Postcolonial Voices: Chinua Achebe and Les Murray

Chinua Achebe: Pioneer of African Literature

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) was an influential African novelist whose masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, transformed the landscape of African fiction both on his own continent and in Western society. His novel changed most of the West's impressions of Africa and its culture, replacing a simplistic stereotype with a depiction of a complex society still suffering due to Western cultural oppression.

He was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, and educated at church schools and at University College. He was the director of external broadcasting from 1961 to 1966, and then he launched a publishing company with his friend Christopher Okigbo, who died in the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Then, he went to teach in the United States.

He is associated with Joseph Conrad because, in his famous essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness", he accuses Conrad of racism. In Things Fall Apart (1958), he depicts the destruction of an individual, a family, and a culture at the moment of colonial incursion.

This novel is set in the fictional village of Umuofia during the late nineteenth century, before the arrival of the Europeans, and during the period of the European "pacification" of southeast Nigeria from 1900 to 1920, including the Ahiara Massacre (1905).

He wanted his novels to teach his African readers that their past was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans, acting on behalf of God, delivered them.

Les Murray: Poet of the Australian Outback

Leslie Allan Murray (1938–2019) was born at Nabiac on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and grew up on a dairy farm at nearby Bunyah. He was educated at Taree High School and the University of Sydney, where he studied modern languages.

After military service with the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, he worked as a translator at the Australian National University, Canberra, and as an officer in the Prime Minister’s Department. Since 1971, he has been a full-time writer.

Remaining true to his roots in the Australian "outback", Murray emerged as a powerful celebrant of the natural world and agricultural work. His substantial Collected Poems (1998), dedicated "to the Glory of God", bears witness to a staunch and highly individual Roman Catholicism. His celebration of nature includes human nature and reveals a sensibility generously attuned to the hopes and fears, hurts and happinesses of ordinary lives.

Murray seems intent on proving that the provincial farmer living at the margins of the former British Empire can write poetry as learned, authoritative, and technically virtuosic as any from the metropolitan center. The language of his poetry startles and amuses, reveling in the fecundity and elasticity of English.

In poems of metaphorical lushness and sonic opulence, he plays on the eddying reflections of homonyms and rhymes, alliterations and consonances, to suggest a profound interconnectedness among things. As Derek Walcott has said of Murray’s work: "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational."