Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller greets Professor Chinua Achebe at the launch of activities to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, at Emancipation Park, recently. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer

Deputy Principal of the UWI, Mona campus, Joseph Periera, added a peculiarly Jamaican word to a peculiarly Jamaican honour from Anthea Morrison to Chinua Achebe, on Thursday afternoon, to the delightful approval of the large audience at the Undercroft.

While the head of the Department of Literatures in English, which hosted the reading by the Nigerian author, had sent 'respeck' to Achebe, Periera amended it to 'nuff respeck'.

That respect was evident in Maureen Warner-Lewis's introduction of Achebe, in which she termed Achebe's Arrow of God as one of the finest novels in English and the writer as 'a trailblazer for what is now known as post colonial literature'. And, the red cap that Achebe wore was evidence of his respect across the Atlantic, as he explained, "It is the cap of a titled man in Iboland."

Still, the respect was not enough to stop several cellphones from ringing during Achebe's reading from Things Fall Apart, and some of his poems.

Achebe, his voice not loud, yet clear, said he would read from the point where the main character, Okonkwo, 'had to flee, to go into exile, and he is in such despair that his uncle Uchendo said I don't like what I see. Okonkwo is going to get into very serious depression. So I am going to talk to him'.

The reading begins

And, so Achebe started reading from the scene of a family meeting, called by Uchendo, chuckles meeting 'a man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and sweet ...'

Achebe ended the reading, appropriately enough, with 'I have no more to say to you'.

The poetry began with We Laughed At Him and continued with Vultures. "My poetry is very much a product of anguish, the anguish of the Nigerian civil war," he said. 'Creatures like vultures inhabit this poetry'. And, in that particular poem they looked at everything 'in easy range of cold, telescopic eyes'.

"This poem taught me something. When I heard Allan Ginsberg read I learnt that a poet is not always the best reader of his words," Achebe said before reading Non-Commitment.

Beware Soul Brother came before the last poem written for poet Christopher Okibo, who died in the Nigerian civil war. The adaptation of a traditional Ibo dirge was read first in English and then the Ibo language, in which it was originally written, the final phrase being the same in both versions.

And after Carolyn Allen, of the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, moderated questions, the Akwaaba drummers played as patrons surged forward with books for Achebe to sign.