 Good afternoon everybody and welcome back again. My name is Stephen Klingman. I'm a professor in the English Department and director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute. I'd like to welcome you back to the second day of our symposium, 40 years after Chinoachebe and Africa in the Global Imagination. We had a wonderful day yesterday and I'm assuming we'll have an equally wonderful day today. Starting off, we'll have a series of testimonies, if you like, from various people who are either connected with the Chinoachebe family or who knew Chinoachebe when he was here at Amherst. And that'll be presided over by my colleague and co-designer of this whole program, Joy Bowman. And then that'll run to about 2.15 and then at 2.30 we'll have our first panel discussion for the afternoon featuring Marzemen Gister, Chuman Wakola, Chinaloak Paranta, moderated by Sabina Murray, and after that the keynote address given by Ashilin Bembe. So it should be a wonderful afternoon. So with that, I'd like to call on Joy Bowman to preside over the first session. Thank you. I have to move the microphone and say good afternoon. Good afternoon. Okay. Those of you who have been to an African-American church know that you are supposed to do that call and response kind of thing. So welcome to everybody. It's amazing that the weather has cooperated and the gods are with us and although we don't have an invocation today, those of you who were not here yesterday missed Professor Roland Avioden who did greet us and asked for health and happiness and blessings from the gods. So we will invoke that again today. And as Stephen Klingman just said, today we're going to have some personal reflections about Chinway Achebe and his life. We are fortunate to have two of the three people who we had planned to have. Dinja Abdullay was unable to get a visa in Nigeria in time to come today, but he did send some remarks which I will share with you after I introduce the speakers. Dinja Abdullay is a poet, playwright and as he calls himself quote unquote cultural technocrat. He studied at both the University of Joss and the University of Eloran in Nigeria and is a journalist who is now both the director of performing arts in the National Council for the Arts and Culture in Nigeria as well as the national vice president of the Association of Nigerian Authors which of course Chinway Achebe had a role to play in its foundation. We will also hear from Dr. Chinway Achebe who is a physician executive who is trying to solve some of the most pressing and challenging issues facing the healthcare system in this country but also abroad. Dr. Chinway Achebe is a medical doctor who has degrees from Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale and is the CEO of AIDE African Integrated Development Enterprise which is based in Boston. Dr. Achebe has dedicated his energy towards improving the global community health situation, targeting issues such as diabetes, HIV and AIDS and prostate cancer. And as you learned from the program he is the third son of Chinway Achebe and Christie Achebe so we're happy to have him and his wife and siblings here. And last but not least Professor Jules Chemetsky who retired from the English department after having taught I believe 45, 46 years retired in 2004 and is Professor Emeritus. In addition to writing several literary texts Chemetsky was the founder of the Massachusetts Review and served as an editor of that journal for almost 30 years. Equally as important as his literary accomplishments Chemetsky was an active member of our faculty union here on campus the Massachusetts Society of Professors. And his contributions to building that union have made the university a better place for all of us faculty, students and staff alike. I'd also like to just say that in a way all three of these speakers this afternoon represent the same kind of passion and commitment for social change that Chinway Achebe had during his life. And so it's not surprising that his son is doing the kind of work that he's doing. It's not surprising that these three people are collected together to talk about that sort of piece of Chinway Achebe's life that made him the special person that he really was and remains in terms of his legacy. So let me turn now to Dinja Abdelay's message to us about his feelings towards Chinway Achebe. So I read from him, Goodwill Message sent across by Dinja Abdelay, Vice President Association of Nigerian Authors on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the lecture on an image of Africa. Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness by Professor Chinway Achebe at the University of Massachusetts. In one of the several events held in Nigeria to herald the burial of the late patriarch of African literature Chinway Achebe in 2013, I had caused to present an address entitled, What else can one say about Chinway Achebe? I will adopt the spirit and the evoked ambiance of that address in this my message to this very historic gathering at Amherst where Chinway Achebe delivered the landmarking lecture 40 years ago and which is being commemorated today. Yes, I want to ask again, what else can one say about Chinway Achebe? Today that will not be a cliche. I can hardly find anything. He has been called father of African literature. Some would say it should be father of modern African literature. Foremost African