Chinua Achebe, ‘Things Fall Apart’, Idris Elba: A lively conversation but misguided

There’s not yet a published Igbo translation of Things Fall Apart; that’s where to start, says Chiedu Ezeanah

By Editor

Mazino Ikime: I have been involved in a discussion somewhere on Facebook, about Idris Elba playing the role of Okonkwo,in a proposed production of Things Fall Apart. The lady who initiated the post, is of the view that an Igbo man should play the part. Her argument is based along the lines that only an Igbo person can give proper translation to the part as a non-Igbo would not be able to understand and translate the nuances of the Igbo customs and traditions.

According to her, the producers should have sought out Nigerian actors. In fact, she named a few actors like Chiwetel, Yul Edochie and some other dude I can’t remember. Yes, Chiwetel has both the star appeal and capacity. However, he is an in-demand actor and we don’t know his schedule. I am not too sure about Yul. By Nigerian (Nollywood) standards, he is a star. However, this is an International production and definitely international star appeal is of the essence, especially for a vehicle such as Things Fall Apart, which is, to my mind, much bigger than any ethnic considerations that may be brought to bear!!

The lady who posted, even hinted that the Achebe family were something akin to sell-outs on the strength of the fact Chinua Achebe himself had rejected overtures from 50 Cents to stage a production of his work. She has no knowledge of the terms and conditions presented by 50 Cents to Achebe. She may not have known that Achebe Master Works are Executive Producers on the proposed production. I daresay, they are more cognisant of the potency of Achebe’s legacy than any outsider! Look at the board. Those guys look like serious people. I doubt that monetary considerations alone would have caused them to permit the production.

Coming to Idris Elba. He is a seasoned thespian. He has played Mandela no less. He is not South African, but he is a professional whom I am certain will immerse himself into any role that he is given. With the Achebe’s on board, I am more than certain that those nuances of Igbo culture and tradition which were spoken about will be explained to Elba. Knowing the greatness of Things Fall Apart as a literary concern, I believe Elba will put in his best. We don’t even know if there is a cultural consultants on board to give further direction. Yet, some are bellyaching over why a Nigerian (Igbo) was not given the lead role. Those who are up in arms against Elba and 22Summers Production don’t know that no writer has as yet been appointed to the production. Thus they have no way of knowing how the production will be interpreted. They don’t know a screen writer can add value to the project and thus help the actors in the interpretation of the various roles!

David Oyelowo, a Nigerian born actor, is also part of this production. There is a lady called Amanda N’duka, whom I suspect is of Igbo extraction; she is also on board. Why not wait to see how the production pans out, rather than jump the gun and begin to throw ethnic slants around?! It is, to my mind, rather irritating!

Besides, there are loads of Igbo practitioners and other Nigerians who have proven themselves on the Nollywood front. Why have they not opted to capture this work and make a go of it! I daresay that finance is a major consideration. This is not a Nollywood-style production. This will have international ramifications, which I believe Chinua Achebe’s work is well worthy of! So please, let’s stop the ethnic rants. To my mind, they are so unnecessary!

Chiedu Ezeanah:

Mazino Ikime, yours is a well-reasoned and pragmatic response to this lively conversation. And it is also faithful to what we know already: that no ethnic enclave can, with the facts on the ground, claim to “own” Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

1) Caging A Transcultural/Transcendental Treasure: The very title Things Fall Apart is a borrowed phrase from “The Second Coming”, a poem by an Irish Poet and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, WB Yeats. The very fact that it is written in English already makes Things Fall Apart a trans-cultural treasure.

To support what the anti-Elba crowd are saying is tantamount to taking ethnic insularity, and perhaps worse, chauvinism, to an absurd extent, for the most widely read, critiqued and translated book/novel by any African living or dead.

No less than 30 million copies of TFA have been sold worldwide while it has been translated into over 60 languages, thus connecting it with and transcending over 60 cultures globally!!!

Nearer home in Nigeria, Wale Ogunyemi, late actor, playwright and director, had translated TFA into Yoruba before he passed a couple of years ago. Ibrahim Sheme, a writer and journalist, has also translated TFA into Hausa language.

Any attempt to limit the interpretation of a work of art of any genre or form is a disservice to the work and its author.

It may interest everyone to know that those reiterating the Igbo origin and the need for “authenticity” in the reading/translation/adaptation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that there’s not yet a published Igbo translation of TFA.

The literary sage, Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is essentially about beating the British colonialists and writers in their negative stereotypes of Africans in their official and fictional narratives in their own game. TFA used Joyce Cary’s own language to respond to him in the fictional genre. He took on Joyce Cary, and Cary got trounced in TFA as well as in Arrow of God.

Things Fall Apart, written when he was only 28, eventually became a work penned by a literary luminary. And, Achebe wasn’t done with deconstructing imperial racist stereotypes in Western fiction.

In his seminal essay that has virtually opened up a whole global academic discipline—The Postcolonial Discourse, he got Joseph Conrad literally whipped:

‘An Image Of Africa: Racism In Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darknes’…’

Achebe’s work has always engaged other cultures in fictional and polemical conversations; the message in his works was never intended solely for his ethnic or racial base but also for the wider world.

