SOURCE: “Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It,” in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 25, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 117–36.

It is only when we go to the riverside that we can gauge the size of the water pot.

—Ewe Proverb

No matter how well the hen dances, it can not please the hawk.

—Akan Proverb

The proverbial epigraphs to this essay seek to integrate the enterprise of criticism into a traditional African cultural context. The first points to the relativity at the heart of all critical pursuits: it is mainly in relation to the literary enterprise that the critical one is validated. Furthermore, no criticism can hope to completely encompass the total significance of the literary artifact, just as no water pot can hope to take in all the river's water. On the other hand, all critical enterprises harbour a certain predatoriness which the relationship between the dancing hen and the hawk can be taken to figure. The critical enterprise is never completely satisfied with the work of its predecessors, and thus, continually seeks to tear open previous critical discourses to make space for its own activity.

These two proverbs are recalled to contextualize my own critical exercise. In offering a critique of the general evaluation of Things Fall Apart, I am conscious of the perceptive work that has been undertaken on the novel since its publication some three decades ago. Much of the criticism relating to the novel, however, shares implicit assumptions with the nature of the “realism” that the work itself offers. These assumptions subtly valorize the hermeneutical and exegetical approaches to the work without paying attention to the fact that its “realism” is a construct whose basic premises cannot be taken unproblematically. To help problematize the nature of the novel's realism, I shall, in the second part of this essay, focus on its construction of women and the feminine. This specific reading is offered as a model open to further modification and an alternative to the dominant tendencies in the area of the criticism of African literature. Ultimately, I intend to suggest that the representationalist readings that relate to his work are, though valid, grossly inadequate and that it is preferable to adopt a multi-tiered approach to his work and to African literature in general that will not take them as merely mimetic of an African reality but will pay attention to them as restructurations of various cultural subtexts. This will hopefully liberate more exciting modes of literary analyses that would pay attention to the problematic relationships that African literary texts establish with their cultural backgrounds. This will also pave the way for a proper examination of other works that do not rely on realist modes of discourse for their re/presentations of Africa. I bear in mind that if I now “hawk” other critiques, mine will soon be “hen” for subsequent ones; that is exactly as it should be, for it is impossible to say a last word on a writer as fine as Achebe.

I

Achebe's work, particularly Things Fall Apart, has inspired a great amount of criticism. In surveying this criticism, it is useful to bear in mind that the nature of that criticism is symptomatic of the evaluation of African literature in general.¹ The issues posed in relation to Achebe often pervade the critical practice relating to African literature. But, perhaps, it is only Biodun Jeyifo and Chidi Amuta who have attempted to define a typology of the criticism in the field. Jeyifo's two-tier typology holds greater potential for elaboration, and it is to his that I turn to contextualize criticism of Achebe's work. Jeyifo defines the purview of post-coloniality as the dismantling “of bounded enclaves and subjectivities” (Jeyifo 52). He shares in this definition the tendency evident in The Empire Writes Back to perceive post-colonial practice as a discourse concerned with a self-definition that foregrounds the tensions with the imperial power and emphasizes the differences from the assumptions of the imperial center (Ashcroft 2). The implicit assumption that post-colonial literatures are in a perpetual umbilical dance with the metropolitan center, counter-productive though it is, will not be taken on here. Jeyifo divides post-colonial writing and criticism into two distinct fields which he names the post-coloniality of “normativity and proleptic designation” and the “interstitial or liminal” post-coloniality. The post-coloniality of normativity and proleptic designation is one in which the writer or critic speaks to, or for, or in the name of the post-independence nation-state, the regional or continental community, the panethnic, racial or cultural agglomeration of homelands and diasporas (Jeyifo 53).

The normativity in this conception of post-coloniality often entails a return to cultural sources, the projection of a futurist agenda, and the celebration of cultural authenticity. Indeed, Achebe himself espouses such an agenda in relation to his work. In his famous words:

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them.

(“Novelist as Teacher” 45)

Ignoring for the time being the implications of these remarks for constructing the social role of the writer,² I note the implicit confidence expressed about the role of realism in the project of recovering cultural authenticity. Realism is so powerful as a conduit for social criticism, that it is taken to pass on the verities available to other empiricist social discourses. Perhaps it is David Lodge, in The Modes of Modern Writing, who offers a definition of realism closest to that implied in Achebe's confident assertions on the role of his work:

[Realism is] the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to descriptions of similar experience in non-literary texts of the same culture.

(25)

The assumption that realism shares a community of values with other non-literary discourses was particularly important in the general conceptions of the role of literature in the newly emergent African nations. And especially in the period just before and after Independence in West Africa when a burgeoning newspaper culture and the Onitsha Market Literature³ emphasized an empiricism and rationalism embodied in a recourse to “facts” and factual reporting, the perceived affinities between the economy of realism and those of other non-literary discourses were taken for granted in the espousals of cultural authenticity. A remark by an early reviewer of Achebe's A Man of the People to the effect that the novel was “worth a ton of documentary journalism” (Time 19 Aug 1966: 84, ctd. in Larson 16) encapsulates the expressed confidence in the shared “factuality” of the protocols of both novelistic realism and newspaper reportage in general.

