition or genealogy of writing as Achebe does, he has become
a dominant point of origin, a hyper-precursor one might say, in whose
aftermath virtually every African author self-consciously writes. At the same
time African writers relate to his influence in various ways
deferentially or
 ACHEBE AND HIS IN FLUENCE IN SOME CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN WRITING
Elleke Boehmer
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143

disruptively, embellishing or reducing, adapting incisively or tangentially,

with Bloomian ‘strength’ or with ‘weakness’ (Bloom 1973). Even given the
inevitable diffusion and etiolation of his influence in more recent decades, it
remains difficult from our point of view now, reading African writing after
Achebe, to conceive of African writing without him.
To reduce the burgeoning subject of Achebe’s influence to manageable,
essay-length proportions, I here propose to consider the transmission process
from his work to others’ in the form of a delineated case study focusing on
the relay and adaptation of a complicated cluster of motifs. Though it would
be interesting to examine features like language borrowing, generic transfer,
and the replication of narrative voice in Achebe’s literary ‘followers’, my
concern is to investigate a set of powerfully generative images through which
influence has arguably moved from a strong text such as Achebe’s into later
texts. Certainly, these generative images
which also, significantly, are
images of generation
have performed prominent roles in the work of the
interlocutors who have addressed themes and issues that also preoccupy him.
As suggested by the word generative, these motifs have to do with modes of
reproduction that are traditionally cursed or tabooed: they are expressed in
the shape either of twins (forbidden in traditional Igbo society) or of the
ogbanje, abiku or fatefully returning child. In other words, they deal,
interestingly, in forms of anomalous generation
generation that is either
excessive (multiple births) or impaired (failed births).
The body of the essay explores how these motifs operate in a small but
distinct group of writers who have worked some time ‘after Achebe’. It is
worth acknowledging straightaway, however, that early on Flora Nwapa in
Efuru (1966) at once signalled and sealed her having obtained ‘permission’
from Achebe by making her eponymous market-woman character an
ogbanje mother. Here, the focus begins in the 1990s with the Nigerian-
born Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and its central abiku character
2 For informed Azaro (abiku being the Yoruba word for ogbanje).2 Okri memorably
discussion of the develops the abiku child’s story in his novel into an analogy for the
lines of (af)filiation
and transfer of
emergent, yet reluctant-to-be-born, Nigerian nation. Thereafter, attention
influence that moves to the Nigerian-British novelist Diana Evans’ 26a (2005), in which a
connect Okri’s work pair of Nigerian-British twins who survive into adulthood form the central
to that of his literary
narrative consciousness. Then the essay looks at the twin protagonists of
precursors, see
AQ Quayson (1997). Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), and at a single
passage on returning babies in Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of colonial
Rhodesia, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002). A brief reference
to the suspected appearance of an ogbanje child in my own recent novel Nile
Baby (2008), which is concerned with curtailed promises and buried
histories, rounds off the analysis.
As suggested, both intertwined strands of transferred motifs
of the
ogbanje and the cursed twins
relate to the potential for growth and the
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frustration of that potential, and so to the dangers, anomalies and
possibilities of destruction that accompany the appearance of all new life.
These motifs that gesture at Achebe therefore also emphasize the perils and
distortions accompanying the transmission of traditions, practices and
knowledge from one generation to another. Possibly, too, they reflect,
even if obliquely, on the difficulty of enlisting in a genealogy that leads from
a hyper-precursor such as Achebe
one who has so persuasively incorpo-
rated motifs from local myth and oral tradition like the ogbanje into his
work. In sum, influence from Achebe in these various cases operates through
