Things Fall Apart Chapters 18-25/END

Please use this forum to discuss chapters 18-25 AND your overall take, both good and bad about this book. Are you going to continue with the trilogy? Why or why not?

I completed this book on 1/7/2022. I'm not very good at reading in sections and/or interrupting my read with something else--I focus pretty good!

Here is my overall take/summery: This book is very readable in spite of the numerous African words that I'm sure I couldn't say aloud. I even stumbled over them when reading. Achebe established that the Ibo's are a very stable, patriarchal, and religious society. The main character, Okwonko, is driven by the haunting memory of his father's "un-masculinity." He has to do the opposite to prove that he is successful, and that is his downfall; when tradition begins to fall apart. I was expecting to be more wowed than I was. Even though this story is set in the 19th century, it still had some very common and universal themes. I got the feeling that the characters were detached from the reader. I think maybe this is because the author told us what the characters were thinking instead of SHOWING us this through their speech.

This is book one in the trilogy. I probably won't go looking for the other books. This wasn't a bad read. It was educational, predictable, but not fun. 215 pages

Part 2
That’s where things start to fall apart. The first white man arrives on his iron horse latter identifed as a bicycle. Really, Europeans were travelling in bicycles in these areas?…
The short chapters in this part describe how the new religion slowly takes a growing importance. This is seen in big and small facts (including the use of “Mr” for the first time in the book, to refer to Mr Brown and to his interpretor, Mr Kiaga.).

Achebe describes well how this new religion allows some people in the society to emancipate from traditional rules that are not favourable to them. It’s an individual decision and how this decision affects the cohesion of the whole society is not taken into account by those new adepts (which is totally understandable, especially from a western point of view where individuality is so high!).
It is also interesting to see in this part how decisions to try to stop the new religion to establish actually works in favour of it (the best example being allowing them to build a church on the “cursed forest” (sorry, I don’t know the term Achebe uses in English, this is a translation back from my French translation book…), hoping their gods will make them die quickly, then not so quickly, then not at all… and therefore showing how this religion is strong while the aim was to debilitate it).

An interesting part. I’ve read or learnt some of those aspects, including in other parts of the world. But Achebe wrote in this mid-XXth, so his analysis might have been farily new at this time, and interesting for the readers at that time. Achebe’s straightforward style and descriptions made the reading of this part rather enjoyable.

Part 3
The last part is the one that sees the two worlds collide. First, Okonkwo comes back to his village, then Mr Brown has to leave and is replaced by Mr Smith – how impersonal are the British character in this book!.
But seven years have passed, things are not the same anymore. Things have already fallen apart and can’t be mended. This part felt much more uncertain than the two first ones. I was not expecting how the plot would unfold, especially in the last two chapters.

I've now finished the book. I'll write my review latter today or more probably tomorrow and will then come and post here on my overall feeling about the book.

What I think Achebe has handled rather well is the balance and integration of the individual and the societal (or universal). With his idealized and nostalgic picture of Ibo society prior to European contact, Achebe allows us to see the integrity of this culture – that on its own terms it is stable and makes sense. By sketching out Okonkwo's father's story, Achebe at the same time makes the flaws in Okonkwo's character, flaws that are crucial to the plot, credible. Thus Okonkwo is both representative and an individual.

Years ago I marked a passage in the second part of the trilogy, No Longer at Ease:

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden. The rest of the world is unaware of it.

My marginal note reads, "This is Achebe's definition of tragedy."

And that's pretty much how the tragedy of this novel unfolds. There is the private tragedy of the alienation of Nwoye from his father and then the ingnominious death of Okonkwo himself, which is, above all, untidy. The world passes on oblivously; it is collateral damage.

There is an old saw about how the grass that bends survives the storm while the strong and upright tree is snapped off.

This is the choice these people face, and what sort of choice is it? Achebe does not romanticize this dilemma; he does not give us Atticus Finch or the mayor in The Moon is Down. No honour accrues to integrity in colonial Nigeria. On the other hand, we see a hint of the future for those who yield. On top of the ransom levied by the District Commissioner, the naïve and helpless people of Umuofia pay a 25% surcharge to local crooks for the release of their leaders. Such corruption is something we have not seen in traditional Ibo society, and it will be a focus of the succeeding two novels.

