Things Fall Apart (Achebe): Comments

Okonkwo’s main Characteristics. Okonkwo was a honourable man in his community due to his earlier years as a powerful wrestler and as a warrior of great skill in two intertribal wars. He was a successful farmer, and he had a large family with three wives and several children. Okonkwo's wealth was visible in his big compound hedged in by a large wall of red earth. “He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue.” (Achebe15) He was a respected man in the village and received noteworthy tasks by the elders; he was one of the egwugwu - the masked spirits of the ancestors. “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even  beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.” (ibid. 1)

Okonkwo was still relatively young. He was a tall, big man, and he looked cruel, with bushy eyebrows and wide nose. He had a heavily breathe. His way to walk and speak was quick and hasty as full of energy and violence. He had no patience with fruitless people, he often got angry and beat them. He hadn't liked his father, Unoka, who was the opposite of him.

Unoka had been a lazy and unproductive man who made off with what he earned almost immediately on booze and parties. He had been ill-fated and constantly in debt. Unoka have had a bad personal god. He was known for his weakness with his machete and his hoe. He didn't like to work in the traditional way. “In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.” (ibid. 1) But, he liked music, he knew how to handle the flute; he had liked coming together with people, playing music, dancing and talking, it had made him happy and gay. Unoka had never been happy when war came over the village and he hadn't stand the look of blood. Old and sick, afflicted of swelling, he was left to die outside the village as a pariah due to have offended the gods with his sickness. He didn't take any titles of fame during his lifetime. Okonkwo felt ashamed of him in his memory.

Okonkwo's Relationship to his Father. Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.” (ibid. 5) Okonkwo was “a man of action, a man of war.” (ibid. 4) He was a great warrior who had brought home several conquered human heads. Skulls out of which he drank his palm-vine on great occasions.

Okonkwo was a hard working man in traditional farm work and he rarely felt tired; he started working early in the mornings and finished late in the afternoons. It made him feel strong, healthy and a wealthy member of his tribe, its traditions and a part of his ancestors. “Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.” (ibid. 12). But during his whole life he had a feeling of fear, of failure and weakness. He felt that his father's weak characteristics should take hold on him, that it should even turn him into “a woman” as a playmate once had gibed him about his father's behaviour, a weak person without titles. “Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness, the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.” (ibid. 10)

Listen to an weak and ailing man as his father talking about consolation in times of sad harvest and rotting yams tried Okonkwo's patience beyond words; yams was a symbol of manliness and his father was a “weak woman”, talking the way his father did was an act of blasphemy in the mind of Okonkwo.

Okonkwo was a man who openly treated less successful men with inferiority, e.g. calling them “women”; if he, a man with titles, was contradicted or, from his point of view, noticed weakness in men's ways of discussing serious issues. He knew “how to kill a man's spirit”. (ibid. 9).

Despite the respect and honour that was showing Okonkwo he was a lonely man with just one friend, Obierika, and he, Okonkwo, was happy being friend with a man whose son was a great wrestler to whom he could express emotions of happiness because the boy was a good fighter.

Okonkwo was worried and anxious about his eldest son's being to weak, that he didn't resemble him but his grandfather, Unoka; and Okonkwo was constantly nagging and beating this son, telling him he behaved without strength. “I am worried about Nwoye. A bowl of pounded yams can throw him in a wrestling match.” (ibid. 24)

Okonkwo’s Relationship to the Feminine? Okwonko's way of behaving and acting a woman should do what the traditions in the tribe are telling her to do; be attractive to men; having the traditional manners of a woman; marry a man and accept the other wives the man already have married, give birth to many children, do the cooking and cleaning in the household. Frankly do a woman's work a husband orders her to do in the family, but not doing men's work. The husband is her master.

If Okonkwo's wifes do behave in a way they shouldn't, as contradicting him, they are running the risk to get beaten in front of the rest of the family, and no one dares to interfere. Sometimes for very stupid reasons, like cutting of to many leaves from one of his trees; if not treated that bad they are often shouted at in a bad fierce way. One time Okonkwo even aimed a gun out of anger and shot at one of his wifes, luckily the bullet didn't hit her. “Okonkwo knew she was not speaking the truth // he beat her very heavily // it was the sacred week [Okonkwo] was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess // It was unheard of to beat somebody during the sacred week.” (ibid. 10 pp.)