novelist, one of the profound theoreticians of post-colonial studies, the one who enlivened the English language with native African wisdom. The sage with the gift for simple but profound words, phrases and sentences. The pioneer who broke the path and lent a helping hand for others to follow. The discoverer and nurturer of talents, the eagle perched on the tallest Iroco tree, the one who became an quote unquote ancestor in the bloom of youth. The man of story who insisted all stories must be heard and that every man must be ready to tell his own as it suits him. The steadfast man who would not let an old grudge be or be swept under the carpet just for quote unquote peace to reign. Chinway Achebe can be likened to a dancing mask that can only be partially comprehended by the appraiser's willingness to shift perspectives. This last statement is itself a popular Achebian study cliché that is drawn from an Evo saying that the world is like a masquerade dancing and that to understand or see it better you do not stand in one place. The gathering at Amherst today is an indication that there is still lots more to say about Achebe. You only need to probe further with a dynamic critical tool. His presence in whatever form is an invitation for knives of myriad shapes and sizes to slash away their chunks from its mammoth sides. The mound of literary fufu prepared by Achebe will continue to feed a potpourri of literary taste, new insights, new issues and new themes. I therefore thank the organizers of this event at Amherst for remembering the contributions of the founder of my association to world literature and global thought. I will end this goodwill message by requesting your indulgence to borrow by way of paraphrase the extension of the scene of the scene and things fall apart when the masked spirit with one hand and carrying a basket full of water danced into the arena to address the corpse of one of the greatest men of Umofia, Zudu. Achebe, if you had been a lackluster storyteller in your last life, I would have asked you to borrow the tongue of a griot when you come again. But you told wonderful stories. If you had been a traitor to your people, race and nation, I would have asked you to come again with their love flowing in your veins. But you were a patriot. If you had pounded your cultural fufu and eaten it alone while your fellow men wallow in heritage hunger, I would have asked you to come back with selflessness. But you were a cultural philanthropist. If you had lacked honor and integrity in your last life, I would have asked you to get them when you came, come this way again. So I will ask you to come again the way you came before, Achebe. Come again. The world awaits your return. And I hope that we will be able to send Dinja a copy of the proceedings. So with no further ado, I will call on, I think Dr. Chinwe Chidi Achebe will come and then we'll have Jules Chemetsky. So probably about 10 minutes or so? Yeah, 10 to 12 minutes. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Very quickly, let me just begin by thanking the chancellor, the provost, Professor Klingman, Professor Thelwell, Chamesky, friends, colleagues, the committee, all the departments, all the colleges, everyone that came together to put this conference together. I'm personally deeply grateful. I know my family is, and we truly cherish the work that went into this symposium, and we're grateful. I'm going to begin by speaking about some of my, some things I remember coming to Amherst with my family. So in 1972, a former roving cultural ambassador from a defeated republic called Biafra packed up his things and set out on a transatlantic journey to America. Accompanying him would be his equally war weary and exhausted wife and four young children. That man was my father, Chinwe Achebe, and I, at five years of age, was one of four excited youngsters in tow. I remember a journey, how we got to Lagos from the eastern part of the devastated former republic, I don't recall, but I do remember the flight on a jet. I believe it was a Pan Am or maybe it was Transworld Airlines, TWA flight. In any case, both are extinct dinosaurs of the airline industry. We took off from Lagos, touching down in Monrovia, Liberia for a short stop. The tarmac in Monrovia was wet from a recent downpour. We stayed on the plane as others filled up the few remaining seats. We were then off to New York's JFK airport. We were greeted by the brisk fall weather of New York. Compared to the tropical climate we were accosting to, New York felt like the Arctic Circle. It didn't help that we were not appropriately dressed for the weather either. Undaunted, my father gathered up our few belongings, paid for the taxi to Penn Station, where we picked up a Peter Pan bus to Springfield. The details here become a bit fuzzy, so I had to lean on the help of my two older siblings and my mother. All of them recall anti-genetic coal, the fantastic late Harvey Suidos. Perhaps Michael Thelwell, if he's here, he would remember. They were all there to welcome the family at the bus station. We soon settled into a cozy house in Amity Street in the center of town. There were several fond memories there. I remember announcing to the mailman that I could spell my name, and he asked for a special performance, and I went on and said, C-H-I-D-I, to which he clapped with my mother beaming in the background. We also