Chinua Achebe, Homi Bhabha and the Language of Ambivalence in Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist is one of the most outstanding figures in modern African Literature. What bestows him such a credit might be taken to be his attempts to use literature as a discursive tool in the way of de-colonization. Precisely, what Achebe does in his novels is providing an alternative discourse which can depict not only an authentic picture of native African life with all its complexity, but also dynamic native characters in such a context with all their human and existential conflicts. Thus, it can be claimed that what makes Achebe’s novels different from the other novels produced at his time is the specific language he adopts; a language which is able to give birth into a kind of ‘ambivalence’ and can structure, in consequence, a discourse capable of drawing on the postcolonial condition his people face as inheritors of ‘hybridity’ and ‘otherness’. Accordingly, the present study intends to investigate the language, or discourse, adopted by Chinua Achebe in his first novel, Things Fall Apart, by approaching them through Homi Bhabha’s theory of ‘Ambivalence’, as it seems to be much illuminating in the case.