motifs that themselves refer to risky, sometimes etiolated, sometimes
intensified, processes of (conceptual, metaphoric and stylistic) transfer.
The essay therefore approaches these motifs as a type of symbolic code, in
order to consider how they themselves work as vehicles of cultural
transmission and translation. Chris Abani (2008) has commented on how
Achebe’s legendary presence closes from all directions on the creative terrain
he occupies as a fellow Igbo writer, and yet, paradoxically, allows other
writers, including himself, entry, exchange, responsiveness; that is to say,
bequeaths a voice. From such a point of view, too, it is interesting that the
motifs that have migrated more or less intact
though not without
interrogation
from Achebe to others are concerned to highlight at once
the deadly dangers and the creative challenges associated with that process of
migration or cultural translation.
‘This man told [Okonkwo] that the child was an ogbanje, one of those
wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers’ wombs to be
born again’ (Achebe 1962: 54). To proceed, it is helpful to be reminded of
Achebe’s citation of the figures of the ogbanje and the cursed twins in Things
Fall Apart. The ogbanje child in that novel is of course Ezinma, the only
living child of Okonkwo’s favourite wife Ekwefi, towards whom however he
rarely shows affection in public. Ezinma and Ekwefi are twice introduced as
characters before the scene in which Ezinma begins to ail, as all ogbanje
inevitably do, which, not coincidentally, is soon after the death of Ikemefuna
at Okonkwo’s hands (Achebe 1962: 28, 35). She becomes at this time an
emotional barometer of Okonkwo’s depression. ‘At last Ezinma was born,
and although ailing she seemed determined to live. . . . But all of a sudden she
would go down again. Everybody knew she was ogbanje.’ Indeed, in so far as
the diagnosis of Ezinma’s disorder correlates with the description of
Okonkwo’s emotional state, there may be an undercurrent suggestion here
that Okonkwo himself with his fits of aggression, irrational moods, and
tendency to self-destruct, bears ogbanje qualities.
The information Things Fall Apart gives concerning ogbanje is juxtaposed,
significantly, with the first references in the novel to the Evil Forest, more
often now called the Bad Bush, which is the place where mutilated ogbanje
corpses are thrown, along with other cursed dead and dying, including twins.
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The hope in doing so is that the ogbanje will thereby be too incapacitated
and ontologically demoralized to come back and haunt their mothers. The
knowledge of community lore transmitted in these details then prepares for
the scene in chapter 11 when Ekwefi and Okonkwo shadow Chielo the
priestess, devotee of Agbala, when she disappears into her shrine with a
feverish Ezinma for a night, but finally returns her, restored, to her bed.
Thereafter, through and in spite of Okonkwo’s years of exile, Ezinma grows
into ‘a healthy, buoyant maiden’, still the apple of her father’s eye, though
prone to unpredictable bouts of depression
not too different from the
periods of darkness that beset her father (Achebe 1962: 122).
In a narrative in which Okonkwo’s legendary strengths are carefully
balanced against the crimes fuelled by his anxiety and excessive aggression,
his delight in and care for Ezinma
a girl, as he observes with irritation, not
a boy
counts as one of his volatile strengths. Through her, as well as
through the lessons of his exile, he learns to understand a little more clearly
how ‘Mother is supreme’. In his son Nwoye’s case, by contrast, solicitous-
ness for the cursed and the outcast is out of proportion to his other qualities,
and this eventually drives the son into the arms of the missionaries. He has
been disconcerted by unexplained cruelties within the life of the village: the
death of Ikemefuna, ‘the question of the twins crying in the bush’ (Achebe
1962: 104). In Diana Evans and Chimamanda Adichie these accursed twins
crying in the bush, doomed to die, triumphantly if also ambiguously become
the ebullient central characters of the novels 26a and Half of a Yellow Sun.
But before going into this in more detail, my focus must first move to the
presence of Achebe in Okri’s The Famished Road, where it intermeshes with
the equally prominent presences of Soyinka, Okigbo, and also Bekederemo
(John Pepper Clark).