A woman is a weak creature in nature who weakens the strength of a society if she is not educated and kept under supervision.

Though, Okonkwo was specially fond of his daughter Ezinma. She acts in an independent way. Maybe because her mother, Ekwefi, let Ezinma decide things in their household, due to having lost many children, dead in her early infancy. Ezinma is her tenth child.  The relationship between mother and child was more of an companionship of equals; they call each other by name. Though Okonkwo notice this behaviour he didn't interfere. He often says to himself that he wishes Ezinma were a boy, that she has the right spirit. She makes him feel happy but he never stops lamenting the fact that she was born a girl; Ezinma as a boy would have made him more happier. But Okonkwo is proud of her beauty as a grown up young woman. At that time they understand each other's mood of depression and anger. “If Ezinma had been a boy I [Okonkwo] would have been happier. She has the right spirit." (ibid. 24)

The only woman he treats with slight respect is the priestess of Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. But he breaks taboos   when he tries to talk to her, when the priestess asks him to beware of that, he listens reluctantly, but does as he is told.

The Ending. The book ends up with Okonkwo's suicide. He hangs himself after having killed a court messenger. Obierika, one of the eldest, asks the District Commissioner to help the tribe in taking down the body of Okonkwo and bury it; themselves can not do it because a body of a dead man who committed suicide is taboo and can no longer be touched by someone of the tribe.

The Commissioner is carrying out what Obierika asks for, but himself, he is not going to attend because he believes it would render him despise by the villagers if he took part in it. In fact, it would honour him to participate in such an act, but he doesn’t understand that; we who have read the novel know by this that the Commissioner never will understand anything about the world he has entered. A world he calls primitive.

On the way out of sight of the body in the tree the Commissioner thinks on what to write about this and other events in the book he is planning to publish: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. The event he just has attended will be an interesting but a short chapter, or at least a paragraph.

What the narrator in that book not are going to discuss is the cruel violence that will be needed to subdue and pacify the countless tribes of this vast area, their people and their ancient traditions. It will not talk in terms of genocides and the murder of cultures. The District Commissioner will not understand that he will wipe out a great part of human living history, its age-old customs and traditions; how people lived in harmony with nature and gods as very real elements in their daily domestics. He will not write about the suggestive ceremonies, not the important harvest of yams in a man's world, not  the woman's struggle for her and her children's survival, not about the ogbanje and the searching of its iyiuwa. All this ruthless and beautiful world will be erased from people's history the moment the District Commissioner put the pencil to his paper and starts to compose his book.

A Symbolical View of the Arrival of the Locusts. In connection with the arrival of the locusts in Umofia, The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves has pronounced that Ikemefuna must be sacrificed; maybe the locusts are the ultimate sign from the Gods that the tribe definite must atone the murdered woman's life with Ikemefuna's, or, he is the only sacrifice they can provide the Spirits for the food they have bestowed the tribe (Ikemefuna was once donated in exchange for a murdered woman, which must mean that there can not be a sin to let him die a substitutionary death). It had passed many years since locusts last were seen in the village and now people's prayers come true about the locust's staying overnight so that they can be caught and eaten.

It might also be as an Oracle later claims that the locusts were the harbingers of the white men's arrival in the village. By the rejoice and by eating the locusts the tribe gave the white men sacred right to their arrival and the right to build their church as a kind of compensation for the gift the locusts were. (The arrival of the white men might be a double punishment for the unjust death of Ikemefuna; an ordered capital punishment in itself and Okonkwo's participation in the completion despite the warning he is given by an elder to renounce, killing a person who is considered to be one's own child is a sin.)

