A letter to Chinua Achebe, never sent

Dear Chinua Achebe,Now that I finally begin this letter, I don’t know what to call you. Do I call you Professor Achebe, Chinua Achebe, Mr. Achebe, Sir?  That is how I began the letter I started to you nearly ten years ago in the first week of my postgraduate programme in African Literature. I never […]

Dear Chinua Achebe,
Now that I finally begin this letter, I don’t know what to call you. Do I call you Professor Achebe, Chinua Achebe, Mr. Achebe, Sir? 
That is how I began the letter I started to you nearly ten years ago in the first week of my postgraduate programme in African Literature. I never ended up sending what I wrote because I was never able to distill it down to the right words, because over time, my questions about identity no longer seemed so urgent.
My family first moved from America to Port Harcourt, Nigeria in 1988 when my father was invited to teach at a university. I had just turned eleven. My parents had no cultural orientation, no training seminars before we left. We packed our belongings into a transatlantic container and flew, all five of us, to Lagos and then to Port Harcourt. Our parents placed us in the university staff school. Because the school year was on a different schedule from the American system, I re-did half of fifth grade. I wasn’t sure how to respond to the other children, who would write me notes calling me “proud” or to the teacher who slapped my hand with a ruler when I got a math problem wrong. After the first year, our parents moved my brother and sister to an international school that went up to fifth grade, and I home schooled for two years.
I wrote pointed, often unhappy journal entries in those first few years—the first impressions that my father told me to write down “because I would never have them again.” Since then, my affection for Nigeria has grown.
Three years after moving to Port Harcourt, our family moved to Jos, where my father began to lecture at the University of Jos, and my brother, sister and I went to an a international school. It was my first year of high school. Although I was painfully shy, I was adopted into a clique of girls made up of Nigerians and one other American: Nkem, Ugo, Nina, Ruth, and Maria, who told me all the gossip from middle school and gave me somewhere to belong. By my third year, Ruth had become my best friend. We both wrote. She had finished whole novels, stretching out over several exercise books, which we would pass around our group. Her characters felt as real as those in the books from the library. I just wrote fragments. I never managed to finish anything so long as a novel. Every month the two of us would have a sleepover at her house. I’d sit in the kitchen, chopping onions while Ruth and her mother pounded yam, laughing and gossiping. Dinner over, Ruth and I would stay up far into the night reading our diaries out loud to each other, seeing the events of the month through each other’s eyes. 
In high school, I loved reading fantasy and science fiction, Christian historical romances. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I read any African literature. When I did, it was at the urging of my father. He gave me Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City, your Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between, journalist books about “Africa” with titles like “Africa: the Broken Continent.” My senior year, I took a course on African Literature. Our twenty-three year old American teacher had us read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “I hate it,” Ruth said. “Why are we always the heart of darkness?” I remembered her reaction, later, when I read your essays on Conrad.
I left Nigeria in 1995. Sani Abacha had been in power for two years. My parents and siblings stayed behind, while I ventured back over the ocean to major in English at a small Christian college in Pennsylvania. My third year, I did a project comparing your work with that of James Baldwin.  Reading your novels and essays made me begin to question my own background in Nigeria. I read that part of the reason you had begun writing Things Fall Apart was as an answer to Joyce Carey, to Rider Haggard, to Joseph Conrad, white colonialists writing about Africa. In your novel Anthills of the Savannah, Beatrice is angered by the obnoxious American journalist Lou Cranford who calls some of the most powerful men in the nation by their first names and flirts with the head of state. In A Man of the People, Odili resents his condescending American lover, Jean, who drives him home after a party. As she comments on the disparity between the slums and the politician’s mansions, he thinks, “So what, […] Your accusation may be true, but you’ve no right to make it. Leave it to us and don’t contaminate our cause by espousing it.” (55)
You have written in your essay “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration” about realizing that in those colonial adventures set in Africa, you were meant to be “one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on riverbank” rather than the “white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes” with whom you identified. Similarly, I realized that instead of Odili or Beatrice, I was meant to be one of those patronizing American women. But whereas Conrad’s savages were a dehumanizing caricature, your representations were recognizable. And in my memories, I saw those disrespectful diary entries I wrote when I was eleven. I remembered being in settings where expats talked about Nigerians in the way that expats had talked at Jean’s party. When I read about Jean and Lou, I became terrified to write about Nigeria, lest I be seen as one of them.
Now I realize that I am not Jean and I am not Lou, and, although I have met people like them, my experience is not theirs. But your books were important in making me wrestle with the sins of “my people” and the questions of privilege I would inevitably face as tried to find an identity that would allow me to claim Nigeria as well as America.
In 1999, I moved to New York City with Ruth. In 2000, we attended an event where you read from your new book, Home and Exile, which details your own struggle to reclaim writing about Africa from the colonial writer. 
As I remember it, during the question and answer session, I shot my hand in the air. I had been practicing all day. I had to ask you about the role of the expatriate writer in Nigeria. What did you really think? Could I write about Nigeria? Would you mind?
Your answer was kind. “Well, I suspect that you might think that I don’t want expatriates writing about Nigeria. That’s not the case. Anybody can write about anybody, visitors can write about other places. As a matter of fact, the visitor might have a perspective on a problem which is useful. So I am in favour of expatriates in Nigeria writing about our country. The problem that we had in the past was people writing not what they saw but what they had in their head before they came. And that is always bad, very bad writing. . . But honest to God writing. I am in favour of it.”
Ruth and I stood in line afterwards to have our books signed, and when you signed mine, I told you that I had lived in Nigeria. She said we had been discussing what classification my writing would fall under if I wrote about Nigeria. Would it be African literature or American literature? You looked at us for a minute, and said “But the classification doesn’t really matter, does it? You should write.”
Thirteen years later, I live in Nigeria again and write a column for Weekly Trust. I realize now I didn’t need your permission. I just needed to write with honesty and respect. But perhaps I needed to hear you say that before I could begin to understand.
Rest in peace.
Love, Carmen