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Article: Chinua Achebe & Politics of Art; The Novelist's Tales From A World Turned Upside Down
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- February 16, 1988
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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The writer's block that for 20 years has kept Chinua Achebe from
producing a novel was not the work of the usual inner demons or
fickle muse. It was, he says, the effect of something more
substantial-"one of the most horrendous wars in modern history," the
bloody secessionist struggle of his fellow Ibos against the federal
government of Nigeria in the late 1960s, better known as the Biafran
war.
"It left me in a state of trauma," Achebe says now. "The novel
seemed like a frivolous thing to be doing."
Yet this is the same man who declares, a little later, that
fiction is anything but frivolous-that it is a serious instrument of
social purpose.
"The novel form is itself a political ...