[fantasyfan]

I found this novel absolutely wonderful!

One way of approaching Things Fall Apart is to look at the words in the Yeats poem, “The Second Coming” which immediately follow the title quotation:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

This is what occurs with Okonkwo. The Ibo society in which he was born and raised--his social, religious and identity centre--is largely supplanted by the culture of the missionaries and the colonial power they represent. His world falls apart and to him a kind of anarchy takes its place.

One of the things that makes this story of disintegration so moving is the fact that Chinua Achebe never tries to portray Okonkwo’s world as some kind of ideal society living close to the earth. And he does this as an insider. He is part of that culture; he knows and understands it. This makes his criticisms all the more telling. The culture of Okonkwo is deeply, horribly flawed. Infanticide is practised. Twins are killed just because they are twins. A woman is seen as useless if she gives successive births to children that are somehow deemed possessed. The children, of course, are killed. One of the most awful moments in the book is the episode involving the killing of Ikemefuna, a boy offered by another tribe as part of a compensation for a murder they committed. The child is sentenced to death by the “Oracle” of the tribe for no very good reason. Okonkwo has come to love this boy who calls him “Father”. But at the moment of the intended murder the child runs to him hoping to be saved and Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna himself.

Another problem with the Ibo world of the book is the fact that the culture is aggressively male-oriented. Women are hardly more than property. Wife-beating is a male preogative and to call a man a ”woman” is the ultimate insult. Male, physical power is the quality that makes Okonkwo the ideal male in social terms. He’s a famous wrestler, known as a fierce warrior, and dominates others through a combination of physical strength and a powerful alpha-male personality. Ironically, Okonkwo is capable of forming a close relationship with a daughter, Ezinma but constantly laments that she wasn’t born a boy.

Thus in the case of his daughter {and Ikemefuna}, Okonkwo shows the capacity of love--though it is unappreciated and subverted. It is not what his world feels is a male-oriented quality. In addition, his world does not require of him the power of reflection and compassion. But other members of the tribe indeed are fully capable of this. near the end of part 1, Obierika has this meditative passage:

“Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grieviously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed?”

Then in the very next chapter in a magnificent, extended speech, Uchendu, an old member of the tribe with whom the exiled Okonkwo lives insists that he answer questions about the customs of the tribes: He queries the assumptions revolving around the relationships of the belief in a supreme Mother and the male-dominated culture e.g.

“We all know that a man is head of the family and his wives do his bidding. A child belongs to its father and his family and not to its mother and her family. A man belongs to his fatherland and not to his motherland. And yet we say Nneka--‘Mother is Supreme.’ Why is that?”

and later:

“Why is it that when a woman dies she is taken home to be buried with her own kinsmen? She in not buried with her husband’s kinsmen. Why is that?” . . .
“It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. . . . Your mother is there to protect you.. . .”

and finally:

“If you think you are the greatest sufferer in the world ask my daughter, Akueni, how many twins she has borne and thrown away. Have you not heard the song they sing when a woman dies?
“‘For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no none for whom it is well.’”

Okonkwo can answer none of these questions. It is unlikely that he ever even thinks about them. His world falls apart and its centre does not hold because he cannot adapt. His life ends with murder and death because he knows no other answer.

The Christian Culture is always viewed from the outside. It certainly has its own flaws. Sometimes it seems quite silly to the Ibo people. But it is inimical and destructive. The two priests show two very different approaches to the natives, but both wish to replace the Ibo culture with one of their own. There is no respect for the customs, traditions, and beliefs of the indigenous population. Modification is not their aim. Destructive assimilation is what they desire.

Thus, we have a dual tragedy--social and personal. No wonder "anarchy seemed loosed upon the world".

And perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think that Achene possibly also had the chilling destructive conclusion of the Yeats poem in mind when he wrote this powerful book:

. . . somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?