ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
www.nathanielturner.com 
These rooms or chapters may naturally share common walls and
ideas which Dr. Rose Ure Mezu purposefully uses to reinforce the unit
rather than repeat or duplicate parts of the whole. The reader of Chinua
Achebe: The Man and His Works can therefore end with
the beginning or begin with the end . . .
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Other Books by Rose Ure Mezu
Women in Chains: Abandonment in Love Relationships in the Fiction of Selected West African Writers (1994) / Songs of the Hearth (1993) /
Homage to My People (2004) / A History of Africana Women’s Literature (2004)
Black Nationalists: Reconsidering Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. & Nkrumah (1999) Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works (2006)
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Books by Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart / Arrow of God / No Longer at Ease / A Man of the People / Anthills of the Savannah
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Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works
By Rose Ure Mezu
Preface
to Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works (2006)
The several novels of Chinua Achebe can stand alone and can be read, appreciated, and studied in isolation. They also can form an integrated corpus some progressing either spatially, historically, and genealogically from one to the other. The chapters that form Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works by Rose Ure Mezu can be viewed and read in much the same way as Achebes novels. Each chapter while forming part of a whole can stand in isolation and on its own.
The work is not a novel to be read from the beginning to the end but should be seen as rooms with separate and connecting doors in a house each designed with a specific purpose in mind, sufficient unto itself yet forming part of the whole. These rooms or chapters may naturally share common walls and ideas which Dr. Rose Ure Mezu purposefully uses to reinforce the unit rather than repeat or duplicate parts of the whole. The reader of Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works can therefore end with the beginning or begin with the end chapter or simply move into the central chapter or living room and from there explore the house that Chinua Achebe built, or better still try to climb the iroko tree that Achebe planted with its foundations rooted in pre-colonial Africa and its branches extending to the diaspora.
Dr. Rose Ure Mezu, in this work, inaugurates a new tradition, juxtaposing Achebes thoughts and concepts and those of diasporan literary and cultural groundbreakers such as Olaudah Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, 1789) and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Are Watching God, 1937). Equianos work has lately become the focus of some controversies by some people who are neither Igbos nor inhabitants of Essaka. These people question, out of ignorance, the authenticity of Equianos place of birth. Without setting out to do so, Mezu in Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works has presented veritably a defense of the truth about Igbo / African culture and Equianos recollection of it. As pointed out in this work and as established by Cheikh Anta Diop and other scholars, Africa was not and is not culturally, socially, and technologically a tabula rasa.
Literature brings the world together, interlocks human experience and brings out the universal in the individual experience. Chinua Achebe in extolling the individual succeeded in celebrating humanity with his works and now Dr. Rose Ure Mezu has celebrated in this work the humanity of Chinua Achebe. It reads almost like a novel and certainly one would hope there will be a sequel to this volume.
Dr. S. Okechukwu Mezu
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Table of Contents
Preface
viii
x
Chapter 1 Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Implications for Black Cultural Nationalism and Revisionism
16
Chapter 2 Achebes Arrow of God: Ezeulu and the Limits of Power
37
Chapter 3 Conflicts and Notions of Culture and Civilization in No Longer At Ease
65
Chapter 4 A Man of the People: A Moral Approach
90
Chapter 5 Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah: A Writer and his Ideas
121
Chapter 6 Achebes Okonkwo and Hurstons Jody Starks: Twin Souls in Different Climes and Their Women
147
Chapter 7 Achebes Writings: An Authentication of the Igbo Culture of Olaudah Equianos 1789 Narrative
164
Chapter 8 Women in Achebes World: A Womanist Critique
210
Chapter 9 Conversations with Chinua Achebe, 1996
227
Chapter 10 The Mezus Visit with the Achebes: (A second interview, June 15, 1999)
235
Bibliography
256
Index
268
Published by Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd http://www.adonis-abbey.com
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Chinua Achebe wins $300,000 Gish prizeBy Philip NwosuMonday, September 27, 2010The author of the epic novel, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, has emerged winner of the United States Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. The Gish prize, which was established in 1994 by the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize Trust and administered by JPMorgan Chase Bank as trustee, is given annually to a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankinds enjoyment and understanding of life. The prize is worth $300,000. . . . Achebes writings examine African politics and chronicle the ways in which African culture and civilization have survived in the post-colonial world. Some of his acclaimed works include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1988).
