[sun surfer]

I thought the book was excellent and thank you all for choosing it from among the nominations; I've been wanting to read it for a long time but my "want" list is so long that I don't know when I would've gotten to it if it hadn't won this month.

I really loved how we are able to experience colonialism from "the other side". The book takes us into the village and makes us understand it and its people and even relate to them in many ways, which is a far contrast from, say, Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Despite the village's evils, I even found it somewhat dangerously idyllic. It was a simple way of life built on tradition and there was general happiness to be found there.

However, though experiencing the villages "from the inside" was great, this book even went one step further and brought the book into true greatness by showing the aforementioned evils and unjustness of a way of life that has since been threatened and overtaken by another intruding culture. There was no bias here anywhere; no attempt to illustrate right from wrong. Instead, it simply showed life in all its murkiness.

I think it's very interesting that Achebe chose such a hard man to relate to as the protagonist and the tragic character that resulted from the beginnings of colonialism there. I think he may have done it for a few reasons. First, perhaps he wanted to make sure he wasn't making the pre-colonialism village life into something too easily seen as an ideal and having such a hard man as the central character really helped that. Second, though it is so easy to see colonialism as evil, I think he may have wanted to show that while it may be harsh and oppressing, it doesn't hold a monopoly on those things, and that there are many shades of grey (just, hopefully, not 50 of them).

Okonkwo's death is quite interesting as I can see it supporting two opposite ideas. In one way it's a symbol of the tragedy of what's happening to the "Ibo" (in real life it's Igbo) while in another it's an almost fitting end to a man who was so hard and unbending even by his own village's standards. I think this duality of interpretations is so apropos to the book itself since Achebe seems to want to steer away from easily labelling things as right or wrong. It seems to me he wanted to leave us pondering if the death was simply a result of these colonialist intruders driving Okonkwo to his final breaking point or if it went deeper to things he did pre-colonialism.

I did a little investigating afterwards on the Igbo people of Nigeria that this book is based on, and I was quite surprised to find that the traditional Igbo culture and society is still stronger and more prevalent than I would've expected given the colonialism. It may now be heavily influenced by colonialism and modernity, but it is still there, to the point where I found a message board where Igbo people a few years ago were actually discussing if nowadays it was acceptable to befriend or marry osu (the outcasts/untouchables from the book), with some actually replying that they just couldn't marry an osu because the stigma is too strong. One had even moved and was now living in the UK and still said he wouldn't marry an osu for anything. Even though I just happened upon that discussion, it does reinforce the neutrality of the book, since we often associate oppressed and disappearing cultures as things to be cherished and idealised where in reality here we are in 2013 and one holdover from Igbo culture is that people today still see osu as untouchable outcasts.