The confidence Achebe expresses in the realism of his early novels was shared by his critics and led to several critical formations which sought to elucidate the representationalist aspects of his work. The critical tendency that seemed to take the novels most evidently as in a one-to-one relationship to reality was that which sought to recover anthropological data about the Igbos from the novels. Charles Larson elicits such an anthropological reading from Things Fall Apart, though he introduces his work by deprecating that same tendency in Achebe's earliest reviewers. “What is clearly needed,” writes Larson, “is the reviewer equipped to examine African fiction both from a cultural (anthropological) and an aesthetic (literary) point of view, though I am not trying to suggest that the two are ever totally separated” (Larson 16). He goes on to affirm that the first part of the novel is “heavily anthropological, but contains the seeds of germination for the latter half of the book” (Larson 30). Proceeding from such a premise, it is not difficult for him then to conclude that there is very little scenic description related to the building of mood and atmosphere in the Western sense, and that Achebe's descriptions are used directly for functional rather than for aesthetic purposes. In discussing the passage in which Ikemefuna is led into the forest to be murdered, Larson asserts that the description of the forest is given just to let the reader know where he is; the boy could not have been killed in the village anyway, so the forest scene is an inescapable necessity imposed on Achebe. In other words, the novel is intent on giving only factual information. Because of his anthropological biases, Larson fails to see that the whole scene is rich with meanings and can be read as an important symbolic expression of the darkness at both the centre and margins of all cultures.

Obiechina duplicates this tendency from an insider's perspective. In his Culture, Tradition, and Society in the West African Novel, he sees the novel as reflective or mimetic of traditional beliefs and practices in an almost unmediated way, being interested, as he is, in showing how the cultural and social background “gave rise to the novel there, and in far-reaching and crucial ways conditioned the West African novel's content, themes and texture” (Obiechina 3). Within Obiechina's formulation, “culture,” “tradition,” and “society” become paradigmatic of the real West African world reflected in the novels he studies. In this way the novels become amenable to an “anthropological harvest” in which details are read from cultural background to fictional world and back again.

These readings of Achebe are better understood in the context of a general rhetoric that sought to define an authentic African worldview opposed to the Western one. Criticism, in this context, tried to demonstrate the extent to which the narrative had “naturalized” the borrowed form of the novel by its specifically African discursive strategies. Several critics devoted themselves to arguing the “Africanness” of the text such as was evident in proverb use (Egudu; Lindfors; Shelton), in the oral rhythms concealed in the text (McCarthy), or in the patterns of temporality that are arguably relatable to African cultural sources (JanMohamed).

A more subtle version of the Africanness rhetoric seems to be offered by criticism that sees Achebe's work as setting itself against the construction of the African available within Western fiction. In her recent book on Chinua Achebe, C. L. Innes undertakes a contrastive pairing of Achebe with Joyce Cary, in which she establishes a typology of the “preferred.” She draws inspiration for this from Achebe's own remarks about the factors that led him to write novels as a corrective to some of the jaundiced images about the African that were purveyed in writings by Westerners. Achebe's fictionalization of African reality is to be preferred to Cary's because Achebe is closer to the reality of Africa:

In challenging Cary's ‘superficial picture,’ a representation to be observed on the surface without critical intervention, Achebe challenged not only the vision depicted but also the manner of the depiction, not only the story, but the mode of story-telling, and the consequent relationship between reader and writer.

(Innes 18)

Innes explores the novel's Africanness in relational terms, and this suggests that it is the construction of different representations of the same world that is at stake. It is necessary to be alerted to the modes of perception of the African encrusted in reactionary discourses such as those of Cary. Representation is a subtle process imbricated within the textual strategies deployed by realist discourse. But it is important to note how such an approach privileges the realism of the preferred version and ignores the potential exclusions of such a version. In Achebe's specific evocation of the Igbo world, it is possible to further contrast him with other Igbo writers, such as Buchi Emecheta, to show that his version of African reality requires as much interrogation and qualification as those proffered by the Carys.

Side by side with this type of criticism was another which sought to identify Africanness as a first step towards corralling the rural novels into a more radical political agenda. Indeed, the position of Chinweizu et al. in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature can be taken to represent the most radical expression of this agenda. They attacked many of the leading African writers and critics for obscurantism and a divorce from African oral sources and advocated a return to a traditional afrocentrist literary and critical practice. The reactionary essentialism concealed in this position was quickly discovered and attacked by both writers and critics. It is now fashionable to address the bolekaja⁴ formation in surveys of African literature in derogatory terms, but it seems to me that the nature of the bolekaja radicalism derives precisely from an unquestioning confidence in the capacity of realism for reflecting the real. Their fear was that, if the wrong “reality” was reflected, it would have a corrupting influence on readers, and ultimately militate against the larger processes of political decolonization which were at the centre of their concerns. In this sense they share the same attitudes that inform all criticism accepting realism at face value and ignoring its constructedness as an “ism.”