scandalized my parents by visiting the Amherst Library every lunch hour and eating up all the cookies set out for coffee hour. The librarians, I am sure, must have been whispering to themselves, they just got out of a war zone. A few months into our stay, we moved into 73 Blackberry Lane near the campus. It was from there that my mother commuted to her PhD classes, completing them in 1975. We had to get up really early to line up for the school bus. I hated that. Chinelo Aike and I were whisked off to Wildwood School and Wando to a school that bore a certain resemblance to her name called Wanda Haven Kindergarten. The bus monitor was a bully, mostly verbally. He picked on a snotty chubby kid with glasses and would call out to him, burger, pick me a winner, to which the whole bus burst out laughing. It reminded me of the character Charlie Brown from Charles M. Scholl's classic peanut series, who had the whole school laughing out loud at him when he accidentally read a love letter to the red-haired girl instead of his book report. I'm surprised that we did not experience more culture shock. Perhaps because in liberal Massachusetts, our transition was made easier by a truly gifted and wonderful group, the Kohl's, the Chameskis. By the way, we stayed in the home of Jules and the late, lovely, I mean really lovely Anne Chameski, at least twice during our separate visits to Amherst. There were others like Harvey Suidos, Michael Thalwell, Professor Esther and Jean Terry, and their wonderful son, Michael. Now speaking about our friends, the children, Genetic Kohl's children, Che, Aaron, David, were very kind and supportive, as were Jeff Taylor, Peter Knight, The Volpees, The Chisms. These were children that were kind to us, that we played games such as poison and bombardment with, that we built tree houses and go-karts with, that helped me get on a bicycle and glide down dangerous hills with glee. I also remember the pain of puppy love, a young girl called Joanne Shibbles or Shibbles, that I had a summer-long, excruciatingly painful crush on, only to discover that she had an older boyfriend who, oh my God, smoked. It was a great cultural period, the women's movement was gathering up steam on the crest of the civil rights movement, in fashion, maxi dresses, mini skirts, knee socks, bell bottoms, patterns, were happening in a big way. Rowald Dahl, who by the way was one of my favorite childhood authors, had released his beloved Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and was in most kids' Christmas socks across the nation. My parents and millions of others were lining up to see the Godfather, which had been just released in the theater as well. The children were addicted to the Brady Bunch, Herbie the Love Bug, and the adaptation of E.M. Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. By the way, my name was confused with the title of that 1968 movie, about a magical car by teachers, parents, and classmates alike. But there was also a dark side, not just to Amherst, but to the world. Under the gleam of this lovely progressive town, some ugliness will pop up on occasion. Three years into our stay, my delict existence came to a crashing end, one day in school. My first exposure to racism came in the local elementary school, when a young white boy called me the N-word. I had never heard that word before, and I had no idea what it meant, or rather was supposed to me, so I ignored him. The next time he used the epithet, I recognized that it was supposed to hurt me, so I ran to my older siblings, who suggested that I reply with the H-word, and so I did. The boy summarily reported me to the teacher, who set me to the principal's office for disciplinary action. This, of course, despite my explanation to the teacher, the course of events. The principal angrily asked my parents to visit his office that very day for a PNT meeting. That was when they learned not to cross a woman called Mrs. Christia Chebe. My mother agreed with the principal that I had behaved badly, but insisted that he not only punished me, and if he did not punish the other instigator, the superintendent of schools would hear a mouthful. And so it was that both offenders received equal punishment for their sins. I think that was the point I started to pay attention to my older sister's record collection. The words of Stevie Wonder's Living for the City, the mantra of James Brown, Say It Loud and Black and Proud, and the excitement around the then very black Michael Jackson doing the robot on Sunny and Cher's show. Vaguely in the mind of a child, albeit eight, all of eight years old, I understood even then that they all in their own way were making a statement to the world. It was years later, when the family returned to Amherst in 1988, as I watched eyes on the prize, the excellent PBS documentary in the Civil Rights period, that a deeper intellectual awareness of the ugliness of racism took root. All of a sudden, Achebe's rage seemed incredibly well placed, as dad would often say, literature is my weapon and boy, did he trigger an earthquake. What Achebe achieved is both monumental and courageous. With the deconstruction of one of the most revered books in English literature, he achieved multiple things. One of them was exploration of the relationship between white privilege awareness and white racial identity development. He also forced white Americans or Europeans to perform a seldom introspective analysis. I suggest this as a physician, because literary readings of this work often miss other corollaries. Most Americans, indeed, Westerners were taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in individual systems conferring dominance on any group. There's been a concerted effort to refuse to accept the fact that there has been irrefutable historical and systemic disadvantages placed on people of color to fuel the benefits for dominant groups. There is a need, therefore, to free most members of the dominant group who oppose this resistance, and by no means is it a majority but a minority, from approaching racism through this prism of white privilege. That, beyond the literary merit of Achebe's revolutionary treatise, is what was also achieved by his essay. The foundation of the definition of whiteness lay on the perception of the African as extreme other, upon which all groups could trample and enter into the realm of power and prestige and economic well-being. Any disruption of that notion was violently resisted, which ties into Achebe's achievement. Most who read Heart of Darkness did not see the racism that he points out that lays therein. They therefore transfer hostility towards their author rather than themselves for failings to see obvious facts. This is why I believe that Achebe is the most undervalued friend of the Western world, because your friends tell you the truth, however painful. Achebe's emphasis on the dehumanization of the African in Heart of Darkness and some other European classics was informed by a lifetime of careful study, reading and analysis of this phenomenon. As I read this essay again and the book in preparation for this symposium, I couldn't help but marvel at its brilliance. My physician lens clearly picked up on the use of code switching in sending linguistic optics of animalistic behavior on the part of the Africans to the reader. He lapped out of his hands, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone. I doubt anyone with a straight face can point out to me where in the vast array of European literature, Europeans are referred to in this animalistic manner. Listening to Professor Carl Phillips speak brilliantly yesterday about his own struggle with his relationship with Africa as a boy from St. Kitts in England, something that James Baldwin also wrote extensively about, I recalled another example of Conrad's equal opportunity disdain for people with the N-word. A certain enormous buck-nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage as manifested in the human animal to the end of his days. Of this nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. The formulation of the black male as buck or brawn and no brain is deeply etched here as well. It's important to step back and look at the context from which Achebe's essay sprang. When Achebe wrote The Essay of Heart of Darkness, he was writing on the shoulders of the giants of the civil rights movement, both black and white. It was now time as he saw it to continue this struggle but this time in literature. The power of the written word is well known to everyone in this audience. One of my favorite quotes comes from the University of Wisconsin that reminds us that literary study pays dividends far beyond the practical ones resulting from increased verbal ability. And as a provider of many other important intellectual gifts, reading literature increases knowledge in an active, intellectually challenging way that other more passive activities such as watching television cannot do. A thorough grounding in literature automatically provides knowledge of our literary heritage while at the same time increases the students awareness of cultural values, history, sociology, psychology, and almost every branch of human knowledge. I will conclude by saying again as a physician that the power of literature also lies in its ability to shape our world view, how we see the world, how we value the world, and those in it. In the age of irrational killings of black men and others, we must all see how the power of the written word can be used to shape a new world of deeper understanding, love, and tolerance. And that, by the way, was Achebe's purpose. Thank you. I want to thank a lot of people, of course. It's a privilege to be invited to participate in this most fitting tribute to Chinua Achebe and to his legacy. I thank Chancellor Subhaswami and Stephen Klingman and his wonderful aides at the Institute of Sponsoring and Organizing this historic event. I also wish to thank Mike Farewell for his mastery of Achebe's work, life, and importance, and for all he has taught me over the years about these matters and much more. I also thank Raul for giving me a cold and nut. Because after yesterday's wonderful presentations by Carol Phillips and a couple of African writers, I think I had to change some things in the piece I had written several days earlier. So I put the cold and nut down near my computer this morning very early and rewrote about half of my piece. So now I want to talk about Chinua as a beloved and admired friend. And then I want to go into some other matters that arose in my mind after yesterday's presentations. And Achebe's talk today was just brilliant. I won't try to equal that. I couldn't. I remember Chinua's warm voice, tender and broad smile, photographs, a test