Book #19: Things Fall Apart

Book #19: Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe

April 2, 2013


This is yet another book that I had started at a previous point, but had never had the chance to finish. I had actually read about half of this book during my student teaching assignment in a Phoenix suburb. It was at this giant high school, and just for the sake of putting it into perspective, Arizona is one of many states that has mandated high-stakes testing for its students. It's a controversial issue, really not something I want to get into (especially after proctoring another state assessment today during my substitute assignment), but suffice it to say, there was this chunk of two or three days where I had about half of the day to just...sit. So I found this book on my mentor's shelf. The title drew me to it; I remembered seeing the quote from Yates, "Things fall apart/the center cannot hold," on a course syllabus from, I don't know, one of my sophomore year literature classes. That was the instructor's way of saying that our syllabus was tentative, I guess. But I picked up the book, got about half-way through it...then other things came up and I just didn't pick it up again.

I remember being really interested in the story, and its main character, Okonkwo. But I viewed his mindset, his culture, as being really backward, and it made me somewhat uncomfortable (or maybe moreso the fact that I thought it to be backward made me uncomfortable...I like to think of myself as open-minded). At the time, I had just finished reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (which still sits on my shelf), and I had sympathized with the characters in her book, the zealot missionaries daughters who are stuck in an often-hostile African village. I remember being shocked maybe more by the natural hostilities of Africa, like the storms and the bugs and the wild animals, and the way that Africa just tore their family apart. Still, for some reason I couldn't quite stomach Okonkwo during my first go at reading this.

Well, obviously I was much more successful this time. Maybe my perspective has somehow changed in the last three years that I'm better able to appreciate, or at the least understand, this book. You see, Okonkwo is a tragic hero, of almost mythological proportions. All of his adventures and misadventures in the book are laid out almost like the stories of a Greek hero. He is a tragic hero in the classic sense because he has a clear flaw: he is quick to anger, and he is not quick to show love or mercy. This leads, as you might guess, to his own tragic demise.

Okonkwo lives in the large village of Umuofia. Only in the very last lines of the book was I able to figure out that this is meant to be located in what we know as Nigeria. His people, in his own village and in the many vastly populated ones, have a very traditional culture. There are very clearly defined roles for men and women. The man rules the household; he can have multiple wives, and the more he has, the higher his status among his people. Okonkwo has three. Women are property; a man pays her family to marry her, though there are incidents described in the book of women leaving their abusive or unsatisfying husbands. Men are expected to be tough. Okonkwo especially values these traits, and though his aggression as a wrestler and his strength as a farmer and businessman have gotten him a good reputation among his people, he's also kind of seen as a bully, particularly among his wives.

His first wife is never named throughout the book. She has four of his children, including a son named Nwoye. Okonkwo is ashamed of his son, feeling like he never strong or tough enough. He reminds him too much of his own father, who was a debtor. Oknokwo is ashamed of his father, and all of his aggression seems to stem back to that relationship, and his determination that he will be nothing like him. But he threw the baby out with the bath water, as it were; though his father was lazy, he was also good-hearted and kindly, and so Oknokwo will not be those things, either. Oknokwo does love his children; he is especially attached to his daughter Ezinma, his only child with his second wife Ekwefi. Ekwefi's difficulties, first with her first marriage and then with her bad luck in having sick children who died on her, are described in detail, as are the various ceremonies that she and her people would perform to appease their gods.

Knowing that Achebe, the author, grew up in Africa when European missionaries were taking over and changing everything, I would say that his point in including all of the side stories, not directly related to Okonkwo's story but describing various ceremonies and laws and beliefs of their village and people, would be to show how deeply rooted their culture was. And the Europeans, the British missionaries and tradesmen and others, swept in and dismissed it. It's evil. They didn't understand it. They didn't want to understand it; the book describes how, in Okonkwo's home village and in the village where he stays amongst his mother's family when he is in exile for accidently killing a young man during a funeral ceremony, the missionaries came in and began aggressively preaching, using African interpreters who had a shaky understanding of the native language and not much of an understanding of their customs, to aid them. But while their ways are, at times, overly brutal (such as holding the leaders of  Umuofia hostage until a ransom was paid, and having the African guards beat them up and threaten them in the meantime, and refuse them food, water, or bathroom), Achebe presents the dark side of their culture, the things that would make someone like Nwoye go and join them, and change his name to Isaac.

One belief is that twins are evil, so twin babies are left in the woods (often in a place called "The Evil Forest" or thereabouts, where dead bodies that are deemed dirty can be safely dumped without ruining their good earth or displeasing their earth goddess) to die. Obviously, in our culture, this would be considered wrong. When twins are born, we go out and buy them cutesy little matching baby outfits (but please God, don't let them have alliterative names). We don't abandon them. Nwoye, soft-hearted in some ways, always questioned this custom.

