The centre cannot hold
For the Africa Reading Challenge.
This novel was first published fifty years ago this year. Spoilers may occur in what you read next.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
I can’t remember when I first heard about Things Fall Apart, but it seems that I’ve known of it for my entire adult life. Known of it and avoided reading it. The descriptions of it made me sure that it would be both painfully didactic and painfully guilt-inducing (for example, from the preface to the edition I read: "Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe portrays a stunning moment in African history - the imposition of colonial rule - with sympathy and dignity, focusing on the complexity and integrity of precolonial Igbo life, and the turmoil resulting from British rule."). Ouch. To me, that sounds tedious. Tedious, and perhaps also uplifting in that sort of way that I detest, the way where the author imposes their voice and their moral universe in such a way that I am left complicit in everything bad in the world that the author condemns.
Well, okay, Things Fall Apart is not that book. I hope I can talk about what I found so amazing about in such a way that you can understand my enjoyment of it.
Part of the thing that Achebe does in such an interesting way is that he really erases himself as the author until the final chapter. There is no Achebe obviously present in the voice telling the story, if that makes any sense. The language is plain and unadorned - lapidary, as one of my English professors calls it - and reminded me very much of the stylized language in which folktales are told. This gives it an interestingly ahistorical quality, particularly in the first part of the novel, which is about traditional ways of life in one Igbo village.
Achebe builds a character study to anchor this plainly-told story, and the complexity of the character who crashes into the historical calamity of European invasion is what is so extraordinary about this novel. Underlying this are complicated allusions both to Christian imagery and to Igbo oral tradition that show the ways that communal meaning is made and re-made in the face of sudden, devastating change.
The main character of Things Fall Apart is Okonkwo, a proud, angry man who has built a prosperous life for himself to prove to his clan that he is nothing like his lazy, good-for-nothing father. Okonkwo’s tragic flaw is that he will do anything rather than be perceived as weak, which is his greatest fear. Even without the advent of Christian missionaries and colonial administration, his was a personality that was destined for a tragic ending, because he was so blind to his own limitations. But he is compelling, because he isn’t just a two-dimensional bully. There are moments of tenderness that he shows one of his daughters, and he seems to love his wives, in his own way, and he is very responsible towards his entire family. He also has a deep love of his way of life, the traditions and practices that have helped make him who he is. Okonkwo has his ideas about how the way the world is supposed to work, and anyone who disappoints him or doesn’t behave according to his expectations drives him into a rage. The frustration with the failure of others to do what they "should" makes him very inflexible just when it's likely to be most damaging to him.
So there’s an interesting combination of the inevitability of Greek tragedy going on, based on this tragically-flawed character, along with the storyteller’s voice that tells Okonkwo’s story with the same straightforwardness as it tells the story of the time that turtle learned to fly. This is a story about colonialism, yes, but it’s also about the inevitability of heartbreak, situated at a specific time and place that is gone forever. There is no going back to a pre-colonial consciousness, but Achebe invokes it in a way that lets the reader know some of the cost (and arguably, some of the benefit) of its vanishing.
Ugh. I'm sort of embarrassed by how poorly this is written. Perhaps I will come back to it later after I've thought about the novel some more, but I wanted to get my first thoughts down. I guess part of what I'm struggling with is the so-called universality of the story told. I have issues with the idea that there is some overriding "human nature" that means we are all more or less alike under the skin, throughout history, now and forever amen. And I don't think Achebe is making that claim. But by making Okonkwo someone who is both so easy to identify and to identify with, Achebe makes it too simple to fall into the trap of thinking "He is just like 'us'," where "us" is the dominant white culture/point of view/whatever you want to call it. It really bugs me that the greatest strength of the novel is also it's greatest weakness: "Hey, he's just like a (white) guy I know." Okonkwo is Okonkwo.