All these critical formations in relation to Achebe's work can be perceived as united in subtle maneuvers that take the culture of the realist novel as most truthfully inscribing the space and time of history. Palmer can be taken to be representative of this notion:

Broadly speaking, the African novel is a response to and a record of the traumatic consequences of the impact of western capitalist colonialism on the traditional values and institutions of the African peoples.

(Palmer 63)

It is interesting how such a formulation, and the critical practice informed by it, defines a novelistic agenda that emphasizes “record,” grounding it in rationalism and empiricism. Furthermore this type of formulation permits the exclusion or underprivileging of the counter-realist and non-rationalist. In Palmer's own practice, when he engages with Tutuola, he is at pains to show that Tutuola is merely a teller of tales and not a novelist. His work thus requires a different level of seriousness:

Tutuola is not strikingly original, but we can then go on to assert that whereas realism and originality are expected of the formal novel, the teller of folk tales is expected to take his subject matter and the framework of his tales from the corpus of his people's traditional lore.

(Palmer 12; emphasis added).

Since Palmer has already suggested that the African novel is supremely concerned with “record,” it is easy to see how his conception of Tutuola's work underprivileges the type of mythological discourse that his writing engages in. But more importantly, it serves to institute a subtle dichotomy between realism and non-realism, with the added suggestion that the non-realist is not properly the staple of the novel form. All the debates around Tutuola seem to me to adumbrate what Karin Barber (“African-language Literatures and Post-colonial Criticism”) detects at the center of post-colonial and Commonwealth literary criticism: the desire to bracket out certain forms of discourse, and to underplay or dismiss the vital activity of oral literature. Much of the criticism of African literature, she says, seeks to give oral tradition only an originary role in the construction of typologies of the Europhone African literatures. The oral tradition is seen mainly as a reservoir of materials to be exploited by the modern writer. This maneuver forecloses the possibility of seeing oral literature as vitalizing its own traditions of writing as expressed in indigenous language literatures. It seems to me that, additionally, the elements of oral literature employed by writers and elucidated by critics are seen mainly in the role of subserving an essentially rationalist and empiricist realist discourse. The African novel is made to yield reflections of Africa, and there is often an unconscious urge to read them as recording an “African” reality that comes without mediation. Thus, when a Tutuola gives full vent to the transgressive potential inherent in oral literary traditions, his work can only be seen in terms of the problematic. His work disturbs the process of establishing mimetic adequacy in the representation of the African world view.

It is perhaps fruitful at this stage to note Hayden White's general scepticism about the definitions of realism to make room for a contextualization of the relationship between realist and non-realist discourses in the representations of Africa:

In my view, the whole discussion of the nature of “realism” in literature flounders in the failure to assess critically what a generally “historical” conception of reality consists of. The usual tactic is to set the “historical” over against the “mythical,” as if the former were genuinely empirical and the latter were nothing but conceptual, and then to locate the realm of the “fictive” between the two poles. Literature is then viewed as being more or less realistic, depending upon the ration of empirical to conceptual elements contained in it.

(3n)

Realism is ultimately a construction that is privileged because it is seen as reflecting History and Truth in its engagement with empirical data. But it is a construction that needs to be interrogated. In the context of African literature, the myths and legends are important sources for the construction of an African world view. It is in fact significant that from the very inception of African literature, a tradition that draws dominantly from oral literature and its modes of perception has grown alongside the more realist tendency. We can number writers like Soyinka, Awoonor, Armah, and lately Laing, Okri, and Bandele-Thomas in the ranks of those who draw mainly on a mythic consciousness, but it is still disturbing that no full-length study has yet been made in which these writers are seen as together exemplifying a specific mode of literary consciousness.⁵ The crucial thing though, is to regard their works as drawing from the wealth of cultural materials to produce re/structurations of the culture within a general mythopoeic practice. But it is a type of re/structuration that realism itself participates in so that any representationalist reading of realism is a manoeuvre that, consciously or unconsciously, ignores the problematic status of the “realist” text.

In order that African novels, be they realist or counter-realist, are not rapidly incorporated into an anthropological-representationalist reading of African reality, it is important to regard them all as symbolic discourses that continually restructure a variety of subtexts: cultural, political, historical and at times even biographical.⁶ And it is useful to bear in mind that a palpable gap is forever instituted between the narrative text and the subtexts it appropriates. It is then fruitful to regard the African novel as only partially reflecting a “reality” beyond itself; one reflected in a highly problematic way, forever struggling to be self-sufficient within itself, but always involved in various relationships with its informing matrix. It then becomes possible to endorse Homi Bhabha's desire to see a shift in the criticism of post-colonial literatures from the perception of the text as representationalist to seeing it as a production (see Bhabha). But it seems to me also important not to privilege the textual as solely generative of meanings. The text is meaning/ful partly in relation to the culture from which it borrows its materials and with which it establishes varying relationships. This view of the text permits the recovery of a cultural matrix for the text, and at the same time opens up a space for an interrogation of the assumptions upon which it is grounded.

