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.

This is a short novel set in eastern Nigeria in the late 19th century. The protagonist, Okonkwo, is a man of renown in his village, first as a wrestler, and then as a self-made man who has worked hard to attain a position of respect in the community. But he is also hot tempered and something of a domestic tyrant over his family. He despises weakness in others, and in himself.

The traditional way of life of the village is disturbed by the coming of white men -- missionaries, traders and colonial rulers. Okonkwo does not like the social changes they bring to the village, and urges others to resist them, but this resistance, and the manner of it, bring about his downfall.

The first half of the story is fairly static. It describes the village and its social life, the seasons of planting and harvesting, in a manner reminiscent of [a:George Eliot|173|George Eliot|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1525078524p2/173.jpg]. It enables the reader to experience something of the atmosphere of rural life. To readers from elsewhere, the description makes the unfamiliar become familiar. The main crops may be unknown in other places, but we are told enough about the farming methods to become familiar with the rhythms of rainy seasons and dry seasons, seed-time and harvest, and thus to appreciate something of the shock of social change when it comes.

As a missiologist and church historian I found the social change wrought by the missionaries particularly interesting. There are two missionaries in the story, Mr Brown and Mr Smith, The names are generic, deliberately so, I think. They represent two types of missionaries, and two different approaches to Christian mission in the 19th century.

The first, Mr Brown, represents the missionaries who preceded the New Imperialism of the 1870s and later. He is interested in the culture of the local people, and has religious discussions with them. "Whenever Mr Brown went to that village he spent long hours with Akunna in his obi talking through an interpreter about religion. Neither of them succeeded in converting the other, but they learnt more about their different beliefs."

In Achebe's report of these discussions, which is probably a condensed report of thousands of such conversations, it strikes me that Mr Brown's interlocutor, Akunna, had a better grasp of Christian theology than Mr Brown himself had, but that goes beyond the scope of a book review, and I expand on it in a blog post here.

It was missionaries of Mr Brown's type who, earlier in the century, had consecrated Samuel Adjai Crowther, a freed Yoruba slave, as a bishop in western Nigeria.

Mt Smith, who followed Mr Brown, represents the new-style missionaries who came after the New Imperialism. They were more confident in themselves, more convinced of their own superiority, and less willing to learn anything from the local people. They were generally racist, and denounced their predecessors who had consecrated a native bishop in the person of Samuel Adjai Crowther, saying that it was premature, and the natives "weren't ready for it". For the Mr Smiths it would take centuries if not millennia of white tutelage before Africans were ready for a black bishop.

The Mr Smith-type of missionary was dominant until 1914, when the First World War shook European complacency and the tide of the New Imperialism began to recede. Achebe doesn't take us that far, however. He just shows us the effect that it has on Okonkwo.

Achebe also shows how colonialism introduced or exacerbated corruption in African society, and how Christian mission became entangled with colonialism. If these things were unique to one small part of eastern Nigeria, it would perhaps make the novel less interesting, but in its very particularity, the story is universal. The society may change, its economy may change, but rural societies have often undergone such changes. The detailed descriptions at the beginning enable the reader from a different culture to feel at home in the society, to feel that it is not so strange. I've never seen or tasted a yam, but in reading the book I become aware that yams in that society play the same role as mealies in southern Africa, or wheat in England, or oats in Scotland. Achebe does that particularly well.

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.