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ABSTRACT
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Headstrong Historian" is a complex revisioning, completion, and extension of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. A narratological analysis employing Gérard Genette's theories reveals the numerous ways in which Adichie deepens and extends Achebe's legacy, and, in doing so, complicates his account of African identity and history. With significant repetitions and variations in events, characters, and action, Adichie's story develops its source text in areas such as gender, religion, and history. The text's handling of temporality and focalization demonstrates how history involves the future as well as the past. "The Headstrong Historian," thus, presents what Paul Ricoeur calls "human time" as a shared experience in which the traces left by the lives of past generations can be located and drawn on during our continual move into the future.
Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.
-Walter Benjamin
The gifted Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been widely heralded as one of the most significant new voices in African literature. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), earned the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and her second, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Americanah, was awarded the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, Adichie has given two popular TED talks, "The Danger of a Single Story" and "We Should All Be Feminists."1 As part of the "third generation rewriting the Nigerian literary tradition," Adichie is often described as the literary heir of Chinua Achebe, the so-called "father of the African novel."2 Such an association is made poetically apt by the accident of history that found Adichie growing up in the same house at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where Achebe once lived. The young Adichie even discovered Achebe's daughter's name carved on a window sill of the faculty house in which they both resided.3 Adichie has spoken frequently of her appreciation for and indebtedness to Achebe. When Achebe died in 2013, Adichie told the Canadian National Post, "[F]or me, and for many Nigerians, even people who weren't interested in books, necessarily . . . we felt...