West Africa Review (2001)

ISSN: 1525-4488

Malignant and Beneficent Fictions: Constructing Nature in Ecocriticism and Achebe’s Arrow of God

Michael Lundblad

The recent introduction to Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment raises significant questions about how ecocritics will continue to define ecocritical theory and practice. One of the central issues involves the concept of speaking for nature, or determining how to let nature’s “voice” speak for itself. On the one hand, “the voice of nature [...] cannot speak through conventional means,” yet, on the other hand, ecocritics are trying to “read literature with a fresh sensitivity to the emergent voice of nature” (Branch et al. xii, xiii). Inevitably this “voice” can only be expressed, in literature at least, through human representations of non-human creatures and landscapes. Of course it is possible to argue for a shift of emphasis toward those representations, but I believe ecocritics need to be much more aware of the human costs involved. In the context of postcolonial nations struggling for social equality, we need to explore the ethical implications of speaking for nature, even if our sympathies might generally be labeled “green.”

In order to conceptualize a voice of nature, some ecocritics maintain that we can identify the environment, or nature, as the “reality” behind or before any social construction. This position has come under fire in recent years by critics willing to give more consideration to post-structural discourse analysis.1 Identifying “authentic” nature can provoke debates similar to questions of determining an “authentic” postcolonial voice. But perhaps the more urgent task in both cases is evaluating which socially constructed discourses are dangerous in which specific contexts. We need to be asking who speaks or represents voices, how they do so, and what they stand to gain from claiming narrative authority. In this regard we can take a cue from an essay by Chinua Achebe titled “The Truth of Fiction,” first delivered as a convocation lecture at the University of Ife in 1978. Achebe’s distinction between “malignant” and “beneficent” fictions, both in literature and other forms of cultural communication, gives us an appropriate framework to consider the political and “real-world” impact of various discursive constructs. Although I believe Achebe ultimately affirms a problematic view that holds “Western science” apart from socially constructed narratives, I think his impulse to evaluate discourses in terms of their visibility as “fictions,” as well as their practical consequences, is one that can serve as a model for ecocritical and postcolonial praxis. As we try to foster better relationships between and among humans and nature, we need to be aware of discourses that can become “malignant” if they reinscribe unjust power relations, hierarchies, or exploitative practices. My aim in this essay is thus to explore the deceptively simple question of who speaks for nature, both in Achebe’s novel Arrow of God (1967) as a particularly useful example, and in contemporary ecocritical praxis. After placing Achebe’s framework in the context of postcolonial and ecocritical theory, I will apply that framework to discourses of religion, biological determinism, and biodiversity suggested by the novel. In conclusion I will consider the lessons we might learn from the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s “environmentalism” in contemporary Nigeria.

Although Achebe might seem an unexpected spokesman for discourse analysis, his aim in “The Truth of Fiction” is to study fictional narratives not only in literature but also in cultural and religious practice. His examples range from mathematics, with the fiction of “infinity plus one” (96), to medicine (discussed further below), to racism, often based unjustly on “biological difference.” While the term “fiction” might imply a negative or dismissive attitude toward all of these discourses, Achebe uses the term more loosely to apply to both “malignant” and “beneficent” examples. The difference, he argues, is that beneficent fictions, on the one hand, are readily acknowledged as fictional and contingent, and thus able to teach us some sense of morality or at least sensitivity. They allow us to draw “essential insights and wisdoms for making our way in the world” (104). Malignant fictions, on the other hand, are those narratives that are presented as unconstructed “reality,” and result in a reduced sensitivity to injustice. The term “malignant” connotes medical contexts, and Achebe uses it accordingly to describe how certain discourses can lead to a kind of sickness, to “malfunctioning powers of identification with the plight of our fellows” (100). We need to be careful, he argues, that our imaginations do not end up “hardening rapidly into the sclerotic rigidity of literal-mindedness and material concerns” (104). These terms are obviously setting up a discourse which is itself open to important questions: who decides what is malignant or beneficent?; and, what power relations are embedded in these determinations? But I believe we can shift the debate self-consciously to “real-world” implications by continually asking these questions without denying the social construction of what we call “reality.”

Evaluating “fictions” in the context of pressing political situations is a recognition of both discursive constructs and essentialized categories that can be politically useful. While post-structuralist theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak are perhaps more likely to dwell on the difficulties of essentialist positions, my own analysis seeks to build upon their work while simultaneously articulating the need, at times, for Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary call to pay attention first and foremost to political exigencies.2 Echoing Fanon’s call, Benita Parry has insisted upon the importance of the native voice, even as it remains constructed by multiple narratives. In “Signs of Our Times” she critiques Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, for example, for ignoring political realities in favor of discourse analysis, and argues that “the construct of binary oppositions, if epistemologically faulty, retains power as a political category” (15). I agree with Parry’s notion that essentialisms can be useful when it comes to addressing issues like blatant exploitation. But I think she chooses the wrong terms to argue with Bhabha because she ends up in the awkward position of agreeing that everything is constructed, but finally trying to assert that we can also access the “reality” upon which those constructions are based. Achebe’s distinction between malignant and beneficent fictions has the potential to solve this problem because we can use it to argue that social construction is inevitable but not by definition malignant. In this way we can avoid falling back on notions of pre-discursive “reality” and concentrate instead on when various social constructions become vehicles for unjust power relations.