[The 80-year-old author has founded a number of magazines for African art, fiction and poetry.] Achebe, who is paralyzed from the waist down due to a 1990 car accident, is currently Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.SunNewsOnline
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Again, Chinua Achebe Rejects Nigerian AwardThe reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed let alone solved. It is inappropriate to offer it again to me. I must therefore regretfully decline the offer again, Achebe said in the letter which he reportedly sent to Nigeria Ambassador to the United States. Achebe had in 2004 rejected offer of national award from the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo in protest of the political situation in Nigeria and his native Anambra State then.
The US based writer had in the rejection letter he wrote to the then President noted that: I write this letter with a very heavy heart. For some time now I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the Presidency.
Forty three years ago, at the first anniversary of Nigerias independence I was given the first Nigerian National Trophy for Literature. In 1979, I received two further honoursthe Nigerian National Order of Merit and the Order of the Federal Republicand in 1999 the first National Creativity Award.
I accepted all these honours fully aware that Nigeria was not perfect; but I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples. Nigerias condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honour awarded me in the 2004 Honours List.PMNewsNigeria
posted 21 March 2006
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AALBC.com’s 25 Best Selling Books
Fiction
#1 – Justify My Thug by Wahida Clark #2 – Flyy Girl by Omar Tyree #3 – Head Bangers: An APF Sexcapade by Zane #4 – Life Is Short But Wide by J. California Cooper #5 – Stackin’ Paper 2 Genesis’ Payback by Joy King #6 – Thug Lovin’ (Thug 4) by Wahida Clark #7 – When I Get Where I’m Going by Cheryl Robinson #8 – Casting the First Stone by Kimberla Lawson Roby #9 – The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth by Zane
#10 – Covenant: A Thriller by Brandon Massey
#11 – Diary Of A Street Diva by Ashley and JaQuavis
#12 – Don’t Ever Tell by Brandon Massey
#13 – For colored girls who have considered suicide by Ntozake Shange
#14 – For the Love of Money : A Novel by Omar Tyree
#15 – Homemade Loves by J. California Cooper
#16 – The Future Has a Past: Stories by J. California Cooper
#17 – Player Haters by Carl Weber
#18 – Purple Panties: An Eroticanoir.com Anthology by Sidney Molare
#19 – Stackin’ Paper by Joy King
#20 – Children of the Street: An Inspector Darko Dawson Mystery by Kwei Quartey
#21 – The Upper Room by Mary Monroe
#22 Thug Matrimony by Wahida Clark
#23 – Thugs And The Women Who Love Them by Wahida Clark
#24 – Married Men by Carl Weber
#25 – I Dreamt I Was in Heaven – The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang by Leonce Gaiter
Non-fiction
#1 – Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable #2 – Confessions of a Video Vixen by Karrine Steffans #3 – Dear G-Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love by Zane #4 – Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny by Hill Harper #5 – Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You’re Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant #6 – Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey by Marcus Garvey #7 – The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda DeKnight #8 – The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by Frances Cress Welsing #9 – The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
#10 – John Henrik Clarke and the Power of Africana History by Ahati N. N. Toure
#11 – Fail Up: 20 Lessons on Building Success from Failure by Tavis Smiley
#12 –The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
#13 – The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life by Kevin Powell
#14 – The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
#15 – Why Men Fear Marriage: The Surprising Truth Behind Why So Many Men Can’t Commit by RM Johnson
#16 – Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire by Carol Jenkins
#17 – Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority by Tom Burrell
#18 – A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
#19 – John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard
#20 – Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher by Leonard Harris
#21 – Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife by Carleen Brice
#22 – 2012 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino #23 – Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul by Tom Lagana #24 – 101 Things Every Boy/Young Man of Color Should Know by LaMarr Darnell Shields
#25 – Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson
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The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man’s turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners’ plans to give him a “necktie party” (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by “the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn’t operate in his own home town.” Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Wilkerson’s magnificent, extensively researched study of the “great migration,” the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an “uncertain existence” in the North and Midwest.
Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.
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The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom
By Irshad Manji
In Allah, Liberty and Love, Irshad Manji paves a path for Muslims and non-Muslims to transcend the fears that stop so many of us from living with honest-to-God integrity: the fear of offending others in a multicultural world as well as the fear of questioning our own communities. Since publishing her international bestseller, The Trouble with Islam Today, Manji has moved from anger to aspiration. She shows how any of us can reconcile faith with freedom and thus discover the Allah of liberty and lovethe universal God that loves us enough to give us choices and the capacity to make them. Among the most visible Muslim reformers of our era, Manji draws on her experience in the trenches to share stories that are deeply poignant, frequently funny and always revealing about these morally confused times.
What prevents young Muslims, even in the West, from expressing their need for religious reinterpretation? What scares non-Muslims about openly supporting liberal voices within Islam? How did we get into the mess of tolerating intolerable customs, such as honor killings, and how do we change that noxious status quo?
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By Wole Soyinka
Aké: The Years of Childhood is a memoir of stunning beauty, humor, and perception
a lyrical account of one boy’s attempt to grasp the often irrational and hypocritical world of adults that equally repels and seduces him. Soyinka elevates brief anecdotes into history lessons, conversations into morality plays, memories into awakenings. Various cultures, religions, and languages mingled freely in the Aké of his youth, fostering endless contradictions and personalized hybrids, particularly when it comes to religion. Christian teachings, the wisdom of the ogboni, or ruling elders, and the power of ancestral spirits
who alternately terrify and inspire him
all carried equal metaphysical weight. Surrounded by such a collage, he notes that “God had a habit of either not answering one’s prayers at all, or answering them in a way that was not straightforward.” In writing from a child’s perspective, Soyinka expresses youthful idealism and unfiltered honesty while escaping the adult snares of cynicism and intolerance. His stinging indictment of colonialism takes on added power owing to the elegance of his attack.
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Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our countrys economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity. Sachs finds that both political partiesand many leading economistshave missed the big picture, offering shortsighted solutions such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to address complex economic problems that require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that we have profoundly underestimated globalizations long-term effects on our country, which create deep and largely unmet challenges with regard to jobs, incomes, poverty, and the environment. Americas single biggest economic failure, Sachs argues, is its inability to come to grips with the new global economic realities.
Sachs describes a political system that has lost its ethical moorings, in which ever-rising campaign contributions and lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to turn the crisis around. He argues persuasively that the problem is not Americas abiding values, which remain generous and pragmatic, but the ease with which political spin and consumerism run circles around those values. He bids the reader to reclaim the virtues of good citizenship and mindfulness toward the economy and one another.
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By James Carville and Stan Greenberg
Its the Middle Class, Stupid! confirms what we have all suspected: Washington and Wall Street have really screwed things up for the average American. Work has been devalued. Education costs are out of sight. Effort and ambition have never been so scantily rewarded. Political guru James Carville and pollster extraordinaire Stan Greenberg argue that our political parties must admit their failures and the electorate must reclaim its voice, because taking on the wealthy and the privileged is not class warfareit is a matter of survival. Told in the alternating voices of these two top political strategists, Its the Middle Class, Stupid! provides eye-opening and provocative arguments on where our governmentincluding the White Househas gone wrong, and what voters can do about it.
Controversial and outspoken, authoritative and shrewd, Its the Middle Class, Stupid! is destined to make waves during the 2012 presidential campaign, and will set the agenda for legislative battles and political dust-ups during the next administration.
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The White Masters of the World
From The World and Africa, 1965
W. E. B. Du Bois Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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update 14 July 2012
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Related Files: Reading Rose Ure Mezu Achebe Preface Achebe Introduction Mezu and Achebe: An Inside Knowledge Achebe Another Birthday in Exile
Banning Chinua Achebe in Kenya Women in Achebe’s World Okonkwo’s Curse Achebe’s Female Characterisation