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Literary Review
Defeat of the mind
RAVI VYAS
He had done nothing shameful. It was the way they forced him to live, forced all of them to live, which was shameful. Their intrigues and hatreds and vengeful acquisitiveness had forced even simple virtues into tokens of exchange and barter.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
ONLY Africans have acknowledged and explored the colonial experience in depth and its defeat of the mind. Major works on the subject by the Nigerian, Chinua Achebe — No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God — or Ngugi in east Africa — Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat — (the Algerian Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth was more on the identity and economics of the Third World) showed how the encounter with colonial authority set up inevitable conflicts within African societies. The village, or the extended rural community which was the nub of African society, like ours, always provided the setting for the ordeals that tested the "heroes" of the novels to the limit, and with the intrusion of Christianity, eroded the ideas, often of the sacred, that gave these societies their moral cohesion. The scope of these classics is therefore tragic, inasmuch that the outcome of decisions made by the central characters have repercussions throughout the community. But of all the classics, there are several others, perhaps the greatest and most enduring is Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart that set the polemic against colonial domination really rolling.
The title is derived from Yeats' theory of circles and cycles of civilisation in "The Second Coming":
Turning and turning in widening gyre
The falcon cannot see the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
"Things fall apart" best describes this classic because of the analysis of the transforming and traumatising effects of colonialism, as well as its moving portrayals of family relationships, honour, love and death. But Achebe treats the topical theme of colonialism as a subset of a much larger, more abiding theme of literature: the folly of all human (and particularly the pompous imperialist) endeavour that aims at imposing a rational direction on something as incorrigibly messy as the nightmare of history.
Things Fall Apart is a family saga encompassing three Igbo generations that correspond roughly to the times of Achebe's grandfather, his father and himself: say, 150 years of colonial history. The central character is Okonkwo, who, no matter how sympathetically you look at his predicament, first opens the door to the white man. Whether Okonkwo has a choice in the matter or not, or is just pushed along by the forces of history, is another matter, but it is his decisions that affect the entire community and sunders the fabric of African society.
Okonkwo's momentous confrontations with colonial authority are not conscious, deliberate decisions; they are rather in the nature of "messy, debilitating ambushes" that leave him with no choices but to go along. The effect of these compromises impacts not merely on African political authority but on the entire family (as always the women bear the brunt of cataclysmic changes), with all the disastrous consequences of break-ups and family and tribal feuds. What colonialism breeds is a mindless violence in its struggle for land and mind against the ruthless invaders from the west.
"You know very well, Okonkwo, that I am not afraid of blood; and if anyone tells you that I am, he is telling a lie. And let me tell you one thing, my friend. If I were you, I would have stayed at home. What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families."
"The Earth cannot punish me for obeying her messenger," Okonkwo said. "A child's fingers cannot be scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm."
"That is true," Obierika agreed. "But if the Oracle said that my son should be killed I would neither dispute it nor be the one to do it... The things that happen these days are very strange... "
Those who are inclined to fault Okonkwo (who can be taken as representative of past political leadership of the colonised) for his extreme inflexibility in opposing the white man's presence and then to be compelled to surrender all to a far superior military power, forget that political leadership had few options at the time but to stand up and be seen as standing up because of mass pressures from below.
In an interview to Paris Review in 1994-95, Achebe had quoted an old African proverb, "Until lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." This proverb inspired him to write Things Fall Apart (and its sequels, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God) but added, "It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. (All the same) it is something we have to do so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail, the bravery, even, of the lions." The colonial perspective can only be seen when you look back, "warts and all."
Like all African writers, Achebe draws heavily on African myths to press home his point and one of these which finds a place in the novel, is "the masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say: if you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place... if you are rooted to one place, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving and this is the way, the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives." Very simply, no story can be told as if it was the only one.
Things Fall Apart involves a range of questions around the term, "Third World." It offers a range of perspectives on some of our preoccupations of "Third World" studies: post colonialism, nationalism, racial identities, feminist issues and the meaning of independence in a globalised world. These perspectives lie within the subtext of the novel but they are easy enough to spot in what is essentially a political tract of our times.
Properly, Things Fall Apart should be read along with its sequel No Longer at Ease. The title is taken from T.S. Eliot's "The Journey of Magi":
We returned to our place, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
(Originally, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease were planned as one big novel, but had to be split because of publishing reasons.) Arrow of God rounds off the trilogy in which a priest of high intellect is willing to accept ideas of change provided his own sense of dignity and initiative are not compromised — unlike Okonkwo — but he too is unable to go far because of forces beyond his control and comprehension. Both No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God need a fuller treatment than just a passing mention — particularly the latter that has a deep philosophical message on the inevitability of fate.
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, first published 1958, Picador paperback, £3.95.
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