It was 2:43 A.M. on a Monday whose zero hours had stretched out from the night before. I sat quietly in my boxers and singlet, staring at the blinking cursor in the “Relevant Literary Interests” box of the submission form. Earlier, I’d filled everything else out—bio, clips, references; the only thing left was to sound literary, flowery. Not “bookworm” literary, but the kind that impresses a bored editorial assistant somewhere, anywhere, in Brooklyn or Oxford; the type that carries the faint scent of tweed, pipe smoke, and devastating opinions on the classics: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Kipling, take your pick.
And so, I typed:
Deeply influenced by the storytelling clarity of Achebe and the restrained interiority of Teju Cole...
Which would have been fine if I’d actually read Achebe. I mean, I’d read the first three chapters of “Things Fall Apart” twice. The first time in Senior Secondary School, when Miss Adesuwa instructed us to read it over the mid-term break, I skimmed just enough to fake a quiz. The second time was at the university, when a girl I liked said it changed her life. I made it to Chapter 4, then life happened. Or more accurately: sleep.
So, no, I hadn’t read Achebe. Neither properly nor scholarly. Not as a woman who claims to be a writer should. And yet, there it was, in black and white, my declaration of literary heritage: Achebe and Cole, as if I had tea with them every Wednesday—or is it Thursday; why not Tuesday?
My falsification began almost insignificantly. It was cloaked in a professional bluff as a way to fit in. Writers do that. Everyone says they read Tolstoy, Shakespeare too. Everyone quotes Baldwin. We’ve all faked it at some point, right?
Then the email came:
Congratulations. We’d love to offer you a regular column at The Literati. We’re huge fans of your work—and we have a special idea for your first piece: a short reflection commemorating Chinua Achebe’s upcoming birthday. Something personal and insightful. No pressure. 800 words max. Deadline is in three weeks.
I skimmed the email, stared at it in silence, and then, after a reprieve, reread it, this time, keenly. Then I let out a rueful laugh: a wheezing, matter-of-fact kind of laugh. I had faked authenticity, and it seemed to be working. In that moment, I made a pact with my alter ego: I'll kick this can down the road for as long as possible.
Let me say this now: I have nothing against Achebe. I’m not proud of not reading him. I wasn’t making a factional point or rejecting “the canon.” I was just tired and insecure: Thirty-three years old with a half-baked manuscript, a dusty English degree, and a day job in corporate communications, where the only story I told daily was the one about quarterly earnings and market trends. So, yes, I wanted to belong. To be taken seriously as a writer.
And somehow, over the years, I’d gotten away with faking it, with belonging—I had germinated into something Anna Sorokin would be proud of. I had a few short stories published in small journals with names like The Identifier and Ink & Soot. I chaired a panel once at the Aké Arts and Book Festival. I followed the bigwigs on Twitter and tweeted about the right things. I had a thoughtful-looking headshot, cropped in black and white, hand on my chin, and a compliant smile.
But this assignment—this Achebe thing—was different. It wasn’t just about faking credentials or legitimacy anymore. It was about entering a negotiation at a disadvantage, arriving at a conclusion without facts, revering someone whose work you are clueless about—someone who shaped the foundation of African literature. It was, first and foremost, self-serving and performative. It was art. Yet, that’s where it begins: the black pot that emits the white pap. It was art founded on inauthenticity, yes, but it was also one whose aspirations might be its Achilles heel.
The following morning, I told myself I would finally read Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” from cover to cover. It was a small book. How hard could it be? I pulled out the copy I had from a few years back and slowly unwrapped the cellophane. I even made a cup of tea for the grand unveiling before I sat at the edge of the bed and began to read.
“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.…”
Strong start. Clean prose. But also, after the first few pages, I started to drift off. Something in Achebe’s knack for simplicity hamstrung me; it made my mind wander toward the mundane tasks and obsessions of everyday life: laundry, groceries, that weird noise from without, whether I should text back that girl from last week, my overdue service charge payment, the Netflix show everyone was raving about, the pile of dishes in the sink. Four hours later, I had only read five pages and knew nothing. Things had indeed fallen apart, where I had serendipitously hoped they’d fall into place. To make up for lost time, I descended far too late into the deep end. I picked up my phone to Google things like “Okonkwo symbolism” and “Things Fall Apart literary analysis,” then followed the search recommendations to YouTube, where I stuffed myself with Chimamanda’s several talks about narrative structure—and some other misaligned recommendations.
