Jacquie's Email Hello Literary Ladies! Just a reminder, next up on our syllabus is Lori Walsh's presentation on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. We will be meeting this coming Wednesday, October 8, at Frances Greenberg's tranquil home. Luncheon will begin at noon, and our meeting will follow promptly at 1 PM.
I often find my thoughts wandering to the past, but this year's theme, as well as my high school yearbook which has found its way next to me at my desk, has been putting me into time sucking reveries. My senior year was the first time AP English was offered in my high school. It was a fantastic class, and next to typing, was the class that most prepared me for college. There were only eight of us in AP English, all girls. Seven of us were already friends. The eighth was Marcie McMahon, who was A CHEERLEADER and REALLY popular! Crossing the social divide as she did was a very unusual thing to do in Roy C. Ketcham High School in Wappingers Falls, New York, but, to our collective biased surprise, she was terrific and funny and SMART. And she liked us too! She not only accepted us, but she helped raise our social status in the school. I'll forever love Marcie and be grateful for her bravery and her friendship, and the seemingly impenetrable barriers she broke down. Her behavior was the most memorable lesson of all.
And I distinctly remember sitting and taking the AP English Lit exam, and one moment in particular. After finishing explicating a poem and realizing I knew what I was doing and feeling really good about myself, I looked up from my desk to where my friend Maria was sitting diagonally across from me and becoming completely distracted by how pretty her hair looked that day. A perfect example of how erratic my thinking process was and still is. And it's SO high school. Sigh.
I can't wait to see you all on Wednesday! x Jacquie
Frances' Minutes At noon, eleven members and one associate assembled in Frances’ house. Sharon joined us at 1:30 PM, for a Lit Club historical first. She had been held in a lockdown at Sing Sing Prison. She had just begun teaching a class on reading short stories when a lockdown was announced. Her students returned to their cells. She was held in the classroom, without her cellphone, credit cards or money, all not permitted inside Sing Sing. She spent 3 ½ hours bored and hungry despite being within sight of vending machines.
President Joanna called the meeting to order at 1 PM.
Treasurer Lori gave her report: $313.12.
We have donated $99 to the Friends of the Library, who purchased books from the Barkin Library to give to the Yonkers Family Services.
Joanna proposed donating $200 to the Hastings Library. We will request the library replace deteriorating board books in the children’s library. The rest of the donation should be used for more children’s books. Motion passed.
Christine brought a British bookmakers’ list of possible winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with their odds of winning. Many writers were unknown to us, like Helle Helle at 24/1. Bob Dylan’s precedent put Paul Simon on the list, with the same odds as Stephen King, 49/1 and behind Margaret Atwood at 34/1. N.B. the next day, October 9, Lásló Kraszuaborkai, second on list at 6/1, won.
As usual, some book recommendations: Frances suggested A Fortnight in September by R.C. Sheriff. Jacquie suggested Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. Both exquisitely written novels about the lives of ordinary people, both novels British, the drama low key but affecting.
To Lori’s presentation on Chinua Achebe.
She chose the Nigerian writer because in high school she had never read a novel written by a person of color. She asked how many of us had read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in high school; all hands raised. At university in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe also read the Heart of Darkness. The chilling, racist descriptions of Africans in Conrad’s novel deeply disturbed him.
We read a passage from Heart of Darkness. The narrator Marlowe describes an African sailor, feeding coal to the furnace which drives a steamer up the Congo River. The characterization is racism at its dismal worst.
Chinua Achebe was born in 1930, in Igboland, then as now, a part of Nigeria. The British colonization of Achebe’s homeland was thoroughly established during the 1890’s, the decade in which his novel Things Fall Apart takes place. Achebe was raised as a Christian; he was educated in English, from grade school to university.
Through his older relatives, Achebe knew Igbo history and culture unaltered by contact with the British. He knew that the Igbo had a rich oral literary tradition.
He wrote Things Fall Apart, he said, to oppose “the image of Africa as ‘the other world’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization.”
The novel had a cataclysmic effect on African writers. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize laureate and also Nigerian, said it was “the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character rather than as the white man would see him.”
The novel is set in the 1890’s, when the Igbo were still resisting British control. Okonkwo, a man in his 30’s, occupies center stage in Things Fall Apart. He’s physically strong, the champion wrestler of his village. He’s prosperous and respected, he strives to differentiate himself from his ineffective father.
Things fall apart. We are witnesses to tragedy. We might attribute Okonkwo’s downfall to his arrogance, cruelty, overweening ambition, his toxic masculinity. In the Igbo religion, his chi, his spirit which guides his actions and determines his fate, would lead him to ruin.
Both Igbo and Anglo literature share an understanding of a tragic flaw.
Respectfully submitted,
Frances Greenberg
Recording Secretary
