Abstract
Achebe uses Nigerian Pidgin English in his fiction to focus the identity of a range of characters and to give their discourse a down-to-earth dimension. As a non-elite discourse, moreover, Pidgin underscores cultural and class tensions. In particular, it draws attention to the inequities that mark relations between several power orders in Africa—inequities that lie at the heart of Achebe’s themes. Pidgin infuses with carnivalesque potency and irreverence the expressions of non-privileged characters, especially in relation to members of the educated elite. With its blend of elements from different languages, its vernacular frankness, and its rhythmic vitality, Pidgin not only reflects hierarchical structures in Achebe’s literary dramas, but also serves to challenge them.
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Notes
- 1.
See “Chike’s School Days,” “Civil Peace,” and “Girls at War” in Girls at War and Other Stories, as well as the young person’s novella Chike and the River (1966).
- 2.
See Tony Obilade: “In the works of Achebe and Soyinka (and probably a few others)…PE [West African Pidgin English] rises above the level of a slot-filler or a curiosity item to that of a vehicle to express certain meanings” (434).
- 3.
According to Nicholas Pweddon, Gerald Moore “refer[s] chiefly to the use of pidgin in A Man of the People, when he notes ‘the humour and inventiveness of popular speech, its capacity for irreverence and deflation’” (Moore 55; Pweddon 95).
- 4.
With Mister Johnson (1939), which is set in colonial Nigeria, Anglo-Irish author Joyce Cary became the first writer to incorporate a type of Nigerian Pidgin into a novel. (Daniel Defoe incorporates a similar Virginian Pidgin in Colonel Jacque [1722]; Obilade 442.) At the same time, Mister Johnson is a novel whose portrayal of Nigeria the young Achebe found rather inauthentic and thus helped motivate him (as discussed above) to portray his native land “from the inside” and “to show what was false” in European representations of Africa. Achebe’s older Igbo contemporary, Cyprian Ekwensi, beginning with People of the City (which appeared in 1954, four years before the publication of Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart), also has been a pioneer in the novelistic rendering of Pidgin in a Nigerian setting. See Chantal Zabus (54–70) and also Wren (178–84).
- 5.
See Pweddon: “[Pidgin’s] use [by Achebe] reflects…the linguistic heterogeneity of his world” (95). Also see Zabus: “This complex interlingua [i.e., a pidgin language] grows best in linguistic crucibles where people speaking mutually unintelligible languages coalesce, that is, in the metropolis” (75).
- 6.
See Pweddon: “One quality of [pidgin English] that usually frustrates attempts to use it for serious writing is its tendency to make people laugh.” Achebe himself was asked at a class discussion to spell out the limitation of pidgin English. He notes that a “version of a book of the Bible…was translated into pidgin in the Cameroons long ago. All that it did was make you laugh…Now this is not the intention of the Bible” (in Morell 46).
- 7.
In this particular case it is not apparent whether the non-Pidgin conversation, which is rendered in Standard English, is conducted entirely in English (Okoli uses a few English idioms) or whether it includes Igbo dialogue as well. Though Achebe does not clearly do so in this scene, he does evoke at times the nuances of Igbo speech in a stylized English. For more on this topic, see Achebe’s essay “The African Writer and the English Language.”
- 8.
See Zabus: “Following in the wake of Ekwensi and Onitsha Market pamphleteers, recent [Nigerian] popular fiction tends to confirm the role of Pidgin as an index to the social status of a character and its association with a semi-literate urban subculture” (71). While Achebe’s fiction would not be identified as “popular,” Zabus’s statement is applicable to it. Indeed, compare Zabus’s phrase “a semi-literate urban subculture” to a reference in Anthills of the Savannah to the social background of Elewa, who speaks almost exclusively in Pidgin: “A half-literate salesgirl in a shop owned by an Indian; living in one room with a petty-trader mother deep in the slums of Bassa” (168). See also Booker and Reynolds: “In [No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah], the use of pidgin is often a marker of class position, just as dialect often indicates the class origins of characters in British novels” (220–21).
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Lynn, T.J. (2017). Language and the Power of Subordination: Achebe’s Integration of Nigerian Pidgin. In: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51331-7_5
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