Home And Exile

Description

Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer. His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in "Home and Exile", Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work. This work is an extended exploration of the European impact on African culture, viewed through the most vivid experience available to the author - his own life. It is an extended snapshot of a major writer's childhood, illuminating his roots as an artist. Achebe discusses his English education and the relationship between colonial writers and the European literary tradition. He argues that if colonial writers try to imitate and, indeed, go one better than the Empire, they run the danger of undervaluing their homeland and their own people. Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away.

Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930, and in a long and distinguished career has published novels, stories, essays and poems.Cited in the Sunday Times as one of the "1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century" for defining "a modern African literature that was truly African" and thereby making "a major contribution to world literature". Achebe has received more than 30 honorary doctorates from universities around the world. In 2007 he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. He lives with his wife in Annandale-on-Hudson, where they teach at Bard College. They have four children.

* The value of Achebe's book is ... to insist that literature matters. Financial Times * A moving account of an exceptional life ... Achebe reveals the inner workings of the human conscience through the predicament of Africa and his own intellectual life ... A story of the triumph of the mind, told in the words of one of the century's most gifted writers. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr * A book that anyone concerned with advancing social justice and human dignity should read. Seattle Times * In defining the dignity and vibrancy of African literature, Chinua Achebe defies the stranglehold of colonial, imperialist and cultural dispossession. He brings us into balance with a world of literature and hope that the West with its myth of primacy denies. -- Walter Mosley