Mercifully, I caught myself midway. In the midst of the mishmash, clarity arose. If I weren’t going to—or couldn’t—read Achebe, I would have to research him. I’ll borrow voices. Stitch together ideas from brighter minds. Skim interviews. Reword Wikipedia entries. Find quotes. Use phrases like “pre-colonial tension” and “moral gravity.” I’d write my way through the fog like a dissident writing a samizdat.
But somewhere in the middle of a deep dive on postcolonial narrative frameworks, I found something worse than guilt. I found envy. Everyone had an Achebe story. On blogs, in essays, in documentaries, everyone talked about how they read him, when they read him, why he changed them. A woman from Kenya said her father handed her “Things Fall Apart” on her twelfth birthday and told her, “This is your inheritance.” A professor from Ghana said he read “No Longer at Ease” under candlelight in boarding school and decided, there and then, to become a writer. An Algerian doctor said he wept in the last chapters of “Anthills of the Savannah” and had to walk for three hours to clear his head. And there was the revert, who, after reading “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra,” decided to study journalism.
I had no such memory. Nothing of my own. Neither an inheritance nor a story. My father didn’t even own a bookshelf. My mother read the Bible. The only stories I read growing up that made me cry were “The Giving Tree” and “Hansel and Gretel”—the horror story that was somehow made for and legally allowed to be marketed to children. As I watched video after video of people praising Achebe in sonorous tones, I realized I didn’t just feel guilty, I felt excluded. It felt like I’d missed the initiation ceremony; no one told me the time or place.
By the end of the week, I had no essay—just a blinking cursor and a copy of “Things Fall Apart” on my desk, its bibliosmia as fresh as new paint. But I had three weeks until submission closed. I still had time. Right? Right?
Then I had seventeen days. Then fourteen. Then eleven. And still, no essay. No Achebe. Instead, I had six bookmarked articles on “Achebe’s Legacy,” an empty Google Doc titled “The Achebe Piece (the real one),” and one increasingly panicked Notes app entry that simply read: IS THERE A WAY TO WRITE ABOUT NOT READING HIM WITHOUT SOUNDING LIKE A FOOL???? (That entry had four question marks. I counted.)
I told myself I wasn’t procrastinating—I was “building context.” I watched old interviews, the famous one where Achebe’s voice is calm but gently scathing, saying things like, “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” I found clips of him at Oxford in the ’60s, dark suit, soft face, speaking presciently, like someone who had already won an argument whose premise the rest of the world hadn’t caught up to yet.
But I still hadn’t read “Things Fall Apart.” And the problem wasn’t just the lie anymore. It was what it revealed, because if I’m being honest, the real reason I hadn’t read Achebe wasn’t laziness. Or rebellion. It wasn’t irreverence. It wasn’t because he was “too mainstream” or “over-assigned.” It was simply because something in me always assumed it wasn’t for me. I hadn't grown up in a house where books were sacred. Our living room had more framed Bible verses than novels. My parents were practical, God-fearing, and broke—not sequentially. They didn’t have time for novels. They dealt in constants and absolutes: they read receipts, bank slips, school reports, permission slips, and occasionally The Daily Sun. The closest thing I had to a library was my uncle’s stash of James Hadley Chase’s paperbacks—under his mattress.
Books, when and if they came, came from school. And Achebe… Achebe came with red pen marks and comprehension questions. He came with warnings not to fold the spine. He came as an obligation. I never saw or experienced anyone in school read any of his books quietly or joyfully. I saw students groaning about book reports. I saw boys memorize plot points like they were preparing for battle. School, for some reason, had turned Achebe into a chore, a subject we were merely supposed to partake in for an exam. It was an institutional requirement that stripped away the soul—cultural, literary, and historical relevance. The appeal was, to put it simply, nonexistent. The implications were caustic. No one I came across ever said, “Achebe changed me.” So I assumed he couldn’t change anyone, not me. It always felt like a buzz in the air that I couldn’t quite get my hands on—a distant rave. It was paradoxical and beyond reach—as long as I remained bounded by the four walls of the school.
