Comparative Postcolonialisms: Storytelling and Community in Sholem Aleichem and Chinua Achebe

Abstract

This paper compares Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Despite all their obvious differences in terms of cultural traditions and historical moments, the two authors’ fundamental commitment to modes of storytelling allows us to draw parallels and counterpoints between them. In both works storytelling is shaped by the essential polysemy of orality (such as the collocation of proverbs, gnomic statements, and anecdotes as crucial aspects of the stories being told), as well as an orientation toward ritual (in terms of the formal repetition of storytelling motifs and devices). In the Tevye stories, the first-person narration is addressed to various explicit and implied addressees and gives the impression of an immediate orality, whereas in Arrow of God the third-person narrator is coextensive with the one we encounter in Things Fall Apart in its quasi-ethnographic orientation. In both texts, storytelling and orality are mediums for identifying with an imagined community. Imagined implies a nonideal relationship to existing communities, something that is made clear in the agonistic infrastructure of the two central characters’ minds. The paper argues for seeing this agonistic infrastructure as a form of “contexture,” that is to say, a way to provide texture to the historical contexts in which they were written and to which their referential relays point us to.