101 Letters to a Prime Minister (33 page)

And then the white man comes, in the form of missionaries. They are not intrinsically bad, these newcomers. In fact, Mr. Brown, the first missionary, is a rather sympathetic character. He is a zealous Christian, for sure, but not a blind one. He wants to convert the African heathens among whom he lives, but he is not insensitive to their feelings. He makes genuine attempts at dialogue. Alas, Mr. Smith, his successor, is not so open-minded. As for the District Commissioner, who is there to provide the colonial administrative muscle behind the religious preaching, he is even less so. Incomprehension, the white man’s of the African man and the African’s of the white man, wins the day—and things fall apart.

The novel is a marvel of even-handedness. It is not that the African way of life is Edenic until the arrival of the white man.
Not at all, and the novel makes that clear. Some of the religious practices of the Africans are barbaric, such as their treatment of newborn twins, who are thought to be evil and are abandoned in the forest to die of exposure. Achebe makes plain the travails of life in Umuofia. And yet the villagers manage. Life may be harsh at times, but they know who they are and where they belong. They are a people and a civilization. Not very different, really, from the people and civilization of the white man. That is the point so deftly made by the novel, that the encounter between Africans and Europeans went so poorly not because one was inferior to the other, but because they failed to understand each other and, as a direct result, to respect each other. The villagers are patriarchal, for example. Take Okonkwo and his
three
wives. An outrage. But were the Victorians any less patriarchal? The religion of the Umuofians is so much voodoo mumbo-jumbo—but is it really any different from the voodoo mumbo-jumbo of the white man? The villagers expect evil to befall the missionaries for flouting the rule of the native gods, just as the missionaries expect evil to befall the villagers if they continue to disobey the new God. And so on. The Umuofians are shown in their bigness and smallness, just as the white man is shown in his bigness and smallness. Why couldn’t they properly meet and gently, slowly syncretize? It wasn’t to be. Hence the heart-wrenching tragedy at the core of the novel: things didn’t have to fall apart. Given better emissaries, given greater efforts to reach out, perhaps Africa wouldn’t have been so wrecked and Europe so tainted.

I have rarely read a novel that so portrays a foreign reality with such an acute mix of insight, understanding and outrage.
Things Fall Apart
is a brilliant novel, Mr. Harper. I heartily recommend it to you.

I should mention that I am writing this letter in unusual circumstances. Normally I write to you in the quiet of my home office.
Not tonight. Tonight I’m sitting in the middle of the Mendel Art Gallery here in Saskatoon, on a raised platform, writing my letter in public. I’m participating in a multidisciplinary, carnival-like event called Lugo, which is bringing together dancers, musicians, actors and others in a celebration of the arts. I’m also soliciting book suggestions. I better start writing them down before the pile falls off my desk. So here goes, as they are given to me by the crowd surrounding me, suggestions of books for your consideration from Canadian readers:

That’s quite the reading list. And a reading list as it should be: multinational and of all genres, and fresh from the minds of the people of Saskatoon.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

C
HINUA
A
CHEBE
(b. 1930) is a novelist, professor, poet and critic. He is professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of five novels, four short story collections, six books of poetry and numerous other books. In 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. He lives with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Have you ever felt limited by language? I’m sure you have. A common instance would be when you’re speaking with someone and you want to convey an idea, but you’ve momentarily forgotten the word, it remains on the proverbial tip of your tongue, and you struggle to explain what you mean to say in a roundabout way. Another common occurrence of language limiting expression is when one is speaking in a foreign language. You, for example, have made admirable efforts to learn French, but it remains a language with which you’re not fully comfortable. When you give a speech in French, I’m sure you prefer to speak from a written text vetted by a native speaker, and when you have to ad lib, I imagine you seek safety in the set phrases and expressions that you’ve learned; otherwise, you must struggle, trying to express your meaning in the limited knowledge you have of the language. In English, by contrast, you must feel no sense of limitations. I imagine you feel, like most native
speakers of a language feel, that what you think, you express, effortlessly and without any delay or searching.

Of course, this sense of freedom, this perfect match between thought and expression, is an illusion born of comfort and familiarity. Faced with an utterly new experience, whether beatific or horrific, we often lose the capacity to speak, we are rendered speechless. And expression is more than simply a question of vocabulary. Experiences that are not emotionally overwhelming but intellectually complex can also have us struggling to speak meaningfully. In such situations, it is not necessarily words that fail us, but the preliminary understanding that leads to the choice of words. All this to say that sometimes we are tongue-tied—and we don’t like it. We value expression. So, humming, hawing, non-sequituring, we struggle until we manage to put idea or experience into words.

The book I am sending you this time—the poetry collection
Eunoia
, by the Canadian writer Christian Bök (pronounced “book”), both the book and the CD (read with great gusto by the author)—is all about limitations and the soaring over-passing of them. Bök, a fervent admirer of Oulipo, the French experimental writers’ collective, has taken one of their favourite techniques, the lipogram, to a very high level. A lipogram is a composition in which a letter is missing throughout. A fine example of a lipogram is Georges Perec’s novel
La Disparition
, written entirely without the most-used vowel in French, the letter
e
. If you think a lipogram sounds like a gimmick, think again. In the case of the Perec novel, the letter
e
in French is pronounced the same as the word eux, them.
La Disparition
refers not only to the disappearance of a letter, but of
them
. Them who? Well, to start with, Perec’s parents, who were Jewish and who were swallowed up by the Holocaust.
La Disparition
is a metaphor on the wiping-out of a good part of
Jewish civilization in Europe, something very much equivalent to an alphabet losing one of its key letters. No gimmickry there, I don’t think.

Bök has taken the challenge even further. With
Eunoia
, he has written a series of poems that omit not just one letter, but several, and not consonants, of which there are many, but vowels, and not just one, two or three vowels per poem, but
four
vowels. That leaves just one vowel per poem. The opening lines of the collection foreshadow the treat you’re in for:

The hero of the vowel
A
is the Arab Hassan Abd al-Hassad, while
E
features Greek Helen, who