Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison by Christopher N. Okonkwo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison by Christopher N. Okonkwo Adewuyi Aremu Ayodeji Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison BY CHRISTOPHER N. OKONKWO U of Virginia P, 2022. xii + 297 pp. ISBN 9780813947112 e-book. Projecting the seemingly unforeseeable yet shared village-centric tropes in three novels each by Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison, Kindred Spirits yields a reimagining of both literary greats as kindred spirits. For Christopher N. Okonkwo, “[t]hose profound parallels in their personal and professional histories, artistic visions, and works warrant imagining them as kindred spirits” (6). Though separated by spatial and temporal barriers, both Achebe and Morrison are said to (re)connect culturally and intellectually via the mutual history of blackness. The four-chapter book “critically reconnects and celebrates” the duo of the Nigerian novelist and Man Booker Prize–winner Chinua Achebe and the African American writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (3–4). Okonkwo, who contrives the book as “merely the beginning of a rigorous and sustained Achebe-Morrison comparative scholarship,” anchors it on an overarching twofold goal: first, “to direct attention to certain disciplinarily significant relations between both authors”; second, “to synthesize a theoretical model with which . . . to elucidate the compelling inter-textualities of their fiction” (3). Unarguably, part of the book’s aim is recognizing and celebrating Morrison’s undeniable but unsung intellectual investment in, and indebtedness to, modern African literature and writers like Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Cyprian Ekwens, and, particularly, Chinua Achebe. [End Page 180] Okonkwo demonstrates a thoroughness of Achebe-Morrison scholarship by drawing on scholars such as Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, M. M. Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Toyin Falola, Isidore Okpewho, Nkiru Nzegwu, Michel Foucault, etc., for historical, theoretical, and critical coverage of the study. He carefully sets the theoretical basis of the book in chapter one where he purposefully articulates the tenets of villagism by first repurposing Toni Morrison’s 1984 groundbreaking essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Morrison, in the essay, has proposed the presence of the ancestor or an ancestral figure. This proposition effloresces into villagism, which entails the idea that the village is not just a cultural context but also a theoretical model fit to tease out the similarities in the six trilogies of Achebe and Morrison. Characterization and aesthetics are the two ways, Okonkwo discerns, through which village tropes like “the ancestor,” “the past,” “generations,” generational “change,” and “the tragic” (41) manifest in the trilogies. As well as building on the contributions of West African scholars such as Ernest Emenyonu, George Nyamndi, Wendy Griswold, and Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi on the emergence of the village novel tradition in West Africa, Okonkwo heavily alludes to Achebe’s and Morrison’s essays, interviews, and public lectures in theorizing villagism. In essence, villagism is less of a new theoretical framework than a broadening of, or an improvement on, the existing studies on the West African village novel theorized by Griswold. Chapters two through four are analytical. In chapter two, Okonkwo explores the “villagism-connected subjects” (12), including superstitions, magic, ancestors as guardians, and communal lifestyle, in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Morrison’s Beloved. Both texts, established as history-inspired, are termed “village novels” (52). The writers, Okonkwo contends, revisit how descendants of Africa on both sides of the Atlantic are presently haunted by the tragedy of colonialism and slavery—the “pasts” (171)—but still share kinship ties despite being torn apart by those traumatic experiences. Meanwhile, “spatial backdrops and temporal linkages” (131) of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Morrison’s Jazz are the focal points of chapter three, which appositely delves into transatlantic alliances of the novels. Okonkwo believes the writers’ allusion to slavery sites like London and Liverpool excites the traumatic memory of African and African American people. Set in these major cities, the texts are representative of “New Nigerian/New African” and “New Negro” members (12) who pander to the village mentality. The people, then, resist “the repression of their supposedly shameful African village heritage and painful racial pasts. [Therefore,] the village, ‘the past,’ survives” (144). In chapter four, Okonkwo invokes Henry Louis Gates to unearth a vast “web of affiliation” (185) in Arrow of God...