Living and Narrating the Tensions of the Postcolonial Situation: Chinua Achebe Between Ambiguity and Ambivalence.

Abstract

If Chinua Achebe has sometimes been presented as “the father of modern African literature” it is because by many of the characteristics of his personality and artistic practices, he embodies most of the traits of the postcolonial African writer. He sums up the tensions, contradictions and paradoxes that most African intellectuals and artists have been through with their dual educational identities in their artistic and intellectual developments. The objective of this paper is to show that Chinua Achebe, not only by his positions on social and political issues in his country but also in his fiction works, has embodied in his lifestyle and narrated in his artistic works, the tensions and paradoxes that have been synthetized by theoreticians of postcolonial studies as the traits of the postcolonial situation.