This framework applies equally well to analyses of nature or the environment, where essentialist categories can be politically useful too. But, as Eric Todd Smith has argued, listening for the authentic “voice” of nature is not always the most productive activity for ecocritics. He suggests that “because it is difficult to agree on what nature-as-a-subject is saying, the ideal of subjectivity is an unreliable basis for effective ecocritical praxis [...T]his question needlessly simplifies our relationships—biological, moral, and aesthetic—with other entities” (38n). What we can focus on, instead, is a more sensitive awareness of how various discourses function and how everyday people and animals are effected by those narratives.

I want to begin a discussion of Arrow of God (1967), then, with an eye toward malignant fictions in the text itself as well as in the context of contemporary cultural and environmental problems. The novel as a whole is clearly a beneficent fiction in the sense that we can learn moral lessons by identifying with various fictional characters and by experiencing vicariously the effects of colonial oppression. Achebe draws our attention to the fact that different characters have constructed different interpretations of nature, for example, even if they do not recognize their beliefs as constructions. Religious doctrines in particular become the grounds for clashes between Christian and non-Christian Igbo people, primarily through the interpretation of sacred animals and seasonal cycles, through which the process of manipulating discourse for power becomes apparent.

The novel is set in Nigeria when the British maintain colonial control but not quite complete domination over villages further inland. Set as a kind of sequel to Things Fall Apart (1959) the novel represents new Igbo characters forced to confront the realities of both political and religious colonization. The protagonist is known as Ezeulu, so named because of his status as the chief priest of the god Ulu, who has been chosen to protect the six villages that together make up the community of Umuaro. Ezeulu’s major rival Nwaka, from another of the six villages, is supported by Ezidemili, the chief priest of the god Idemili, who is represented by the sacred python. The religious significance of the python, common to all of Umuaro, provides a thread we can follow to show some of the fictions present in terms of struggles for power through religious practices.

As Christian missionaries become further entrenched in Umuaro, the interpretation of the python becomes a central issue. Igbo traditional reverence for the python is ridiculed in the novel by John Goodcountry, the Christian catechist who “spoke the white man’s language as if it was his own” (47). But even among converts such as Moses Unachukwu, the idea of rejecting traditional taboos against harming the python is met with considerable hesitation. Goodcountry tells his flock that Christianity had defeated the cult of the sacred iguana in the Niger Delta, and that as Christians they must be willing to abandon their worship of the python. He says, “You must be ready to kill the python as the people of the rivers killed the iguana. You address the python as Father. It is nothing but a snake, the snake that deceived our first mother, Eve. If you are afraid to kill it do not count yourself as a Christian” (47).3 In response, Moses tells the story of the now-extinct seventh village of Umuaro known as Umuama, in which the python was once killed and eaten. The brothers who ate the python soon began to fight amongst themselves, and eventually the whole village joined in and essentially wiped itself out. Seeking an explanation for this course of events, the remaining six villages “went to a seer to know the reason, and he told them that the royal python was sacred to Idemili; it was this deity which had punished Umuama. From that day the six villages decreed that henceforth anyone who killed the python would be regarded as having killed his kinsman” (48).

The narratives thus given for either worshiping or despising the snake are clearly recognizable as alternate “realities” to Achebe’s readers (even if Christians and non-Christians might see them, respectively, as the truth), and defenders of either view in Umuaro can find concrete ways of asserting their positions in terms of how the literal snakes they encounter are treated. While Moses appeals to the Bishop on the Niger on behalf of the priest of Idemili, his petition amounts to more of a threat: “It warned the bishop that unless his followers in Umuaro left the royal python alone they would regret the day they ever set foot on the soil of the clan” (214). This threat is taken seriously by the bishop in part because of another situation in which a “young, energetic ordinand had led his people on a shrine-burning adventure and had killed a python in the process, whereupon the villagers had chased out all the Christians among them and burnt their houses” (214). The reaction of the colonial Administration reveals how much these battles are reinforced by military might: “Things might have got out of hand had the Administration not stepped in with troops for a show of force” (214). In response to the specific situation in Umuaro, though, the bishop decides to avoid this kind of confrontation and issues the order that the python is not to be touched, even as he prays “that the day would not be far when the priest [of Idemili] and all his people would turn away from the worship of snakes and idols to the true religion” (214). Claims about the “true religion” are thus clearly in conflict, and have the potential for becoming malignant fictions once violence is used to enforce either position.

