African Literature Book Club: Review of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
For our 5th book review, we tackled Things Fall Apart (Pocket Penguin Classics)
Present: Aminata, Alice, Sibusiso, Elizabeth and Tope.
Things Fall Apart revisited
Alice: Penguin were going to send us another book for this series but it wasn’t available for the UK so they offered us Things Fall Apart as an alternative. I agreed because it is a classic. And I love it just as much as I did when I first read it 15 years ago.
Sibusiso: It didn’t work for me; I think maybe I had huge expectations. You know Chinua Achebe “the father of African literature”. Perhaps I over romanticised it and so it didn’t work for me. But I respect the book in terms of what it achieved but I’ll be interested to see how Chinua Achebe’s writing has developed.
Elizabeth: I felt like that the first time I read Things Fall Apart, and maybe it was just because I really did not like Okonkwo (the novel’s protagonist) and I think I missed a lot of the nuance. But now with all the other novels I’ve read in this series I can really appreciate how well this story is told.
Aminata: I found it very powerful: through one character and his life Achebe manages to tell us a lot about Nigerian history. He shows how easy it is for a group to come in and divide and conquer. It’s definitely a book that I would read again to pick up on the small details I may have missed.
Tope: I got what I expected from it and I mean to go read the follow up novels (No Longer at Ease / Arrow of God). I love it.
Where Things Fall Apart falters
Sibusiso: The proverbs, the irony of conversation, the stereotype romanticism of being “poor but happy” in the storytelling – It just didn’t work for me. I wish we had gotten to see some of the elders’ flaws: it would have been more realistic. I would like to have seen a bit more darkness. Compared to more contemporary African authors or someone like Wole Soyinka there wasn’t enough there.
Tope: [to Sibusiso] I understand what you are saying about the changes from when this was written and how it would perhaps be written by a contemporary author today. For example if Toni Morrison had written this you know you would have been in tears. She would have gotten to the bitterness of their everyday life and the new bitterness of colonialism, whereas Chinua Achebe glossed over all the whippings and the struggles…
Sibusiso: Yeah, I feel he needed to go there.
Tope: But then again the book isn’t about that, it is about African pride. The story is focused on Okonkwo, the protagonist. Iit’s not about colonisation which only takes up about one third of the book.
Achebe tells us how colonisation went down
Alice: You always kind of wonder how it was that Africans let down all their guards and traditions and embraced something so foreign [as Christianity]. The way the story is told in history books is that colonisers bought the natives with trinkets, and guns. But in this book it shows that people went to Christianity to escape the oppression of tradition.
Elizabeth: Definitely, the stories of Christianity are what they used to get people on their side, they used it to divide and conquer.
Aminata: There was inequality and unfairness in Okonkwo’s village. The missionaries used that to lure them into embracing Christianity. If you’re an Ozu [a person without a title] then why would you stay in a tradition that sees you as worthless? Like the woman who is forced to abandon her twins – why wouldn’t she join a religion that allows her to keep her children? It is possible to attract people without force or bribery, just by giving them more freedom.
The ending *SPOILERS*
Alice: The ending is a bit the same as in Weep not Child: the main character tries to commit suicide. But Okonkwo succeeds whereas in Weep Not child the main character fails. I thought both characters acted in a very cowardly way.
Aminata: I thought Okonkwo’s suicide was a form of resistance. He knew the white people would come for him and he thought “I’ll kill myself before I let you kill me”.
Elizabeth: I agree that his suicide was “they’ll never take me alive” Okonkwo is a control freak until the end.
Tope: No, I think Okonkwo gave up; he reached the end of his tether. I think he thought it would be better to die in the evil forest than to be buried amongst his clansmen. You know at the end there were so many sentences about “they are behaving like women” when he committed suicide he couldn’t stand the thought of living or dying remembered by such a weak clan.
Alice: There is something so mythical about this story, like a greek tragedy, or something from Shakespeare.
Elizabeth: You could compare it to Othello! Only with Okonkwo it is mostly internal, you have his kinsmen directly telling him “you don’t have to do this to prove yourself”, but he always has to be the one controlling the situation. Whereas with Othello even though he is paranoid as a black soldier in all white Venetian society, Iago is the one playing on his paranoia.
What makes Things Fall Apart the quintessential African Novel?
Ami: It has everything on the list we made: family, politics, education a sense of duty from Achebe, the proverbs, and mostly being as far away from Alexander McCall Smith as possible!
The next big story after Things Fall Apart is AFTER THE JUJU MAN, the tragedy of Okafor, a village palm wine tapper, who fell from a palm tree and fractured his leg. Relations carried him miles away, to the home of a witchdoctor, or “Juju-man”. According to some people, this wise and grey-haired old man had mystical powers. After greetings, gifts were presented. The Juju-man examined the injured man, invoked the gods of the land and poured a libation. Then he caught a cock and broke one of its legs and said to Okafor: “The day you see this cock walk, you will walk.” http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/after-the-juju-man-chinwuba-iyizoba/1032929937
I think Chinua Achebe has tried to show us that this is a patriachal society as depicted by the main character Okonkwo who does not regard women as equal participants as men. He does not involve his wives in his decision making. For example when the lad Ikimefuna is brought in his home and his elder wife asks him for how long he will stay, he tells her “woman when did you start quedstioning the ways of chic?”