In Chinua Achebe's view, the African writer of our time must be accountable to his society…. To Achebe, it is 'simply madness' to think of art as pure and autonomous, happening by itself in an aesthetic void…. Each of Achebe's four novels has had an obvious (but never obtrusive) purpose. Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God both aim to show that the African past 'with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans, acting on God's behalf, delivered [Africans]'. The public problems of bribery and the osu caste are examined in No Longer at Ease; A Man of the People, his most purposeful novel, was written with the deliberate aim of providing 'a serious warning to the Nigerian people' about corruption in government and the cynicism of the masses…. Written during and shortly after the Nigerian Civil War, the poems [of Beware, Soul-Brother] are centrally concerned with the regeneration of belief after the blight of war…. In 'Beware, Soul-Brother' and implicitly throughout the collection he identifies the enemies of the public spirit and admonishes his readers to beware. And in the more personal poems of the collection, which dramatize the rebirth in the poet himself of hope for love, new life, and order, Achebe creates a representative spokesman, an exemplary persona whose experience realizes the goal Achebe seeks for his society as a whole, 'the regeneration of its deepest aspirations'. (pp. 1-2)
Achebe's recovery of spirit is sustained more through dessicating irony and indignation than a positive faith, and in the sequential ordering of the poems, is achieved only after an ordeal of horror, disgust, and cynicism.
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