The actions of Ezeulu’s son Oduche bring the internal conflict between Ezeulu and Ezidemili to the foreground, but also reveal once again how interpretations are manipulated in the struggle for power. Sent by his father to learn the white man’s religion, Oduche responds to the debate between Goodcountry and Moses by deciding to kill a python himself. But he balks when he has the opportunity and instead traps the snake in a wooden box, hoping that it will die by suffocation, with the added benefit that he wouldn’t have killed it directly and thus violated the taboo. Once Ezeulu discovers the still-living python struggling in his son’s box, he releases it, but not without recognizing the terrible affront that has occurred. But the act becomes more than just a concern for offending Idemili; it becomes grounds for exacerbating the rift between Ezeulu and Nwaka, supported behind the scenes by Ezidemili. Responding to “the impudent message sent him by the priest of Idemili” demanding to know how Ezeulu would compensate for the sin, Ezeulu decides that he has “no alternative but to hurl defiance at them all” (60). And thus he refuses to perform any special ceremony of absolution. Whether the quarrel is between Ezeulu and Ezidemili or Umuaro and Christian missionaries, the point is that the literal and figurative battleground is the snake itself. Simon Gikandi points out that as “various factions in Umuaro compete over the meaning of myth,” they also reveal that “myths and rituals are not eternal, but are a manifestation of individual or communal needs [...]” (151). Gikandi goes on to argue that “the god who will win is the one who will promise more material and spiritual objects than the other” (155). As we have seen, though, the gods might deliver, but the power also resides in those who claim to speak for each god.4

The other primary example where Ezeulu speaks for his god and affects his people’s interaction with the non-human world is in his role of calling for seasonal festivals. His hold over the village slips away at the end of the novel when people finally make the decision to make the offering of the first yams of the season to the Christian god rather than Ulu. This action is the result of a crisis in which Ezeulu refuses to call for the harvest festival because he has been unable to satisfy the requirements set by Ulu of eating one ritual yam at the beginning of each new moon. Since he was detained by the white man for an extended period, he was unable to do so for two months and therefore feels he cannot call the festival until he has eaten them all at the beginning of a new moon. While this might appear to be a case in which Ezeulu is remaining perfectly steadfast to tradition, it is also at least as much an indication that he is willing to exhibit his power and exact revenge over rivals such as Nwaka who did not support his interactions with the white man on earlier occasions. Faced with yams rotting in the ground because their chief priest will not call the harvest festival, the citizens of Umuaro eventually decide to offer their sacrifice to the Christian god instead, promised by John Goodcountry that they will be protected from Ulu and other deities (215).

Achebe’s own views on traditional Igbo religious practices offer both potentially beneficent and malignant narratives. He certainly has a Christian background, but also a desire to faithfully and accurately depict traditional Igbo culture.5 As Gerald Moore writes, “Achebe insists that we should see it as a life actually lived by plausible men and women before we dismiss it, with the usual shrug, as nothing but ignorance, darkness and death” (125). Certainly this is a major goal of Achebe’s: to fill in the gaps that have been glossed over about the Igbo people when their history is told by the colonizers. D. Ibe Nwoga cautions us, though, against reading Achebe’s novel purely in terms of an anthropological study of the Igbo people (38), and it is significant that Achebe has clearly made the decision to focus his story on the chief priest of Ulu, a god literally invented by the people of Umuaro, instead of emphasizing a traditional Igbo god presumed to have always existed.6 Ulu was created, we are told, “when the six harassed villages got together and said to Ezeulu’s ancestor: You will carry this deity for us [....] So he went down on both knees and they put the deity on his head. He rose up and was transformed into a spirit” (Arrow 188). The fact that Ulu has been installed also means that his worshipers can abandon him if he fails to protect them. The threat to Ezeulu at one point is expressed as, “if Ulu failed to fight in their blameful war they would unseat him” (130). I tend to agree with Nwoga that “By putting narrative emphasis on Ulu, Achebe was freed from a theological or mythical perspective on religion. He could therefore pursue a humanistic direction suitable for the social orientation of his novel” (18).7 Nwoga insists that some gods pre-date people in Igbo religion (22), but Achebe’s emphasis on the ephemeral nature of Ulu, in my view, highlights the competing narratives in Igbo and Christian explanations of the world. This technique, I believe, allows us to see Achebe’s representations of religion as beneficent fictions precisely because we can see their constructed nature (which is not to say, of course, that they are fictional in a more traditional sense of the word).

But Achebe does not always elevate traditional practices over Western views. In “The Truth of Fiction,” for example, he considers the rational ways in which Western-trained doctors would address most health issues. In order to explain widespread problems of children dying prematurely, he argues, Western scientists would of course focus on disease, undernourishment, and ignorance. According to Achebe, who briefly studied medicine himself:8

Every reasonable person will accept that this ‘scientific’ answer is more satisfactory than answers we might be given from other quarters. For example, a witch-doctor might tell us that our children die because they are bewitched; because someone else in the family has offended a god or, in some other secret way, erred. (98)

Evaluating these competing explanations, Achebe reveals his bias even as he labels them both fictions. We are told that “the cool, methodical and altogether marvellous [sic] procedures of modern medicine” as well as “the erratic ‘visions’ of a religious psychopath” represent “the same need of man to explain and alleviate his intolerable condition” (98). In the case of unusual numbers of child deaths, though, Achebe reiterates that the “scientific” explanation is “infinitely more helpful to us than the diagnosis of a half-mad religious fanatic” (98). I cite these comments at some length to highlight Achebe’s attitudes toward traditional practices, some of which we actually see at work in Arrow of God, as well as to show that we don’t necessarily need to agree with Achebe’s decisions about which fictions are malignant in order to utilize his framework. To return to my central question of who speaks for nature, I want to examine the point at which this glorification of Western science can become a malignant fiction itself.

