Writing Back with a Difference: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian” as a Response to Chinua Achebe’s

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s short story “The Headstrong Historian” begins with an account of the marriage and widowhood of Nwambga, and follows her tribulations and triumphs for two generations. It is the second sentence that alerts the reader to a kind of remarkable textual innovation employed by Adichie: “other memories of Obierka also remained clear.” The use of Obierka, a character from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, as a kind of starting point for this significant story signals a new kind of ‘writing back’ or literary revision. Where the act of writing back or of revising canonical texts from a postcolonial perspective was nearly always an implicit critique of the blind spots and self-serving voice in the classic text, writing back to an admired forefather of postcolonial writing, one who began his own literary career as a conscious project of addressing the failures of the literary canon to see Africa, has different implications. This essay explores Adichie’s story both as an homage to Achebe for breaking ground for an African literature and as a critique of some of the limitations of Achebe’s vision. A brief review of postcolonial revisions of literary classics (Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Cesaire’s Un Tempete, and Coetzee’s Foe) suggests the intentions and effectiveness of those interventions. Built into all of these efforts is a kind of homage to the original text from which they depart. Adichie’s story seems, in some ways, to be less a departure from than an extension of Achebe’s vision. Part of this extension involves taking the injunction to write literature from the inside to the task of writing African history from the inside. As with literature, there are problems with the articulation of a Nigerian and Igbo history from within the academy. There is also a strong strain of criticism in Adichie’s story – an awareness of and response to some of the womanist criticism of Achebe. The protagonists are strong woman characters, who utilize the political force of the woman’s council and, in the end, find a way to express the strength of traditional identity in balance with modern ways. This kind of writing back to the literary forefather clears the way for previously elided and unvoiced perspectives to emerge in a retrospective vision of ‘classic’ African literature. Even in its modest reach and with its own limitations, “The Headstrong Historian” may be a harbinger of a significant new approach in African literature