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Transcription: [00:10:57]

{SPEAKER name="Eldred Jones"} I think when you look at, uh, Achebe's heroes,

[00:11:02]
uh, one tends to see something of a lesson of tragedy. Which is that man, no matter how important, no matter how great,

[00:11:12]
he's mere man and he has to be pretty careful in order to keep his balance through the hazards of life.

[00:11:19]

{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
Now are there any other major themes? Besides the idea of struggle, of conflict,

[00:11:26]
dealing with the society that Achebe projects in his writings?

[00:11:30]

{SPEAKER name="Eldred Jones"}
Well, you know that Achebe was involved of civil war, and the civil war changed the outlooks of a number of Nigerian writers.

[00:11:44]
Wole Soyinka was never the same again after the civil war.

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Achebe came out of the civil war really chastened, I think, and he wrote a lot of poetry, he wrote short stories.

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"Beware Soul Brother" is the volume of poems which he wrote, and "Girls at War and other stories" is the title of a book of short stories.

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and really um, all of that covers, shows, the impact of the war upon him, the dark tragedy of the war, the terrible sufferings,

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not just of the people who are protagonists of the war but of women and children and portraits of children dying in the arms of their mothers.

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{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}Of course.

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{SPEAKER name="Eldred Jones"}Quite how--

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{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}This is the Biafran-Nigerian war?

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{SPEAKER name="Eldred Jones"}Yes. The--the Biafran-Nigerian civil war. So I think, so far, what has come out of Achebe's-- since the war,
[00:12:56]
I think he's working out the trauma of the war. We're all looking for--