Perhaps this strategy would satisfy someone like Chidi Amuta, who is radically opposed to what he sees as a hegemonic traditionalist aesthetic that governs the criticism of African literature. In relation to Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, he makes the assertion that they have become axiomatic reference points for diverse interests and opinions intent on rediscovering and commenting on “traditional African society” and “the culture conflict” inaugurated by the advent of colonialism, stock concepts which have since been adumbrated into a “mini-catechism” (Amuta 130). The “traditionalist aesthetic” can be incorporated into a multi-tiered activity of recovering significance for the text without necessarily lapsing either into a febrile essentialism or a constrictive formalism.

We can return finally to address Jeyifo's second formulation of post-coloniality. For him, interstitial or liminal post-coloniality “defines an ambivalent mode of self-fashioning of the writer or critic which is neither First World nor Third World, neither securely and smugly metropolitan, nor assertively and combatively Third Worldist. The very terms which express the orientation of this school of post-colonial self-representation are revealing: diasporic, exilic, hybrid, in-between, cosmopolitan” (Jeyifo 53). In short, acutely aware of the antinomies that riddle existence. It is interesting that Jeyifo names those he thinks are the dominant figures of this formation of the post-colonial (Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha), suggesting that the consciousness of the antinomic began with them. This, I think, is mistaken. “The African writer's very decision to use English,” writes Jan Mohamed, “is engulfed by ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions” (JanMohamed 20). I agree with him and add that the very choice of the metropolitan language for the writing of post-colonial literatures secretes liminality into the inaugural act of post-colonialist representation itself. Furthermore, in the most sensitive of post-colonial writers, the representation is done with an uneasy awareness of the subtle contradictions inscribed in an emergent syncretic culture: on the one hand, the loss of a pristine traditional culture is regretted, but this is mingled with an awareness of its more reprehensible potential. And on the other, the ruthless economic competition of urbanization and Westernization is deprecated while an awareness of the greater possibilities for vertical mobility, self fulfilment, and freedom is registered. In that sense, the condition of interstitiality or liminality is of the very essence of post-colonial writing, though each text establishes a different relationship to this conundrum. Jeyifo's typology breaks down and is particularly subverted by his own reading of Achebe's Things Fall Apart in which he emphasizes the novel's productive ambivalences and liminality in its continual relativization of doxa (represented by Okonkwo) as against paradoxa or irony (represented by Obierika and those at the margins of the text, such as osus and women).

What emerges, then, from the discourses of post-colonial criticism, is that it is new reading strategies that have come into being and are at issue, focusing on aspects of post-colonial texts that had hitherto been silenced. It is, to borrow an apt formulation of Irigaray's in another context, the “spaces that organize the scene, the blanks that sub-tend the scene's structuration and yet will not be read as such” (Irigaray 137–38) that have come into account in the readings of post-colonial literatures. And in the particular context of the criticism of African literature, the requirement that it move away from the dominant representationalist rhetoric to more nuanced approaches that will take account of the hitherto “silent spaces” and the subtle and often problematic relationships between text and context becomes patently imperative.

II

This reading of Things Fall Apart, then, is offered as a means of exposing the gap that exists between the realist African text and the reality that it is seen to represent. The novel is particularly useful for this enterprise because of its highly acclaimed (and well deserved) literary status and the fact that it has been taken unproblematically since its publication thirty years ago.

It seems fruitful to conceive of the realism of Things Fall Apart as constructed on two levels simultaneously. At one level, the novel concerns itself with a description of Umuofian culture and its subversion by the contact with Western imperialism. This level of the novel can be perceived as metonymic of an Igbo or African reality. In Jakobsonian terms, the narrative progresses metonymically, with narrative elements selected for attention because they exist in discernible contiguous relation to one another. Significantly, however, the text frequently departs from the overarching narrative of the fall of Okonkwo and the division of the clan to pursue numerous anecdotes and digressions that are demonstrably not related to the main narrative but embody subtle qualifications of it. Furthermore, within the context of the unfolding events, the narrative generates a secondary level of conceptualization that can be seen as symbolic/metaphorical. This level subtends the metonymic text but gathers around itself all the antinomies associated with metaphor: ambiguity, contradiction, irony, and paradox.

The symbolic/metaphorical level of conceptualization reveals two closely related strata both at the level of content, the culture of Umuofia, and also at the level of the narrative's discursive strategies in general. On the one hand, Umuofia, as a culture, has institutions governed by a viable symbolic order. Though the narrative text itself reflects some of the central concerns of the culture, both in relation to the cultural institutions and more generally in relation to the culture's governing symbolic system, it employs certain discursive strategies that articulate a symbolic/metaphorical system not relatable solely to the symbolic order reflected by the actual culture. The narrative's own order is derivable from the various configurations of significances, and in its structuration of the narrated events. And it is at this strategic level of symbolic structuration that the novel's hierarchization of gender and the subtle subversion of its proferred hierarchy are played out, showing that the novel's realism, in the characteristic manner of a writing continually produces excessive meanings. Taking it at face value then becomes inadequate and problematic.