Things have indeed fallen apart. Europeans have left this legacy wherever they have established themselves among traditional peoples. It's also a legacy that is passed from generation to generation, as we in Canada are being forced to acknowledge at last. Is there another way? Is there a means of recompense? These are questions that I struggle with.

[Corrected 12.5% to 25%]

A worthwhile side read to Things Fall Apart is Malidoma Patrice Somé's short non-fiction book Ritual : Power, Healing, and Community. Somé, who died at the end of 2021, of cancer I think, writes in this book of his perception of the aridity of Western culture where ritual has been largely minimized and devalued.

There's a good deal of material involving him on YouTube.

>5 librorumamans: and >6 librorumamans: These are interesting takes on the book. I liked the way the colonisation is seen both at a collective/social level and at an individual level (although only from one point of view). It's botht the big picture and the details on which colonisation had an impact that are depicted.
Achebe's thoughts on tragedy are interesting and give me food for thoughts now that I can reflect on the whole book.

Finished.

Whelp. It ends badly for Okonkwo.

While they are a distinctly patriarchal society, I was surprised a number of times by the autonomy in certain areas that is still granted to women, such as when rather than a command, Okonkwo requests Ezinma to wait to find a suitor in Umuofia and to encourage her half-sister Obiageli to do the same.

I noticed that prior to the arrival of the foreign government, the village is doing their best to adapt and cope with the changes that occur with Mr. Brown, who employs more pacific tactics among them, the new religion, and even the new converts among them. For instance, they still recognise the converts as part of their clan and are reluctant to expel them immediately; there is even the case of the Christian wife who permits her unconverted husband to mutilate their dead ogbanje child, which tells us that there are families who, unlike Okonkwo, remain together even with a difference of faiths. The point at which this precarious balance that is their new way of living is tipped, is when certain members of the new Christian community utilise more aggressive tactics, such as killing the sacred python and unmasking the egwugwu. The problem is compounded when the village naturally retaliates against such violence against their traditions, and the white government, as expected, has no interest in fostering any kind of understanding between them, instead swiftly bringing down a heavy hand to crush the Igbo people.

There is also a deep moral conflict that some experience within their traditions, which begins even before white people come among them and which gives the missionaries a ready opening when they do arrive. The new church has all the troubled people, like the women with multiple twin births and the ogbanje babies, like the osu, and like Nwoye, whose conversion I suspect is, in part, as well, an act of direct rebellion against his father.

Another conflict that I perceived is the contrast between the man that Okonkwo is and the man that Umuofia, through Obierika, recognises as one of their greatest. As an individual and not a symbol of Umuofia, he is not a great man---at least, not from a modern western perspective---but I was not sure that Achebe intended to portray him as such either. Okonkwo, as he lets us know plainly, is a man ruled by the fear of his father's failure, which in turn leads him to recurring infractions against his own traditions, from the impropriety of killing an adoptive son (aside from the reader's own objections) and beating his wife during the Week of Peace, to finally hanging himself in despair at the end. On the other hand, Okonkwo is undeniably a rigid and uncompromising man when it comes to defending his traditions; so rightly, he represents Umuofia's pride and strength, and tragically also, Umuofia's defeat when he realises that he is alone at the end.

>9 Majel-Susan: I agree with the moral conflict concerning some of their conditions. I think the "fall" of society, as it was known, would have occurred with or without the arrival of the colonizers. (in time)

>10 Tess_W: I still strongly disagree with the fact that the Igbo society would have fallen anyway. I still feel that Achebe describes a society that is a whole, with its own internal coherence and drive.

>10 Tess_W: >11 raton-liseur:

The key qualifier here is "in time". Looking at the record, I think it's safe to say that every society has failed or will fail. Societies are fragile. As I read this book, the image that developed for me was the house of cards; if well built it is in itself stable — its internal strains are balanced. But a very little external disturbance will bring it down in a heap, and, to switch to another allusion, all the king's horses and all the king's men etc,.etc..

All human relationships need constant work and commitment to sustain and even then often collapse. A friendship, a marriage, and a society have that in common. Even so, a large external shock or challenge can push them past their capacity to adjust. The past two years have shown me how quickly this can happen.