On Reading What You Once Blew Off: Part One
Here’s the least-shocking confession of the century: I didn’t always read what my former English teachers and professors assigned.
Like most students, I was busy and didn’t know how to properly manage my time. But there were also occasions — again, like most students — where I’d decided I’d rather hang out with friends than do the reading. So that means I’d turn to online summaries or skim the novel or sometimes even use the comments people made in class as the basis of my arguments.
I regret doing it. And since I finished my time as an undergraduate, I’ve grown in my identity as both a writer and an aficionado of literature. That’s why I figured I’d revisit a few books and see how I responded to them, especially because I could now read them for their own sake, rather than for the sake of completing an assignment.
I’ve caught up on a lot of books since my high school and undergraduate days — I was far more serious in graduate school — but for the sake of this essay, I’ll focus on one: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Things Fall Apart was something I was supposed to read in the post-colonial literature course I took my senior year of college. I read a few pages and stopped. It was March or April, and I had a major case of senioritis.
In a way, I’m glad I waited until now, because I think if I’d read in when I was supposed to, I would have missed the novel’s richness. I would have focused solely on its post-colonial aspects, cramming anything else I’d noticed through that narrow lens. And Things Fall Apart is far, far more than some polemical essay or pamphlet.
In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe has given us a classic study in what happens when the powerful and arrogant fall from grace. Okonkwo, the lead character, is, to put it kindly, not a pleasant person. He’s domineering toward his family, abusive toward his wives, and he generally basks in the status he has in his village. He’s cocky, because he’s been riding high for a long, long time. He’s not much different than the characters you’d find in classical epic poetry, a genre Things Fall Apart resembles.
Its genius is that we don’t see Okonkwo fighting some powerful presence or going to war, as we would in other epics. Instead, his entire world slowly collapses around him. Accidents of everyday life demote him from his once-exalted status. He becomes an exile.
In this, too, is a kind of realism. We see farmers and families and workers. They chat about everyday life; they complain about each other. That’s why we can safely argue that reading Things Fall Apart through a post-colonial lens would actually limit it — especially since the colonizers show up only in the final part of the novel. They’re one of the many nails slammed into Okonkwo’s coffin. That’s why reading it through a post-colonial lens, a style of criticism that includes a study of Western colonial abuses, would prevent you from seeing the novel as it is. There are post-colonial elements there, sure. But you’d be mistaking a tree or two for an entire forest. You’d be doing something contrary to Achebe’s project, which was to write a truly Igbo, Nigerian, and African story, free from the influence of Western busybodies.
And Things Fall Apart is a truly Igbo and Nigerian novel. We’re witnessing Achebe, in his cool and clean prose, tell us about a great Igbo figure as we would have met him before this part of the African continent was colonized and before it became anything like Nigeria. It’s a stunning piece of literature.