Several critics have rightly pointed out that Okonkwo's downfall is mainly due to a neurotic concern with “manliness.” Okonkwo pursues distinction, in the words of Abiola Irele, with an “obsessive single-mindedness that soon degenerates into egocentricity, until he comes to map out for himself very narrow limits of action or reflection” (Irele 11). Almost every critic of the novel pays attention to the nature of Okonkwo's tragic character, relating it to the narrow limits of action defined by his society as “manly” and showing how his character precludes the exercise of the more “feminine” virtues of tolerance, tenderness and patience. Innes argues that it is a flaw encoded in the very symbolic order of Umuofian society and purveyed by its linguistic codes. Okonkwo's attitudes are framed by the culture's language and its implications, and it is this that makes him “unable to acknowledge the mythic implications of femininity and its values” (Innes 117). What seems to have been ignored, however, is the fact that in totally focalizing the narrative through Okonkwo and the male-dominated institutions of Umuofia, the novel itself implies a patriarchal discourse within which women, and much of what they can be taken to represent in the novel, are restricted to the perceptual fringes. In spite of this demonstrable patriarchy, however, Okonkwo is at various times ironized by the text suggesting the inadequacy of the values he represents and ultimately those of the hierarchy that ensures his social status. It is important to stress that it is not just Okonkwo's values that are shown as inadequate, but those of a patriarchal society in general, he representing an extreme manifestation of the patriarchy that pervades the society as a whole.

Part of the structuration of the male-female hierarchy in the novel derives from what Chantal Zabus, in talking about the use of proverbs in Things Fall Apart, refers to as the “ethno-text.” She defines the term in relation to “the discursive segments that belong to the vast corpus of African traditional oral material” (Zabus 20). Her focus is mainly on the implications for the demise of orality that the transposition of traditional discursive elements into the Europhone novel implies, but it is useful to expand the term ethno-text to embrace all the traditional cultural practices that are depicted in a novel, be they linguistically based or not. It is the structuration derivable from Igbo culture itself that arguably offers the raw materials for the construction of the fictional world of Umuofia.⁷ It is noticeable, for instance, that the female principle has a very important part to play in Umuofia's governing cosmogony. Ani, goddess of the earth, “played a greater part in the life of the people than any other deity” (26). The Week of Peace set aside for her before the celebration of the New Yam Festival is a time of tolerance, relaxation, and peaceful co-existence. And so important is Ani that all the society's activities are judged in terms of what is or is not acceptable to her; indeed, she is “the ultimate judge of morality and conduct” (26). G. D. Killam has been led to suggest, from an examination of the role of Ani in the lives of the people, that “a powerful ‘female principle’ pervades the whole society of Umuofia” (20). It is important to note, however, that this powerful female principle is most potent at a symbolic/metaphorical level. It finds its most powerful expression at the level of the clan's governing cosmogony. And, at all times, the female principle always attracts some masculine essentiality in its definition. Ani has constant communion with the “fathers of the clan” because they are buried within her. She has a male priest, while Agbala, god of the Hills and Caves, has a priestess as spokesperson. And in the arena of the traditionally most masculine-centered activity, war, the governing principle of Umuofian war medicine is believed to be an old woman with one leg, agadi-nwayi (9). The clan's cultural values institute the feminine in a very powerful position within the governing symbolic system, taking care to suggest a subtle interfusion of the two principles of male and female. In that sense, Umuofia's governing symbolic system suggest a necessary balancing of the two principles, so that the notion of a pervasive single essence “female principle” requires qualification.

At the level of the metonymic realist description of the institutional practices of Umuofia, however, the ethno-text yields a completely different reality. Umuofia is a male-dominated society, and the narrative reflects this aspect of the culture. The continuing emphasis in the text is on depicting male-dominated activities—the oratory of men before the gathered clan, the acquisition and cultivation of farmlands, courage and resourcefulness in sport and war and the giving and taking of brides. The text's focus on the patriarchy inscribed in the ethno-text is particularly evident in the portrayal of the political institution of justice. Since the Umuofians are acephalous, their central political power is invested in the ndichie, council of elders, and in the egwu-gwu, masked spirits of the ancestors who come to sit in judgement over civil and criminal disputes.

It is in the attitude of women to the egwu-gwu that the hierarchy of power is unmasked. The egwu-gwu emerge to sit in judgement with “guttural and awesome” voices. And the sounds of their voices are no less mystifying than the sounds that herald their entry:

Aruoyim de de de dei! flew around the dark closed hut like tongues of fire. The ancestral spirits of the clan were abroad. The metal gong beat continuously now and the flute, shrill and powerful, floated on the chaos.

