Achebe Brings It All Together When Things Fall Apart

As always, there are spoilers ahead:

It is readily accepted that an ending can make or break a story.  No matter how fantastic the characters or how moving their struggles, if the ending doesn’t satisfy us, we will leave the tale with a bad taste in our mouths.  Conversely, a mediocre telling of a banal set of events can suddenly become great art if it all amounts to something magnificent at the end.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a fantastic example of an ending being able to lift a story well above its station.  At no point is the novel mediocre or banal, but I did not feel the magic of the story until the last two pages.  Up to that moment, I thought Achebe had pulled together a collection of well-told and interesting stories about Okonkwo’s tribe and eventually their encounter with the white missionaries.  But the vines of his narrative, which seemed to weave in and out of each other in beautiful but barren patterns, suddenly bore fruit in the final 30 pages, building up to an unexpected climax that brought color to the vines themselves.

 I was interested in Okonkwo and why Achebe would choose to make his character the heart of his narrative.  What was Achebe saying about Okonkwo’s overwrought masculinity?  Why is it important to follow a character with such disdain for others who have failed?  Why is it important that Okonkwo is a warrior?  Why must he treat his wives and kids so rottenly?  All these questions and more ran through my head as I read, but I found no good answers.  I understood Okonkwo’s motivations and his history, his ambitions and his fear—I just didn’t know why Achebe wanted to tell his story.  It wasn’t until I hit that ending and saw Okonkwo’s body hanging from the tree that I found myself catapulted back through the novel to re-evaluate and examine what I had already read.

Things Fall Apart is a huge success because it never idealizes the past or Okonkwo’s people.  It is important that Okonkwo be an ugly person and that his people engage in appalling behavior, like the murder of twins and the seemingly unmotivated murder of Ikemefuna.  These are not a herd of starry-eyed and loving wildlings who are beset upon by the greedy and vicious white man.  These are people with a complex social order and a full set of recognizably human beings.  They have fears and jealousies and ambitions and cruelties.  Anyone can make us feel for the pains of an innocent, but only an artist can make us suffer for those whose hands are bloody.  For all Okonkwo’s shortcomings, he was a man who faced a ton of adversity and came out on top.  He is a warrior aching to prove his manliness.  This is a man who will not lie down and die when the going gets rough.  So to see him pushed to suicide—my God!  I knew that I was feeling hopeless about the inevitable clash between the colonialists and the natives, but to know that he saw it too is heartbreaking.  He knew his people would not fight.  He knew that he could not fight them all.  He knew there was nothing to be gained by going down swinging.  His son was lost to him.  His clansmen were lost to him.   His world would soon be lost to him.  And there was nothing he could do to change the tides that would batter his people.  All that future is contained in the body hanging in the tree.  That is powerful plotting, and it turns the ho-hum of the tales of Umuofia that open the novel into something purposeful and important

Those first two sections serve as a kind of immersion into the world of Umuofia.  Achebe knew his readers would be most likely aligned with the colonist, for he wrote in English.  This is a tale for people who did not grow up in Umuofia.  The story takes place before the turn of the century, so even Nigerians reading the story would be reading it in a post-colonial world.  It is important then, that we understand the culture, politics, and religious practices of Umuofia thoroughly, that we respect the logic and reasoning of the people.  The true conflicts with the white colonists happen when the outsiders force their own practices on the Ibo without ever understanding even so much as their language, let alone their lives.

Mr. Brown cares to spread the word of the gospel as much as Mr. Smith, but Brown takes the time to talk to the people and understand their beliefs.  He tries to alter those beliefs by cloaking religious education in the guise of scholarly education.  It is Smith and the militaristic whites who care nothing for the people they walk among, and by the time they start wielding their might and government, we as readers do not share their ignorance.  We reject their ignorance.  I for one was hoping the Ibo would stand up against the whites in battle at least, hoping against my own knowledge that they would not go quietly into that not-so-good night.  Both Brown and Smith are distressing to the reader, but Brown is distressing because he represents the inevitability of time and change.  Smith represents something brutal and uncaring.

There is obviously a lot to say in discussing this novel about the relationship between the individual  and his society, and between one society and another, but I will leave all that in the hands of someone who cares more about those things than I do.  Instead, I will end with a few quotes in the novel that I love:

How wonderful is the phrase “fight of blame” to describe an unjust war?

How wonderfully ominous is  the moment Achebe says that “the white man had not only brought religion but also a government”?

Again: “The white man is very clever.  He came quietly and peaceably with his religion.  We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay.  Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one.  He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

And as a final stray thought, I keep thinking how much more I would have liked Avatar had Cameron drawn his story from Things Fall Apart.  Well, I would have loved it.  Certainly the movie would have been a flop instead of a box-office hit, no matter how glorious the special effects and 3-D craziness.  It’s much more palatable to have the Na’vi be starry-eyed wildlings who can repel their invaders, to have the Na’vi win the brothers of the white man so that the white man can no longer act as one.  Palatable and easy with no messy aftertaste.   That’s just not what I’m looking for in my narratives.