Just as religious discourse can be manipulated in the struggle for power, scientific narratives such as biological determinism and sociobiology can also lead to problematic “fictions.” Achebe himself condemns the kind of biological explanations that have historically been used to justify racism and exploitation, even if he seems unaware of how his own discourse on animals and sacrifice can reinscribe similar logic. An example from the novel such as, “man is like a funeral ram which must take whatever beating comes to it without opening its mouth; that the silent tremor of pain down its body alone must tell of its suffering” (Arrow 229), reveals an attitude (among some of Achebe’s characters at least) that it is right for the ram to accept its role as subordinate, sacrificial object. If we insert colonial Nigeria or Igboland into the role of the ram for a moment, we can see how such logic can perpetuate a kind of imperialist hegemony. As Andrew Ross has argued, “The heavily Christianized language of sacrifice and redemption recalls a long history in the West of justifying poverty and social inequality by making promises about the kingdom to come” and making demands “for concessions and forfeits, usually from those with the least wealth and power” (265). If we contribute to this ideology, it would seem to be “an indication that we lack enough imagination to recreate in ourselves the thoughts that must go on in the minds of others, especially those we dispossess” (Achebe, “The Truth” 102).

But how, you might ask, is the life of an animal equivalent to the life of a human being? Even if your concern for animal rights is not as strong as mine, at the very least it is clear that similar rhetoric is used to distinguish between human and animal as has been used to distinguish between races. Edward Said notes that in the discourse of Orientalism, what we find is “second-order Darwinism, which seemed to accentuate the ‘scientific’ validity of the division of races into advanced and backward, or European-Aryan and Oriental-African” (206). As a result, there is an “implicit program of action. Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be subjected [...]” (207). Achebe objects vehemently to this course of action enacted upon colonial and postcolonial human subjects, but his novel reinscribes the same logic in its discourse on animals. In “Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South” he writes, “In confronting the black man, the white man has a simple choice: either to accept the black man’s humanity and the equality that flows from it; or to reject it and see him as a beast of burden” (15). The beast, of course, has no standing whatsoever except in the role of the dutiful subject, or the resigned sacrificial object. In “The Novelist as Teacher” Achebe wonders where internalized racism, “the very worst” of African sins and blasphemies, originated: “What we need to do is to look back and try and find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us” (29). While discourses of animal subjugation are certainly not the only cause of internalized racism, I believe the acceptance of it as “natural” makes domination and exploitation in other contexts that much easier to bear.

Too often the attitudes we have toward nature determine what seems “natural” or inevitable in our relationships with other human beings. As Achebe would argue, exploitation based on supposedly biological terms is nothing less than a malignant fiction. Examples of such fictions are “Belief in superior and inferior races; belief that [...] our own particular group or class or caste has a right to certain things which are denied to others; the belief that men are superior to women, and so on—all are fictions generated by the imagination” (“The Truth” 101).9 While Achebe rejects the logic of “biology” when it comes to malignant fictions like racism, in Arrow of God his representation of hierarchies inscribed through ritual sacrifice raises similar issues. At first glance the people of Umuaro appear to be “close to nature” or “in tune with their natural surroundings”: two clichés that are often trotted out to romanticize “primitive” cultures. While the agrarian economy in Umuaro has the potential for harmonious and ethical interactions with the environment (certainly its modes of production are more sustainable than those developed through colonization), it is also undermined, in the way Achebe has presented it, by a logic of opportunistic adaptation, which threatens to sacrifice an appreciation for nature on the altar of development.10

Life in Umuaro revolves around seasonal cycles and celebrations like the Feast of the New Yam and the Festival of the New Pumpkin Leaves, and one of Ezeulu’s most important functions is to identify the new moon each month in order to determine when to plant, when to harvest the yams, and so on. Spirits are represented in various natural forms in addition to the python discussed above, such as the unruly stream Ota (7) and the udala tree, sacred to the ancestral spirits (196). Sacrifices are made to these spirits, along with deities like Ulu and Idemili, in the form of slaughtered animals and other ritual offerings. The purpose, in traditional Igbo religion, is to interact with the deities, to appease them for perceived transgressions, to thank them for received gifts, to appeal to them for future protection or good fortune, and so on.11 What I am interested in, though, is not necessarily an evaluation of these practices from an anthropological point of view, but rather an inquiry into how Achebe uses them to make different narratives that are based upon domination seem natural in his novel. The potential for becoming a malignant fiction is apparent here once these hierarchies are represented as “a proven fact and a way of life” (“The Truth” 101).

