Book Review: Things Fall Apart(1958) by Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a postcolonial novel, written at the time of the Nigerian nationalistic movement, that continues to hold a prominent place in the study of African literature. Set during the beginning of the colonial era in Nigeria, the text counters the Eurocentric perspective and offers an insider point of view to chronicle the history of the Igbo community. Without indulging in the romanticization of the African past, the author puts forth a nuanced description of the indigenous culture in its originality and nativity. Achebe presents the struggles on the part of the protagonist, Okonkwo, to maintain the cultural integrity of his community when faced with colonial invasion. Since its publication in 1958, the novel has come to shape the postcolonial literary sensibility and has paved the way for a new kind of literature in English, one that includes African oral traditions, such as anecdotes, folktales, myths, narrative proverbs, and more.
Edward Said in his work Orientalism, argues that Orientalist discourse uses the Orient as a foil and a means to represent the Occident as superior. This kind of polarised representation of the East and the West helped the colonizer to establish not just their political, technological, economic, and military control but also and much more importantly, intellectual. This intellectual control usually termed as “cultural imperialism” focused more on psychology, and served to further entrench and sustain the colonial project by extending its hegemonizing powers to capture the minds of people, even after they were politically decolonized. Achebe, focuses more on this ‘intellectual’ dimension of colonialism, through recording the psychological submission of the mind of the Igbo community during the imposition of colonial rule. The idea of consequent disintegration of the centre vis-à-vis the social, cultural, and personal realms lies at the root of the text.
The epigraph echoes W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, foreshadowing ideas of impending anarchy and the centre losing its hold. The invoked imagery of the ‘widening gyre’ works in tandem with the imposition of colonial rule, bound to bring a cataclysmic change, owing to which “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”, where the falcon perhaps represents the cultural integrity, which is being drowned gradually since the falconer, the man in command (Okonkwo), is no longer able to control the falconer. In the text, Okonkwo’s warrior-like powers, which made him the centre of his fatherland Umuofia, collapse once he is transferred to his maternal village for his “inadvertent” crime. His disintegration bears a close relationship with the fall of the Igbo community, built on rigid belief systems struggling to contain its culture in the face of the unforeseen dangers posed by the encroaching colonizers and their despotic authoritarian attempt to convert the natives, eventually disintegrating. Eustace Palmer, one of the most renowned critics of African literature, goes as far as to comment that “Okonkwo is the personification of his society’s values”.
The text reveals the growing ascendancy of the western administration’s invasion through its intellectualism, economics, and ideas of individualism in a traditional African setting that leads to a restructuring of the foundations on which the Igbo society was built. The introduction of a school, commercial store, and an administrative centre, including the church in the Umuofian landscape served as hegemonic tools that initiated the overall reconstruction that engulfed the Igbo society eventually. The intrinsic tension between African traditions and Eurocentric modernity is evident in many clashes between the two parties. The Christian missionaries encountered the religion-bound society, where each person had a personal god (chi), head-on through their new concept of God, while they convinced the natives that they worshipped “false gods, gods of wood and stone”, inculcating the idea of paganism in their religion. The first to be converted were the outcasts, women who bore twins, and people without titles- groups seen as abominations by the clan. Achebe, through this instance, portrays the psychological play of identity crisis of these groups that made their conversion both, an instrument to gain an identity as well as a challenge to their indigenous people, reflecting how even though the Igbo society was welcoming, there was a sense of inflexibility that defied reason and logic, which aided in its destruction. The many tactics worked well in favour of the white government, ripping apart the longstanding African norms of conduct and institutions of governance, turning the Igbo people against each other, in the otherwise united community. Best summed up in Obrieka’s statement, “How do you think we can fight when our brothers have turned against us?”. Okonkwo’s suicide, in the end, becomes what Donald Cook says, “a gesture of stubborn defiant opposition to the calculated degradation of a great tradition”.
Things Fall Apart displays the attempt on Achebe’s part to understand the origin of the ‘culture crisis’ that was a consequence of colonialism. In his book Morning Yet on Creation Days (1975), Achebe asserts the need to “look back and try and find out what went wrong, where the rain started to beat us”. Located at the point of transition between indigenous culture to capitalist colonialism, the text foregrounds the Igbo community at the threshold of socio-political and cultural reconstructions. Here, he writes,
“The white man…came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
Written by Mahima Sharma for Decoloniszation, the first issue of The Zing. Mahima is a recent English graduate from the University of Delhi. Her interests lie in exploring issues of gender & sexuality, freedom of speech, human behavior, and society.
