Things Fall Apart

Review

Though his prose comes off as deceptively simple with its shorter, rhythmic sentence structure, Chinua Achebe packs his novel Things Fall Apart with heavy reflections on the frequent discrepancies between individuality and tribalism and the bloody confrontations between the traditional ways of life and the tantalizing offerings of the English colonists.

The novel chronicles the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a bitterly intense Ibo man whose “whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness” (13). He ruthlessly claws his way through life in order to escape association with a lazy, foolish father, but ultimately blinds himself to the quiet emotional toment his behavior imparts onto his wives and children. Okonkwo’s internal conflict revolves around devotion to his own single-minded goals and how they occasionally fall at odds with the protocols of his beloved tribe. Rather than finding himself empowered to strike a harmonious balance between the two, his mental state slowly and subtly unravels throughout the course of the novel.

Okonkwo’s cautionary story of how fear can swell to encompass and destroy one man is juxtaposed with turmoil between the Ibo and the English settlers who begin to trickle into Nigeria. With threatening religious credos and promises of opportunities abroad, they seduce the tribe’s youth population away from their families and upbringing, thus compromising its future stability and sustainability. It raises questions of the role colonialism plays in the lives it effects – are the educational and vocational benefits provided worth the degredation of an entire culture? Is the culture even being degraded, or is it evolving? Who dictates what way of life is truly best for a person?

Achebe’s writing style recalls traditional storytelling - as if he himself were sitting by a fire telling these tales to an enraptured audience. Scenes of egwugwu, or performers impersonating spirits of tribal ancestors, are infused with a hypnotic sense of magic realism that oftentimes obfuscates the terrestrial origins of the figures. Though all events in the novel could easily be replicated in reality, the characters float through their daily lives – as well as their not-so-daily struggles – in a hazy, beautiful cloud of earthy surrealism characteristic of traditional folk tales. His use of this particular narrative style metamorphoses the mundane into the realm of the mythic, adding real depth, texture, and pathos to Things Fall Apart.

Bibliographic Information

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Broadway Books, 1994.

Further Reading

It’s probably terribly and insultingly Euro/Amerocentric of me to lump in postcolonial African literature with Native American literature, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as I read Things Fall Apart. The plots may be very different, but both concern the same themes of forging an individualistic identity as a member of a tribal community as well as the place of the tribe in the world as a whole. They also explore the negative ways in which external influences from other cultures threaten their traditional lifestyles. Both Achebe and Silko accentuate their works by including folk tales from their respective cultures in order to honor their rich histories. They aren’t perfect parallels, but those interested in reading more about the themes presented would find something to enjoy in both works.

~Riot

[Diversity Rocks! Challenge Progress: 4/24]