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摘要
摘要
Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, the author of Things Fall Apart, the best known--and best selling--novel ever to come out of Africa. His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in Home and Exile, Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work. Here is an extended exploration of the European impact on African culture, viewed through the most vivid experience available to the author--his own life. It is an extended snapshot of a major writer's childhood, illuminating his roots as an artist. Achebe discusses his English education and the relationship between colonial writers and the European literary tradition. He argues that if colonial writers try to imitate and, indeed, go one better than the Empire, they run the danger of undervaluing their homeland and their own people. Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away. Home and Exile is a moving account of an exceptional life. Achebe reveals the inner workings of the human conscience through the predicament of Africa and his own intellectual life. It is a story of the triumph of mind, told in the words of one of this century's most gifted writers.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Though it is labeled autobiographical by the publisher, this small book, which originated as three lectures given at Harvard University in December 1998, barely covers the rudiments of Achebe's long and productive life (he is now 70). But the great Nigerian novelist and poet, a master of compression, needs little more than 100 pages to tell the dramatic story of the emergence of a native African literature; in the 1950s, students at English-dominated universities started speaking out against the long European tradition of depicting Africans as "a people of beastly living, without a God, laws, religion," which dates back to Captain John Lok's voyage to West Africa in 1561. "Until the lions produce their own historian," says Achebe, quoting an African proverb of uncertain provenance, "the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter." With characteristic ease and economy, he traces the long African tradition of asserting the worth of the individual, born of Igbo myths that described each community as created separately with its own original ancestor. This notion of individuality, which made the Africans vulnerable to the Atlantic slave traders and to colonial occupation, is the same quality that defined the native African fiction and poetry that emerged in the 1950s, at the time of independence for many African nations. This slim volumeDtold in Achebe's subtle, witty and gracious styleDis one of those small gems of literary and historical analysis that readers will treasure and reread over the years. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Bookish lectures in which the Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning novelist reflects on his life and work. Achebe (Hopes and Impediments, 1989) is the renowned author of Things Fall Apart, the most widely read novel ever to come out of Africa. Here, in three lectures given in 1998 at Harvard, Achebe draws on his recollections of childhood and youth to describe the origins of that 1958 book, as well as of the Nigerian independence movement that was reaching its full flowering in the late '50s. At several points Achebe recalls an undergraduate class in which he and his fellow students read Joyce Cary's novel Mister Johnson, which was set in Nigeria and full of white-man's-burden tropes; when one of those students rose and informed the teacher that "the only moment he had enjoyed in the entire book was when the Nigerian hero, Johnson, was shot to death by his British master," Achebe realized that he was witnessing the birth of a "landmark rebellion" (one in which Nigerians would press for their own sense of national identity) and of a literature destined to be filled with better heroes than the "embarrassing nitwit" Johnson. Achebe's tour of English literature highlights the outrageous interpretations of African culture that much of it contains (in books that depicted Africans as, in the words of one white author, "a people of beastly living, without a God, laws, religion"). Plainly as tired of multiculturalist appropriations of African cultures as of imperialist ones, Achebe urges his listeners to seek authentic voices, ones outside the confines of the imagined "universal civilization" of Europe and North America. A welcome book for Achebe's many admirers, as well as for all students of contemporary African cultures. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
In this slim volume, Achebe, who pioneered the modern African novel with Things Fall Apart, criticizes European imperialism, which long usurped the cultures of African people. He examines the history of European writing about Africa, which always relegated Africans to the roles of subhumans, incapable of managing the rich land in which they lived and sorely in need of European guidance. Achebe also passionately celebrates African writers of his generation, who voiced African aspirations in the mid-twentieth century without speaking through the filters of imperialism and racism. He recounts his youth and education, lived in a culture he would later read about in books by Europeans, bitterly recognizing how colonization affected African history. He cites European images used to justify slavery and that persisted beyond slavery to justify imperialism and colonialism. Recognizing man to be a "story-making animal," Achebe eloquently recalls the process of repossessing a culture that, for ignoble purposes, was lost, stolen, and appropriated, demonstrating thereby that the "curative powers of stories can move the process forward." --Vanessa Bush
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
To love Achebe is to love Africa and language. As he is Africa's most prominent novelist and critic, this book's 100-plus pages don't seem ample enough to chronicle the development of such an extraordinary intellectual and literary talent. Furthermore, because of his lyrical prose and accessible ideas, at the end one is left desiring more of Achebe's ruminations (both serious and humorous) on empire, postcolonialism, Western writers (e.g., Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and Elspeth Huxley) on Africa, universal culture, and expatriation and exile. Reading Achebe is to know Africa in a way that few are able to tell. Achebe weaves anecdotes from his childhood, schooling, and writing life with African proverbs and literary and political theory to contribute beautifully to the "process of `re-storying' peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession." His passion and truth are sensuous and contagious, warming one's soul. Highly recommended for all libraries.--Sherri Barnes, Univ. of California Lib., Santa Barbara (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
| Preface | p. ix |
| My Home Under Imperial Fire | p. 1 |
| The Empire Fights Back | p. 37 |
| Today, the Balance of Stories | p. 73 |
| Notes | p. 107 |
| Index | p. 111 |