Achebe's Arrow of God is an extended meditation on what it means to write in Africa. The hearth scene in which Oduche reads while his mother tells a story radiates outward so that we find images of literacy everywhere in the novel, even where it does not appear on the level of the story. In particular, the experience of reading and writing informs three different narrative spaces integral to the novel: the container so confining as to be suffocating, the straight line that cleaves through the natural world, and the small room with a single occupant receptive to a disembodied voice but disturbed by the voices of people outside.

LITERACY, THE HEARTH, AND THE WORLD

The domestic hearth in Ugoye's hut is a space apart from the masculine adult world of political and religious conflict that is the main focus of the novel. It can be usefully compared to the hearth scenes in European and American literature discussed by Sarah Robbins and Friedrich Kittler, in which parents read to or are read to by children. The western ideal, dating from the Middle Ages, is ‘of the mother teaching her little boy to read’. As Garrett Stewart notes, ‘a written text inspiring an oral intimacy is … the Dickensian family scene par excellence’. And, according to Robbins, the conjunction of adult, children, fireside, and chores was emblematic of domestic-based literacy in nineteenth-century America.