Here's to Complexity!

On reading the Greenwood “Literature in Context” monograph on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I was a little concerned. Kalu Ogbaa is surely right about the novel: Achebe is offering a pre-contact Iboland that is not Edenic. Achebe is pointing out “native” traditions that make a people vulnerable to the debacles of colonization and post-colonial Nigerian experience. But he is also working through a pre-colonial reality that complete on its own terms, complete independent of contact with Europe. Ogbaa seems to emphasize (for a largely high school reader) the way that Achebe implicates Africans in “scotching Africa” (1). I wonder about this emphasis. Seems to me that the novel (and Achebe’s other novels and his essays) are as interested in the everyday experience of real Africans as it is in establishing blame for what happened after the arrival of the British. Indeed, it is the relationship between everyday experience and the experience of colonialism that seems to drive the work.

Ogbaa notes that Achebe documents a set of “ugly” traditional practices (exposing twins, dismissing the contribution of women). What Ogbaa passes over (in this admitted simplified introduction to the novel) is the frequency with which the narrator and even characters in the novel think about those traditions. Rather than reporting on the “mistakes of the ancestors,” the novel puts those traditions into play and reflects on them. What annoys me with this simplification is that it seems to ask young readers to fall into the very binary (Europe scotched Africa vs. Africans scotched Africa) that this novel—as a novel—undoes.

The crux of this misreading involves the analysis of point of view. Ogbaa declares that the narrator is “an omniscient reporter” who understands the Igbo and reflects their “feelings” (7). I can hear the novel this way. The narrator to my ear is at once an insider and outsider. Like Achebe, the narrator ahs heard and taken at face value the traditions and belief structures of the tribe; the narrator even knows (in an empathetic way) the intentions of these tribe members. But like Achebe, the narrator (and many characters in the novel, even Okonkwo) is aware of alternative traditions and beliefs and of the provisional and contradictory way that individuals hold intentions. Surely Achebe offers a view into what caused the scotching of Africa, but that view is contained within a narrative that makes impossible the determination of a simple causal chain (X caused Y caused Z).

Indeed, such a view is what, in 1958, this novel seeks to undo. The narrative continually questions causal links (tossing in the discontinuous nature of experience—indivdiuals choose to kill others, captives are assigned to new homes, guns “accidentally” explode). Rather than helping readers establish a history of the scotching of Africa, the narrator (and narrative) moves readers (at least readers like me who come from outside of Africa) to wonder about how we see history unfolding and whether our presumptions are not inherited from the ancestors and are, in some instances, a waste.

This I would argue is a more compelling purpose in this novel. Achebe chose not to write history and to write narrative instead. This last claim might lead us to wonder about whether history is not always already a sort of novel (it surely is always narrative). That’s another thread.

Can’t resist encouraging readers of TFA to go and see Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. I happened to watch it last night and can hear “the great African novel” rattling around like a ghost in the lines and scenes.