Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart
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Chinua Achebe on Things Fall Apart
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A gap on the shelf, a story unmadeThe immediate trigger was a novel he encountered in his second year at University College, Ibadan: Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, which Time magazine had named the best book ever written about Africa. Reading it as a Nigerian, Achebe found it not merely wrong but insulting, and the insult became a dare.
I was really angry with this book Mr. Johnson, which was set in Nigeria... And I said to myself, now this is absurd, and if somebody without knowledge, without any inside knowledge of the people who is trying to describe can get away with it, I’ll try my hand at it.
He returned to that sense of absence decades later, in a 2008 PBS interview, and gave it a physical shape that made the problem impossible to argue with.
Think of it in terms of a gap in the bookshelf, you know, where a book has been taken out and the gap is there.
The book that had been taken out was the true story of his own people. He wrote Things Fall Apart, at 28, to put something back.
Writing the book was not only a response to outside misrepresentation. In the 1973 essay ‘Named for Victoria, Queen of England,’ Achebe placed himself inside the problem: he had been educated in the English colonial tradition, had absorbed its assumptions, and the novel was in part a settling of that debt to his own past.
Although I did not set about it consciously in that solemn way I know now that my first book, Things Fall Apart, was an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son.
The historical moment he chose for the novel was not arbitrary. In the same 2008 PBS interview, he explained why the story had to be set at the end of the nineteenth century, when British colonial administration was just arriving in Igboland.
I wanted that moment of change, in which one culture was in contact, in conflict, in conversation with another culture, and something was going to happen.
Beyond the personal reckoning and the chosen historical hinge, Achebe understood the project as a political one with a specific social function. In his 1965 essay ‘The Novelist as Teacher,’ he named that function without hesitation.
Here, then, is an adequate revolution for me to espouse — to help my society regain its belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of the denigration and self-abasement.
How he wrote it
Memory as method, English made newWhen asked in the African Writers of Today broadcast how he had reconstructed traditional Igbo life so accurately, Achebe’s answer surprised people expecting to hear about archival research or fieldwork. He had simply grown up at a moment when enough of the old ways still existed to be seen.
I think I belong to a very fortunate generation in this respect that the old hadn’t been completely disorganized, you see, when I was growing up... if you lived in a village, to see it not in whole, at least in part, you see. There are these old ways of life.
He pressed the point further, closing off any impression that the novel was the product of deliberate scholarly reconstruction. What he drew on was absorbed before he had any intention of becoming a novelist.
This didn’t really entail a deliberate kind of research of the adult artist into this life. No, I didn’t do any research at all.
The decision to write in English rather than Igbo was a permanent one, made on grounds that went beyond audience size. Writing in English was itself a political act: it meant speaking directly to the colonial language and reshaping it from within. By 1965 he had worked out exactly what that required.
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.
At the Library of Congress in 2008, reading from the novel on its fiftieth anniversary, Achebe spoke about why Okonkwo, the protagonist, could not be written as a straightforwardly admirable man. The choice was a craft argument, not a moral one.
It’s no point writing about a hero who is an angel. That’s not of any value to us because we’re not angels. But we can recognize a hero who has a flaw. [paraphrased from audio]
Okonkwo’s defining quality, the ferocious single-mindedness that his community respected, is precisely what isolates him when the world changes around him. Achebe made that loop between honor and destruction the structural engine of the novel.
What he wants us to sit with
One story is no understanding at allThe most foundational thing Achebe wanted readers to grasp required no literary argument. In his 1991 essay ‘Teaching Things Fall Apart,’ he addressed American readers directly, and the fact that the point had to be made at all was, he noted, itself evidence of the problem.
Africans are people in the same way that Americans, Europeans, Asians, and others are people. Africans are not some strange beings with unpronounceable names and impenetrable minds. Although the action of Things Fall Apart takes place in a setting with which most Americans are unfamiliar, the characters are normal people and their events are real human events. The necessity even to say this is part of a burden imposed on us by the customary denigration of Africa in the popular imagination of the West.
He found unexpected confirmation of what the novel could do when it reached South Korea, where an entire class at a girls’ college wrote to him. He had not anticipated that the book’s geography of loss would map onto their history, and what he learned changed how he talked about what literature is for.
This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do — it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it’s a miracle.
When a white student at the University of Massachusetts approached Achebe after class with nothing to say except that Okonkwo reminded him of his own father, the exchange confirmed something about the novel’s range that Achebe had not quite predicted. He recounted it in The Atlantic as proof that the identification worked across every distance the reader might bring.
Those who win tell the story; those who are defeated are not heard. But that has to change. It’s in the interest of everybody, including the winners, to know that there’s another story. If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
That argument is the novel’s deepest claim. Umuofia is not a tragedy the reader witnesses from a safe distance. It is evidence, and the reader is implicated in who gets to give evidence and who does not.