6. Of Canons, Sons, and Daughters
8. Adaptations, Appropriations, and Mimesis
9. Things Fall Apart’s Worldwide Readers
Conclusion: Whither Things Fall Apart?
Illustrations
Figure 1: Legends of the origin of the white man—“Beke ime ala”
Figure 2: District Commissioners Douglas and Cornell peering from second-floor windows
Figure 3: Chinua Achebe and Simon Gikandi at the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations for Things Fall Apart at Senate House, University of London
Figure 4: Ebubedike Redivivus: Things Come Together (2017)
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the following:
The English Department at Brandeis University, where I met Carina Ray, without whose unwavering faith in my ability to write this book I would have never gotten started.
Gill Berchowitz, Director of Ohio University Press, for her encouragement and patience.
My two anonymous readers, without whose suggestions this book would have been much poorer.
Nancy Basmajian, Managing Editor of Ohio University Press, and John Morris, the copyeditor of this book. Their attentive reading and gentle suggestions have not only enriched this book, but have made the revision process a pleasant and edifying undertaking.
The Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, where I was an Honorary Research Fellow when I started to work on this book, for providing the bibliographical resources necessary for my research.
The students and colleagues at the History Department of King’s College London with whom I discussed the making of this book, for their interest and encouragement, especially my colleague and office mate, Anna Maguire, for her very insightful thoughts on the Things Fall Apart Wikipedia ad.
Simon Gikandi and Lyn Innes for inspiring me, and for their enduring support.
Steph Newell and Toby Green, friends and mentors extraordinaire, for setting a priceless example of scholarship, humanity, and resilience.
The convenors of and participants in the Genealogies of Colonial Violence Conference, held at the University of Cambridge in June 2012, where I first presented my ideas on mbari poetics, for their enthusiasm.
Professor Herbert Cole, whose extraordinary work on mbari has so inspired me, for the excellent suggestions he offered upon reading the draft of this book’s first chapter and for permission to reproduce his photographs.
Dr. Emily Hyde, for very kindly responding to my inquiries on the illustrations of Things Fall Apart.
Angela Andreani, whose friendship and intellectual companionship mean so much.
My mother, María del Carmen, for her loving support across the telephone lines; my maternal grandparents, Los Yayos, for their joyful, unconditional love; my aunt Sagra, always there when I call, and her partner César—I must thank them too for the loving care they have so selflessly bestowed on my grandparents in my absence.
My grandfather passed away right before the copyediting stage of the manuscript. I longed for the day he would have held this book in his hands. I pay tribute to him as well as to his life companion, my beloved grandmother, Carmen, who, alongside him has been my shining light, and who is left to carry on without him. May the publication of this book bring her a small measure of comfort. May it be a token of what her and my grandfather’s union, and their love for us all, have made possible.
Finally, I want to thank Carlos, who bears the brunt of each research project and this peripatetic life of mine, and whose pride, with each dream fulfilled, makes everything worth the while.
Introduction
The publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) was heralded as the inaugural moment of modern African fiction, and the book remains the most widely read African novel of all time. It has been translated into more than sixty languages, has sold over twelve million copies, and is a required text at the primary, secondary, and tertiary educational levels the world over. While Things Fall Apart is neither the first African novel to be published in the West nor necessarily the most critically valued, its enduring, larger-than-life iconicity has surpassed even that of its author. It is in this spirit that it is included in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series.
Set in the early years of the twentieth century, Things Fall Apart revolves around Okonkwo, a brave Igbo warrior whose drive and determination lead him to the highest echelon of his clan in the village of Umuofia. Passionately traditional, Okonkwo resists European colonial incursion with all his might. After his denigration at the hands of a British district officer, and determined to defend the integrity of his village, he kills a court messenger. Disappointed with what he perceives as the passivity of his clan, he commits suicide rather than face the white man’s rope.
While the novel charts the rise and fall of Okonkwo, it affords vistas into the intricate Igbo communities that constitute precolonial Umuofia and its environs, whose people’s lives are governed by a supreme creator, Chukwu, and a pantheon of male and female deities. The ancestors, the living, and the dead cohabit—if not always in uninterrupted harmony—and judicial and political power is vested in a council of elders. While not the land of nightmares purported in colonial discourse, precolonial Igboland in Things Fall Apart is far from idyllic, and the villagers react to the colonial onslaught in a variety of ways. Amidst detentions, evangelization, court cases, and punitive expeditions, the villagers find ways to survive in the new, perilous order. According to Simon Gikandi, one of the most prominent scholars of Things Fall Apart, it is precisely the blurred dualities that form the thematic core of Things Fall Apart (tradition/modernity, Igbo/European, masculinity/ femininity, orality/writing) that are the source of the novel’s narrative power.1 But the overarching theme of Things Fall Apart is the ideological sway of narrative. Crucially, the novel is placed within an indigenous frame of reference. The omniscient narrator is immersed in the ways—cultural and linguistic—of the clan, and retains a degree of opacity that asserts the unknowability of Igbo culture. The discursive and perspectival shift that occurs in the book’s concluding paragraphs places the spotlight on colonial discourse and its makings—the projected quasi-omniscience of colonial anthropology, and the gullibility on which the perpetuation of colonial discourse is premised, exposing the ideological burdens of language in stark, resonant ways. What Achebe does is to reflect the results of power over narrative and the power of narrative to redress.
Things