Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

• Chinua Achebe was born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930 and raised by Christian parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria.

• He went to the local public schools and was among the first students to graduate from the University of Ibadan.

• He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student.

• After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer and Director of External Broadcasting.

• Chinua Achebe is a novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic. 

• He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature. It has been translated into at least forty-five languages, and has sold eight million copies worldwide.

Vulture: Summary

"Vultures" is a poem by Chinua Achebe. The poem “Vultures” speaks broadly about life and humanity, using the specific example that evil beings like vultures and the commandant in the Belsen camp are alike, both fighting for survival and happiness. The vulture,“perching high on broken bone of a dead tree” is fighting for survival by feeding off dead animals. In the same way, the commandant tries to survive by killing innocent people. However, they both have some good in them; the vulture loves the other vulture and the commandant loves his baby.

In the first stanza a very dull and lifeless atmosphere is created. The poet describes the,“…greyness and drizzle of one despondent dawn” and how the vultures“ picked the eyes of a swollen corpse in a water-logged trench”. They eat disgusting food in order to survive. 

In stanza two, the poet starts to contemplate how love can exist in such an evil infested place, and how love is not affected by evil as seen in the line of the poem“her face turned to the wall!”.

Stanza three begins with an ellipsis to link the vultures with the commandant of Belsen. After a day of burning human bodies, the unattractive commandant with hairy nostrils still manages to show his love for his baby. “Tender offspring” makes the children looks as if they are human bodies ready to be burnt. 

Vulture

By Chinua Achebe

In the greyness

and drizzle of one despondent

dawn unstirred by harbingers

of sunbreak a vulture

perching high on broken

bone of a dead tree

nestled close to his

mate his smooth

bashed-in head, a pebble

on a stem rooted in

a dump of gross

feathers, inclined affectionately

to hers. Yesterday they picked

the eyes of a swollen

corpse in a water-logged

trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full

gorged they chose their roost

keeping the hollowed remnant

in easy range of cold

telescopic eyes ...

Vulture: Analysis

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian writer who would probably be familiar with the sight of vultures, which are scavenging birds, feeding on the carcass of a dead animal. This is the image that he explores in the first section of his poem entitled 'Vultures'. A miserable scene is set with grey weather, and Achebe uses alliteration in the phrase 'drizzle of one despondent dawn' to emphasise the depressing atmosphere. There is no sign of sun at the start of the day, as the phrase 'unstirred by harbingers of sunbreak' tells us (harbinger meaning a sign or announcer). 

A pair of vultures are sitting together on the branch of a tree. Achebe uses both alliteration and metaphor in describing the branch as a 'broken bone', and the tree is dead. This reinforces the bleakness of the scene and reminds us that vultures are in the habit of feeding on dead creatures. The first suggestion of gentleness comes when Achebe tells us that the male vulture is 'nestled close to his mate', conveying the feeling that they are fond of each other's company. The description of the male vulture, however, is hardly flattering: 'his smooth / bashed-in head, a pebble / on a stem rooted in / a dump of gross / feathers'. The metaphor of the pebble is appropriate, as the vulture's head is indeed small in comparison to its body, and the adjectives 'dump' and 'gross' emphasise how ugly the bird is. Yet his head is 'inclined affectionately to hers', so the attraction between the pair of vultures is clear to see.