And then the egwu-gwu appeared. The women and children sent up a great shout and took to their heels. It was instinctive. A woman fled as soon as an egwu-gwu came in sight. And when, as on that day, nine of the greatest masked spirits in the clan came out together it was a terrifying spectacle. Even Mgbafo took to her heels and had to be restrained by her brothers.

(63)

It is interesting that in its presentation of the scene the narrative betrays its attitude to the relationship between women and power. Significantly, the egwu-gwu are described in an idiom of grandeur, the “tongues of fire” recalling the dramatic events of Pentecost recorded in the Acts of the Apostles 2.1–4. And the women's “instinctive” flight at their emergence can be read as the awestruck response to these masked ancestral spirits. A few lines later, however, the women reveal they have more knowledge of the reality behind the masked spirits than they care to express: “Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwu-gwu had the springly walk of Okonkwo. … But if they thought these things they kept them within themselves” (64–65). The narrative paints the scene with so much detail, objective distancing and humour, that it is impossible not to regard it as of the clearest “realistic” vintage. But the “thoughtful silence” of the women before this all-important masculine institution is ironic. The narrative works both to reveal the “natural” and “instinctive” female attitude to Power and also to ironize the pretensions of the masculine social institutions. But it is important to note that the irony does not work to radically undermine the hierarchy at the centre of the power structure because the women constrain themselves to “thinking” their knowledge, but leave it unexpressed.

Some aspects of the narrative can be construed wholly as fictional constructions and not as trajectories of the ethno-text. Here it is the narrative, in terms of its own discursive strategies, that is responsible for any impression of patriarchy that comes across. In the relationships in Okonkwo's household, for instance, we find a subtle definition of his masculinity that depends on a particular view of the women in his domestic set-up. Twice we are told Okonkwo beats his wives. The first time, it is Ojiugo, his last wife. The narrator's preface to the incident must be noted:

Okonkwo was provoked to justifiable anger by his youngest wife, who went to plait her hair at her friend's house and did not return early enough to prepare the afternoon meal.

(21)

If Okonkwo's anger is “justifiable” then the narrative has passed judgement on Ojiugo's “irrationality” and “thoughtlessness” from her husband's perspective. And it is significant that the text does not bother to let Ojiugo explain herself on her return. It is just reported that “when she returned he beat her very heavily” (21). In Okonkwo's anger he forgets that it is the Week of Peace, and even when he is reminded, he does not stop because, as we are told, he “was not the man to stop beating somebody half way through, not even for fear of a goddess” (21). In earning a severe reprimand from Ani's priest for flouting the rules governing the observance of the Week of Peace, his “manly” values are clearly shown as inadequate, but his character as derivable from this scene is as significant in terms of his attitudes to his wives as it is in his attitudes to the cultural mores he violates. In this segment of the narrative, however, there is a tacit but emphatic foregrounding of the social as against the private, because the beating occurs during a period of heightened cultural consciousness due to the Week of Peace.

At another time it is Ekwefi who is to suffer the brunt of her husband's violent temper. In this instance it is only to satisfy his suppressed anger at the enforced laxity that precedes the New Yam Festival (27–28). Both these instances are explications of what the text has already told us earlier on but only now depicts:

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.

(9)

The importance of this method of characterization for the patriarchal discourse inscribed in the text is that it depends on a binary opposition being established between Okonkwo and the other characters. And it is a binarism that frequently takes him as the primary value. When the binarism works to undermine Okonkwo and his relative values, it regularly foregrounds other men-folk around whom alternative values in the text can be seen as being organized. Obierika and Nwoye are important nuclei of alternative values in this sense. In relation to his wives, however, the binarism implies a secondary role for them. Whatever significance is recovered for them must be gleaned from their silence, for they are not portrayed by the narrative as contributing to the action and its outcome.

The essential discursive operation of containing the significance of the women is most evident in relation to the handling of Ekwefi and Ezinma. The text builds them up till they seem to be alternative centres of significations, but it frustrates the completion of these significations by banishing them out of the narrative at some point. Ezinma and her mother Ekwefi are the only female characters developed by the narrative. We are told that Ekwefi ran away from her first husband to marry Okonkwo (28). By focusing on the relationship between her and her daughter, the narrative reveals the joys of motherhood and the closeness that mother and daughter enjoyed:

Ezinma did not call her mother Nne like all children. She called her by her name, Ekwefi, as her father and other grown-up people did. The relationship between them was not only that of mother and child. There was something in it like the companionship of equals, which was strengthened by such little conspiracies as eating eggs in the bedroom.