2)”Intentional Fallacy” and the Tyranny of a Single Meaning:

Let me just add that Poststructuralist theory in literature has always supported the subjectivity in multiple interpretations of texts and questioned the so-called “objective criticism” that limits interpretation to “the true intention of the author or of the text.”

Let every writer/reader/actor/director bring their own cultural and personal experiences to the interpretation of texts: the text is richer for it. It is also an acknowledgment of the creator’s sagely universal genius.

Derek Walcott in his masterly Caribbean re-interpretation of the work of the Classical Greek author, Homer, in his epic poem ‘Omeros’ scaled down the warring heroic characters in Homer’s two epical poems into ordinary fishermen, and here Helen, Homer’s heroine, transformed into literally “a call girl” in the West Indian milieu. No one has questioned the right of the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott to undertake this most daring creative and literary subversion of the canonical work of the acknowledged father of European literature.

Only two books were authored by Homer: The Illiad and The Odyssey.

Here, the writer acknowledged by one of his non-Nigerian peers as “The Father of African Literature”, that’s no less a writer than Nadine Gordimer, South African Anti-Apartheid Nobel laureate in Literature, and also so well-acclaimed by Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison as a truly world class writer, is being touted as some Igbo-bound literary icon by some mostly well-meaning but misguided Igbo and non-Igbo commentators.

For such commentators, the words of the London-based award-winning screenwriter
Nk’iru Njoku will suffice:

“Things Fall Apart is NOT ‘Igbo History and Culture’ though. Keep the debate going but don’t lose the plot. An iconic fictional literary piece, yes, but not an emblem of being Igbo or a testimony to Igbo greatness. Chill out, homies.”

I am personally looking forward to adaptations, translations and interpretations of TFA where Korean, Japanese or an Arab man would be playing the role of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart… It’s the way great art transcends cultural borders to confirm what we have always known—the oneness of humanity—before white European racism and colonialism disrupted and exploited the rich diversity of our humanity for economic, racial and political domination. This is what, in the end, is one of the enduring themes of the most widely traveled book written by any African, living or dead…. Things Fall Apart!

British actor, Idris Elba

Kolawole Odetola:
If Idris Elba who has African ancestry can’t play Okonkwo, why should Ekong captain Nigeria? Elba doesnt speak Igbo. Does Ekong speak fluent Efik? The world has moved on beyond these archaic ethnic sentiments. Our film industry is doing well but could do far better. The plots tend, not all but many tend to be trite, the dialogue weak and too expressive and the acting over dramatised. Too often verbalising what could be more powerfully communicated by expression or body language . Which is where great directing comes in, i.e. camera angle. Distance of the shot, etc. Like our football, we have the raw talent but that’s not enough. Structure, organisation and technique matter. That’s what Elba brings. Not mediocre films that won’t fly, because we want to be ‘local’.

Was Things Fall Apart written in Igbo? Things Fall Apart became a classic not because of its ‘Igboness’. It became a timeless bestseller because it encapsulated universal themes not exclusive to any race or nationality. A tragic hero who fought all his life to make something of himself against terrible odds who finally fell to his own and his society’s contradictions. How many Italian actors have excelled as Julius Caesar? Do you have to be Scottish to play Macbeth? Or Greek to star as Alexander the Great? This is a distraction and an irrelevant.

Of all the books Nelson Mandela read in his 27-year incaceration, he rated Things Fall Apart the greatest. He did not speak a word of Igbo. You are a Yoruba man. Do you think you are more ‘authentic’ than a Yoruba man in Brazil or Cuba because you speak better Yoruba than them? You, like me, grew up in a family where we all learned to say the Lord’s prayer in Yoruba. Which Lord, you might ask? The son of a Jewish carpenter who his people made a God. The Yoruba in Brazil still worship our authentic Gods. And you think because you and your family worship the God of those who enslaved your fathers and raped your mothers in perfect Yoruba, that makes you more authentic than them? Is a lion that roars like a lion but eats only vegetables still a lion because he speaks like a lion?

The reactions of all pre-colonial nationalities in Nigetia to colonialism were broadly the same. There were Okonkwos in Yorubaland, amongst the Hausa and also the riverine people. Men in the minority who saw the duplicity behind the colonial project and acted but were deserted by their compatriots who were either bought over, intimidated or were simply too fatalistic to resist. My own great grandfather, an Ekiti man, was killed by his town’s leaders after the Ekiti Parapo War for refusing to exchange the tyranny of Ibadan with the new oppression of the British. Most of his people, like those in umoufia, did not follow his path. Compromise was easier, and for many, more profitable. As Obierika wisely observed, the whites came quietly and bought over their brothers. In Okonkwo’s case, it is his own son. Things had fallen apart, so the centre could no longer hold. For Umoufia, take the whole of Africa. That was how we were colonised. When your brother has become a court messenger, your cousin a choir boy and your uncle a policeman, who is left to fight for you?

* Culled from Chiedu Ezeanah’s Facebook wall