Things Fall Apart

Reflections on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I. Summary

“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (3), the opening line of Chinua Achebe’s widely acclaimed and studied novel, establishes a certain status and prestige that the author allows to be picked apart piece by piece, layer by layer, with each chapter.

Things Fall Apart is set and remains almost entirely in the village of Umuofia, an intimate setting for a story that seems to be invaded by the topic of colonization and imperialism. In the first few chapters, Achebe introduces Okonkwo, his father Unoka (a dead failure), and first problem, Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is a boy from the neighboring village of Mbaino. He is traded to Umuofia in an exchange for peace between the two villages, which are on the brink of war due to a Mbaino man’s murdering a woman of Umuofia. The elders of Umuofia put Ikemefuna in Okonkwo’s charge. Ikemefuna becomes like a son to Okonkwo, but when the elders, after three years, decide that the boy must die, Okonkwo, despite an intimate warning from the elder Ezeudu, joins the party and kills Ikemefuna with his own hands.

 The body of Things Fall Apart exposes the reader to multiple snapshots of life in Umuofia and Okonkwo’s compound. There is the extended episode of Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s wife, and their daughter, Enzinma, the strangest part of which is when Ezinma identifies the location of her iyi-uwa, a stone that her spirit supposedly buried deep in the earth. The medicine man hired to find this stone indeed finds a relic where Ezinma tells him to dig, and there is no logical explanation for the coincidence. While other scenes of Umuofia’s customs and rituals could easily be dismissed as barbaric by the western reader, the episode with Ezinma insists on the legitimacy of the village culture. Like the other events of the story, Achebe lets it speak for itself, offering no explanation, commentary, or judgment.

At the end of Part I, Okonkwo accidentally kills a member of the village when his gun misfires, forcing him to take his family and move to the village of his mother’s family, Mbanta, where they live in exile for seven years. While in exile, Obierika, Okonkwo’s best friend, brings him news that white men have come to the villages and that one village, Abame, has been annihilated (by the white men).

At the beginning of Part III, Okonkwo returns to Umuofia after his seven years in exile, but he returns to a village that has allowed a white, Anglican missionary, Mr. Brown, to infiltrate its land and begin a parish. Each day, it seems, Mr. Brown attracts more and more converts to Christianity, one of whom is Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son. Over time, the growing parish becomes a parish and a government, and the caring, tolerant Mr. Brown is replaced by the orthodox, unyielding Mr. Smith. Through a series of unfortunate events, the masked spirits of Umuofia burn down Mr. Smith’s church, resulting in the imprisonment of Okonkwo and many men of the nine villages of Umuofia.

After the British officials release Okonkwo and the others, Umuofia calls a general meeting to decide whether or not to go to war with the white men, but a British official shows up, demanding the meeting disband. Okonkwo decapitates the messenger with two blows of his machete, and when the village responds with panic instead of unified action, he hangs himself from a tree.

II. Response

This was my third time reading Things Fall Apart. I read and reread it for a class entitled “Writing and Ideology” in the English literature department at the University of Glasgow, and then I read as a student. This time I read as a teacher – or tried to – but informed by the scholarship I practiced at Glasgow.

Even upon my third reading, I found myself looking for some sort of judgment, some explicit bias on Achebe’s part. What I found, yet again, was the reality that Achebe does not present the British arrival in Umuofia as the sole catalyst for Okonkwo’s death and Umuofia’s implied downfall. With each reading I am struck by the speech Uchendu, Okonkwo’s uncle, makes during the feast Okonkwo throws in his last days in Mbanta, in which he says outright, “’I fear for you young people because you do not understand the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice” (167). Throughout the entire story, Okonkwo and others make reference to the lethargy of the younger generations, who ultimately prove themselves unable to maintain the stability of Umuofia’s culture within the increasingly tumultuous “widening gyre” that is their world-view.

