Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

   

   Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian author and poet who is still alive today. Why is this useful to know? Well, it’s kind of an obvious question: if you see a question asking when Achebe wrote something, you’ll know it probably wasn’t more than 60 years ago. In fact, his most famous book was written just about that, in 1958, and deals with all of the subjects Achebe has achieved renown for: colonialism, the clashing of cultures, and the effects that Christianity had on African tradition.

    “Things Fall Apart” is easily Achebe’s best-known novel. Today, according to wikipedia, it’s the archetypal African novel, and is read throughout African schools as well as European and American ones. The novel is set in Nigeria, and it tells the story of Okonkwo, a powerful member of the Igbo, who live and love in Umuofia.

    The novel has been described as a “modern day tragedy,” and I found this line haunting me as I read. Ukonkwo is the son of a lazy farmer who never has enough yams to fill barns, and so Ukonkwo, and he grows and starts his own family, is determined to be different. A wrestling hero, Ukonkwo works night and day to support his hard-own wives and to build more barns for his ever growing supply of yams. For Ukonkwo, luck is something you create.

    Yet Ukonkwo meets trouble after trouble, despite his prosperity. For one thing, his son is a weakling. When Ukonkwo is made the caretaker of a boy from another village, given as a peace settlement, the two lads become too close for Ukonkwo’s comfort. He feels that his own son is like a girl -- like the wives that he beats regularliy -- while the boy from the other village, Ikemefuna, is a real man, and someone he can love. Thus the first tragedy comes when the village rulers in Umuofia decide that the peace settlement boy must die.

    Ukonkwo is torn between love, honor, and pride. For one thing, the boy loves and trusts him. How can he betray the boy by killing him? In point of fact, all of the villagers agree that Ukonkwo must not be at the death. But Ukonkwo feels that to shirk his duty is a shame. And so he goes, laying a trap for the young man who has come to love him: the memory of his father is too much for him, and so he kills the boy who could have been a son.

    This is the first of Ukonkwo’s troubles. After Ikemefuna’s murder, his own son turns away from him and becomes more ‘feminine’ than ever. Ukonkwo becomes more and more angry and drunken, until he accidentally kills someone in a ceremony and is forced to flee with his family, losing everything.

    When he returns to his village years later, he begins to rebuild and make himself rich once again. But things have change in Umuofia. For one thing, Christian Missionaries have come to descry his ‘pagan’ traditions -- the ones for which he has lost so much. Worse, Ukonkwo’s own son has converted. Determined to start an uprising against the white people, Ukonkwo is left alone by his own people, who are no longer convinced by the traditions he is so determined to uphold. And so, in the end, Ukonkwo gives in: he kills himself, betraying the very tradition he loves. For, to the Igbo, there is little as appalling as suicide.

        Maybe we all don’t need this huge summary, but I really loved this book. Sure, the colonialism and all that is interesting, but I really love the story of Father and Son, of Male and Female, of Self-Destruction based on Self-Protection. It is truly a story of tragedy. Take, for example, Ukonkwo’s daughter, Ezinma, who he loves because she understands him. He constantly wishes that she were a boy, because she would be the perfect boy -- and while this seems sexist to us, in a way, it also shows his love for her, because he knew that her life would be better as a man. Think, too, of the way in which Ukonkwo, determined to forever escape the shame of a father who did not live up to the tradition of the Igbo man as hard-working, impaled himself on his own dread of shame. Trying to escape the thing he feared the most, Ukonkwo could do nothing but kill himself with it.

         Ukonkwo, without knowing it, committed suicide long before he hung himself. In truth, he committed suicide in allowing himself to be ruled so much by his own dread of weakness that his life was an attempt at putting everyone else under his thumb.