Famine as a Function of Empire in Arrow of God and Star of the Sea

Abstract

This paper speaks to several broad questions about the relationship between culture and nature as represented in Chinua Achebe's novel Arrow of God and Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea: How are the categories nature and culture constructed through colonial and scientific discourses? To what extent do Achebe and O'Connor engage in discourses that frame nature and culture as inextricable categories? What worldviews are inchoate to competing discourses about nature and culture, and how are these worldviews negotiated in the texts? And finally, despite colonialism's difference in kind between Ireland and Nigeria, how do O'Connor and Achebe both present ecological distresses as a long term consequence of colonialism? The truly fascinating aspect of pairing these texts together emerges from the observation that O'Connor and Achebe approach their representations of competing worldviews with drastically different motivations in mind. While O'Connor's text clearly calls the British Empire to task for its involvement in the deaths and emigration of millions of Irish people during the Great Famine, Achebe's novel uses a more self-reflective lens. While both novels use famine as a locus for discussing colonialism's wide scale disruptiveness, Achebe's famine is also an accusation against Igbo people rather than empire because famine in Arrow of God is represented as the drastic consequence of betraying Igbo ways of life through embracing colonial ones.