Chinua Achebe and hybrid aesthetics

Abstract

This essay examines the question of hybridity in Chinua Achebe’s fiction and essays with a view to bringing to fore the inherent contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences that typify writing in the colonial language. It hinges on the premise that Achebe’s choice of English as a language of literary expression is fraught with rejection and acceptance, aporia and agony, and Anglophilia and Anglophobia. Therefore, in his articulation and projection of the postcolonial narrative, Achebe implicitly grapples with the issue of identity in trying to make sense of his world as well as the world of his fictional characters.