Achebe and Me
How “Things Fall Apart” Taught Me to Love My Father Again
By the time I was enrolled in my high school senior year classes, I hated my father. I hated him for having his psychosis. I hated him because he had told us all that he was dying of cancer, when in truth he wasn’t.
I didn’t understand until my first psychosis at age 19 what it was like to believe full tilt your own delusions. But, at 17, I still didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. I wanted to be filled with rage and disillusionment for the spent tears of grief that were wasted.
It went so far that I stopped talking to him, stopped visiting him except for during Thanksgiving or Christmas. Every time I would visit, I’d be near silent, for I had nothing to say to him worth my time. Or, so I thought. Even after his suicide attempt, my anger was unabated.
My father has suffered from mental health issues for his whole life, but they worsened considerably upon the death of his mother, only a few months after I was born. It led to the dissolution of my parent’s marriage. He could hardly keep a job beyond a few months. He had to get back together with his first wife, my stepmother in order to be supported.
He was in the eyes of society, my mother’s side of the family, and in my eyes as a teenager, quickly becoming a man, weak. It didn’t matter that he had served in the Marine Corps and seen action, what mattered is that he had become some sort of neutered house husband from the time he was forty on.
In my senior year literature course, we were assigned a book that most of my peers hated, but I fell in love with, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I fell in love with it for the reason that I felt that Achebe really understood my struggle.
The main character, Okonkwo has a father that is an alcoholic, a musician, a man who is viewed by his tribe as weak, insufficient of the mantle of manhood. Okonkwo’s hatred of his father and the fear of looking insufficient as a man was his tragic flaw. It was my tragic flaw too.
This passage in particular spelled out to me my fate if I continued to live in the shadow of fear of ending up like my father,
“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.”
Did I still harbor negative feelings towards my father? Yes and I would for years to come, but to be heard by someone as different in circumstances from me as Achebe was life changing. It planted the seed of reconciliation that I needed to nurture in my heart. It meant that I was on the path to recovery.
I am now the perfect embodiment of what I feared becoming in high school. I am disabled and unable to keep a job due to my schizoaffective and bipolar disorders and I am supported by others financially while I am trying to get government assistance, or make it as a writer, whichever comes first.
That being said, I do not fear myself anymore, like I did in my early twenties when I was first diagnosed.
I no longer am full of self-hatred for becoming just like my father. I am proud to be like my father, for he is full of love and compassion and empathy in a way that I would be remiss to not try and emulate.
He was always there for me in childhood, that is why it stung so bad when during my teenage years he became something that neither he nor I recognized.
My father and I are on solid, positive terms now. We share our experiences and our struggles together. He is one of the few people I know who truly gets what it is like to have your mind shatter and be left to pick up the pieces.
It’s terrifying to feel like you’re never going to get back to baseline again. I know what it’s like, so I empathize with my father and his past struggles and am able to love, unlike Okonkwo, who’s tragic flaw ended up getting the best of him in the end. That is the power of literature and part of why I know that I must write. I must craft stories and pieces that speak to those who have not heard their voice represented thus far. I must or else, what was the point of all that struggling? If I can help someone feel less alone in their life with my words, then that is a life worth lived.