Another event, earlier in the book, that had a profound effect on both Nwoye and Okonkwo involved a young man named Ikemefuna. This boy came to stay with Okonkwo from a neighboring village, after one of the women from Umuofia (a man's wife, at that) was killed there. The boy, and a virgin girl for the partially widowed husband, are retribution from the neighboring village to avoid war. Warring between villages (resulting in maybe a dozen or two deaths) seemed to be common, and Okonkwo was not afraid of fighting, to say the least. He fancied his village the toughest around, and himself the biggest badass on the block, to put it simply. When things fell apart...well, so did he.

Anyway, Ikemefuna became close with both Okonkwo and Nwoye. He was a tough young man, and Okonkwo looked on him as a son, and Nwoye looked up to him as a brother, an older brother who treated him like a friend. But because the fate of the boy was in the hands of the village as a whole, and not Okonkwo, they had to consult the priestess of their god. Chielo, who, outside of her priestess role is just another woman in the village, a widow who is friends with Ekwefi and is attached to young Ezinma, is believed to channel the god and pass down messages from him. Among other things, she declares that this boy must die. Though Okonkwo is advised not to make the trip, he not only accompanies the party that will kill him, but is the one to take off the young boy's head, just to prove...what? That he's tough...but his companions do not look on him favorable for this.

Okonkwo has a violent temper. He'd gotten in trouble once for beating his third wife (her name is mentioned, at least a couple of times, but I can't remember where to look for it) for being late with his lunch, during the village's week of peace to, I don't know, appease the gods before the harvest or something. I can't keep all of their customs, as described in the book, completely straight, but most of them revolve around the harvest. Okonkwo is a yam farmer, and a good one at that, and proud of it. He's a simple man in some ways, but he grapples with holding down his feelings. But he's never unable to lash out in anger, and it just continues to get him into trouble.

Although the sudden takeover of the white missionaries in his home village are what send Okonkwo over the edge when he first comes home from exile, he was already on the brink. His son had left the family, and though it's clear that he was very hurt by this, he keeps insisting that he has disowned the boy, and he'll do the same to the other sons (and haunt them when he's dead) if they do the same. He's no longer a big shot; his mistake (not even caused by his own temper, but by his gun inadvertently exploding while everyone was firing off rounds during the rowdy funeral ceremony) had cost him his status in the village, his fine barn and his homes for himself and his wife, and the nice wall around his large compound. He doesn't feel like a man without his titles, his status, his possessions. He's been taught that these are what is important in life. He is ready to fight.

But his neighbors aren't so much. After the injustice of the leaders being imprisoned and treated badly, the men meet and claim that they are ready to fight. African messengers of the white missionaries come to break up the meeting, and Okonkwo, ready to light the powder keg, steps up and challenges him, and literally does not hesitate to cut him down with his machete. The fact that his neighbors do not fall upon the remaining messengers proves to him that they will not fight, and that things really will fall apart, and he simply cannot handle that. He goes home and hangs himself, a kind of mortal sin in their religion. A man once honored among his people, and they won't even bury him.

The story ends very abruptly, but while I would be curious to see what happens to Nwoyke (or Isaac) or to the newly-married Ezinma, this was Okonkwo's story, the story of a tragic hero. And so it had an appropriately tragic ending. And not just for him, for we know what happens in Africa, and what's been happening since. Nigeria itself has had a tumultuous history, but today it's not considered a third world country anymore, so it has that going for it. It's sometimes difficult to remember that different parts of Africa have very different histories, and are going through very different things right now. While African history isn't always pretty to read about, I would like to know more about it. I mean, according to scientists or whatever, it is our motherland or something. I blame my lack of knowledge about Africa on the public schools, and all that time wasted on those damn tests...

A modern-day Nigerian woman in some traditional tribal dress. In the book, it was described how, for certain festivals, children's hair would be shaved into intricate patterns and designs. Women would have their hair plaited. I think this women is gorgeous (though her expression is a little strange in this picture); Ezinma is described as being the prettiest young woman in her village by the time she's old enough to marry, and many men are eager to purchase her.

A missionary school in Africa. In the book, it describes how the missionaries started a school, not just for children but for adults as well. Nwoyne got his education there, and was later sent to teacher college. These are good things, and yet, why were the missionaries doing it? To "spread the word of God," as a tool for manipulating the people. It all came down to power. Okonkwo, foolish and rash as he was, knew that. But he wasn't able to see some of the good things that the missionaries might have been able to offer.