We have already seen that Ezeulu, in addition to revering his deities, is concerned with interpreting those deities in order to wield power (whether his own sense of agency is ultimately Ulu’s will or not). But he also represents an attitude of seeing a more practical side to ritual practices, of figuring out the real-world, human benefits to be gained from each situation. When his son Obika is married, for example, and a ritual sacrifice is required to be performed, Obika becomes concerned when the medicine man fails to slaughter the designated hen. Responding to Obika’s question about the medicine man taking the hen for himself to be eaten later, Ezeulu replies, “It is not the custom. You must know that there are more people with greedy, long throats in the pursuit of [Igbo] medicine than anywhere else” (121). But rather than being upset about the thwarted custom (he declares that the medicine man is at fault, not Obika), Ezeulu feels “his heart warm with pleasure” because his son has come to ask him about this instead of losing his temper on the spot (121). The traditional sacrifice becomes less important than the fact that his son is becoming more mature.

The ultimate Igbo acceptance of and deferral to Christianity can be seen as a survival method, a different kind of sacrifice, but also as a way of maintaining parts of their culture in limited form in the face of Christian British extortion. Actions like equating the representatives of British power with new deities are perhaps understandable in this light. When policemen come to arrest Ezeulu, they are appeased in much the same way gods would be appeased, with a sacrifice consisting of live cocks as well as two shillings, because “the white man is the masked spirit of today” (154). On another occasion, when colonial administrators encounter a sacrifice intended for the gods on the side of the road, one of them, at least, has no problem pilfering English coins from the site (161-2). Including money in these offerings represents a turn among the Igbo toward worshiping the idols of the market and commerce, and embracing the white man as “the chief priest of a new deity—money” (Gikandi 157). New deities are created to watch over various markets in the novel (Arrow 19) and, as Gikandi points out, “the new idols of colonialism” have become hegemonic (156-7). Humans can be sacrificed before this power, just as one was sacrificed to create the deity of Ulu (Arrow 133): “Every offence has its sacrifice, from a few cowries to a cow or a human being” (209). Ezeulu’s decision to send his son Oduche to learn the white man’s religion can be seen as another human sacrifice in this light, not to atone for an offense but to hope for future protection. Ezeulu is reluctant to make this explicit connection, arguing instead that he wanted his son to be his “eyes and ears” in the white man’s ways, but his other son Edogo interprets his father’s actions as trying to eliminate the possibility that Oduche would become the next priest of Ulu. The point is, though, that Ezeulu deems it perfectly natural to manipulate members of his own family, in one way or another, in order to achieve his desired goals. Achebe has commented elsewhere that Ezeulu “sees that change is inevitable, and he tries to master the new forces, to use the new forces in order to retain his own position and to manage the inevitable changes in his society. This is the attitude of a clever intellectual and must not be seen in terms of religious beliefs—I mean, of adhesion, or not, to Christianity” (qtd. in Fabre 48).

Ezeulu’s actions interest me because they seem to be based on a feeling that it’s only “natural” to make the most out of a given situation by wielding power over subordinate creatures. This attitude becomes malignant when it is expanded by other characters to justify exploitation of either humans or animals. In Arrow of God, there are obvious instances of racist colonial attitudes that are based on such logic and linked to seeing the Igbo as nothing more than animals. Wright, the road builder, responds at one point to his crew by shouting, “Shut up, you black monkeys, and get back to work!” (83). In general, Wright finds them to be “loyal as pet dogs,” even if some of them are “bone lazy and could only respond to severe handling” (76). Winterbottom, the British District Officer, stereotypes the natives as well with pronouncements on traits such as the “elemental cruelty in the psychological make-up of the native” (58). This last statement refers to the actions of Chief James Ikedi, propped up by the British as the new leader of the neighboring community of Okperi. Winterbottom notes Ikedi’s willingness to exploit his own people for material gain, but after internalizing the logic of domination and oppression, it seems only “natural” to me that an indigenous chief would perpetuate the same logic upon his own people:

Three years ago they had put pressure on Captain Winterbottom to appoint a Warrant Chief for Okperi against his better judgment. After a long palaver he had chosen one James Ikedi, an intelligent fellow who had been among the very first people to receive missionary education in these parts. But what had happened? Within three months of this man receiving his warrant Captain Winterbottom began to hear rumours of his high-handedness. He had set up an illegal court and a private prison [....] Captain Winterbottom went into the whole business thoroughly and uncovered many more serious scandals (57).