of that. Above all, his indomitable courage, three years of a lost country, wanderings in exile, and how he carried on after the horrible and debilitating automobile accident in Nigeria in 1990. I left him bound to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Chidi describes her arrival in 1972. I was not at the airport, but I was certainly in quite a lot of good awareness of Chinua. I was teaching Things Fall Apart in 1972 and invited Chinua to come to my class, which he did. And he talked about the Biafran War, which of course my students knew very little or nothing. He told of the death of a million Igbo people and the surprise of the victors that nine million survived. Those were Chinua's words, having emerged from the forests. Then in a latest story about those days, he wrote, I survived the war, but didn't know if I could survive the peace in the wake of the marauding soldiers in the countryside. Survived, he did, helped by the irony and even gallows humor in such a remark. Mostly survived in the company and steadfast loyalty and care of his wonderful family. A few years later, 1975, when I was invited to teach abroad, I really think if they didn't take my house as a gift, Chinua and Christie used a couple of rooms in my house as their offices to work because my son Peter, home from the holidays, for the holidays from Cornell, came to the house and was surprised to see Christie at work in Ann's study and Chinua at work in another room. I like to think that's where the beginnings of the famous talk, speech on Heart of Darkness, was begun or carried through. Maybe not, but that's my chosen belief, of course. That talk, of course, as has been said before, later was picked up by the Massachusetts Review and published as an article. But then I had retired for the first time from the mass review, and my protege and whom I pushed in my stead as co-editor, Lee Edwards, who went on to become dean of college here for 15 years. But Lee really, with the help of others on the sidelines, Sid Kaplan, Afro-Am people, overcame opposition within the board itself and among colleagues in the English Department to publish that essay. And of course that essay went on to become the most reprinted article that ever appeared in the mass review in its 55 or 56 years of existence. So that, thank you brother. I wanted to also thank Royal for giving me a cola nut this morning, which I put this morning next to my typewriter, my computer. I put that in about Lee Edwards. Later I invited Christie to teach a seminar on African women's education at the Institute of Advanced Study and Humanities that I directed for 11 years in the early 80s and early 90s with Esther Terry as my co-director. Christie and my wife Ann Holly responded to each other warmly, as Chitty indicated. At Christie's 75th birthday celebration in their home near Providence, I attributed in a little talk I was asked to give some of that empathy to the both having been through exile from their homelands, she from Nigeria and Ann from, as a refugee from Nazi Germany. I want to put on record something else. The Amherst community's chiefly Esther Terry, Mike Thouel genetic called the Baskins, the Kaplins, the AFROM department and others, immediate response with financial and emotional support to Chinwunder family after the terrible accident in 1990. Money was supplied here and elsewhere to have one of the best spinal specialists in the country teaching a Dartmouth to fly over to the London hospital, which was an excellent hospital I learned from a doctor friend in England to help Chinwunder in that terrible moment where he had been sent after the accident. The doctor said it was severe, but he had seen worse and that in two or three years he would, Chinwunder would get used to a new body. It seemed like a harsh sentence, but it happened. But not after a horrible first year about which Chinwunder told me when Chitty, his chief caretaker, and he invited me to meet with him in a campus center hotel here. He remembered nothing of that first year, which was in the sense of blessing. He did live with that new body, giving classes at Bard where he was supposed to work for three years and go back to his professorship in Nigeria. But medical care was nearby in New York City and medications were easier to acquire. Not far from Bard, where the president of the college Leon Botstein was very generous, refitting the Achebe homes that Chinwunder continued to teach as long as he wished in his own private living room on campus, which was very nice. Then he was invited to Brown University writing and giving lectures and readings and accumulating justified honors. It was hard, but inspiring, but enough of that. On a happier note, when he had his 70th birthday celebration at Bard, at which luminaries from everywhere all over the world appeared, including Tony Morrison and Wally Swainke. Swainke gave a talk about African writers and Achebe. He said, when African audiences were asked who was the best writer, they invariably replied, the Nobel Prize winner, Wally Swainke. And what was his best work? Things fall apart. True story. I could go on at length, but enough of all that. If there's time, I'd like to add my own small comment on the importance of things fall apart. At opening doors to writers, and not only in Africa, but all over the world in many languages and literatures. For me, too, it was