Reading Chinua Achebe Part 2: Community College

Posted by Sharif S on Mar 27, 2013 in Blog Ends, Writing | 0 comments

(For part one click here)

I was taking a cultural anthropology class where we had to read an ethnography as one of our final assignments.  I read Tales of the Shaman’s Apprentice by Mark Plotkin which is another book in the “which books had a profound impact on you.”

However, when we gave our presentations someone did her presentation on Things Fall Apart which is a book of fiction.  I was kind of upset that I had missed a chance to do a lot less work and reread a book I already knew revisit this amazing text.

Despite my workload, I decided to reread the book anyway.  The book changed.  It became a real world example of how the facts of human nature I had learned from my anthropology class could directly apply to literature.  Now the book was about ethnocide, the loss of one’s culture, the power one’s culture has over our definition of self and over our aspirations, and finally how utterly lost and unstable one can become when all of this is taken away.  When conformity is demanded of a society’s behaviors, when a society’s ideologies are challenged and abandoned, and when this creates changes in that society’s economy and wealth, then what that can do to the individual.

The common reading of the end of Things Fall Apart is that Okonkwo is like Judas who hangs himself for being responsible for the death of Christ, represented by the Christian.  Usually an allusion makes someone evaluate the work through the context of an outside work.  Achebe’s allusion worked in both directions for me, since the typical way of reading this scene seemed not quite right.  I reevaluated Judas through the scope of Things Fall Apart just as much as I thought of Things Fall Apart through Judas.  Did Judas kill himself out of guilt? Or did he kill himself because there was a God who loved him and now he is dead?

In the end Okonkwo’s God is dead: his traditions, his worldview, and everything.  Okonkwo is treated well by the Igbo traditions and religion.  When he kills the Christian, there is the epiphany that the benevolent God is dead, except it isn’t through the death of the missionary, but through the reaction of the crowd.  Their inability to stand up for their way of life against a seemingly unstoppable force shows him that the gods have been acculturated to death.

It would be easy to say that Okonkwo was a victim of an evil, invasive culture, but Achebe didn’t seem to do this.  Things Fall Apart seems more descriptive than prescriptive.  Here are the things, sometimes they are fortunate and sometimes they aren’t.  He could have ignored the mutilation of stillborn babies or the throwing away of twins in the Evil Forest.  But the Igbo traditions, like all traditions, have an aspect of oppression as well as liberation; it depends upon who one is and the circumstances.  This is definitely a theme to Things Fall Apart (hear that high schoolers Googling for cheats on your homework?).

With this theme, I learned Cultural Relativism can actually help create a greater and more complex plot, world, and characters.  I learned a writer has more power being an anthropologist than being a nagging parent demanding the world to conform and behave.  On top of that simply describing a world using your world view, people can’t help but see the same flaws you do.

(Click for part 3)