ABSTRACT:
The subject matter of the nation is a usual staple on the menu of postcolonial Nigerian fiction. In this sense, the repertoire of Chinua Achebe’s art echoes an incurable preoccupation with Nigeria’s postcolonial condition as a nation. Also, this paper explores the centrality of intertextuality in the production of Achebe’s fiction, primarily his political novel about crisis plaguing intellectual leadership, No Longer at Ease (1960). Intellectual leadership deals with championing the espousal of intellectual development for societal alchemy; it also deals with mental or intellectual engagement capable of raising awareness as well as educating people about societal issues for change. Intertextuality focuses on the relations among texts: no text is an island. The departure from author-centred theory of literary criticism to unhindered, fluid mode of criticism, following the pressures of poststructuralist contention, precipitated intertextuality. The significance of intertextuality to the creation of postcolonial Nigerian fiction establishes the fact that social facts that are being refracted are real societal issues. These artistic productions are ‘‘truthful chronicle’’; they are relational in textual make-up. Thus, layers of artistic works after the Boehmerian ‘‘after Achebe’’ thesis orchestrate the body of texts that sing from the same songbook as No Longer at Ease. This paper therefore attempts to demonstrate that Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is a derivative of the corpus of ‘‘verifiable’’, realistic literature on intellectual leadership crisis in Nigeria.