But I always loved books, and so I was open to new ideas—even revisiting old ones that hadn’t originally worked for me. So, I revisited the Achebe paradox, even as I struggled to belong, as I pretended to read him. I envied people who grew up around bookshelves with Achebe, who could say, “I first read Achebe at nine, but of course I understood him differently at twenty-two.” That sentence alone makes me want to hide under the bed. People like that treat literature like home-cooked food. For me, it was a kind of takeout, a foreign currency I never learned to spend.
But I wanted in. I still do. That’s the part I hate admitting. I want to be seen as someone who has read Achebe. Not even because of status (okay, maybe a little because of status), but because the name means something, and I want to mean something too. Achebe isn’t just a writer. He’s the watermark on the paper, the silhouette behind the curtain, the sage whose influence is in his quietude.
I wanted to stand beside him, but I knew I hadn’t earned it. A week before the deadline, I went to Terra Pod for a poetry reading. It was meant to be inspirational, or so I lied to myself. The only truth was that I needed to be around people who wouldn’t ask me, “Have you finished the Achebe piece yet?” The three people I’d informed of the Achebe assignment had been awestruck in varying degrees, as if I’d been asked to write the new national anthem. One of them had been inconsolable, saying, with staccato, “Wow. Achebe. That’s big o.”
At Terra, I watched from a distance as a boy with cowrie-adorned dreadlocks performed. The cowries dangled from each loc; he wore a peach-colored oversized two-piece linen, performing a spoken word piece he called “My Mother’s Voice Is a Country.” The floor was his until he quoted Achebe:
The world is like a Mask dancing.
If you want to see it well
You do not stand in one place
Those words held me stiff; the rendition lit a path of understanding. It was Achebe speaking about movement and perspective, about not standing still. I thought: Maybe that’s my angle. Perhaps, I shouldn’t write as someone who reads Achebe; instead, I write as someone who never read him, as someone chasing him. That night, I started a new document and titled it: “Achebe and Other Things I’m Still Learning to Read.” I wrote the first line:
I came to Achebe late—later than I should have, later than I’m proud to admit.
And for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel like a fraud. I felt like someone telling the truth. The night before the deadline, I stayed up reading. I was no longer just skimming, Googling quotes, or skirting around an impenetrable plot. I read “Things Fall Apart,” from page one, sentence one—Okonkwo and his fame, his fire, his fear of softness. I read until my eyes stung. Then I read more.
I didn’t read like a critic. I didn’t read like a scholar. I didn’t even read like a writer, parsing sentences and examining form. I read like someone sitting beside the ghost of a writer and asking him, quietly, what he meant. I completed the book at 4:12 A.M. I didn’t cry. I didn’t stand and clap. I didn’t declare anything profound on Twitter. But I sat still, in the quiet heat of my flat, and thought: So this is what everyone was talking about.
Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: it wasn’t the prose that broke me. It wasn’t the story. It wasn’t even Okonkwo. It was the silences—the subtle emotional weight he conveyed without being overt: the way Achebe lets things pass without fanfare; the way death happens, and people mourn; the way shame floats simply beneath the surface of strength; the way people carry fear like an inheritance.
I saw my father and my uncles in there. Even I, in the way of Okonkwo, trying to outrun softness, became hollow. It wasn’t a complicated book; it was simple, and yet, that was the most complicated part of it.
The next morning, I wrote the piece in one sitting. It wasn’t clever. It had no academic quotes or footnotes. It did not attempt to sound smart. I wrote about the first time I tried to read him and failed. And the second. And the third. I wrote about shame, about pretending. About growing up in a house without books, and thinking literature was for other people. I didn’t try to sound like someone who knew everything. I wrote like someone who had finally admitted they didn’t. I wrote like myself; I submitted the essay with exactly two minutes to spare, then I closed my laptop and fell asleep on the spot. For the first time in three weeks, I slept without dreaming of blinking cursors.