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My Name Will Not Be Lost: Cosmopolitan Temporality and Reclaimed History in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Headstrong Historian"
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Mikailu, David Wattenberg, Brendan |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | Citizens of the World At the end of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story "The Headstrong Historian," a young woman named Grace travels home from boarding school to visit her dying grandmother, Nwamgba. Grace has been reading "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Southern Nigeria," a chapter in her history textbook, penned by an English colonial administrator. Intended to be an authoritative document, Grace instead finds the descriptions amusing and foreign: "It was Grace who would read about these savages, titillated by their curious and meaningless customs, not connecting them to herself." (1) Decades later, as a historian herself, Grace publishes a book entitled Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. Readers familiar with Things Fall Apart will instantly grasp Adichie's resonant allusion to the final sentence of Chinua Achebe's iconic novel, in which a District Commissioner, collecting material for his report on pacifying the Lower Niger, reflects on the suicide of Okonkwo, whose story merits a chapter, or at least "a reasonable paragraph." (2) Spanning nearly one hundred years of Nigerian history, from the late nineteenth century through the age of independence, "The Headstrong Historian" chronicles the temporal sites where memory, language, culture, and education are in contest. As the title of Grace's book suggests, the action of rewriting history is meant not only to correct the received version promulgated by the colonial apparatus, but also to reclaim Nigerians as the subjects of their own national narrative. Adichie follows the example of Achebe by positioning fictional characters as the torchbearers of social identity. It was Grace who, as a young academic pondering the "stories she was not sure she believed," would make "a clear link between education and dignity, between the hard obvious things that are printed in books and the soft, subtle things that lodge themselves into the soul." (3) Holding in balance the "hard" texts of the archives and "subtle" memories of her grandmother's world, Grace, and by extension Adichie herself, illuminates the cosmopolitan temporality of historical fiction informed by the convergence of multiple, often contradictory perspectives. Achebe states that the colonial depiction of Africa and Africans is "a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe." (4) As such, it is the headstrong historian, who, having taken stock of these distortions, must confront the responsibility of reclaiming the histories of a people and telling the world "about commonsense things." (5) The historian does not fully erase the "original text" but interrogates and, finally, overwrites by placing the "new" ahead of the "old." The historian is a type of cosmopolitan--a person privileged with poly-visional sensibility, a person in whose hands time is translated. Cosmopolitan temporality, therefore, is an active and strategic mode of looking across time in search of new definitions. Adichie was born in 1977 and did not live through the eras described in "The Headstrong Historian." Yet, like Grace, her collaboration with memory and reclaimed history shows how cosmopolitan temporality can provide a method of reading postcolonial narratives in the millennial era. This essay does not claim to distill a political position from Adichie's fiction, nor, in the given space, does it rehearse the immense, and frequently elliptical, literature on cosmopolitanism. This essay is concerned with one African writer's concept of cosmopolitanism in its utilitarian functions: cosmopolitanism as a means to a literary character's personal advancement, and cosmopolitan temporality as a device for storytelling. In Grace, Adichie shows a woman who is at first confounded by, in the words of Achebe, a tradition that has "invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened. … |
| Starting Page | 45 |
| Ending Page | 45 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 15 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://asq.africa.ufl.edu/files/Volume-15-Issue-4-DAVID-MIKAILU.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