Okri, Evans, Adichie

Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child it keeps coming and going.
One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong.
Ben Okri (1991: 478)

If there is one outstanding feature of Okri’s The Famished Road when

compared with Achebe, it is that he has moved away from a dominant
interpretative trend in African writing, set by Things Fall Apart. In his work
images of African reality derived from the oral tradition are adapted not so
much to discuss the representation of Africa, as to address dimensions of
African experience through an African symbolic language. For him, it is a
i n t e r v e n t i o n s
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question of what more than how. These other dimensions include a concern
with the other-than-colonial, also the other-than-national. In contrast to
colonial writing describing Africa as exotic, and to nationalist-realist writing
that reverses colonial stereotypes, the different planes of reality in Okri’s
novel merge the magical and the real in order to construct allegorical
narrative arcs which encapsulate the national condition, yet also refer
beyond that experiential realm.
In Okri’s essay for Chinua Achebe, ‘Redreaming the World’, first
published in the Guardian in August 1990 (Okri 1990: 23; 1997: 128
33),
he spoke of how the suffering of the oppressed allows them to redream the
world. He could also have said how his wrestling with Achebe has allowed
him to redream his own work. Okri’s fiction deals in what Harry Garuba
(2003) has defined as a ‘retraditionalization’ process, whereby traditional
cultural forms, such as the figure of, and legends adhering to, the returning
baby or child are used to interpret the modern world. Writing that
retraditionalizes in this way, I suggest, is taking two distinct yet simultaneous
approaches to the dominant influence of Achebe. It is at one and the same
time displacing the conventional signified of the standard signifiers of
tradition, as in twins curse; yet also, by adopting these signifiers none-
theless, it continues to recognize and to build on their mythic and symbolic
staying power. In other words, Okri’s abiku plot
the story of Azaro, his
mum and dad
acknowledges Achebe in the breach rather than in the
observance, yet at the same time is never unaware of how his legacy accrues
3 For further meaning to the returning child-nation motif.3 Azaro as embryonic nation is
discussion of the thrown upon the repeating cycles of fortune and misfortune that circum-
oblique and
palimpsestic scribe political reality, very much as an abiku/ogbanje like Ezinma risks life
referencing of and death every time he or she embarks upon a new life cycle. The ogbanje
tradition in Okri, see reference, which was chiefly an authenticating device in Achebe, an
the discussion in
Boehmer (2005b:
ethnographic marker, along with the egwugwu, the proverbs and so on,
140
57). becomes in Okri integrated into the cyclical narrative structure, and into its
symbolic or spiritual-realist framework:

The spirit-child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams
of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to
become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain
their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure
and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in
themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till
their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake
of the condition of the spirit child. (Okri 1991: 487)

Diana Evans and Chimamanda Adichie differ in several respects, not least in
national location. Diana Evans, her mother Nigerian, her father English,
ACHEBE AND HIS IN FLUENCE IN SOME CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN WRITING
Elleke Boehmer
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147

describes herself as a British writer, whereas Adichie is Nigerian, resident in

the United States. Yet their novelistic pathways coincide in their interest in
incorporating figures that are recognizably from Achebe, or Achebe-esque,
not so much into the symbolic framework of their narratives (as in Okri), but
at the level of characterization and plot, that is, into their narrative structure.
To adapt the above quotation from Okri, their narrative structure itself
demonstrates how their work partakes of the condition of Achebe.
At the heart of Evans’ 26a are the identical twins Georgia and Bessi
Hunter, growing up in their eponymously numbered house in Waifer
Avenue, Neasden along with their homesick Nigerian mother with wide
cicatrices on her cheeks; their depressed Derbyshire father; and their two
other sisters, one older, one younger. As with twins in the pre-colonial Igbo
world conveyed by Achebe, but here in a more positive sense, the two are
uncannily linked: they occupy ‘an extra dimension’, ‘the sum of two people’;
they are ‘twoness in oneness’ who see and think as one (Evans 2005: 5, 43).
They also share a graphic primal memory with overtones from Soyinka’s
The Road (1965), on which the novel opens, of coming through road
slaughter and nearly dying in order to be born. This not only presages the
troubled destiny of at least one of the twins (Georgia) as she grows older, but
also, for readers of Achebe (as Evans must be), reverberates against what we
know well about the one-time fate of twins. The entire novel turns around
the harmonious, closely attuned twoness of the twins, not unlike the twoness
of the twins in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), only
closer. However, it becomes increasingly clear as time goes on that this near-
impossible closeness is difficult, if not almost life-denying, to sustain,
especially under the pressure of Georgia’s depression, the ‘shadows’ in her
head. It is as if the novel is conceding something to the old Igbo taboo about
twins
that nature does not like to allow this kind of mirror-image
replication. Nne-Nne their grandmother reminds them of this on their one
visit to see her while in Nigeria:

Then Nne-Nne said, ‘It is very special to be twins, you kno that? Your moda tell
you about them
the stories?’
‘No,’ said Ida, lightly reproaching Nne-Nne. ‘You scare them!’
‘Ah, but come, Ida, mek them tough now, not so!’
‘What?’ said Bessi.
‘Who?’ said Georgia.
‘Yeah, what?’ added Kemy.
Baba had stopped talking. His eyes flashed. He rubbed his hands together. ‘They
kill dem!’ (Evans 2005: 61)

