SOURCE: "Chinua Achebe and the Poetics of Location: The Uses of Space in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease," in Essays on African Writing, A Re-evaluation, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Heinemann, 1993, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Gikandi analyzes the development of meaning in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease in terms of narrative representations of space and location.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the works of Chinua Achebe have up to now been read almost exclusively in terms of time and historicity. But this privileging of temporal terms has not arisen because of critical oversight or theoretical blindness: Achebe seems to have written his works so close to the axis of temporality that his whole oeuvre has an uncanny way of forcing us to read it not so much in the sequence in which his novels were written, but in...