William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming (1921) Turning and turning in the widening gyre
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Though Chinua Achebe's great novel derives it's title from William Butler Yeats's classic poem The Second Coming, it actually tells the story of a First Coming. Where Yeats was concerned with the end days of the two millennia long Christian Era in the West, Achebe's novel tells the story of the first contacts between Ibo villagers in Nigeria (Biafra) and white European missionaries and colonial administrators in the 1890's, of the coming of the Christian Era to Africa. The central character Okonkwo, is the driven son of a ne'er-do-well father. He is admired within the clan for his physical prowess, particularly in wrestling, and for his willingness to work hard, but he is a brutal, rigidly stubborn and emotionally isolated man: Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand.
His wives, especially the youngest, lived in
So Okonkwo's life is dedicated to wresting a living from the ground and earning honor and a title in the clan, but he is bedeviled by bad luck, in the form of almost yearly bouts of crop killing weather, and his own bad temper frequently puts him crossways with tribal customs. When he accidentally kills another man at a festival, he ends up being exiled to his mother's clan for seven years. It is while he is living in this village, Mbanta, that he first comes in contact with Christian missionaries. To the villagers great surprise, the missionaries are not struck down by the Ibo gods and to the people's further shock, they begin to recruit church members from along the margins of Ibo society. But even the initial converts protest to their native church leader, Mr. Kiaga, when he begins accepting the tribe's outcasts, the osu: "You do not understand," the convert maintained.
"You are our teacher, and you can teach us the
He was a person dedicated to a god, a thing apart--a
taboo for ever, and his children after him. He
"He needs Christ more than you and I," said Mr. Kiaga. This simple message of inclusion and Christian love, preached by Kiaga and by the white missionary Mr. Brown, proves extremely powerful and attractive. Okonkwo's own son, Nwoye, with whom he has had a very difficult relationship, converts too, which infuriates Okonkwo. Then, his seven year exile at an end, Okonkwo returns to his own village only to find that the whites have also made inroads there. He wants to fight them, but his old friend Obierika asks: How do you think we can fight when our own brothers
have turned against us? The white man is
Then, even as the tension builds, with Okonkwo and other traditionalists recognizing that their treasured way of life is passing, the gently effective Mr. Brown is replaced by The Reverend James Smith, a much more hidebound man: He saw things as black and white. And black
was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which
In keeping with this spirit of confrontation, some of the church's more "over-zealous converts" begin to provoke the other villagers. In a final whirl of events, a native ceremony is disrupted, the Christian church is destroyed, Okonkwo kills a messenger sent by the colonial government, and when the District Commissioner arrives to arrest him, Okonkwo is found to have hanged himself. In the story's final paragraph the Commissioner muses about how he will describe the incident in his memoirs, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. It appears from a quick surf through the web that most of the criticism of this novel treats it as a story about conflict between the generations (Okonkwo & his father, Okonkwo & his son) or as an anti-colonial polemic. It seems obvious however that it is really a Christian allegory, with Okonkwo in the role of Christ. Early on in the book, Achebe rather clearly signals his intention: Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded
very highly, and proverbs
are the palm-oil with
He tells his story in a style that seems imitative of Ibo fashion. The narrative is conversational, almost as if it were being told in oral form rather than written. It is repetitive, often a new chapter begins by recounting what has gone before, as if the narrator were getting us caught up from one storytelling session to the next. It is liberally sprinkled with Ibo vocabulary, so that it gives the feel of native speech. And, by the end of the book, it is apparent that the whole tale can be read as a parable. Okonkwo passes through many of the same stages that Man goes through in the Bible. He rebels against the Father, is forced to earn a living by main labor, is exiled, and finally ends his life in a faux crucifixion. All of these parallels are fairly self-evident. But extend the analogy and what is the meaning of Okonkwo's sacrifice? Presumably, Achebe is making the point that those who adhere most fiercely to the ancient gods and the old traditions, those who live their lives in the grip of fear, must clear out of the way to make room for the coming of a new God and a new Way. This is not to suggest that Achebe does not honor and value Ibo culture. In many ways the book is an attempt to preserve a written record of their traditions. There are numerous scenes involving rituals, religious rites, tribal politics, and village traditions. However, Achebe is quite honest about the primitive nature of that culture and makes no effort to gloss over just how difficult their lives were. They feared the unseen: Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even
the bravest among them. Children were
They faced catastrophic child mortality rates: Ekwefi had suffered a good deal in her life.
She had borne ten children and nine of them had died
They were homicidally superstitious, committing infanticide against twin babies--twins being considered bad luck--and, at the command of the tribe's Oracle, murdering a young boy from another tribe who lived with Okonkwo for several years. But most of all, Achebe depicts their lives as static and stagnant from generation to generation: The land of the living was not far removed from the
domain of the ancestors. There was coming
There was no sense of progress to their existence, no development, no forward momentum. So, while Okonkwo is a tragic figure, representing the impending loss of tribal traditions and the passing of a richly textured way of life, it is the symbolic sacrifice of reactionaries like Okonkwo, and the casting off of the backward looking views they cling to, which will make Western style progress possible and will finally allow the Ibo to escape from a life of bare subsistence governed by fear and superstition. This is a wonderful novel, full of universal figures, themes and lessons. It balances an abiding respect for Ibo tradition with a realization that their future depended on Western ideas. The real tragedy is that Yeats's Second Coming swamped Africa's First Coming. Within fifty years from the time of this story the Christian Era was at an end and the white man gone, as nation after nation in Africa reverted to native rule, mostly in the form of brutal dictatorship, often Marxist and frequently Tribal. Would that the leaders of Africa had been blessed with the vision of Chinua Achebe and the discretion to see that though many aspects of colonialism were objectionable and many of the colonialists personally repellent, there were other aspects of Western culture with much to offer. I'm really surprised that Achebe has not won a Nobel prize. What greater contribution can a novelist make than to help preserve the best of his own culture and convey it to the world, while at the same time showing his own people what they can learn from other cultures? (Reviewed:) Grade: (A+) Tweet Websites:See also:Chinua Achebe (2 books reviewed)African Literature Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels Library Journal: Top 150 of the Century New York Public Library's Books of the Century -WIKIPEDIA: Chinua Achebe - -ESSAY: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" (Chinua Achebe, 1977, Massachusetts Review) [PDF] -INTERVIEW: Out of Africa: Chinua Achebe, father of modern African literature, has long argued that Joseph Conrad was a racist. (Caryl Phillips, February 22, 2003, The Guardian) -INTERVIEW: Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139 (Interviewed by Jerome Brooks, Winter 1994, Paris Review) - Book-related and General Links: -Chinua Achebe & Things Fall Apart (Cora Agatucci, Culture(s) & Literature(s) of Africa, Central Oregon Community College)(includes Study Guide) -Who is Chinua Achebe? -Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (Addison Public Library, Readers' Corner) -Kingwood College Library: THINGS FALL APART By Chinua Achebe -LINKS: ComL 100: Resources for students Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart -Internet Resources: Chinua Achebe & Things Fall Apart (Bill Barrett) -Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart Study Guide -STUDY GUIDE: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart -ONLINE STUDY GUIDE: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (SparkNote by Selena Ward) GENERAL
|
Copyright 1998-2015 Orrin Judd