Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. EveryFriday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it. ( Joyce 1993 [1922] : 105) The concepts of ‘writing back’ and rewriting are well established, both in postcolonial literature itself and in writing about it. Decades before this trope became established in postcolonial literary criticism through the impact of The Empire Writes Back ( Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin: 1989 ), whose title draws on Salman Rushdie's newspaper article, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’ ( Rushdie 1982 ), many authors had made explicit their concern to correct the misrepresentations of their culture and history which were produced by, and in turn helped to produce, colonial attitudes. In this respect, Chinua Achebe has been among the most outspoken in his denunciation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ( Achebe 1988 ) and in his determination to refute Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson by telling that story ‘from the inside’ partly through his second novel, No Longer At Ease ( Achebe 1972 : 4). Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart provides a book length alternative to the final imagined paragraph by the white District Commissioner, a paragraph which encapsulates colonial attitudes to what the District Commissioner terms ‘the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’ ( Achebe 1976 : 148). Achebe's first two novels illustrate ... log in or subscribe to read full text