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Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A
Casebook. Isidore Okpewho,ed.
The
novel, Things Fall Apart, is central not only in African literature,
but also in postcolonial literary and cultural discourses. The reason,
according to Isidore Okpewho, is precisely “because it inaugurated a long and
continuing tradition of inquiry into the problematic relations between the
West and the nations of the Third World” (3). This justifies his new
collection of essays, some of which are more than two decades old. In a
splendid introduction, he poses a crucial question, which is perhaps more
relevant to our age than it could have been for the people of Umuofia: What
fell apart (36)? The essays explore this question using different approaches.
The
first two essays establish the ethnographic and the lingua-politico backdrop
against which the novel can be understood. In his essay, Achebe does not deny
the “importance of the world language which history has forced down our
throats” (60). And since Africans have found themselves in that framework,
they have to make the best out of it. The result has, at best, a hybrid
spirit, a postcolonial-postmodernist identity that exists in Homi Bhabha’s
renowned “fissures.” Exploring
the “egalitarian and democratic” nature of the Igbo society, Clement Okafor
highlights the importance of “destiny” in Igbo cosmology. The Igbo,
nevertheless, believe in the human agency and “that hard work results in a
better life” (68-71). Are we then better equipped to understand Okonkwo’s
motivation? Okonkwo’s
character is a conundrum. What kinds of motivations were behind his actions?
Why, in Goodness’ name, did he kill the boy who called him father? Damian
Opata sees nothing wrong in Okonkwo’s killing of Ikemefuna. In his essay, he
executes a tightly knit inner-textual analysis of the story to expose the
cultural forces that prompted Okonkwo to act the way he did. “If Okonkwo is
to be held guilty of any offense,” he concludes, “it is not that of killing
Ikemefuna (i.e., carrying out the wish of the Oracle of the Hills and the
Caves) but that of taking an uncanny pride in his action” (93). Okonkwo
therefore merely obeyed the law, and, if there is any problem it is to be
sought in the system. But
Harold Scheub does not seem to find any problem with the system. Hence he
believes that Okonkwo failed alone. Through analysis of Okonkwo’s character
(which might find interesting corollaries in some African nations), Scheub
concludes that there is no evidence of destruction of Igbo society; Okonkwo
merely grabbed those elements in his society that will guarantee his prestige
and ascendancy. Perhaps
neither Okonkwo nor his society fell apart, as Neil ten Kortenaar would
argue. In his strictly structuralist take on the novel, he systematically
deconstructs, the layers of the story to arrive at how Achebe strove to
create a “non-existent” African history, which is the problem with the story
(132). Obviously you cannot use fiction to establish an area of non-fiction.
That attempt would reduce the characters in the fiction to representative
roles (139). Ten Kortenaar does not dismiss Clayton
G. Mackenzie rereads the novel in a somewhat reader-response way and
establishes that Christianity is responsible for weakening the bonds of the
society, while Rhonda Cobham, interested in showing how the feminine was
ignored, makes use of Jauss’ Rezeptionsästhetik – loosely understood
as the history of reception – to draw attention to the fact that “Okonkwo and
his creator are concerned with the construction of a […] masculine, identity
(169). Biodun Jeyifo would even conclude that this identity was what fell
apart in the world of Umuofia. He highlights that the very point when things
began to fall apart was when Okonkwo ignored “the mother’s creative role in
the formation of his personhood, his sensibility” (185). Bu-Buakei
Jabbi is more interested in the poetics of the novel than in its perceived
ethno-cultural importance. For him, the recurrent use of a primal element,
fire, underscores Achebe’s central theme of the inevitability of change, and
how one man who refused to be changed “fell apart.” Also considering the
novel as a literary text, Ato Quayson revisits the different ways it has been
interpreted, noting that many critics were like hawks that would never
appreciate the beauty of hens’ dances. Art is based on a skillful
manipulation of reality as the novel has just done, thus every critique
should pay attention both to the reality being manipulated and the technique
used (232). Isidore
Okpewho has been particularly successful in the careful selection of these
essays which make the novel as relevant as it ever has been. What is most
satisfying is not only the high quality of most of the essays, but also their
overall arrangement so that they seem to be in dialogue with one another.
This creates a logical thread throughout the book, and it makes for an
engaging read. For this writer, the
casebook would have lost nothing in beauty and logic if Achebe’s input had
been left out. But one can understand the relevance of the interview at the
end. College teachers and their students would love it. Otherwise the rest of
the book throws a heavy task to scholars who are prepared not only to
continue with the dialogue between the West and the
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