In the field of ecocriticism, it might be tempting to think that discourses valuing “real” animals and biodiversity could help to reverse the logic of exploitation I’ve explored so far. But these ecocritical narratives have the potential for becoming dangerous as well, even as they address the urgent need to protect the non-human world. As David Mazel has argued, inverting the paradigm to the point of worshiping nature (or animals) is ultimately analogous to a form of Orientalism.12 If we substitute “environment” for “Orient” in Edward Said’s formulation, we can see that the non-human has been essentialized as always subordinate to the human, even if the rhetoric seems to value nature for its biodiversity or its “wildness.”13 Mazel calls on contemporary ecocritics and environmentalists to exhibit the same awareness of discourse when it comes to nature by pointing out the need “to test whether in fact what comes to count as the environment is that which matters to the culturally dominant, and [...] to explore whether the construction of the environment is itself an exercise of power” (142). Following Foucault, he suggests “approaching the environment as a construct, not as the prediscursive origin and cause of environmental discourse but rather as the effect of that discourse” (143). While I agree with Mazel’s insistence on looking at the environment as a construct, I don’t believe Orientalism is the most appropriate term here because it tends to imply that there is an essential Other whose voice has been ignored by Orientalist discourses and can thus be reclaimed. As I’ve tried to argue thus far, arguments over the true “voice” of nature won’t get us as far as discussing who is trying to represent those voices and what they stand to gain by doing so.

The questions that need to be asked, to return to Achebe’s framework, concern the power relations involved in discursive “fictions” like those constructed around the “literal” python in Arrow of God: Who stands to gain? Who suffers? For ecocritics interested in the “voice” of nature, there might be an impulse to consider the literal snake itself, as a living creature, regardless of any religious symbolism or constructed meaning. But the attitudes of non-Christian Igbo characters in the novel, for example, resist the idea that this distinction can be made; they reject the concept that the python is first and foremost “just a reptile” (Gikandi 154) and therefore a pre-discursive “reality.” Pythons have a literal, everyday presence in Umuaro, such as the two pythons that live in Oduche’s mother’s hut. These snakes, we are told, “did no harm and kept the rats away; only once were they suspected of frightening away a hen and swallowing her eggs” (Arrow 50). Ezeulu makes a distinction between common snakes and the sacred python, and confesses that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference: “when a man sees a snake all by himself he may wonder whether it is an ordinary snake or the untouchable python” (143); and, “A common snake which a man sees all alone may become a python in his eyes” (226). While Oduche and Ezeulu distinguish between other species of snakes and the python, though, they believe that the sacred nature of the python is inseparable from the “real” reptile. In this particular case a Western environmentalist might be willing to applaud this “fiction,” because it could result in the protection of this species of snake in the name of biodiversity. But too often this enthusiasm for a literal creature assumes that it is possible to somehow avoid constructing one’s own narrative (in this case the idea of placing value on biodiversity). When an environmentalist’s agenda conflicts, rather than coincides, with other discursive constructs, it becomes more difficult to assess which fictions are malignant or beneficent.

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, for example, would argue that we can always identify the literal snake isolated from any religious symbolism constructed upon it: “Culture transforms the snake into the serpent, a far more potent creation than the literal reptile” (“The Serpent” 100). Advocating this “biological” explanation, though, can become much more problematic if it ignores localized discourses and refuses to recognize itself as similarly constructed. As Achebe reminds us, “What distinguishes beneficent fiction from such malignant cousins as racism is that the first never forgets that it is fiction and the other never knows that it is” (101). Biological explanations are certainly not malignant in all cases, but this particular example has the potential to become dangerous if the inverted emphasis of the nonhuman over the human is taken too far, without acknowledging that the “scientific” view is a “fiction” as well.14

We might be inclined as ecocritics and environmentalists to think of the plight of the literal python in Igboland as a symbol of biological diversity that needs to be protected along with millions of other species and their habitats. Wilson exemplifies this view in his introduction to Biodiversity in 1986: “Biological diversity must be treated more seriously as a global resource, to be indexed, used, and above all, preserved.” He points out that “exploding human populations are degrading the environment at an accelerating rate, especially in tropical countries” (“The Current State” 3). As for the citizens of those countries, the apparently simple answer to all of their problems is to somehow exploit natural resources “by making biological diversity a source of economic wealth” without completely destroying the environment (14). In this way, we can supposedly shift attitudes to consider the “fauna and flora of a country” as “part of the national heritage” instead of maintaining an ethic that focuses on “pressing concerns of daily life” (16-17). But what are the consequences of this line of thinking that places supreme value on biological diversity? What “pressing concerns of daily life” in Nigeria today or the Igboland of Achebe’s novel get ignored once we shift our attention to environmental crises?

Taken to its extreme, this logic can also become a malignant fiction, in a way that Wilson does not seem willing to acknowledge. If Americans and Europeans demand the protection of biodiversity, for example, or ecocritics focus on it in their work, there is the potential for a new form of imperialism that ignores the specific human contexts involved. In “Farmers’ Rights, Biodiversity and International Treaties” Vandana Shiva points out that “Instead of being treated as common property of local communities, or as national property of sovereign states, the third world’s biodiversity has in recent years been treated as the common heritage of humankind” (555). As European and American powers negotiate international treaties over biodiversity, Shiva illustrates how local farmers (in this case in India) are seldom consulted, and the resulting exploitation is “brazenly unjust and non-sustainable and needs to be changed” (560). Much of the problem, though, can be traced back to competing interpretations of key terms and discourses:

Negotiations related to biodiversity and biological innovations are complicated because different groups and actors involved give different meanings to basic concepts. For traditional societies, biodiversity is common property, and knowledge related to it is in the intellectual commons. For biotechnology corporations, biodiversity becomes private property through their investments, and IPRs [intellectual property rights] are the means for such privatisation. (555)

Shiva’s article points to the problems associated with quantifying biodiversity in economic terms, particularly when such a discourse ends up ignoring local forms of knowledge and interaction with the environment.

An emphasis on biodiversity can also end up displacing or destroying local communities dependent upon their natural surroundings. Deane Curtin’s recent book, Chinnagounder’s Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship, takes an approach, it seems to me, properly sensitive to both ecological and human issues:

We are in the midst of only the sixth period of massive species extinction in all of biological history, occurring at a rate approaching 100 times what biologists consider normal. We hear less frequently about the parallel loss of human cultural and genetic diversity. Of the world’s 6,000 linguistically different cultures, the great majority, some 4,000-5,000, are classified as indigenous [...] (xi)

As many of these small but unique cultures are in effect sacrificed for the preservation of biodiversity, Curtin argues, we lose the cultural diversity they represent (xi), and we also reinscribe the logic of imperialism.

Curtin cites the work of Ramachandra Guha as well, who presents a much needed argument in “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” Guha’s central point is that the emphasis on wilderness preservation in Western environmentalism is a uniquely American construct that cannot be applied ethically to so-called third world countries.15 His focus is on “deep ecology” in particular, a movement whose various threads Curtin discusses at length, and Guha’s conclusion is that “the social consequences of putting deep ecology into practice on a worldwide basis [...] are very grave indeed” (72). Even though discourses of “biocentrism” have “begun to act as a check on man’s arrogance and ecological hubris,” Guha finds it unacceptable to argue that “intervention in nature should be guided primarily by the need to preserve biotic integrity rather than by the needs of humans” (74). He cites the example of Project Tiger in India, which was supported by international environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund, as a case where local needs were completely ignored: “the setting aside of wilderness areas has resulted in a direct transfer of resources from the poor to the rich [....] The designation of tiger reserves was made possible only by the physical displacement of existing villages and their inhabitants; their management requires the continuing exclusion of peasants and livestock” (75). Achebe warns us that “Privilege [...] is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity. We see the same deadening of consciousness all around us today at all levels—personal, communal, national, and international” (“The Truth” 102). In the case of global environmentalism, the privilege of the Western world can be malignant indeed.

I want to conclude this inquiry into speaking for nature in the postcolonial context, finally, by applying Achebe’s framework to the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the ethics of “environmentalism” in contemporary Nigeria. Hanged in 1995 on trumped up charges by the despotic Abacha regime, Saro-Wiwa represents an example that complicates easy distinctions between environmental and human rights concerns. The West certainly has played a malignant role in the form of multinational oil companies like Shell, pirating resources through a partnership with the corrupt Abacha government. Rob Nixon points out that “Shell’s racism is manifest: in Africa, the company waives onshore drilling standards that it routinely upholds elsewhere. Indeed, forty percent of all Shell spills worldwide have occurred in Nigeria” (47). According to the U. S. Energy Information Administration, “More than 4000 oil spills have been recorded in Nigeria’s Niger Delta over the past four decades” (“Nigeria: Environmental Issues”). Saro-Wiwa documents the results in Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy; the Ogoni people’s oil-rich land has been brutally exploited “by two racist, brutal and callous multi-national oil companies—Shell (Dutch/British) and Chevron (American) whose activities have completely devastated the local environment and ecology” (102). The damage has been extreme:

All wildlife is dead, plant life is endangered, the rivers and streams and air are polluted by the oil spillages, blow-outs and gas flares of 33 years; the land has been rendered infertile by acid rain. All primary schools are closed, educated youths find no jobs, children die of malnutrition and kwashiokor; there is no pipe-borne water, electricity, hospital or industry. (102)

Any environmentalist narrative that fails to take into account the human rights issues involved in this kind of case must be considered a malignant fiction. Calling for the protection of biodiversity, for example, without considering the implications for the Ogoni people, does not qualify as an ethical “fiction.” In the larger context of Nigeria as a whole, a nation of 124 million people, 66% are below the national poverty line. Life expectancy is 53 years, while child malnutrition and access to “improved” water sources are both stagnating at 39% (World Bank).

What’s interesting to me about the case of Saro-Wiwa is that international attention has largely been courted through the discourse of a more stereotypical “environmentalism.” Nixon, who certainly analyses the human rights implications of this case as well, identifies Saro-Wiwa as “the first African writer to articulate the literature of commitment in expressly environmental terms” (43), noting Saro-Wiwa’s appeals to organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. For Nixon, Saro-Wiwa represents hope for the future of global environmentalism because “As the spectrum of what counts as environmental activism expands, it becomes harder to dismiss it as a sentimental or imperial discourse tied to European or North American interests [....it] needs to be reimagined through the experiences of the minorities who are barely visible on the global economic periphery” (46). Such an expansion of environmentalism, as well as ecocriticism, is certainly much needed, and seems to represent the kind of ethical awareness of discourse that Achebe calls for.

