Excerpts from "An African Voice"

The voice belongs to Chinua Achebe, who, in an interview with Katie Bacon, talks about characters in his novel "Things Fall Apart," themes in his collection of essays "Home and Exile," his role in modern African literature, and his views of America.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 3's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Things Fall Apart, Prayer to the Masks, The Second Coming, Things Fall Apart (excerpts), An African Voice
15 words 95 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. resonance
    the ability to create understanding or an emotional response
    After a while I began to understand why the book had resonance.
  2. dispossession
    the removal of someone occupying a home or land
    There are different forms of dispossession, many, many ways in which people are deprived or subjected to all kinds of victimization--it doesn't have to be colonization.
  3. disrupt
    throw into disorder
    The society of Umuofia, the village in Things Fall Apart, was totally disrupted by the coming of the European government, missionary Christianity, and so on.
  4. initiate
    set in motion, start an event or prepare the way for
    The problems that Nigeria is having today could be seen as resulting from this effort that was initiated by colonial rule to create a new nation.
  5. lurid
    glaringly vivid and graphic; marked by sensationalism
    The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms.
  6. justify
    defend, explain, or make excuses for by reasoning
    The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
  7. motive
    the reason that arouses action toward a desired goal
    And therefore, describing this fate that the Africans would have had back home became the motive for the literature that was created about Africa.
  8. suppressed
    kept from public knowledge by various means
    We realize and recognize that it's not just colonized people whose stories have been suppressed, but a whole range of people across the globe who have not spoken.
  9. acquire
    gain knowledge or skills
    English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it.
  10. claim
    demand as being one's due or property
    It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway; it is something which you can actively claim to use as an effective weapon, as a counterargument to colonization.
  11. portray
    represent, as in a work of art
    The reason for this concentration on the failings of Africans is the same as what we've been talking about--this tradition of bad news, or portraying Africa as a place that is different from the rest of the world, a place where humanity is really not recognizable.
  12. complexity
    the quality of being intricate and compounded
    It is that ability to see the complexity of a place that the world doesn't seem to be able to take to Africa, because of this baggage of centuries of reporting about Africa.
  13. transition
    a change from one place or state or subject to another
    I've been struck, for instance, by the impressive way that political transition is managed in America.
  14. factor
    anything that contributes causally to a result
    That's something that I really wish for America, because no day passes here without some racial factor coming up somewhere, which is a major burden on this country.
  15. swindle
    deprive of by deceit
    I don't think we want to swindle ourselves in that way; I think if we want a universal civilization, we should work to bring it about.
Created on Mon Oct 13 18:00:56 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Oct 13 19:26:31 EDT 2014)

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