Review: Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel should be read by all citizens who live in an imperialist country. They will get a small glimpse, as I did, of how colonialism/imperialism and the "1st world agenda", coddled by a savior complex, is the imposing blind force civilizing other cultures throughout the world. The end result is a chaos, a tearing apart of certain ways of life. The way that Things Fall Apart.

It goes way past misunderstanding, because the dogmas and the manipulation of the external forces- the white man- unabashedly and negligently stomp into town to conquer through word, government, and infrastructure much ado to the salvation of souls. Chinua Achebe juxtaposes these familiar ways of ordering society to the white reader, beginning with Part 1 that establishes the narrative of Okonkwo, his tribe, and family. The reader is witness to a painting that is rich in detail and nuances on all levels; color, paintbrush strokes, medium, tone, and construction. Achebe's language is marvelous and fosters the visuality. Intricately, he narrates customs and protocols that the tribes practice in regards to interpersonal relationships and interfamily relations that are strongly weaved together in spirituality, mother nature, and tradition.

Also, Chinua emphasizes that even between tribes of the same region, there are many different ways of handling matters. So in the 2nd part, when Okonkwo has to exile with his family to his mother's tribe because of protocol in regards to involuntary manslaughter, he begins to develop an alienation, along with his family outside of his norms of his birth tribe. And in the distance, away from him, the white man, not to be mistaken with an albino, begins to appear as a faint breeze in the distance- arriving as hearsay already morphed into many storylines and versions by the time it reaches his ears.

Finally in the third part, out of exile and returning home, the faint breeze blows wind in full force, like the Holy Spirit itself, bringing with it changes and subjugation to the white man and their missionaries. They come in breaking African paradigms and defying the gods of the people with their one and only God. Dialogue and meeting is inexistent and tumults Okonkwo and his tribe further into an unknown abyss that only holds fate in the hands of foreignness, power, and injustice- questioning with no adherence to listening for an answer. So the demise of Okonkwo goes hand in hand with the assimilation of many in his tribe, even his own effeminate son who abandons everything in reaction to a long planted seed of pain and hurt of losing a brother to a traditional protocol as a boy.

In the end, Achebe concludes this dense and emotionally packed novel with an ingenious affirmation. The white pastor will perpetuate the entire story for future white missionaries, ambitious and proseletizing, by depicting what the entire three parts, the experience of Okonkwo, his tribe and family, as a case study on how to deal with Africans of similar circumstance and nature- easily addressed and compressed into one simple paragraph of an entire book. Surely this could be comparable to the few paragraphs I have read on Africa, all at the helm of white and foreign hands. And what about this review? I'm challenged and inspired to read more from the country and continent of Chinua Achebe.

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