Bearing the Burden of Native Experience: A Stylistic Approach to Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

Chinua Achebe has made a creative Africanization of the English language in all his literary works. In the process of writing counter-narratives to Euro-centric misrepresentations of Africa, Achebe has successfully harnessed the colonizer’s language to make it bear the burden of his native experience. The present paper proposes to take up the third novel by Achebe, namely Arrow of God (1964) to introspect the different kinds of narrative strategies involved in it. This includes a study of the kind of narrator used, and a survey of the various ways in which the language is maneuvred—through the usage of standard and pidgin English, through linguistic devices like humour, satire and irony, through symbols, proverbs, images, metaphors and songs—in order to capture a vivid picture of Nigeria of the late 1920s, in which the novel is set. In a nutshell, this stylistic criticism aims to illustrate in effect how Achebe creatively extends the frontiers of English language to accommodate the various shades of Nigerian reality within it.