50byPOC: Number 2 - Things Fall Apart
#2 on my 50books_poc reading list - which is still developing, so please be dropping suggestions in the comments on that post - is Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
I really wanted to like this book. I had heard great things about this book, and the wide popularity of it as a book for high school students to learn in the classroom gave me a lot of hope too. But I came out of this book with extremely mixed feelings about it.
I can see why this book is popular. It presents tribal life in a much richer, more human fashion than many of the books I remember reading growing up, which othered the fuck out of anything that might could be called a tribe, or clan, or what have you. And it is an interesting story; it was not lack of interest that led me to be so ambivalent about the book.
If I don't like your main character, it's not necessarily the death knell for me liking your book. But if I don't like them, and also don't find them fascinating? I'm going to spend my time disliking the person I'm supposed to follow because I'm not rooting for them, nor am I particularly arrested by reading about them.
Things Fall Apart is distinctly Okonkwo's story, and Okonkwo, for all that he recognizably has positive qualities, is greedy and arrogant and cruel and self-centered. And so much of his casual abuse is directed at women that I found it difficult at times to keep on. While this is consistent - that women get the short end in many different cultures is knownfax - that doesn't make it glorious, and it's so ubiquitous and unremarked-upon as to be troubling. Until the sequence with Ekwefi following the priestess carrying Ezinma, there's very cursory treatment of the female characters, to the point that they feel almost like ciphers - and even then, when it got around to the end of that sequence and Achebe seemed to be setting up some sort of explanation for why Ekwefi loved Okonkwo enough to leave her first husband for him, despite the former's temper and bearing, what he gave us was this:
"As they stood there together, Ekwefi's mind went back to the days when they were young. She had married Anene because Okonkwo was too poor then to marry. Two years after her marriage to Anene she could bear it no longer and she ran away to Okonkwo. It had been early in the morning. The moon was shining. She was going to the stream to fetch water. Okonkwo's house was on the way to the stream. She went in and knocked at his door and he came out. Even then he was not a man of many words. He just carried her into his bed and in the darkness began to feel around her waist for the loose end of her cloth."
That didn't necessarily satisfy me. I know much about how the men who were important in Okonkwo's life feel about him by the end of the book. I know little to nothing about how the wives feel. I know Ekwefi loves him - otherwise she wouldn't put up with his bullshit, she would run away, like another woman did in the book when her husband wouldn't stop beating her and things had become intolerable. What was it about him that made her marriage to Anene impossible? Was it young love? Did she still love him? I don't know. I couldn't tell.
I just don't know what to think about this book, is the puzzler. I certainly didn't root for the asshole white dudes who came in at the end and all the havoc they wreaked, but by then my sorrow was for everyone but Okonkwo, because the nicest thing I could say about him as a person was that he wasn't particularly stingy with his material possessions despite having such a great concern for accumulating wealth, titles, etc. While I felt sorry for him that he'd ended up losing everything that mattered to him, I still found him to be mostly a repugnant character, to the point that it marred the enjoyment of the book for me. So, yeah.
I'd like to see a teacher's syllabus or two that included this book, though, to see how it's taught in a classroom, and what themes/ideas teachers attempt to elicit out of their students who read it.
F-list, have you read this book? Did I miss something? What did you think?
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. 0-385-47454-7.
Next up: probably Feminism is For Everyone by bell hooks, unless my Package of Delight mentioned in my first review gets here first.
I really wanted to like this book. I had heard great things about this book, and the wide popularity of it as a book for high school students to learn in the classroom gave me a lot of hope too. But I came out of this book with extremely mixed feelings about it.
I can see why this book is popular. It presents tribal life in a much richer, more human fashion than many of the books I remember reading growing up, which othered the fuck out of anything that might could be called a tribe, or clan, or what have you. And it is an interesting story; it was not lack of interest that led me to be so ambivalent about the book.
If I don't like your main character, it's not necessarily the death knell for me liking your book. But if I don't like them, and also don't find them fascinating? I'm going to spend my time disliking the person I'm supposed to follow because I'm not rooting for them, nor am I particularly arrested by reading about them.
Things Fall Apart is distinctly Okonkwo's story, and Okonkwo, for all that he recognizably has positive qualities, is greedy and arrogant and cruel and self-centered. And so much of his casual abuse is directed at women that I found it difficult at times to keep on. While this is consistent - that women get the short end in many different cultures is knownfax - that doesn't make it glorious, and it's so ubiquitous and unremarked-upon as to be troubling. Until the sequence with Ekwefi following the priestess carrying Ezinma, there's very cursory treatment of the female characters, to the point that they feel almost like ciphers - and even then, when it got around to the end of that sequence and Achebe seemed to be setting up some sort of explanation for why Ekwefi loved Okonkwo enough to leave her first husband for him, despite the former's temper and bearing, what he gave us was this:
"As they stood there together, Ekwefi's mind went back to the days when they were young. She had married Anene because Okonkwo was too poor then to marry. Two years after her marriage to Anene she could bear it no longer and she ran away to Okonkwo. It had been early in the morning. The moon was shining. She was going to the stream to fetch water. Okonkwo's house was on the way to the stream. She went in and knocked at his door and he came out. Even then he was not a man of many words. He just carried her into his bed and in the darkness began to feel around her waist for the loose end of her cloth."
That didn't necessarily satisfy me. I know much about how the men who were important in Okonkwo's life feel about him by the end of the book. I know little to nothing about how the wives feel. I know Ekwefi loves him - otherwise she wouldn't put up with his bullshit, she would run away, like another woman did in the book when her husband wouldn't stop beating her and things had become intolerable. What was it about him that made her marriage to Anene impossible? Was it young love? Did she still love him? I don't know. I couldn't tell.
I just don't know what to think about this book, is the puzzler. I certainly didn't root for the asshole white dudes who came in at the end and all the havoc they wreaked, but by then my sorrow was for everyone but Okonkwo, because the nicest thing I could say about him as a person was that he wasn't particularly stingy with his material possessions despite having such a great concern for accumulating wealth, titles, etc. While I felt sorry for him that he'd ended up losing everything that mattered to him, I still found him to be mostly a repugnant character, to the point that it marred the enjoyment of the book for me. So, yeah.
I'd like to see a teacher's syllabus or two that included this book, though, to see how it's taught in a classroom, and what themes/ideas teachers attempt to elicit out of their students who read it.
F-list, have you read this book? Did I miss something? What did you think?
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. 0-385-47454-7.
Next up: probably Feminism is For Everyone by bell hooks, unless my Package of Delight mentioned in my first review gets here first.