Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

More waiting-room reading

Category: This is a bit lengthy. I first read this book in 12th grade AP English. See, our teacher assigned my class this book after we had taken the AP exam. We expected to basically do nothing in AP English after the exam (because part of the point of the class was getting ready for the exam). So we were not at all enthused at being assigned a book after the exam was over and during our final weeks of high school. Most of us changed our minds and came to really love the book once we began to read it.

Fast forward to earlier this year. Where I work, we have interns from a nearby high school. One day, I saw that one of our interns was reading Things Fall Apart, which made me want to reread it.

My thoughts: This is a good novel, but I didn’t like it as much on the second reading, to be honest. Maybe that is because the first reading was one of my first introductions to the African experience of European missionaries and colonization, and that had a deep effect on me at the time. Although I remember the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (which happened when I was in 7th grade), I never realized that it was linked to after-effects of colonization until much later.

The main character of Things Fall Apart is Okonkwo, who is well respected in his Ibo village, Umuofia. After an accident results in tragedy, he’s banished from his village for seven years. During this time, he hears about and is personally affected by European missionaries who have come to set up shop. Much to his chagrin, his own son becomes a convert. Upon his return to the Umuofia, Okonkowo finds things have greatly changed, because of the missionaries and the forms of government they brought with them. And he does not like it one bit.

Chinua Achebe, the author, was born in Nigeria, which became a British colony during Queen Victoria’s reign. Colonization is a pretty big theme here, and it’s an issue that I have strong feelings about. At the end of the story, one of the Europeans, while contemplating writing a book about Africa, ponders naming a chapter, or maybe a “reasonable paragraph” about Okonkwo. As a reader, it’s an upsetting thought—you’ve experienced this rich story about a fully embodied, powerful, but very flawed man and his society and its traditions. And someone thinks about how the story of his life might make a great…paragraph. I like and respect this novel because Chinua Achebe seems to say that stories about the real-life Okonkowos are worth telling. I think, generally, when we think of colonization, we think of Queen Victoria, King Leopold of Belgium, Stanley and Livingstone, even Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Or maybe the after-effects of colonization, as seen in the brutality that happened in Rwanda. But what about the people who were going about their lives, and then became subject to colonization? What about the societies and traditions that were in place before the Europeans determined that theirs were better?

One thing I noticed upon rereading, that I didn’t notice before, is an allusion to a line in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam in Things Fall Apart: Achebe writes about “the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.” While I love a good Tennyson allusion, it again reminded me of colonization—Tennyson was poet laureate during Queen Victoria’s reign. Speaking of literature, Chinua Achebe also writes about the Ibo tradition of storytelling. People in the story often tell fables to get a point across, which appealed to me because I love storytelling and oral traditions.

Great passage: Yam, the king of crops, was a very exacting king. For three or four moons it demanded hard work and constant attention from cock-crow till the chickens went back to roost.

Up next: A Hope in the Unseen