Things Fall Apart
— 1958 —
New York: Penguin, 2017; with glossary of Igbo words and phrases; 209 pages
FIRST LINES
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.
PLOT SUMMARY
The title of this landmark work in contemporary literature comes from the W. B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” whose lines are used as the book’s epigraph:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,…
For untold years, the center has held for the people of Umuofia, home of the novel’s central character, Okonkwo. Fierce wrestler, fearless warrior, proud farmer, formidable man in his clan, Okonkwo resides in a place of unchanging traditions. Through time-honored seasons of planting and harvest, it is a world largely untouched by European contact.
All that will soon fall apart. Set in the late 1800s in what is now Nigeria, the story is told in three parts. The first richly describes the circumscribed universe of Okonkwo’s village and how he has strived mightily to distance himself from his lazy, drunken father. With hard work Okonkwo has acquired a degree of wealth, and he is admired as a village leader, with his three wives and large family as symbols of his station. Hidebound by tradition, Okonkwo’s world is no pastoral paradise. It is an often-unforgiving society with demanding rules. Okonkwo is unwilling to break those rules, even if it means he must sacrifice a young boy when the village oracle demands it.
The book’s second and third parts are about that world invaded by white men. First come missionaries, bringing Christianity, which divides Okonkwo’s family and people. The missionaries are followed by a British colonial administration with its own set of rules. This clash of cultures moves the novel toward its dramatic climax and stature as a tragedy of classical proportion. “The white man is very clever…,” says Okonkwo. “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CHINUA ACHEBE
Born on November 16, 1930, in what was then British colonial Nigeria, Chinua Achebe has been called the “father of modern African literature” by South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer (see entry).
He came into a world straddling two cultures. Achebe’s parents were Christian converts and evangelists who traveled widely to spread their faith. Achebe went to Nigeria’s first university, University College (now the University of Ibadan), studying English, literature, and religion, both Christian and African. The conflict between African traditions and European Christian colonizers would inform his work from the outset.
His acclaimed first novel almost never was. While in London in 1957, Achebe had shown the book in draft to another writer who was enthusiastic. After returning home, Achebe mailed the manuscript to a London typing service. He never heard back—the parcel from Nigeria had apparently been tossed aside. A British colleague then demanded that the service produce the typescript, which was then sent off to British publisher Heinemann. According to Achebe, Heinemann’s editors had never seen a novel by an African writer and sent it to an outside reader. The reaction: “The best first novel since the war.”
Even after publication, the novel might have been stillborn. “They had no idea if anybody would want to read it. It went out of print very quickly,” Achebe told the Paris Review in 1994. “It would have stayed that way if [publisher] Alan Hill hadn’t decided that he was going to gamble even more and launch a paperback edition of this book…. But that was how the African Writers Series came in to existence…. So it was a very small beginning, but it caught fire.”
Published when Achebe was twenty-eight, Things Fall Apart may have started slowly but became a classic of world literature. “It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing,” scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.” The book has since been translated into fifty-seven languages and is required reading for students, with more than 20 million copies sold, according to the publisher.
Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, working there until 1966. During that time, he completed two more novels, No Longer at Ease (1960)—featuring the grandson of the character Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart—and Arrow of God (1964), which together with Things Fall Apart form the African Trilogy.
A fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966), would be his last for two decades. When the region of Biafra attempted to break away from Nigeria in 1967, it marked the beginning of a dreadful civil war, rooted in religious differences and tribalism, known as the Biafran War. Aligned with the Biafran cause, Achebe was forced to leave the country, settling in England with his wife, Christiana, and their four children. With brutal civilian massacres and horrific images of starving children broadcast to the world—part of the estimated 2 million who perished from famine caused by a Nigerian blockade—the conflict lasted to 1970.
Achebe returned to Nigeria after the war. But he later moved to the United States to take a series of teaching posts, first with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It was there that he gave a lecture, later published in a 1977 essay, that stirred considerable controversy by attacking one of the giants of English literature, Joseph Conrad.
“The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist,” Achebe said. “That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.” It is worthy of note that the Modern Library’s famous list of 100 Best Novels included four by Conrad, Heart of Darkness among them, but none of Achebe’s fiction.
While producing essays and nonfiction, Achebe did not publish another novel for twenty-one years. “For more than 20 years a case of writer’s block kept him from producing another novel,” Jonathan Kandell explained in Achebe’s 2013 obituary. “He attributed the dry spell to emotional trauma that had lingered after the civil war.”
In 1987, his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, was named a finalist for the Booker Prize. Reviewing the book, novelist Nadine Gordimer wrote, “It is a work in which 22 years of harsh experience, intellectual growth, self-criticism, deepening understanding and mustered discipline of skill open wide a subject to which Mr. Achebe is now magnificently equal.”
During a stay in Nigeria to teach in 1990, Achebe was seriously injured in a car accident that left him wheelchair bound, paralyzed from the waist down. He returned to the United States to teach at Bard College in New York, remaining there until 2009.
In 2007, Chinua Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, a lifetime achievement award. He died in Boston after a brief illness on March 21, 2013, at the age of eighty-two.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
You could listen to the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who wrote, “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe. For passion, intellect and crystalline prose, he is unsurpassed.”
In placing Things Fall Apart on Time magazine’s list of “All-TIME 100 Novels,” Richard Lacayo wrote:
Achebe guides us through the intricacies of Igbo culture, its profound sense of justice, its sometimes murderous rules, its noble and harmful machismo. By the time the British colonial administrator arrives towards the end of the book to dismiss the natives as savages, we know how profoundly mistaken that word is.
Richly told, with its lush sense of Okonkwo’s world, Things Fall Apart is firmly rooted in its place—in wet and dry seasons, in deep connections to the earth, and in ever-present spirits of past generations—and with dialogue sparkling with Igbo aphorisms and wisdom. But this book is more than a moment in history or an indictment of colonialism’s heavy weight.
In Okonkwo, novelist Achebe created a figure in the mold of classic Greek tragedy—a noble character with ideals of honor who is brought down by both the fates and his prideful arrogance, his own fatal flaw.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
I plan to move on to the succeeding two novels in Achebe’s African Trilogy: No Longer at Ease, in which Okonkwo’s grandson has become a Christian; and Arrow of God, set in the 1920s, in which Ezeulu, the traditional chief priest of several Nigerian villages, confronts the forces of Christianity and the colonial British overlords. These three novels have been bound together in several editions.