Beware Soul Brother: Poems

by Chinua Achebe

Written during the Nigerian Civil War, this collection of poetry won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972.

Genres: Poetry, African Literature, Nigeria, Africa

72 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1972

About the author

Works, including the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe describe traditional African life in conflict with colonial rule and westernization.

This poet and critic served as professor at Brown University. People best know and most widely read his first book in modern African literature.

Christian parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria reared Achebe, who excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. World religions and traditional African cultures fascinated him, who began stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian broadcasting service and quickly moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe defended the use of English, a "language of colonizers," in African literature. In 1975, controversy focused on his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" for its criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a bloody racist."

When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe, a devoted supporter of independence, served as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The war ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved in political parties but witnessed the corruption and elitism that duly frustration him, who quickly resigned. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and after a car accident left him partially disabled, he returned to the United States in 1990.

Novels of Achebe focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of values during and after the colonial era. His style relied heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He also published a number of short stories, children's books, and essay collections. He served as the David and Marianna Fisher university professor of Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, United States.

ollowing a brief illness, Achebe died.

Reviews

[Pavel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a dawn unheralded at midnight
it opened abruptly before me-a rough
circular clearing, high cliffs of deep
forest guarding it in amber-tinted spell
A long journey's end it was though how
long and from where seemed unclear,
unimportant; one fact alone mattered
now-that body so well preserved
which on seeing I knew had brought me there
The circumstance of death
was vague but a floating hint
pointed to a disaster in the air
elusively
But where, if so, the litter
of violent wreckage? That rough-edged
gypsum trough bearing it like a dead
chrysalis reposing till now in full
encapsulation was broken by a cool
hand for this lying in state. All else
was in order except the leg missing
neatly at knee joint
even the white schoolboy dress
immaculate in the thin yellow
light; the face in particular
was perfect having caught nor fear
nor agony at the fatal moment.
Clear-sighted with a clarity
rarely encountered in dreams
my Explorer-Self stood a little
distant but somewhat fulfilled; behind
him a long misty quest: unanswered
questions put to sleep needing
no longer to be raised. Enough
in that trapped silence of a freak
dawn to come face-to-face suddenly
with a body I didn't even know
I lost.

[Lucile Barker · Rating 3 out of 5]

7. Beware Soul Brother by Chinua Achebe
This is a collection of poetry that Achebe wrote during and immediately after the Nigerian Biafran war and is both sad and hopeful. I do prefer his fiction but I did like some of his images, such as children chanting at a python crossing a funeral procession. The book won the Commonwealth Poetry prize in 1972. One can see the influence of his Christian family, but he can still relate to his superstitious countrymen with no judgment. Looking back, the Biafran war looks almost civilized in comparison to Rwanda and the Sudan, although it wasn't. These poems make more sense when read aloud, and if you let the rhythm take over.

[M F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps it’s just my superficial understanding of Nigerian culture and the Nigerian Civil War, but the best poems in Beware Soul Brother are the poems that aren’t explicitly about either war or Nigeria. In “1966,” for instance, we get a short, imagist-influenced poem using Christian mythology as allegory for a fallen and bifurcated state:

a diamond-tipped

drillpoint crept closer

to residual chaos to

rare artesian hatred

that once squirted warm

blood in God’s face

confirming His first

disappointment in Eden

The musicality of Achebe’s writing melds wonderfully with the poetic simplicity of imagism, and at its strongest, Beware Soul Brother feels like a postcolonial anachronism, a modernist missive in a world already verging on postmodernism. Likewise, “The Explorer” perfectly combines abstract rumination on identity with imagery, recalling the ghosts of Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers, culminating in a brilliant closing sequence: “Enough / in that trapped silence of a freak / dawn to come face to face suddenly / with a body I didn’t even know / I lost.” As in these two cases, when he lets the images do the work for him, he’s capable of excellent poetry, but many of these poems are so eager to articulate their messages that they don’t let the images unfurl, such as in “Benin Road,” where the image of a butterfly as a counterpoint to the violence of war is robbed of its power by the speaker explaining to us the butterfly’s symbolic significance:

speed is violence

power is violence

weight violence

the butterfly

seeks safety

in lightness

in weightlessness

fluctuating flight

but somewhere

our divergent

territories meet

in paved forests

While the poem’s ending is excellent, bringing the two conceptual poles together in a striking contrast, it’s robbed of its power by his abstract and explicit linkage of modernity and violence coupled with his redundant delineation of the butterfly’s associations with lightness and weightlessness. And so it goes for most of the collection: the occasional gems’ subtle noise is out-shouted by their too-explicit siblings, while Achebe’s penchant for precise adjectives and abstract nouns over-clutters his imagery to the point that poems with promise, like “Mango Seedling,” fall strangely flat. In the end, like many prose writers, Achebe’s a better novelist than a poet; one of the most rewarding parts of his books is their humanistic irony, and while the occasional poem in here (e.g., “We Laughed at Him”) manages to capture that, I don’t know that poetry is a mode that allows him to fully exercise his talents.