Free There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe Page B

create an environment in Nigeria where freedom of creative expression
     was not only possible but protected. We sought ultimately through our art to create
     for Nigeria an environment of good order and civilization—a daunting task that needed
     to be tackled in a country engulfed in crisis.
    The notion of beneficent fiction is simply one of defining storytelling as a creative
     component of human experience, human life. It is something griots have done in Africa
     from the dawn of time—pass down stories that have a positive purpose and a use for
     society, from generation to generation. Some people flinch when you talk about art
     in the context of the needs of society, thinking you are introducing something far
     too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn’t
     be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from
     the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed,
     to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.
     Still I think that behind it all is a desire to make our experience in the world better,
     to make our passage through life easier. Once you talk about making things better
     you’re talking about politics.
    I believe that it is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment,
     some kind of message, some kind of protest. In my definition I am a protest writer,
     with restraint. Even those early novels that look like very gentle re-creations of
     the past—what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past. That was the protest,
     because there were people who thought we didn’t have a past. What I was doing was
     to say politely that we did—here it is. So commitment is nothing new. Commitment runs
     through my work. In fact, I should say that all of our writers, whether they’re aware
     of it or not, are committed writers. The whole pattern of life demanded that one should
     protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your traditions, your religion,
     and so on. 7 The question of involvement in politics is really a matter of definition. I think
     it is quite often misunderstood. I have never proposed that every artist become an
     activist in the way we have always understood political activity. Some will, because
     that’s the way they are. Others will not, and we must not ask anyone to do more than
     is necessary for them to perform their task.
    At the same time it is important to state that words have the power to hurt, even
     to denigrate and oppress others. Before I am accused of prescribing a way in which
     a writer should write, let me say that I do think that decency and civilization would
     insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly there is no moral obligation
     to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally
     oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word,
     would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. 8 If one didn’t realize the world was complex, vast, and diverse, one would write as
     if the world were one little county, and this would make us poor, and we would have
     impoverished the novel and our stories.
    The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred
     years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge
     it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand.
     The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened
     by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood. The writer
     is often faced with two choices—turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating
     complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the
     former soon runs out of energy and produces