I tell my students, it’s not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What’s more difficult is to identify with someone you don’t see, who’s very far away, who’s a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Achebe frames literature as an ethical and imaginative exercise in crossing boundaries. He notes that empathy is easiest when the subject resembles us—socially, culturally, racially, or geographically. The “wonders” of literature begin when readers can inhabit lives that feel remote or unfamiliar, recognizing full human complexity beyond stereotypes. The remark also reflects Achebe’s broader career-long project: challenging Eurocentric narratives about Africa and insisting that stories shape how societies perceive one another. In this view, reading is not merely entertainment but a practice that can enlarge moral perception and weaken the reflex to treat difference as distance.