I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Chinua AchebeThe Novelist As Teacherโ: โI would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past โ with all its imperfections โ was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on Godโs behalf delivered them.
Chinua AchebeIf someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.
Chinua Achebe