Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
Interpretation
Storytellers challenge authority and oppressive systems by expressing the truth of human experience.
In this quote, Chinua Achebe highlights the power of storytelling as a form of resistance against those who seek to control and suppress individual freedoms. Storytellers serve as a threat to authoritarian figures across various institutions—be it governmental, religious, or educational—by exposing truths and promoting the intrinsic rights of the human spirit. Their narratives inspire critical thought and encourage a reevaluation of societal norms.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of free expression in literature.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.
It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
An angry man is always a stupid man.
I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
Small acts of decency ripple in ways we could never imagine.
The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
Because war and preparations for war have acquired legitimacy, and because of the tremendous proliferation of arms through production and export, so that they are now available more or less to all and sundry, right down to handguns and stilettos, the cult of violence has by now so permeated relations between people that we are compelled to witness as well an increase in everyday violence.
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