Their grandfather Baba then goes on to enlarge on how twins are a curse, the
offspring of witches and devils.
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At the time, not much is made of the insertion of this mini-tale of a
traditional taboo into the narrative. However, for the reader, the new
knowledge of the twins’ forbiddenness closely precedes if not presages the
abuse that Georgia will suffer at the hands of the Lagos watchman Seldrick.
This, the first experience that she keeps secret from Bessi, sets her off on a
journey away from their land of ‘twoness in oneness’, increasingly locks her
into her own inner darkness, and finally ends in her suicide. In a novel which
powerfully evokes how the different dimensions of the characters’ subjective
realities continually interweave, separate and mesh, Georgia, though the first
twin born and so traditionally stronger, finds it impossible to sustain a sense
of separation between these different strands of perception and reality
(Evans 2005: 124, 188). She comes to feel possessed by her shadows, or, as
she describes it towards the end of her life, a devil has entered her and
replaced her soul
not unlike what Baba had earlier said happened with the
4 The fate of stronger of a pair of twins.4
Georgia in her More prominently than in the case of Diana Evans, Chimamanda
pairing with her twin
Bessi shows parallels, Adichie’s work to date is stamped with numerous filiative gestures towards
too, with the life and Achebe. There is the explicit reference to things falling apart in the opening
death of the sentence of her first novel, a bildungsroman with a dark twist in the tale,
perceptive Adah, the
twin of Leah, in Purple Hibiscus (2004). There are the many untranslated Igbo words that
Barbara Kingsolver’s pepper both of her novels to date, this and Half of a Yellow Sun, her Biafran
The Poisonwood War story. There is the unmistakably Achebe-like epistemological and
Bible (1998). In this
novel, set in the textual about-turn at the end of Half of a Yellow Sun, when it becomes
Belgian Congo at the apparent that the novel-in-formation that Adichie’s narrative has been
time of tracking, is the work not of Kainene’s lover Richard, as the reader has been
independence, the
children of the led to suspect, but the houseboy-soldier Ugwu. Ugwu’s dedication ‘For
American Price Master, my good man’ repeats closely, though with an anti-colonial rather
family adopt African, than a colonizing twist, the DC’s decision at the end of Things Fall Apart to
specifically
Congolese, entitle his book The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
tendencies and But what is particularly interesting about the undertow and overtones of
features. Achebe in Adichie occurs where his influence does not so much reside in a
gesture present on the surface of the text, but when, as with Evans, it is
incorporated into the configurations of plot and character. As does Evans,
but arguably even more fundamentally so, Adichie hinges the entire Half of a
Yellow Sun narrative on the twoness or separateness of the Igbo twins
Olanna and Kainene, which their competitive destinies force into a rift, that
will not sustain mutual life. Kainene is the sceptical materialist entrepreneur
with the English lover and the androgynous look; Olanna, more central to
the plot, dynamically beautiful, an Africanist lecturer in sociology, feels that
her sister has put distance between them since their teenagehood (Adichie
2006: 36
7). Relatives, friends and lovers all comment on the gulf that
divides them, though are not aware of its complicated motivations.
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A major split, which is not fully revealed until the novel’s second half,
occurs following Olanna’s one-off seduction of Richard, which Kainene
hears about before too long. Olanna’s wish to take revenge on Odenigbo for
his seduction by his mother’s maid in part motivates this act, though it may
also represent a vain attempt on Olanna’s part to get closer to Kainene
through her lover (Adichie 2006: 252). But whether it is a mistaken sisterly
overture or not, the event predictably has negative consequences and leads to
the long-term estrangement of the twins. The onus then lies on the wounded
and insulted Kainene to rebuild the bridge between them, which she does
when the civil war has started to go badly for Biafra (Adichie 2006: 343). At
a time of fratricide, she recognizes that familial and national solidarities
must outweigh personal differences, and chooses to reassert sisterliness. At
the same time she is involved in a different kind of border-crossing, trading
across enemy lines on behalf of a refugee centre. It is while on one of these
trading missions that she disappears and is not heard of again, despite
Olanna and others’ attempts to locate her (Adichie 2006: 407, 413, 433).
The novel ends without confirmation of her being alive or dead. So,
regardless of her survival into adulthood, Kainene the twin has entered and
been lost to the realm of ghosts, the Bad Bush or Forest populated with
Deads that traditionally claims twins. Though Ugwu returns from his war
horrors, and the other central characters survive, fratricidal war, which
reduces all relationships to their bare bones, does not permit the twoness of
the twins to last. One of the twins has, it seems, to be sacrificed to familial
and national destiny, as is suggested by the resignation expressed in the
following:

