Things Fall Apart: a reflection
Title: Things Fall Apart
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pages: 209
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? Anyone who would like to read a raw description of colonization from a voice who delivers the subject thoughtfully, to contemplate differences in cultures, and how that shapes our own ethics and worldviews.
I first stumbled upon “Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe in a literature class, and it prompted me to think about the balance between traditional worldviews and modern beliefs, and how it can tear apart a school in a small Nigerian village. I wanted there to be a concrete answer telling me what was right and what was wrong, and I hoped Things Fall Apart by Achebe would help me clear out this unrest in my head and flesh out the gaps in my understanding. Things Fall Apart is so nuanced, perplexing, and heartbreaking and puzzling all at the same time.
In the eyes of someone who lives in a western liberal democracy, it is effortless for us to criticize, to pick out the flaws of our tragic hero Okonkwo, to weed out the wrongs in an entire society, from Umuofia to Mbanta, down to every single thought that appears in the back of a character’s mind. Their society prides men in their masculinity and strength, and “no matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.” Okonkwo ruthlessly beat his wives and painfully slaughtered his child, all to live up to the ideals of this society ingrained within him. By our standards, this toxic masculinity is abhorrent. We can be judgmental, and slap on terms like “misogynist” and automatically see this people as a backward society who eat foo-foo and yams. But we’re forcing this society into a mould that we sculpted and defined, and then we’d be trimming every single obtrusion we dislike by our egocentric standards. We’re establishing that chocolate cake is superior to yams while blind to our internal epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
Okonkwo is hardworking. He had dreams and ambitions like many of us, and he rose from the bottom when he has nothing, building his life with his bare hands. We can see why he appreciates his society for the opportunity to flourish. And we cannot blame one individual for not having epiphanies of concepts like feminism and liberty when he is brought up in a society with conflicting values. Achebe carefully portrays the clash between cultures without inciting an immediate reaction of hatred or oppression but allowing us to see moral relativism. Sometimes we’re too used to thinking that our morals are absolute beyond the shadow of a doubt. Who would question “democracy” and “equality” as the fundamental principles to govern a society? But the abstractness cause us to forget how morals can conflict — justice can contradict mercy and compassion, perfect equality can undermine equity, and individualism chips away collectivism. In the nine villages, they perhaps had “bizarre” beliefs of casting away twins or believing in many “trivial” gods, but those acts were exchanged for respect, order, and collective peace. On the other hand, some Christian missionaries have benevolent intentions, as Mr Brown welcomes everyone with an open heart, regardless of their backstory, even the ones most neglected by society.
Yet inevitably, there was a rift growing in the towns. When Mr Brown deems that Okonkwo’s life was only worth a paragraph or two in his book titled “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger”, it comes as a twisting, wrenching thought. Okonkwo, whom we watched struggle for a decade is to be diminished to a mere flashing thought in a piece of prose, and a white man can watch his death curiously and still profit from it. It is heartbreaking and confusing how we can live inside our microcosms of customs and values and can be utterly oblivious to someone else’s point of view.
I love W.B. Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming”, but now when I read its lines, another layer surfaces that I cannot unsee. The Spiritus Mundi reminds me that although we can all be different, there are themes that appear simultaneously in different cultures, whether the male or female nature of Okonkwo’s life-changing crime or the Yin and Yang of elements. The falcon, full of passion and fervour, might be Okonkwo himself. The falconer might be colonizers, attempting to get a grip on him for their own greed, and amid their vain efforts, darkness appears, gaining in size, threatening to swallow us whole.
(The connection here is that “Things fall apart” starts off the third verse.)
