Reading a culturally different text: Meaning signification process in Chinua Achebe’s short stories

Chinua Achebe has written extensively on African culture, its mores and the impact of European imperialism on indigenous African societies. His novels garnered worldwide attention and contributed towards the development of the African literature. But his short stories merit equal attention and interest owing not only to the similarity of themes that they share with his novels but also the skilful use of English, a ‘world language’ or an ‘alien language’ as he himself calls it, to depict the clash between traditional African cultures and colonial encounter. As an African author writing in English, Achebe appropriates this European linguistic means as an ethnographic tool to depict the traditions of Igbo society to which he belongs. Storytelling was a mainstay of the Igbo tradition and an integral part of the community, and it becomes pertinent for his readers outside Africa, who are unfamiliar with the sociocultural nuances of the African language, Igbo, to construct its meaning in the reading process by interpreting the textual cues. This study, taking a few of Chinua Achebe’s short stories as an example, will explore how the meaning of unfamiliar cultural elements is signified in the reading process through the language of the text such that it is comprehended and responded by the reader. The article argues that an understanding of the meaning signification process can make a reader conscious of the cognitive processes taking place in his her mind during the reading event and can introduce his or her to features of a distinct culture.