When first she saw her parents, her father called her ‘Ola m’, my gold, and she
wished he wouldn’t because she felt tarnished.
‘I did not even see Kainene before she left. When I woke up, she was gone,’ she said
to them.
‘Anyi ga-achota ya, we will find her,’ her mother said.
‘We will find her,’ her father repeated.
‘Yes, we will find her,’ Olanna said too, and she felt as if they were all scratching
desperate fingernails on a hard, scarred wall. (Adichie 2006: 431)

Lest this reading seem to overemphasize the twinship of Kainene or Olanna

(and twinship is, after all, not a dominant plot feature in Things Fall Apart),
it is worth imagining the alternative that Adichie might have used in their
characterization. Kainene and Olanna could, after all, have been made
sisters only, not twins; close in age, yet not close in emotion. However,
Adichie the narrator chose to make them twins. She chose to dwell on the
specialness, the intense genetic charge that links the sisters, in spite of their
many differences. And therefore, by extension, she chose from the start
i n t e r v e n t i o n s
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to allude to the encroaching fate that appears almost inevitably to befall
them
even though they live into adulthood
as Achebe’s novel allows us
to predict. Here it is suggestive to think again by contrast of the two-egg
twins Rahel and Estha in Arundhati Roy, who survive despite their sorrows
and separation, whereas, in Adichie and Evans’ novels, being one of a twin,
especially the more domineering, independent one, is in existential terms to
be doomed.

Conclusions

To begin to close, attention now shifts from twinship back to the motif of the
returning baby, and in particular the Africanizing device that the ogbanje
story offers the memoir writer Alexandra Fuller, whose work is otherwise far
removed from the cultural and ethnographic terrain occupied by Achebe. Yet
Fuller writes with some sense of his and other Igbo writers’ symbolic legacy
in her attempt, or so it seems, to ground her own vision and identity in
African soil
specifically, in Zimbabwe.
Fuller’s 2002 memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight recounts in
evocative prose her childhood on a farm in eastern Rhodesia, and her
family’s struggle to cope with a series of blights, tragedies and incursions.
These include, at a national level, warfare to defend the white settler
country’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and, at a micro-
cosmic level, the domestic yet equally devastating disasters that bring about
the deaths of three of the family’s five young children: Adrian, Olivia and
Richard. The deaths of the children lie at the painful heart of Fuller’s
memoir, yet, at the very start, she as it were resolves these sorrows into an
overarching cyclical and cosmic story, which she causes to overlap with her
own, through the medium of her anecdote about the Coming-Back Baby. She
incorporates her family biography into a
to her, generic
African legend of
the spirit-child, even though she at the same time subtly separates her own
particular life-narrative from it:

Some Africans believe that if your baby dies you must bury it far away from your
house, with proper magic and incantations and gifts for the gods, so that the baby
does not come back, time after time, and plant itself inside your womb only to die a
short time after birth.
This is a story for people who need to find an acceptable way to lose a multitude
of babies. Like us. Five born, three dead. . . .
My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea.
Meanwhile, Adrian’s restless African soul still roamed. Waiting. Waiting to come
back and take another baby under the earth. (Fuller 2002: 35)
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Ogbanje has certainly allowed me, as the author of Nile Baby (2008), a
novel about friendship, Africanness and journeying, yet set in England, to
establish an explicitly Africanizing device through which to excavate and
reclaim the still-residual African migrant histories that lie embedded in
contemporary Britain. Self-consciously as this device is used in Nile Baby,
I am bound equally self-reflexively to acknowledge here that my reading of
Achebe’s influence in the form of the returning-baby motif has inevitably
been mediated through, as well as mediating, my own creative adaptation
of the motif in my novel. In Nile Baby, the ogbanje figure
a preserved
embryo in a bottle who seems under certain lights to come alive
is
identified as a returning baby by a Nigerian nurse, Katrina, who, herself
feeling stranded and abandoned in England, identifies with the embryo’s
plight. Twelve-year-old Arnie, the son of Katrina’s boyfriend, who carries
the specimen jar with him on a journey to find his father, also has reasons
for identifying with the embryo, whom he calls Fish. Fish thus invites a
range of possible readings. To Arnie and his misfit friend Alice, who has
an absent African father, he comes to signify the long-embedded presence
of Africa in England. To Katrina and also to Arnie, he suggests how
certain kinds of possibility remain immanent, tantalizingly beckoning; and
also how dominant pathways of cultural influence between Africa and
Europe may be reversed. Moreover, like ogbanje figures elsewhere, Fish
plays an important role as a social catalyst between the main characters.
Like Okri’s Azaro, he occupies zones of transition and interchange, as
here:

And then [Katrina] began to talk. A long stream of talk came flowing from her
mouth with only now and then a pause for breath. It was the strangest thing.
Where last night I’d struggled to catch her meaning, now every word was plain.
The only problem was that sometimes she called herself I and sometimes Katrina,
as if she was standing outside of herself, so it wasn’t till later that I understood
clearly parts of what she’d said.
‘Now then Danny’s boy Arnie,’ she said. ‘You think why I help lift your heavy
burden? I tell you why. Katrina born five, six, pickin in this life. She bring her five
or six child into this life, but not bring one for her house. No pickin. No single one
live. They come from Katrina perfect like this one here, five or six. Some early,
some late, only one they take a knife to open my belly so the breeze rush inside.
That one have a nice, round head, his body fine, too, but all-the-same he die. The
other ones have long, smart heads like this Fish.’ She cupped his head, she rocked,
the bracelet clicked. ‘Fact is,’ she went on, ‘Katrina know very well how new baby
look. She has midwife certificate, she seen plenty. She seen poor, sick pickin born
with brain hanging down their back like raffia. And heart outside body. And too-
small arms like little wings. I think Fish born small like this and head frontwards,
i n t e r v e n t i o n s
11 :2 152
.........................
very ordinary, but then like my pickin he choose not to live. No, not at all. Maybe
he got hole inside him somewhere, so his ghost leak out. Or maybe he take one
look round and think no way, not this world, it too raw, not for me, just like each
and every one of the pickin Katrina born.’
She cradled Fish up higher, between her chin and her shoulder, as if he was a
violin.
‘Off my babies go, and then come back, and again and again and again.
Ogbanje child we Igbo call them in the muddy river delta from where I come.
Ogbanje child always knock at the door of the same belly, the same mother, and
yank her hair, want to try the thing one more time. Please, let me try another little
bit of this life, they say. I want to put these arms around you, make you feel warm,
give it a go one last time. And the mother say yes, ’course, come
how can she
not?
and the child rush in, and lose the hope and hunger to live even while they
rushing.’ (Boehmer 2008: 139
40)

What tentative conclusions might be drawn from the fact that Achebe
appears to have energized figures referring to excessive and impaired
generation
cursed yet magical children, and cursed and mysteriously
linked twins
in work that has followed him? Apart from the specific
ways in which these figures of anomaly operate in the different texts,
something the writers discussed here suggest in common, I submit, is the
importance and slipperiness of his influence itself
influence marked with
the sign of Achebe, which however they adapt, mould, warp and
translate. Influence, as Said (1984) and Mitter (2007) among others
observe, works through filiation as well as networks of affiliation,
through direct and familial as well as less direct and mediated transfer.
In Things Fall Apart filiation is noticeably frustrated: Nwoye is
permanently estranged from his father Okonkwo and his tribe; the
ogbanje child remains always under threat; twins are not permitted to
live. In the work of Okri, Evans, and Adichie, the cursed or doomed child
achieves some familial filiation as well as the connections of affiliation,
such as with friends and compatriots. Anomalous generation produces
miraculous metamorphosis as well as loss
and this at the level of the
narrative action and at the level of metanarrative. Transmission from one
generation to another in these writers, though it takes place through the
small-scale metaphorical vehicle of the child, the symbolic code of the
twin or ogbanje, is made to be successful, generative, transformative

though the source of transmission remains Achebe. Stamping their work
with the signatures of Achebe, yet adapting those signatures even as they
do so, these writers declare their complex allegiance to, and affiliation
with, Achebe and his now-transnational Igbo tradition.
ACHEBE AND HIS IN FLUENCE IN SOME CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN WRITING
Elleke Boehmer
R e f e ren c e s
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