Unoka, Okonkwo’s Father, Goes to France

With more than eleven million copies sold and translations available in more than thirty-five languages, one can safely claim that Unoka, the lazy father of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is as familiar to the global literary community as Miss Havisham or Aureliano Buendia. Given the patently macho bent of the narrative’s emplotment, the effeminate Unoka has received more than his fair share of bad press in the global critical industry that has developed around the novel. Okonkwo, admittedly, has not helped matters. His Oedipal aversion for everything his father represents provides the perfect excuse for the critical demonization of a failed pater familias. After all, if you change the principal function of your basket from ferrying yams from the farm to carrying shit, your neighbours can be forgiven for unburdening their bowels into every basket within sight in your compound.

The major victim of Unoka’s negative image is his talent as artist and humorist. The character is often so suffused in discussions of his failure that scant attention is paid to these two significant qualities. The fictional, precolonial version of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti or Hugh Masekela is thus unable to overcome his limitations within the novel’s economy of meaning. Not even his brilliance as a humorist, his effortless capacity to infuse wit into every situation, has enjoyed sufficient attention. His spectacular handling of Okoye’s debt-collection mission is a case in point. We are by now sufficiently familiar with the mathematical formula through which Unoka arrives at an Orwellian hierarchization of his debts. Unoka’s bigger debts are more equal than others and he employs considerable wit in delivering that unpleasant message to Okoye: “You see, I owe that man a thousand cowries but he has not come to wake me up in the morning for it. I shall pay you but not today. Our elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them. I shall pay my big debts first.”

Fortunately, there is one man who, rather than see Unoka as a failure, has become an ardent student of his wit and philosophy: Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing fundamentalist President of France. Fresh from his honeymoon with his latest wife, Mr. Sarkozy has found it auspicious to dabble into the politics of memory and remembering in the national self-fashioning of France. At a dinner speech to the Jewish community in France last week, Mr. Sarkozy announced that every fifth grader would henceforth have to learn the life story of one of the French children killed by the Nazis during the holocaust. According to Sarkozy, “nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew.” Consequently, every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”  Faced by a barrage of criticism bordering on the trauma that could devolve from exposing children to the gory details of the Holocaust, Mr. Sarkozy offered this beautiful rider: “It is ignorance – not knowledge – that leads to the repetition of abominable situations. You do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of a country”.

The seismic public outcry that has greeted Mr. Sarkozy’s proposal is evidence of the profundity of residual French anti-semitism. It’s been one screaming headline after another since last week in France. Says Pascal Bruckner, an eminent French philosopher: “every day the President throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence but this last one is truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality. Let’s judge it for what it is: a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel”. I have monitored this controversy very closely in French and international newspapers and have been generally disappointed by the seeming inability of international punditry to grasp the nuances and implications of Mr. Sarkozy’s proposal in terms of the politics of memory in France.

Mr. Sarkozy has a key phrase that deserves to be carefully unpacked: “the memory of a country.” After all, we are in France, a country where history and memory are carefully and consistently policed. We are in France, the country that has produced some of the most formidable theorists of history and memory and has meticulously avoided learning anything from their theories, discursive strategies, and legacies. We are in France, the country of Pierre Nora and his lieux de mémoire. We are in France, the country of the Annales School of historical knowledge production pioneered by the likes of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. We are in France, the country of Fernand Braudel who internationalized the Annales School’s longue durée strategy of historical writing. We are in France, the country of Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and so many others whose oeuvre must constantly endure the terrorism of official memory.

Official memory in France has always had to devise strategies of dealing with four major ghosts: civilization, slavery, colonization, and, of course, Vichy collaborationism. Brushing aside the strategies inherent in the works of its illustrious historians, official memory in France has evolved a time-tested, two-pronged strategy of dealing with these ghosts. A national narrative has been concocted that is remarkably generous with the truth of French civilization (read mission civilisatrice) and brilliantly economical with the truth of French atrocities and crimes against humanity (read colonization and slavery). The scenario is a lot more interesting on the economical side of this equation. So thorough is French law enforcement approach to memory and history that there are official avenues of determining who has the right to remember what. La République frowns upon any remembrance that is prejudicial to the gargantuan ego of that thing called l’oeuvre de la civilization française. When it comes to officially manufactured scarcity of memory, you simply cannot beat the French. Only last year, they pushed the grotesque to the point of espousing legislation that only the positive aspects of the French colonial enterprise should be taught in schools. Thus, it is potentially a felony or misdemeanor to mention words like “torture” and “Algeria” in the sacred ears of French officials.

Enter Monsieur Sarkozy, the current Director of the French national comedy on memory. Not known for half measures, Monsieur Sarkozy has screamed from every rooftop, every mountaintop, that there is no room for slavery and colonization in the official memory of France. Whether he is insulting his Arab hosts in Algeria or abusing his Senegalese hosts in Dakar, his racist message has been consistent during state visits to Africa. Get over it! Move on! Your history is not worth remembering! Why should you guys insist on reading what is on the page when it is so much easier to turn it? And patati and patata! Admittedly, Monsieur Sarkozy’s chorus comprises a handful of funny African internet intellectuals who, like their French patron, have no room for history and memory in their conceptualization of Africa’s present and future.

Having put colonization and slavery firmly in their place – outside of official French memory – Monsieur Sarkozy turns his attention to another intractable ghost haunting the present in France: crimes committed during French collaboration with the Nazis. Here, Monsieur Sarkozy has an epiphany! He discovers Things Fall Apart and, with it, Unoka’s brilliant strategy! Those who accuse Nicolas Sarkozy of pandering habitually to the Jewish community in France are themselves neck-deep into the business of understatements. Monsieur Sarkozy constantly dreams of when he will outdo the Americans in this department. Faced with the Jewish community, Monsieur Sarkozy’s unwavering hostility to the memory of the atrocities of France magically disappears. He suddenly discovers that there is such a thing as the “memory of country”, knowledge of which must be packaged as a “gift” to ten-year-olds.

How to advance this position without appearing to be on Senator John McCain’s Multiple Talk Express? Unoka comes to Sarkozy’s rescue with his Orwellian hierarchy of debts! If you are still wondering how exactly Unoka comes into the picture, close your eyes and picture Nicolas Sarkozy pointing his left index finger irreverently in the direction of Africa’s nose and screaming: “You see, I owe the French Jewish community eleven thousand children that I delivered to the Nazis for slaughter but they have not come to wake me up in the morning for that reason. I shall remember your suffering during colonization and slavery but not today. Our ancestors the Gauls say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them. I shall remember my big crimes first.”