The role of ecocritics in interpreting cultural events, such as the exploitation of the Ogoni people and their land, as well as literary texts that engage similar issues, remains to be seen. William Slaymaker’s recent article in PMLA, “Echoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black African Responses,” suggests a number of ways in which ecocritics can address the environment in African literature, as well as ways African writers and critics can respond to the global environmental crisis. I believe we can promote what Slaymaker calls “a genuine, if impure and often self-contradictory, call for information exchanges and interpretive responses” (142n), but I have concerns over Slaymaker’s emphasis on how African writers and critics will respond to ecocriticism. Slaymaker hopes that the “green revolution will spread to and through communities of readers and writers of African literature, ‘ecoing’ the booming interest in other parts of the literary world”; and that “black African writers and critics [will] echo, reflect, absorb, or avoid the green sound waves rumbling around the globe [...]” (139, 140). But the terms of this hope are still flowing outward from the metropole, refusing to listen to the messages being generated by activists like Saro-Wiwa and writers like Achebe. In a comprehensive examination of “green” African literature and criticism (including the work of Saro-Wiwa but not Achebe), Slaymaker decries the absence of what he calls “nature, the environment, and ecology” (138), as well as the “general absence of ecocriticism and literature of the environment as noteworthy and attractive topics for research and creative writing” (139). But the answer, it seems to me, lies in the broadening of our definition of what counts as “the environment” and continually questioning whoever claims to be speaking for nature.

Whether we analyze novels or ecosystems, we would do well to follow Achebe’s advice in “The Truth of Fiction” in terms of paying attention to unjust discourses. He calls on us to “find a criterion with an alarm system that screams red whenever we begin to spin virulent fictions” (101). This reminder is an appropriate caution against assuming that we always know which fictions are malignant, that our own can never be, or that malignancy is some sort of universal and unchanging standard. Vigilance, though, can help us to remember that exigencies can shift and are dependent upon specific communities at specific historical moments. A guiding principle could be the desire to empathize with other points of view. As Achebe argues, “Imaginative identification is the opposite of indifference; it is human connectedness at its most intimate. It is one step better than the golden rule [....] Our sense of that link is the great social cement that really holds, and it will manifest itself in fellow-feeling, justice, and fair play” (103). We can, indeed, pay attention to the suffering of our fellow human beings and fellow creatures by not only empathizing and embracing alternative points of view, but also by recognizing that the stories we tell have the potential to both help and harm those complex “voices” we cherish.

References

Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. 1964. New York: Doubleday, 1974.

---. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-1987. Oxford: Heinemann, 1988.

---. “Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South.” Hopes and Impediments 14-19.

---. “The Novelist as Teacher.” Hopes and Impediments 27-31.

---. “The Truth of Fiction.” Hopes and Impediments 95-105.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Branch, Michael P., Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic, eds. Introduction. Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment. Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P, 1998.

Curtin, Deane. Chinnagounder’s Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999.

Fabre, Michel. “Chinua Achebe on Arrow of God.” Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1997. 45-51.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.

Gikandi, Simon. “Rereading the African Novel: Myth, Language and Culture in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine.” Reading the African Novel. London: James Currey, 1987. 149-70.

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996.

Guha, Ramachandra. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11.1 (1989): 71-83.

Manby, Bronwen. “The Price of Oil: Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights Violations in Nigeria’s Oil Producing Communities.” Human Rights Watch. 1999. 6 Dec. 2000. <http://www.hrw.org/hrw/reports/1999/nigeria/Nigew99105.htm#P500_147118 >.

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Moore, Gerald. “Chinua Achebe: Unless Tomorrow.” Twelve African Writers. London: Hutchinson, 1980. 123-45.

Nixon, Rob. “Pipe Dreams: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice, and Micro-Minority Rights.” Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire 1.1 (1996): 39-55.

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---. A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Shiva, Vandana. “Farmers’ Rights, Biodiversity and International Treaties.” Economic and Political Weekly 28.14 (1993): 555-60.

Slaymaker, William. “Ecoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black African Responses.” PMLA 116 (2001): 129-44.

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---. “Nigeria: Environmental Issues.” U.S. Department of Energy. April 2000. 6 Dec. 2000. <http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/nigenv.html#ENVIRO>.

Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Wilson, Edward O. “The Current State of Biological Diversity.” Biodiversity. Ed. Edward O. Wilson. Washington: National Academy P, 1986. 3-18.

---. “The Serpent.” Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. 83-101.

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Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

Lundblad, Michael (2001). MALIGNANT AND BENEFICIENT FICTIONS: CONSTRUCTING NATURE IN ECOCRITICISM AND ACHEBE’S ARROW OF GOD. West Africa Review: 3, 1.