(54)

The warmth depicted in the relationship between mother and daughter aids in eliciting the reader's empathy with them, and thereby opens up a space for possible significations around these two. The significations, however, seem to be limited to a definition of maternal and filial instincts only. The episodes around Ekwefi's pursuit of Chielo when her daughter is taken on a nocturnal round of the villages by the priestess are significant in that respect (72–76). And when she stands with tears in her eyes at the mouth of the cave into which Chielo has entered with her daughter and swears within herself that if she heard Ezinma cry she would rush into the cave to defend her against all the gods in the world, we know we are seeing terribly courageous maternal, and indeed human, instincts at play. Indeed, the scene even gains wider significance if perceived in contrast to Okonkwo's handling of Ikemefuna who called him “father.” In both instances where parental instincts are put to the test, the central characters are, significantly, taken outside the village into the forest. In Ekwefi's case as in Okonkwo's, an element of eeriness governs the atmosphere, with Ekwefi's situation being the more frightening of the two. And both episodes involve the enigmatic injunction of deities, but whereas Ekwefi is prepared to defy the gods in defence of her daughter. Okonkwo submits to cowardice and participates in Ikemefuna's ritual murder. Ekwefi has been given admirable but limited stature by the text, and this is partly because it refuses to lend her a more crucial role in the action.

In Ezinma, we see a tough-minded and questioning personality. When her mother tells her the tale of the Tortoise and the Birds, she is quick to point out that the tale does not have a song (70). She joins the ranks of other male characters who pose questions of varying interest in the narrative: Obierika, Nwoye, Rev. Brown, Okonkwo, the strict commissioner. Interestingly, her questions are posed in relation to what is not of great consequence in the narrative, the tales of women told in their huts at night to children, a context which Okonkwo thinks his sons should be excluded from the better to ensure the growth of their “manliness.” At another time, Ezinma ventures to carry her father's stool to the village ilo, a move she is reminded is the male preserve of a son (32). And when she sits, she often fails to adopt the proper sitting posture prescribed for her sex and has to be forcefully reminded by her father in his characteristic bellowing command (32). When, in the quest for her iyi-uwa, she calmly takes her impatient father, a renowned medicine man, and indeed much of the village on a circular “treasure-hunt,” we see she enjoys the momentary leadership position that the situation permits her (56–60).

It is also significant that Ezinma comes to take the place of a boy and someone that can be trusted in her father's eyes.⁸ At periods when he is in the greatest emotional crises. Okonkwo instinctively turns to his daughter. Such is the case for instance after his participation in the murder of Ikemefuna. After the boy's sacrifice “he does not taste food for two days” and drinks palm-wine “from morning till night.” His eyes were “red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor” (44). On the third day, he asks Ekwefi to prepare him roast plantains, and these are brought by Ezinma. We notice the filial attachment that passes between the two:

‘You have not eaten for two days,’ said his daughter Ezinma when she brought the food to him. ‘So you must finish this.’ She sat down and stretched her legs in front of her. Okonkwo ate the food absent-mindedly. ‘She should have been a boy,’ he thought as he looked at his ten-year-old daughter. He passed her a piece of fish.

(44)

The narrative further registers a crucial position for Ezinma in our eyes when it tells us that during his enforced exile Okonkwo “never stopped regretting that Ezinma was a girl” and that of all his children “she alone understood his every mood. A bond of sympathy had grown between them” (122). It is to her that her father gives the task of convincing her other sisters not to marry any eligible man from Mbanta, but to wait till they return to Umuofia to make a better social impact on arrival. Thus, the space for registering significations around Ezinma, and for exploring a viable notion of femaleness that would offer a possible contrast with Okonkwo's notions of manliness are clearly built by the narrative. It is then highly problematic that Ezinma vanishes from the story after the return from exile, and is never referred to again. It is as if to suggest that in the crucial exercise of delineating the climactic consequences of the meeting of the two cultures at the end of the novel, there is no space for women.

How, we might speculate, would the novel have been if it were to have focused on Ezinma's reaction to the changes in Umuofia from the specific standpoint of the institution of marriage? Or how would the society's value systems have been perceived if their interrogation had been focalized through Ezinma instead of Nwoye and Obierika? And what would our attitudes to Okonkwo's death have been if Ezinma's reaction to the event had been registered alongside Obierika's? In fact, is it not valid to ponder what the reaction of the womenfolk in general was to the mores of the society and the radical changes that unfold in the course of the narrative? There seems to be an unconscious recognition of the potential inherent in Ezinma and Ekwefi's characterization for subverting the patriarchal discourse of the text. The significations around them go to join the various meanings around those “othered” by Umuofia and the narrative, such as twins, osus and those who die of abominable ailments. These come briefly into the perceptual horizon, and though marginalized, remain potentially disruptive, partly because the mere fact of their presence constitutes a qualification of what has been centralized by the narrative. Though it has foregrounded the masculine in the male-female hierarchy inscribed at the level of the description of events, the narrative has also opened the hierarchy to a subtle interrogation of its values, even if ultimately leaving it intact. Considering the ways in which women are handled in the novel, it is possible to perceive Things Fall Apart as operating a mode of realism that does not just “name” an African reality; it also seeks to fix certain concepts such as those around “woman” within a carefully hierarchized system of values that underprivileges them. In this light, Things Fall Apart would almost answer to the charges levelled by Hélène Cixous at the language of philosophical systems in general: they are all phallocentric and seek to privilege the masculine in the patterns of male-female binary pairs often proffered as “natural.” Cixous's charge would require some qualification in the context of Things Fall Apart, however, particularly because its hierarchization of the masculine-feminine undergoes a continual subversion revealing a more profound contradiction at the heart of its construction of the “natural” relations between “masculine” and “feminine.”