A Response to Joseph Conrad’s the Heart of Darkness. The narrator describes how the village and its people in the community hold together and is torn between different life situations, sensitive and dignified towards the doom we all know will come. Although we do not agree with Okonkwo about his views on women or how he looks upon his father's memory, we understand quite clearly the weakness he sees and the shame he feels. His love for strength and masculinity we may not share, but he speaks to us through his human inwardly emotions. Okonkwo's worrisome thoughts or warm delight about his children, we do understand even though we live in a complete different world. His immense pain of having killed his own stepson, we understand and can manage without judging him or think he is primitive; we can share a room with him and share his deep anxiety. We forgive him. We can share his happy once-a-lifetime moment of such divine meals as locusts, his nervously chasing after snuff in his goatskin bag, his dependence. We can understand his last desperate act to preserve his dignity as a human being in a world that is falling apart. This novel gives a proud image of a dying world.

The Struggle Between Change and Tradition. The men in the village who had reached high social status due to their recognized masculinity, such as Okonkwo's, see in the white man's culture a weakness, a femininity, they do not want to acknowledge. However, the men in the village who have low status, perceive the missionaries man's culture, especially in his church, a chance to redress as men and gain recognition as human beings equal any other person whatsoever.

Okonkwo sees in every departure from strength, masculinity and tradition as an indication of the tribe's extinction.

When the men in the tribe discover that no harm affects the missionaries building a church on cursed land the whites gain a certain respect for their magic. The event makes more people, now even women, converting to the new church. People also become interested in the school the missionaries have built where they teach reading and writing. They even build a small hospital. The trading store the missionaries have built in the area becomes a little gold mine to the villagers when selling their palm-oil and kernel at a high price. The village's economic prosperity increases. The white man's way to handle things win respect.

The whites have built a court house where the villagers are sentenced and put in prison according to the white man's law, but immoral to traditional beliefs. This creates of course conflicts. Violence between the new and the old escalates, renegades are abused when they try to proselytize; a christian named Enoch, a former traditional in beliefs, enters a meeting of the tribe in which the sacred egwugwu is present, and Enoch unmasks one of them. This causes great anger: the white man's church is burned down, people are killed on both sides.

Applying Freytag's Pyramid to the plot of Things Fall Apart: 

“Exposition” – Okonkwo is a hard-working wealthy strong man who is brusque with his family and the people of his village striving to remove the weakness of his dead father's memory. He is courageous and powerful and because of this he is selected to be the guardian of a boy as a peace settlement between two villages.  The boy lives with Okonkwo's family and they grow fond of each other.

“Unstable situation” – The arrival of the locusts. The Oracle pronounces that the boy must be killed. Despite a warning of not cooperate in the execution Okonkwo gets in on the act and kills the boy himself.

“Rising of action” – During a funeral Okonkwo's gun explodes and accidentally kills a boy.  Okonkwo an his family are sent into exile to appease the gods he has offended. While Okonkwo is away white men begin to arrive in his village introducing their religion and their way of living.  As the number of converts increases in the village the position of the white man's culture grows and villagers are forced to respond to the commencement of the upcoming innovative society.

“Climax” – Returning home, Okonkwo finds his village changed. Trying to reclaim their hold on their native land he and some men from the tribe destroy a local Christian church. The white man's government takes them as prisoners for a time and humiliates them.

“Falling action” – During a great uprising Okonkwo promotes for war and despises any form of cowardice. But the leaders thinks things has changed and it is to late to fight. Okonkwo kills a white messenger who is trying to stop their meeting.

“Stable situation” – Okonkwo commits suicide by hanging himself as a last act of self dignity and respect to his history.

(in part) An Answer to Yeats’s Poem "The Second Coming". The falcon in Yate's poem “The second coming” is the bird of prey, the Kite, that occur in Achebe's novel “Things fall apart”. It appears in the sky as a supervising and distant symbol of God who makes sure everything is as it always has been, that everything will remain in the good way. It is a symbol of joy of the state of things, the changing of seasons, that everything in one's life is in order. The Kite makes the children chant anthems. It brings pleasure and hope for the future. But, like a child, the Kite itself appears to be unreachable for the evil of the world hovering in the sky on its mighty wings, naive and innocent it risks to end up in a trap and succumb.

