My Review of Things Fall Apart

“We’re the ones who fuckin’ gave all y’all the freedom that you got!”

~ A white woman yelling at a group of African American protesters after the police shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri.

I’m sorry to begin my review with such an ugly quote, but that’s where we’re at now.

Chinua Achebe’s masterful and hard-hitting novel, Things Fall Apart, takes us back to an earlier chapter, to life in the nine self-governing villages of Umuofia, Nigeria, before the arrival of the Europeans. There, a tightknit community flourished.

In prose that reads like oral story-telling, Achebe paints a vibrant and multifaceted portrait of a thriving and sophisticated society. These are a people of place. They belong to the land and are intimately connected to its patterns. They are a people rooted.

Their psychology is informed by the rhythms of the wild, natural environment. They worship Ani, the “great goddess of the earth without whose blessing our crops will not grow.” She is “the source of all fertility and the ultimate judge of all morality and conduct.”

Characterization is rich and varied. The people and their culture are portrayed with keen insight, sly wit and a straightforward simplicity, both at work and at play.

We witness a full-bodied society—the mundane and the profound, the intimacies and tensions of family life, the joy of a wedding feast, the solemnity of a funeral, the administration of justice, rituals, fears, kinship, superstitions, triumphs, friendships, levity, betrayal, kidding around, sorrow, shrewdness, tenderness, love, hate, lessons learned, humanness and much good humour.

The plot revolves around fierce-tempered, hard-working, ambitious Okonkwo and his large family, following them from adversity to adversity, for several years. The character study of Okonkwo is utterly absorbing, and I won’t say much more about it here, except: read the book.

About two-thirds of the way in, the Christian missionaries show up.

The story turns into a poignant, up-close-and-personal account of the devastation wrought by colonization. The indigenous community is at first blindsided, finding themselves subject to odd strangers who neither play fair nor respect their way of life. When soft steps and reason and threats of eternal damnation don’t work quickly enough, when the proud among them, like Okwonko, refuse to bow, the subjugators resort to force, with tragic consequences.

A heart-wrenching series of events unfolds. The sacred is destroyed. The people are cut at their roots. They are dispossessed of their ancestral lands, their autonomy, and who they are.

It’s a story that’s been replayed hundreds of times on American soil, and around the world. Its origins lie in the Doctrine of Discovery (1493), the document which awarded sovereignty over any pagan “uncivilized” land to the first Christian monarch who discovered it.

The era of colonization, characterized by patriarchy, competition and aggression, was thus ushered in. Under the whip-hand of the colonizers, more and more peoples suffered disconnection. Concurrently, the world over, industrialization, urbanization and the rise of commercialism eroded the connections that keep tightknit communities together.

But the story does not end here. It does not end with a woman in Missouri claiming her group is the holder and distributor of another people’s liberty. Backlash movements aimed at reclaiming stolen pride, and rights, as well as a sense of belonging to a place, continue to gain ground.

I like this quote from Dr. Sharon Blackie, from The Place of Belonging:

So many of us have no true sense of belonging to a place. Today, we live mostly in ways that are displaced from the land and from the nonhumans who share our places with us. And yet, from time to time throughout our lives we may catch a glimpse of a different way of being in the world: a way of enchantment and wildness and mystery.

And many believe - “The hope lies with the women.”

The Igbo people of Umuofia believed: A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and sweet, and to his motherland when there is sorrow and bitterness … your mother is there to protect you … that is why we say the Mother is supreme.

This entire novel is told from the indigenous point of view, except for the final page, which switches to point of view of the colonizer. His thoughts are chilling. They will stay with me for a long time.

Please, read this book.

I welcome your comments about anything written above.