Grommersoft

Critical Essay #4

In the following excerpt, Sarr explores Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart from a cultural perspective.

Written about the past of Africa by a novelist who sees himself as a "teacher," Things Fall Apart encompasses several worlds, several experiences, sometimes complex, all altered or mixed. Achebe is never a mere reporter of public events. Talking of Things Fall Apart, he said: "I now know that my first book was an act of atonement with my past, the final return and homage of a prodigal son" [Achebe in Morning Yet on Creation Day, Heinemann, 1975]. The past that Chinua Achebe describes so beautifully in Things Fall Apart is a past that Achebe himself had to rediscover. It is a past iliac was largely lost as a result of twentieth-century Europeanization. This rediscovery of the suppressed past is an act of faith and religious revival. Achebe, like the majority of African writers today, wants his writings to be functional, to serve as oral literature did in traditional Africa, reflecting the totality of actual experience. As David Cook tells us:

Close study of a passage from Things Fall Apart out of context is particularly likely to lead to pedantic fault-finding and to have little relation to the full Im pact the novel makes upon us since . . the achievement of tins work is essentially an epic achievement in which the whole is greater than the parts and in which the parts cannot be appreciated properly when separated from the whole. [African Literature. A Critical View, by David Cook, Longman, 1977]

John Mbiti similarly sees the holistic and communal nature of African culture in his statement: "I am because we are and since we are therefore I am" [in African Religions and Philosophy, by John Mbiti, Anchor Books Doubleday, 1970]. This communal sense makes it necessary to see Okonkwo as something other than just a tragic hero in the usual Western sense--a lonely figure who passes moral Judgment the group.

The "we" of Achebe's story is the Tho society of Umuofia, which has no centralized authority or king. The tribal setup is very different from most tribal societies in Africa, because of its respect for individualism and its rejection of any inherited or hierarchical system of authority. The Tho people's highly individualistic society may have developed partly because of geography, for they lived in forest areas which were difficult to penetrate, and each village lived separated from the next. These natural obstacles are described by another Tho writer, Elechi Amadi, in his novel The Concubine [Heinemann, 1982]:

In spite of its isolation, Umuofia society is proud, dignified, and stable. It is governed by a complicated system of customs, traditions, and rituals extending from birth through marriage to death. It has its own legal, educational, and religious system and conventions governing relations between men and women, adults and children, and the various generations. The first part of the book allows us to see the customs, rituals, and traditions of Umuofia (e.g., consultation of oracles, the Week of Peace, the New Yam Festival) and to see the myths operating in the clan (e.g., Ogbanje, or a child that repeatedly dies and returns to the mother to be reborn, the exposure of twins, and taboos about shedding the blood of one's clansmen).

In addition, we are shown a society that is competitive and materialistic. A man's prestige is in direct proportion to the size of his barns and his compounds, to the number of titles he has taken. As Things Fall Apart shows the first impact of European invasion upon the old Tho society, Achebe presents, in a very fair and objective way, the strengths and weaknesses of this society. Contrary to the views of the District Commissioner who plans to write a book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, Achebe presents an Tho culture which is neither "primitive" nor "barbaric." Even though his ambition to prove that "African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans" might seem to cast doubt on his objectivity, he does not romanticize the Tho society, but reveals instead the bad side as well as the good. He acts as the conscientious teacher he wants to be. Nothing is left aside.

To his credit, Achebe does not merely describe these traditions, values, and customs; he brings the ceremonial to life, presenting events and conversations dramatically. In so doing, he presents convincingly a rich Tho culture which is not static, but clearly in a state of transition. Outwardly, Umuofia is a world of serenity, harmony, and communal activity, but outwardly it is torn by the individual's personal doubts and fears. At times, the reader is faced with contradictions. For example, although the child is valued more than any material thing in Umuofian society, an innocent child named lkemefuna is denied life by traditional laws and customs which demand his life to return for that of a Umuofian who was killed by his people. But Tho society is full of contradictions. It is a world in which the spiritual dimension is a part of daily life, but also a world in which a man's success is measured by his material goods. It is a world which is at once communal and individualistic, a world to which human relations are paramount, but in which old people and twins are left in the forest to die. It is a male-dominated society, in which the chief goddess is female and in which proverbial wisdom maintains "Mother is supreme." This sustained view of the duality of the traditional Tho society intensifies the wider tragedy and reveals the dilemma that shapes and destroys the life of Okonkwo....

In providing a context for interpreting Okonkwo's relationship with his society, the novel's use of proverbs plays an important role. They reveal the clan's dependence upon traditional wisdom and help to present the whole way of life. Many critics have demonstrated the power of proverbs in the work of Achebe in general and in Things Fall Apart in particular. Beinth Lindfors sums up the role of the proverbs in Achebe's fictions when he declares:

Such an understanding of the subtleties of language by the reader is possible only through personal effort linked with open-mindedness. It is, unfortunately, those elements which are lacking among many of the characters in the novel and which have led also to cultural misunderstanding among its readers. Achebe is using English, a worldwide language, to translate African experience. In other words, English, a tool in the hands of all those who have learnt to master It, can be submitted to different kinds of use Critics of African literature must keep this fact in mind and try to grasp all the riches of the Ibo language and rhetoric that Achebe, as a son of the tribe, has tried to translate. With such an attitude, the critic will contribute to consolidating and widening our experience, the human experience. Hasn't the reader grown into accepting, for instance, that the natural world is penetrated by the supernatural, thanks to Achebe's ability to make us live (With the characters) the various stages of their cultural life?

Things Fall Apart, the title of which is an allusion to W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," is a novel in which Achebe is interested in analyzing the way things happen and in giving language to the Ibo experience. He offers a larger view of history and of individual life:

The novel, therefore, celebrates stability in human affairs despite its apparent "anarchy" (to use a word from Yeats's poem).Ibo culture, even while changing, is very much alive. Despite the tragic loss of Okonkwo, the society of the Ibos, because of its flexibility, survives. Despite the loss, "the center holds."

Source: Ndiawar Sarr, "The Center Holds' The Resilience of Ibo Culture in Things Fall Apart," in Global Perspectives on Teaching Literature. Shared Visions and Distinctive Visions, Sandra Ward Lott, Maureen S G. Hawkins, Norman McMillan, eds., National Council of Teachers of English, 1993, pp. 347-55.