Just as little as the Kite sees the death in a falconer, the villagers do not recognize the white man's arrival as a harbinger of their own destruction, the white skin's culture of leprosy that will annihilate their venerable tradition and assassinate their people.

But, there is perhaps after all, a hope of rescue with the white man's good traditions, “Their second coming”, with their schools, hospitals, their trading station and their fearless attitude to evil spirits.
But the Oracle says no, go and kill the evil head of the iron horse and tie “the Sphinx” by a holy silk tree, in whose shade woman becomes fertile, above whose branches the Kite's hovering and supervises  their traditions.

The falcon also refers to the villagers wise myth of Mother Kite,  a n allegory telling how to show respect in the world, of what is prohibited and what is permitted. That recognition is lost at the white man's arrival, the villagers stop listening to what the tradition always have instructed them to do, which is a portent of their impending annihilation. The villagers imagine, as the falcon, that they are out of touch on their wings of manliness tradition; they eat the locusts without realizing that it requires something in return, their subjection. The arrival of the falconer portends that the leisurely circling of the Kite in the sky and the villagers striving will be suffocated by chaos and cease to exist. Will the cowed remnant of all outcastes try to recapture their lost Bethlehem?



                                WORKS CITED

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe http://l-adam-mekler.com/things-fall-apart.pdf [viewed 20130313]

Achebe, Chinua (1992). Things fall apart. New York: Knopf

Lord of the Flies (Golding) & Things Fall Apart (Achebe): A Comparative Essay

Things Fall Apart takes place in West Africa during the late 19th century. Thematically it deals with daily life and hardships of a tribe and its encounter with the arrival of missionaries. Lord of the Flies is about a group of young teenaged British school boys and their conflicts on how to survive on an uninhabited tropical island where they have been stranded without adults after an accident during wartime.

The theme that is to be presented is related to the conflict between the individual and society. The aim is to show how personal attitudes may become a death trap if they do not follow the dominant ideology within a community during times of fundamental change. The argument made is that both novels suggest that an individual is risking his life if his attitudes are challenging the rising tide of a radical take-over within his society. The analysis will put forward a number of characters and subjects in order to support the thesis.

Okonkwo is the protagonist in Things Fall Apart. He is one of the male tribal members. He is a static character with a fiery and impatient temper who acts more violent against the Christian mission than his clan can support. His way of encountering cultural changes will ultimately drive him to extinction. Okonkwo's last offence against his clan and its religion – the act of intentionally causing his own death – is the culmination of a series of insubordinations he commits as an individual, rather than as a member of his community. Throughout his life, he balances an uncontrolled anger that is on the verge of exploding.

In Lord of the Flies some characters are acting more civilised than the rest of the group. They are more rationally oriented, empathetic and sensitive. But their attitudes are challenging the leader of an  opponent wing within the group who is seeking to establish unity through blind obedience. The goodnatured boys do not realise the serious danger they are heading into. Somehow trapped in their own ideas or by naivety they continue arguing or acting their personal points of view. The more they cling to their unique personalities, the more they are seen by the oppressive leader as self-interested institutions and deviants who threaten the creation of unity within the group. As the conflict escalates their exclusion is increasing and becomes a threat of death to them.

In the society of Things Fall Apart men are dominant. They have power and rank higher in the hierarchy than women and children, who often are treated badly. But Okonkwo uses this right too heavily, even when it is forbidden by the tradition of the tribe. Clansmen are scared by his behaviour to overreact in social life and towards the sacred. The tribe does not agree with this but they do not rebuke him much due to Okonkwo's rank. When he once threatened to kill his own son an uncle to him just ordered him to stop beating the boy and commented the behaviour as madness. However, Okonkwo is an honour-able and respected member of his community and receives noteworthy tasks due to his earlier years as a powerful wrestler and a warrior of great skill. But, he himself despises men without possessions and titles or men showing female tendencies and weakness. These males are risking Okonkwo's pouncing manners of insulting. Despite a warning from the oldest member of the clan not to participate in a hu-man sacrifice of his stepson Okonkwo not only ignores the urge but carries out the ritual killing him-self. Okonkwo is incautious even when handling weapons. Once he nearly causes the death of one of his wives when he deliberately shoots at her. On another occasion he indirectly inflicts the death of a clan boy when one of his rifles explodes in the boy's face. Humiliated by the Christian mission and the white man's court, and finding no more support from his tribesmen, Okonkwo kills a white messenger in outraged, self-absorbed anger, and then hangs himself. Killing a relative or a clansman is against the customs of the clan. Committing suicide is an offence against the Goddesses and desecrates the land. The body of a suicide victim is taboo and is excluded from the privileges of the clan.  

In Lord of the Flies, Ralph, the protagonist of the novel, knows what characterises a leader. He shows empathy by saying that they all soon will be rescued, and that he will provide them all shelter, food, water to drink and time for free play. Ralph is rational in setting up a plan for how these issues will be implemented. He calls the others to meetings by blowing into a conch and using it as a symbol of their unity; holding it gives individuals the right to speak in public gatherings. However, when the group as a whole begins to follow another headman Ralph is not able to prevent it, but he does not accept the loss of his leadership role. Due to his civilised nature he openly criticises the manners of the new oppressive leader. Ralph  stubbornly refuses to subordinate himself to the antagonist's ideas. His attitude is disturbing to the establishment of the autocratic community. Ralph becomes a hunted outcast, but he is miraculously rescued from death’s door by the author's sudden intervention of  “a divine being” – a navy officer.

Simon is by nature good, a sensitive shy boy who has an internal desire to do good just for the sake of doing good; unselfishly he supports the younger boys and assists the group in all sorts of things. He is an important foil character to the antagonist. It is Simon who is receiving a prophecy that Evil is something each human carries within himself. In his eagerness to reveal his vision he naively does not realise that the group of wild dancing boys he stumbles into on the beach are carrying out a hunting ritual in honour of the Beast. There, on their “altar”, Simon is slain and sacrificed; there his body and blood are received by the Evil, because his individual attitudes are risking the consolidation of the society in worshipping of the Beast. 

Piggy is a sensitive character who often questions those who think they have the right to decide for others. He shows precocious tendencies. He often gets excited and naively harps on and on about his personal matters. In order to silence him from talking he is made a laughing stock of his way to be chatty, or for his weak appearance: he is very fat, has asthma and he is wearing thick glasses. Piggy's persistent querulous obstinacy gives him low status in the group. The headmen of the group definitely get tired of Piggy when he in his last gesture thinks he can, if eager enough, claim back his stolen glasses. Piggy is risking his life because his personal attitude is disturbing the consolidation of the community of the strongest. The new clan has no time for such a childlike stubbornness and erase it once and for all by killing him. 

Neither Okonkwo nor the good-hearted boys are flexible enough to let go of their individual attitudes. They remain somewhat blinded of their own ideas or immediate feelings. Their lack of discretion prevents them from sensing the fatal destiny of their lives. They cannot temporarily force themselves to compromise and accept the deprived conditions in which they are living. The possibility of disguising their opinions while biding their time and building an underground movement does not even occur to them. They all die because they unconsciously gambled with their lives in confronting a fundamentalist society for their own reasons.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua (1992). Things Fall Apart. New York: Knopf
Golding, William (2006). Lord of the Flies: a novel. 1. Perigree premium ed. New York: Perigee      
               Books

The Fifth Child (Lessing); Motherhood: Private and Public

Harriet's behavior as a mother drags me beyond what both private and public state of a Mother means. I experience it as Doris Lessing in her drama of the nature of a Mother in ”The fifth child” is looking for the roots of a Motherhood's grammar.

She passes all stages of conventions about how society characterizes women to become Mothers: a Home with life and activity; she is getting Married and gives birth to several Children; the family struggles for financial Freedom and Gatherings, her large Family reaches the peak of it's spirited life, but the mother in Harriet's not quite at ease to the ideal image that society has provided her. The private Mother Harriet restives a little. It's at this point Lessing uses public life as a cleansing process.

It is as if the fifth child is going to give her an answer on what motherhood means; tempting her and letting her become a human being and, Mother.

When she is at the institution for bringing Ben home she emphatically highlights that she is the Mother. Harriet shouts out, if it is now, for the first time, she gives birth to her Motherhood: "'I'm the child's mother. I'm Ben Lovatt's mother. Do you understand that? '" (p. 97)

The decision to go and bring him home comes on suddenly and instinctively after a difficult night with poor sleep and unpleasant dreams. She just says, as from the depths of her soul, almost mechanically: ”'I'm going to see what they are doing to Ben.' "(p. 94)

The incredible, superhuman dedication and effort Harriet is showing while crossing the mythological river of death, the Styx, to find Ben and bringing him home from the institution, the Hell, describes what a Motherhood entails.

It is as if she is a being with just instincts. She acts completely alone. The family's persistent attempts to conceal the child's hiding place can not control the love of a Motherhood. Love as a refined and inherited mechanism, crystallized.

There is nothing that can stop Harriet's mission: it is carved in her heart, neither rain nor wind nor thirst nor hunger nor human hand can make her even stop for an instant. She enters Charon's boat without paying the tribute; when the Creation in her calling from time immemorial to rescue a Mother's child the gears of the World start to turn.

”Ben had been taken to a place in the North of England; it would be four or five hours' drive – perhaps more //. There was bad traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain.” (p. 95)

When then the gates of Hades opens up and she stands among the living dead, and the nurses themselves, the dogs of Cerberus, succumb and let her face the Underworld, it is Motherhood, once and for all proven, the engine of life. It obliges and demands taking care of and nurturing a child, no matter what it is.

”On the floor, on a green foam-rubber mattress, lay Ben. He was unconscious. He was naked, inside a strait-jacket. His pale yellow tongue protruded from his mouth. His flesh was dead white, greenish. Everything - walls, the floor, and Ben - was smeared with excrement. A pool of dark yellow urine oozed from the pallet which was soaked.” (p. 99)

             WORKS CITED

 Lessing, Doris (2003). The fifth child. London: Collins Educational


PS

I wonder how it is possible for a father to reject his own child, so completely. This husband may not realize that this approach will disrupt the relation with both his wife (the mother/Harriet) and the rest of the family. How is it possible not to recognize one's own child, no matter what it is, as if it not were one's own? This father doesn't even demonstrate human sympathies. Is it perhaps a post-traumatic reaction he is suffering of, a psychosis of some kind? How could one otherwise understand David's almost total denial of his fatherhood versus Ben, in the heart of the family. Or is it that nature is revolting in a father if he, in his biological being perceives his offspring as a bad seed for the survival of the species; hence his behavior?


"Motherhood" is of course a lifelong process which starts early during one's living and then progresses and develops throughout a person's various phases of life, quite regardless of whether one wants to be responsible for a child or not; a woman (man) always has an attitude to her (his) role as a biological being: to feed, educate and push a child out in the world, whether she is a literally mother or a potential one; one has always an idea of being a mother.

Of course, it is not at a specific moment humans perceive their being, but there are situations in a person's life that sharpens it, moments of chaos from which humans either succumb or are born again. I regard it as Doris Lessings' “The fifth child” describes man's constant struggle against the dissolution, as a mother, as a father and as a child.

Man is a complex being, and he needs his lifetime to refine and compromise with this existence, and emotions. He is both good and evil; he can both love and hate the very same person. There is no definitive with him, there is no either-or here, just both-and. Man is set to live, give birth and let go, and die; and his mission is to manage this absurdity, without a raison d'être

Yes, Harriet wakes up out of her preconceived dream world about how family happiness is designed, she gets to experience, into her bare skin, the most complicated aspects of  human existence, thanks to Ben. It's not a question of love or hate, there is both love and hate; it is thanks to Ben, she will be able to grow as a person, it is as if God has put her on a test; Lessings “The fifth child” is in my opinion a variant of “The Book of Job”.

Well, I just tried to boil down Harriet and the issue of Motherhood in a mythological black / white analysis in the context of the biological of human being in the Universe, how it is that Man strives, carries on in the space of God's silence, in spite of the emptiness of being...