the politician with a prudent modesty. It emerges from his fiction that this better
experience of the world is a moral (not necessarily religious) experience of the world.
The idea that politics is inimical to art, according to Achebe, is merely “a
superstition.” Writers who eschew politics “have been conned into apoliticism by those
who have a vested interest in keeping us out.” This would appear to be a familiar
position commonly adopted by contemporary or “post-modern” literary critics in their
historical and theoretical investigations. But in Achebe’s view good writing, far from
being politicized, is about politics, and provides a testament to the power of language and
stories to guide and shape lives. The avoidance of politics, the desire to converse on or
inhabit a “higher” plane, which Achebe associates with modern Western writing he
attributes in large part to the modern Western emphasis on “individualism.” Western
literature “played a central role in promoting the ideal of individual autonomy” and “the
view of society and of culture as a prisonhouse from which the individual must escape in
order to find space and fulfillment.” (Hopes and Impediments at 53). Achebe contrasts
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s introduction of the word “individualism” into the language as a
term of praise with Alexis de Tocqueville’s cautions about the dangers of American
individualism. (Hopes and Impediments at 49). Achebe’s writes instead from a
communal perspective.
Achebe’s understanding of the artist, any artist, is that he must be working from
within a community, “I never really believed that a writer had to be removed from the
normal tasks of the community because he’s a writer. I didn’t accept it . . . and I don’t
accept it now. . . . It’s the only way of being involved in life. I think the role of writer as
public persona “it’s regarded . .. considered with more suspicion in American than in
Africa, and, yes, in Europe, too.” He observes that the first generation of national leaders
9
Convention