"The Trauma of a Diminished Existence": Chinua Achebe Revisited

Abstract

This essay discloses Chinua Achebe's ambiguous treatment of the English language throughout his carrier and advances a critique of his politics of language, presenting it as a symptom of the writer's traumatic relationship with Anglo-American cultures. Achebe's contradictory justifications for his use of the colonizer's language will be considered both in terms of his place of enunciation and of critical accounts that emphasize the damaging effects of the hegemony of English in Africa's former British colonies.