"Woke" Frauds Go After Shakespeare

The post that was quoted here has been removed

The father of African literature.
Not bloody difficult, I’m surprised they have letters over there at all.

I mean, with all the cannibalism, inbreeding with monkeys and whining about Belgium (or whatever great and impressive European state owned Nigeria before it fell to religious infighting and circumcision), I’m surprised they have any time at all to read. Never mind write.

In fact, only the Chinese are more retarded in their mental growth than Nigerians.
Do the Chinese write? I mean, they can’t even use cutlery. How the hell are they going to use typewriters?

Say what you want about Nigerians, at least they have large cocks compared to Chinese people.

There you go Dutchess. And not a tad of sarcasm or irony in sight!

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Why should UK and USA people have heard of him?

I’m sure there are brilliant writers in the UK and USA they’ve never heard of either.

Until the film or TV series, most people wouldn’t have heard of Philip Pullman either.
Or Anthony Burgess.

How many Africans know Joseph Heller, do you think? Or Gabriel García Márquez? Or Graham Greene or Umberto Eco?

Seems to me you’re trying to make a point which is not really there to make.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Chinua Achebe wrote in English, not in his African mother tongue.

Achebe was conscious of this problem, and reflected carefully on his choice of language:

"For an African writing in English is not without its serious setbacks. He often finds himself describing situations or modes of thought which have no direct equivalent in the English way of life. Caught in that situation he can do one of two things. He can try and contain what he wants to say within the limits of conventional English or he can try to push back those limits to accommodate his ideas ... I submit that those who can do the work of extending the frontiers of English so as to accommodate African thought-patterns must do it through their mastery of English and not out of innocence."

However, one reason he chose to write in English was that, precisely, he did not want his audience to be restricted to Igbo speakers. He wanted to write for Nigerians in general, and because Nigeria was a British colony, English was a language that was used across the country. It had become, he said, "a language with which to talk to one another", and in order to secure a readership across Nigeria, he wrote in "the one central language enjoying nationwide currency".

Writing before Nigerian independence, Achebe also wanted his critique of colonialism to be read by citizens of the colonial power, Britain. Moreover, Achebe's native Igbo did not have a standardised literary form until 1972.

It seems questionable (at least) that Chinua Achebe has been more acclaimed than Wole Soyinka, who became the first sub-Saharan African to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

Maybe so... but then, Ivan Bunin won the Nobel Prize where Tolstoy and Chekhov did not; Bjørnson won the Nobel Prize where Ibsen did not; Kipling won the Nobel Prize where Thomas Hardy did not, etc, etc. The Nobel Prize is a rather inadequate measure of acclaim!

Well they did give one to Obama for no reason so I guess you're right.

Obama's comment: "for what?"

@kevcvs57 said
“ I have also read his critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which these days is frequently assigned to students reading Conrad's challenging and equivocal novel.”
That’s exactly how it should be done. I haven’t read any Chinua Achebe but I shall endeavour to do so.

Achebe's essay condemned Conrad as "a bloody racist". Yet when he was asked later about his perspective, he said that he did not want people to stop reading Heart of Darkness: "It's not in my nature to talk about banning books. I am saying, read it – with the kind of understanding and with the knowledge I talk about. And read it beside African works."

There has been much critical debate about Conrad's attitude to Western colonialism as well as his racial attitudes. Some have argued that the bleak portrayal of Africa in Heart of Darkness is in part animated by prejudice against native Africans; others have asserted that it is in fact a harsh critique of European imperialism.

It's also been pointed out that as a Pole, Conrad was himself a native of a country that had fallen under imperial rule, and that his sympathies might be expected to be the victims of colonialism. I recently read the early novel that we must now perhaps learn to call "The BAME of the Narcissus" (certainly, I can't spell out its real title here!); and I was struck by the fact that the crew is full of people from then colonised territories - a Finn, two Norwegians, a Welshman, and an Irishman, as well as the Jamaican who features in the book's title.

Personally, I think the outlook of Heart of Darkness is somewhere in the middle. It's set in the notorious Congo Free State, which operated under the personal control of Belgian King Leopold, and whose brutalities shocked the consciences even of Europeans who were generally in favour of colonialism. So I read Conrad's novella as a book which condemns Belgian colonialism while cautiously championing the British variety. When Conrad's narrator looks at a map (the British Empire was at the time usually coloured in red or pink on maps) he comments:

"There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre."

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Tolstoy died late in 1910; the Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901; thus Tolstoy was eligible for ten years, and indeed, was nominated nine times in succession. He was turned down in 1901 when Carl David af Wirsén (permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy until 1912) condemned him for his "narrow-minded hostility to all forms of civilization." Subsequent nominations were also vetoed, apparently because Tolstoy's work was full of "detestable opinions on art, government, and civilisation."

Underlying this, no doubt, was a more general Swedish antipathy towards the Russians, who had been historic enemies of the Swedes. So the first Russian to receive the prize was an exile who lived and worked in France (as well as a fervent anti-Communist). After Ivan Bunin won the award in 1933, Anders Österling (who was to become the longest serving member of the Swedish Academy in history), explained that it was "to pay off our bad consciences on Chekhov and Tolstoy."

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Interestingly, when "The N-word of the Narcissus" was published in America, the publisher insisted that the title be changed to "The Children of the Sea". This was not because the notorious racial epithet in Conrad's original title was thought likely to offend, but because the publisher judged that American readers were not likely to want to read a book about a person of colour!