In the old dispensation
For the Africa Reading Challenge.
This novel has been in print longer than I have been alive. Expect to be spoiled accordingly.
No Longer at Ease, by Chinua Achebe
This book was not originally on my list for the Africa Reading Challenge, but after reading Things Fall Apart, I was interested in finding out what happened in the next part of the story of Okonkwo’s family. As I understand it (and am too lazy to look up and confirm), Achebe originally wrote the two stories as one to trace the impact of colonization of Nigeria across generations. In the end, he broke the story in two. In some ways, I think it makes his points more powerful, but it has also left No Longer at Ease much more the neglected story of the two, which is unfortunate. The contrast between the two highlights Achebe’s skill as a writer and shows that the “primitive” elements in the storytelling in Things Fall Apart that I wrote about before are, in fact, all deliberate and extremely artful.
As I mentioned before, Things Fall Apart is very much in the mode of classical tragedy. Achebe makes this clear in No Longer at Ease:
“You say you’re a great admirer of Graham Greene. What do you think of The Heart of the Matter?”
“The only sensible novel any European has written on West Africa and one of the best novels I
have read.” Obi paused, and then added almost as an afterthought: “Only it was nearly ruined by
the happy ending.”
The Chairman sat up in his chair.
“Happy ending? Are you sure it’s The Heart of the Matter you’re thinking about? The European
police officer commits suicide.”
“Perhaps happy ending is too strong, but there is no other way I can put it. The police officer
is torn between his love of a woman and his love of God, and he commits suicide. It’s much too
simple. Tragedy isn’t like that at all. I remember an old man in my village, a Christian convert,
who suffered one calamity after another. He said life was like a bowl of wormwood which one sips
a little at a time world without end. He understood the nature of tragedy.”
“You think that suicide ruins a tragedy,” said the Chairman.
“Yes. Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is
too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a
corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden. The rest of the world is unaware of it. Like
that man in A Handful of Dust who reads Dickens to Mr. Todd. There is no release for
him. When the story ends, he is still reading. There is no purging of the emotions for us
because we are not there.”
Given that Things Fall Apart ends with Okonkwo’s suicide (and I definitely experienced that purging of emotions that Obi describes), it’s a pretty good guess after this passage that his grandson’s story will end in the vein of a modern tragedy, just like the man reading Dickens to Mr. Todd. Given what we know about the course of colonialism, it’s hard to imagine what a happy ending might be, in any case, but Achebe draws an interesting distinction between the damage done to individuals as they negotiate old, traditional ways of life, whether they refuse to accommodate them or not, and the damage done to individuals who have become at least partially divorced from the old ways and embedded in - indicted by - the news ways of the colonizer.
The old ways never quite go away, and that’s part of the tragic nature of Obi’s story. The woman he falls in love with is osu, which means that she bears a generational mark of uncleanness. For him to marry her would condemn both him and their children to being outcasts as well. When he tries to marry her anyway, the results are disastrous. Even his father, a staunch convert to Christianity - which was that character’s way of rebelling against Okonkwo’s autocratic demands of him in Things Fall Apart - still believes that osu are cursed. As much as he rejects the old ways in his embrace of Christianity, there are some lines he will not cross, because he still believes in their truth.
So Obi is trapped in a world with very little flexibility, just as his forebears had been. He is caught between the responsibilities the old ways bring him after his education in England and the stultifying bureaucratic life as a member of a government agency that his education has prepared him for. His boss has no respect for Africans and says incredibly insulting things to his face. People try to bribe him and continuously touch him for loans. The money economy is, in great part, the modern, colonial force that combines with the inflexibility of the old traditions to destroy him.
However, Obi is not innocent in his downfall. Like his grandfather, Okonkwo, he is willful and proud. His grandfather had a meaningful place in the old world and destroyed himself once it started to change. Obi is out of place in both the old and the new, and is unwilling to bend or to compromise once he decides what he is going to do. When his engagement to the osu girl ends, he begins to break. He begins to do things that he told himself he would never do, and thus begins the betrayal of the bright promise of his future. The tragedy is a whimper, not a bang - modern, not classical - because Obi is just another cog in the colonial machine.
I sort of wonder whether the enduring popularity of Things Fall Apart and the neglect of No Longer At Ease doesn’t reflect some deep-seated need for primitivism that still resides in the “Western” reader, a need to conform just how foreign/Other Africans were prior to colonization (as well as the biting truth that can be made in any critique of colonial rule). Okonkwo’s death at the end of Things Fall Apart represents the end of a way of life that can no longer be sustained, and it makes him tragically heroic in a way that Obi Okonkwo’s fall does not. His tragedy is banal, just like everybody else’s these days.