Things Fall Apart

"O mundo se despedaça", de Chinua Achebe, é uma obra extremamente rica e com múltiplas dimensões, que podem ser analisadas paralelamente ou em separado.

Esse livro é uma reconstrução fictícia dos modos de vida de sociedades que pouco conheciam povos brancos -- e do impacto causado pela colisão desses mundos. Em particular, dos modos de vida da aldeia de Umuófia (na atual Nigéria) no fim do séc. 19.

São comunidades com ênfase nas tradições, que foram carregadas ao longo dos anos com poucas modificações. Uma estabilidade que é trançado firme, uma sobreposição de uma trama vertical (o respeito àqueles com maior capital econômico, político e social) apoiando uma trama horizontal (a união entre as comunidades familiares).

Até a vinda de mais um elemento, o homem branco, que desfia tudo a partir dos fios soltos: os párias (efulefu) e outros que não se sentiam contemplados pelo sistema vigente.

"O homem branco é muito esperto. Chegou calma e pacificamente com sua religião. Nós achamos graça nas bobagens deles e permitimos que ficasse em nossa terra. Agora ele conquistou até nossos irmãos, e nosso clã já não pode atuar como tal. Ele cortou com uma faca o que nos mantinha unidos, e nós nos despedaçamos."

Interessante notar que esse despedaçamento de um mundo externo ocorre concomitantemente ao do personagem principal, Okonkwo, um líder ambicioso que dedicou toda a sua vida a galgar uma posição de prestígio em sua comunidade e vê tudo desmoronar. Seu destino, como o de todos nós, é muitas vezes independente da sua vontade.

Achebe constrói um elaborado jogo de derrubar dominós, em que cada peça é cuidadosamente posta em pé. A primeira parte do livro é mais lenta, mas isso finca as bases para que, uma vez que o jogo esteja montado, inicie-se uma cascata de eventos que nos absorve intensamente. Somos despertados em súbito da ilusão de que tudo está como sempre foi e como sempre será.

Uma das principais obras nigerianas e africanas, "O mundo se despedaça" é mais do que um romance magistralmente orquestrado sobre a colonização africana. Ele vai mais além, sendo um comentário quase universal sobre a natureza da mudança e das relações de poder.

The silver lining in my personal Covid-19 lockdown has been my re-engagement with reading fiction; pursuing two degrees in History on a part-time basis while working full-time meant that whatever spare time I had was more profitably spent in reading around my subject rather than reading for pleasure. The conclusion of my studies and the enforced restriction of movement has therefore opened up an opportunity for me to read purely for the pleasure of reading, and as a consequence I have finally got around to reading books, like Things Fall Apart, that have been on my mental 'to read' list for far too long.

All I really knew about this book before reading it was always hearing this book described as being the first post-colonial novel. So it was with very little in the way of pre-conceptions that I read this book. I found the novel well written, and felt it really introduced me to characters and into a culture and way of life that on the one hand is completely different to anything that I have encountered before, and yet on the other hand I found underlying aspects of the human condition with which I could more readily identify, and this was probably the most significant thing I took from this book. The central character, Okonkwo, was in a number of ways difficult to like: he often uses violence, including on women and youngsters, to define and express himself. While these actions are hard for me to see as acceptable, the point is of course that they are not in my context and Okonkwo's 'choice' of actions are arguably dictated to him by his gender, his position as head of his family and within his village society, and so on. His problems, and the book's dramatic development, really expand when conciously or unconciously he acts outside of these expectations, or comes into contact with cultural expectations which are totally alien to him (that is Christian, and European). In reading this book it did invite a consideration of culture clash, and personal perspectives upon it.

Well worth reading.

Wow. For the first half of this book I thought it a bit artless and frustrating, but it turns into a very much cleverer and more subtle work than I had been expecting. Ultimately the book is utterly damning about colonialism without ever romanticising what came before it.

I feel weird tagging "spoilers" about a book the outlines of which are pretty well known, and the plot of which is basically described in the publisher blurb, but in spite of all that there were some surprises as I went, so here goes:

First of all, there is one thing that annoyed me intensely through the entire book: the complete lack of any development of female characters or voices. I can imagine a defence of that in terms of the book describing two intensely patriarchal cultures and their meeting, but I'm still digesting Achebe's critique of Conrad. One of his more on-point criticisms is that Conrad writes about colonialism in Africa without ever giving a single African character a real voice - it's fair, but then it rankles to see Achebe do exactly the same thing to women, especially in a book that's partly about brutal patriarchy.

The first part of the book, describing the traditional society that existed before colonisation, is an interesting mixture of pastoral and horrifying. It's not hard to see how people would value what they had, and find its disruption by outside forces intensely painful, but there's also plenty about it that is terrible. Not only the status of women (property whose only apparent chance at any agency at all is by cheating on the husband they didn't necessarily get to choose), but murder of twins, mutilation of sick childrens' corpses, and casting out of men who don't fit a very specific mould. At first I was frustrated by Achebe's stalwart refusal to allow a hint of judgement on any of this; by the end I saw it as a real strength of his writing.

Once things do start to fall apart, I came to appreciate that by keeping any editorialising out of the way, Achebe was able to let his characters and story say all that needed to be said about their own society. The real genius of the book is in its dissection of how weaknesses in the existing culture allowed missionaries to make inroads, how effectively the missionaries manipulated this (often without seeming to understand what they were doing), and yet how disastrous this all was for the people it happened to in spite of the completely unvarnished portrayal of what they had before.