Okeke faces an internal struggle that concerns his obedience and compliance to the traditional Igbo culture and his love for Nnaemeka, his son. Okeke is depicted as a traditionalist who obediently abides by the Igbo customs and traditional culture. When Okeke's son Nnaemeka decides to challenge the traditional marriage customs of the Igbo tribe, Okeke is faced with a difficult decision to accept and honor his son's choice or reject and shun Nnaemeka. Okeke's internal struggle concerns the love for his son, which conflicts with the expectations of the traditional Igbo society. Okeke realizes that in honoring his son's decision to marry Nene independently without consulting him or his wife, he will be dismissing the traditional Igbo marriage custom. Given the fact that Okeke is a strict traditionalist, he decides to reject and shun Nnaemeka for deciding to marry Nene. Okeke struggles to repress his feelings of love and affection...
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after the dismissal of his son.
At the end of the story, Okeke reads a letter from Nene asking him to allow his two grandsons to visit him. Achebe illustrates Okeke's internal struggle concerning the love for his family and the respect for traditional Igbo culture by writing,
The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was telling himself that he must not give in. He tried to steel his heart against all emotional appeals. It was a reenactment of that other struggle (5).
Okeke continues to repress his difficult emotions and spends the rest of the night feeling guilty for shunning his two grandchildren.
The massive conflict faced by Okeke in this excellent story is between the power and force of the tribe and following tradition, and between the new ways that are springing up and threatening to overwhelm the importance of the tribe and narrow lines of ethnic identity. When Okeke's son says that he will marry from outside of his tribe, he is going against tradition and his own tribe. This greatly angers his father, and Okeke as a result shuns his own son and his family. The cost of this decision is made clear in the following quote:
By a tremendous effort of will he had succeeded in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had preserved, and won.
Note the reference that is made to the "strain" of this conflict and the "tremendous effort of will" that is needed to forget his son. Okeke has to face a brutal choice: either ignore his son and cast him off because of his belief in the importance of tradition, or reject tradition and maintain his relationship with his son. His choice to embrace tradition at the expense of his son is something that has a very high price tag to it, as he discovers when he realises he has wasted his remaining years embracing tradition when he could have been embracing his grandchildren.
What finally weakens Okeke's resolve, and what new worry does he have?
In the story, we are told of the way in which Okeke manages to conquer his desire to see his son and his new wife by sticking to his rigid belief that his son should have married somebody from his own tribe. This itself ushed in a massive internal conflict that "nearly killed him" with the strain, but in the end, Okeke manages to be successful and lives without having any contact at all with his son and his family.
However, what raises the stakes of the conflict and makes it impossible to fight any more is the letter that he is sent by his daughter-in-law informing him that he has two grandsons who are desperate to see him and want to get to know him. Note how Okeke responds to this news:
The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was telling himself that he must not give in. He tried to steel his heart against all emotional appeals. It was a reenactment of theat other struggle.
In the end, it is clear that this conflict has forced him to completely reverse his position, as he is unable to sleep that night from "remorse" and the fear that he might die before he has had a chance to "make it up to them." The massive conflict that Okeke has been under in terms of following tradition and emphasising the importance of the tribe has resulted in his complete change when he found out about the existence of his grandchildren.
In "Marriage is a Private Affair," what is Okeke's external conflict?
The fundamental external conflict that Okeke has is that he cannot accept the marriage of his son. In his mind, Nene is an unacceptable choice for a couple of reasons. The first is that she is of a different cultural background, not of the Ibo of which he and his son are a part. Additionally, Okeke did not choose Nene for his son. He selected someone else for his son, a neighbor's daughter who "has studied in a convent," and who seems to be a more acceptable choice to his liking. Finally, the fact that Nnaemeka chose a wife on his own, without consulting Okeke represents the last reason that his external conflict is so pronounced. He sees his son's actions in a variety of ways, with all of them being bad and representing a form of disenchantment and resentment with his son. The external conflict reaches its zenith when the son sends Okeke a wedding picture and it is returned with Nene's likeness marked up and hacked up with what appears to be scissors or a razor. The external conflict is defined as son and his life versus the father and his own expectations. The ending with Nene's letter is what brings resolution to this external conflict, transforming it into a physical one. The father's anger melts at the mention of his son and grandsons, and turns into fear that he will not have time to right his wrong. It is here where Achebe might be trying to use the situation to represent a "teachable moment." External conflicts over something small have a tendency to fester over time, to a point where one cannot rectify it for it is too late. It is here where Okeke is located in that he cannot shake the feeling that time and mortality will rob him of his opportunity to bring a sense of peace to the situation. In this, external becomes internal quite quickly.
What is Okeke's internal conflict in "Marriage Is a Private Affair"?
In "Marriage Is a Private Affair," when Okeke receives a letter from his daughter-in-law, Nene, his internal conflict is between his stubbornness and his desire to know his grandsons. He experiences many different feelings all at once; these include pride, anxiety, guilt, regret, and fear or mortality.
Okeke’s ongoing stubbornness and pride, along with his conviction that shared ethnicity is an essential component of every marriage, have contributed to his solitude. Years before, his son, Nnaemeka, had refused to comply with his father’s wishes to marry a different woman and had gone ahead with his plan to marry Nene, the woman he loved. One reason for this opposition was that Nene was not Ibo, like they were. Okeke’s rejection had resulted in his living without his son and also without knowledge of his grandchildren.
As Okeke aged, however, this disconnection from family began to wear on him. In her letter, Nene did not push him to accept or even meet her. Instead, she emphasized the connection with his grandsons. Many suppressed feelings well up to challenge his stubbornness. Okeke worries about further regrets that he might have and even that he might die before he ever meets the young boys or reunites with his son. This anxiety gives him a sleepless night.