This was the first book I studied that demonstrated to be the power of presenting events as they are, and letting the reader pass judgment on them. There is no description for the grotesqueness of the District Commissioner’s final lines, the title of his book, “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger,” but the effect is achieved by the realities Achebe presents in the book, not by some external, irrational appeal to the reader’s emotion. Even that final move is Achebe’s way of balancing the scales. He would be historically inaccurate to present a Nigerian victory over the English, but the title of the commissioner’s book, word for word, forces the reader to reflect on “the tribes of the lower Niger”: Were they primitive? Were they pacified? Things Fall Apart insists on reflection, on looking backward while being inescapably pulled toward the historical conclusion of the story.

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Things Fall Apart is steeped in a great deal of historical controversy that in inextricably linked to the narrative itself. I would be unable to differentiate between formalist close reading and New Historicist cultural criticism when studying TFA on any sort of large scale, like the scale on which it would likely be taught at the high school level, rather generally. The fact that Achebe wrote in English places the book in a precarious place in the context of post-colonial literature and criticism. Does Achebe’s writing in English undermine the anti-imperialist sentiment which is attributed to the story? And one cannot ignore TFA’s historical connection to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Achebe himself says that his novel is a direct response to Conrad’s novel, his way of giving a voice to the savages that are silent at the end of Conrad’s story. But Achebe’s work could hardly be classified as reactionary, and he cannot escape his upbringing, his education in a British school system, and his consequent capability to read and understand Heart of Darkness. Disputes over Achebe’s work walk the line between complicity and rebellion.

Of course, imperialism in British literature does not begin with Africa or India. Centuries before Achebe wrote, Sir Walter Scott wrote Waverley, a novel about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, which in vastly overgeneralized terms was a Scottish uprising against the British. Waverley, and much of Scott’s writing, despite its reverence for tradition, ultimately accepts the reality of change, and, one could argue, supports modernization. Achebe, in the most subtle of ways, is thought to break that model, but that would be a good discussion for students to have.

IV. Teaching and Learning

In Critical Encounters in High School English, Deborah Appleman says, “To broaden their sphere of understanding in addressing social issues, [students need] to think of themselves as public individuals as well [as unique individuals]” (91). Scaffolding that connection to students will be difficult on multiple levels, but I believe that is the fundamental challenge that faces teachers of postcolonial literature, a challenge that is especially difficult in teaching Things Fall Apart in an American classroom because there are no Americans in Achebe’s novel. Step one of teaching TFA would be to include historical and literary scaffolds for communicating why Things Fall Apart is relevant in an American classroom and not a just a British classroom. Poems, for example, that tell of the American imperial experience would be useful. White, upper-middle class students, especially boys and young men, need to see themselves in Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith and the District Commissioner, and they can only see that if they can extrapolate themselves to a collective. The ridiculousness of white guilt is that most of us are not personally responsible for the slavery and oppression that ravages the history of the west. But individual students must recognize that they are part of a culture that has been and still is oppressive of other cultures because knowledge of their complicity alone will help them see beyond that culture.

The complexity that I am struggling with trying to hypothesize how I might teach TFA and the postcolonial lens is one that I think my students would struggle with: the struggle to see themselves and others as cultural groups and to do so by recognizing the dignity and humanity of other cultures, which can only be done through profoundly individual narratives. Things Fall Apart is about Nigeria and the British Empire, but the story comes down to Okonkwo: “This man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself, and how he will be buried like a dog…” (208).

To begin teaching TFA, I would start with a modified transactional reader response, and I would ask students to focus on their expectations of the book and the many different ways the experiences within the book will be different from their own. Then students would identify the textual elements of the book, and I will be very curious to see what they identify, especially on the levels of language and writing. When I first read TFA, I did not pick up on the awkwardness of the language to my American ear. Only upon studying the text and rereading it did I realize the unique rhythms of a writer whose first language was Igbo, not English. After having students think about the context in which they were reading the story, I would turn their attention to the final step, the meaning statement. Rather, I would set up the assignment, graphic organizer, or other vehicle in such a way that students expected to write a meaning statement. But as they went to move on, I would interrupt them: “Woah! Hold up! Why are you writing meaning statements? What makes you think you have the right to write a meaning statement for this story?” Writing a meaning statement would be delayed until the book is finished and would somehow become incorporated into their final project. However, by this point, the focus of students learning would not be on the meaning statement itself, but on why they are allowed and should and need to write one. That will be their justification and their transfer.