I would therefore like to redress the balance and demonstrate that Achebe is actually trying to reveal the tangle of constituent factors that go into the making of his protagonists' masculinity and that this also implies a critical evaluation of its impact on society. Arguably, the critics' concern with women has made them overlook that Achebe's portrayals of men are far from one-dimensional and are interlocked in a rather more complex way with the situation of women than is commonly assumed. Although it is certainly true that Achebe mainly shows us male protagonists in a male-dominated society, this does not necessarily mean that he approves of this situation. It seems somewhat naïve, however, to equate Achebe's narrator's not taking an explicit critical stance against chauvinist attitudes with tacit approval. These are strong accusations and they are mainly based on readings of Things Fall Apart and the "reactionary masculinity" (Hogan 125) of its protagonist. Florence Stratton (27) fears that Achebe's representations of women might legitimate their exclusion from public affairs, and Rhonda Cobham (178) has recently compared the situation of female African writers with regard to Achebe with that of the colonials and the District Commissioner as similarly stifling. Tsitsi Dangarembga thus felt provoked to paint a different picture of the role of women in pre-colonial African societies in Nervous Conditions (1988) in order to counter what she thought constituted a repression of the voices of African women. Unavoidably, certain aspects of these novels have also met with disapproval from readers and critics: some have criticised Achebe's portrayal of Africans and Europeans, his description of modern Nigerian attitudes, his choosing the European form of the novel and writing in English, and increasingly the (male) protagonists' or the implied narrator's alleged attitude towards women has become the target of criticism. Things Fall Apart has become a set text in English speaking countries all over Africa as it portrays an archetypal situation: the breaking apart of the old tribal society through the coming of the colonists. Especially the first one won him international acclaim, but all of them are still widely read and discussed. In the years 1958 to 1966 Chinua Achebe published four novels in which he traced the history of Nigeria from pre-colonial to post-colonial times, mainly centred on the fate of the Ibo people: Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), and A Man of the People (1966).
De/constructing Male Identities in Chinua Achebe's Tetralogy
0 kommentar(er)