crucial. In the spirit of the topic of this session, which is called I Have Called You All Together, I figure I'm part of the all. Thirty years ago, I was struggling with an introduction to my book called Our Decentralized Literature, a study in cultural mediation. That phrase, a decentralized literature, was invented by William Dean Howells at the end of the 19th century, great American writer and influence. He was called the Dean of American Letters at the time. And in that essay, he welcomed newcomers to the American literary scene. I was writing at the time about the move of writers at the margin of the establishment to its mainstream center, namely at that time Jewish and Southern American writers. I began my book as follows. This is true. First lines of my book, the introduction. In the last paragraph of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, perhaps the most memorable account in English of an African culture and the impact upon it of white European encroachment, the voice and language of the book shifts with startling abruptness. From the point of view of a sensibility deep within tribal culture in which the reader has been privileged throughout the novel to participate and whose world has therefore become familiar, nuanced, rich and real as lived experience can and is, we are suddenly forced to see all that fullness reduced by the language of the conqueror. As he orders the body of a concoct cut down from the tree, the English District Commissioner reflects on his plans to write a book about his years toiling to bring, quote, civilization to different parts of Africa, end of quote. He muses as follows, the story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make an interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him, perhaps not a whole chapter, but a reasonable paragraph at any rate. There was so much else to include and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book after much thought, the pacification of the primitive tribes of the Niger, end of quote. Anyone who has read or taught this novel can testify to the outrageous reductionism of this last paragraph, especially its last sentence. It is chilling, but ultimately fulfills the enlightening effort of the whole book. Significantly for my purposes and from the perspective of a chief assumption underlying this collection of essays that I had written over more than 20 years is the demonstration, brutal and unmistakable in this case, that who controls or attempts to control language and the act of interpretation, the process of naming and definition aims to control in imperial fashion, historic memory, culture and people. By taking the words out of their mouths as it were and substituting their own words, cultural dominance of a particular group, class, nation, hegemony to use a popular word is established and legitimated. The struggle to remain or recover or invent out of an acculturated existence, her and his stories, involves over and over again the recovery of a voice, the articulate embodiment of experience that is authentically, legitimately one's own. At the end of my book, No Last Lines, I say we have finished one phase of the incorporation of groups at the edge of our literary establishment and the next group should be the Afro-American writers and women writers. So on that note, I end you and thank you all for listening. Thanks to both of our speakers and again to Dinja who couldn't be here with us. And I thank Jules for pointing out that the title of this session was, I have called you all together and I think that these presentations help us think about that a little bit more. So without further ado, I am going to call on Stephen Klingman to do a small presentation and we will get started with the next session shortly. Thank you Joy. Thanks to all our speakers. You know, in the course of planning something like this, you get to know people quite well, not only my co-workers but others I'd never met before. For Dinja Abdelahi, I still have not met but we've corresponded and I have to say what a wonderful person and I thought he sent an absolutely beautiful message to this gathering here. I came to know Dr. Chidi Achebe through correspondence and have met him yesterday for the first time and again what a moving and wonderful tribute that was. And I think a view into what a few of us in this room actually know about life in Amherst 40 years ago for someone such as yourself moving here from Nigeria at that time. And Jules Tumeski I've known for many, many years, we too have stayed in his house, one of the most generous people he and Anne together in Amherst. And I do want to say that when he mentioned being director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, we in a way are the kind of progeny of that project because the interdisciplinary studies institute inherited that mantle in some form. We used to be called Isha, interdisciplinary studies in the humanities and fine arts and if you think of the letters, I S H A, it's just an acronym for I Ash. I kept that spirit in mind. But one thing I want to do because I know Dr. Achebe has to leave very soon is I'd like to give him a memento of this event, a framed poster, which I will show you here. And we have posters as well for his sister Chinalo and we'll be sending one to his mother, Mrs. Christia Achebe. So, Chidi, would you accept this from us, please.