If, on the one hand, patriarchy is privileged by both the ethno-text and the narrative itself, then this same patriarchy is alternatively shown as sitting uneasily within the general discourse of symbolization that the text constructs. And it is in the area of the political themes of the novel that this is most evident. The contact between the colonizing and the traditional cultures is attended by a subtle construction of the male-female polarities which this time are not hierarchical but rather intermingle and change places in restless slippage.

When the whiteman first appears on the perceptual horizon of Umuofia, he is naturalized by being linked to the marginal. The white man is first referred to as an albino (52). And later, when their violent intrusion into the perceptual horizon through the riot of Abame has to be confronted, Obierika reflects other previous self-satisfied attitudes to these whitemen in his reporting of the rout:

I am greatly afraid. We have heard stories about the white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true.

(99)

In other words, they were harmless because they inhabited what was thought to be the realm of the fictive. When whitemen make their first physical appearance in the shape of Christian missionaries, they are first confined to the Evil Forest in which were buried “all those who died of the really evil diseases, like leprosy and smallpox” (105). They were not wanted in the clan and so were given land that was thought to be only marginally useful to the clan. But the early Christianity is depicted by the narrative as embodying and stressing qualities considered womanish—love, tolerance, affection and mercy⁹; Okonkwo characteristically evaluates the missionaries as a “lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens” (108). A feminine “valence” attaches to the Christians. In this sense, the early relationship between Umuofia and Christianity describes a male-female hierarchy in which Umuofia is masculine and privileged. In effect the narrative suggests that the white missionary vanguard of the colonizing enterprise possessed an initial effeminacy which was amusing and, in effect, tolerable.

The effeminacy turns out to be highly contradictory and sinister, however. The church succeeds in attracting to itself all those marginalized by the society, efulefus, osus, and the men of no title, agbala. In doing this, it emasculates the society, making it incapable of standing as one. And as Obierika observes with uncanny perspicacity, “the whiteman has put a knife on the things that held us together” (124). In figuring the whiteman's intrusion firstly in terms of “effeminate clucking,” and now in terms of an invading knife, the narrative prepares the way for an inversion of the implied male-female hierarchization that it suggested in describing the first contact between the missionaries and the culture of Umuofia. Indeed, it is significant that at the crucial point when Okonkwo seeks to assert the possibilities of a violent rebellion, his own clan breaks into a catatonic “effeminate” confusion. At that point the text transfers the feminine valence with which it first constructed the whiteman onto the Umuofians. The shift of the feminine valence from the invaders to the invaded helps to define an important contradiction at the heart of the text's attitudes to the colonial encounter. Colonialism is perceived at one and the same time as feminine (in the missionaries) and masculine (at the level of the British administration and their ruthless exercise of power). And for colonialism to be able to succeed, Umuofia has to be transformed from the essential masculinity which has governed the textual construction of the society, to an enervated femininity at the crucial point when rebellion was an option. In that sense, the narrative depicts Umuofia's “castration,” with Okonkwo's suicide representing the ultimate overthrow of its masculinity.¹⁰

It is arguable, then, that the textual strategies have ascribed different values to the male-female hierarchy at two different levels of the text. At the level of metonymic realistic description, a certain ironized patriarchy governs the construction of the fictional Umuofia that derives its impulse partly from the ethno-text. But at the level of symbolic conceptualization, the narrative has hinted at its own patriarchal discourse which it has proceeded to undermine most powerfully when describing the colonial encounter. Then, the male-female hierarchy that has governed the text completely collapses, and its place is taken over by an exchange of the “masculine” and “feminine” among the two poles of the contending cultures. Things Fall Apart thus explores a loving image of Umuofia at the same time as it reveals a dissatisfaction with the values of the society it describes in such detail. And this is undertaken at a more subtle level than the mere explication of content can reveal. In a very important sense, the “naming” of a pre-colonial culture and the depiction of its subversion by a marauding imperialism has involved the necessary construction of philosophical categories both within the pre-colonial culture and between it and the invading one which fail to stand still, involving a doubling back of the categories such as to problematize the very assumptions on which the enterprise of “naming” was undertaken in the first place. The novel thus reveals that its own realism is a construction traversed by both sensitivity and ambivalence so that it cannot be addressed unproblematically.

What is important, in the context of criticism relating to Things Fall Apart and the African novel in general, is that critics often take novelistic realism at face value. They thus fail to perceive the more subtle workings of the texts they engage with and fail to interrogate the assumptions on which they are based. And even more crucially, they fail to see that “realism” is an “ism” and a careful restructuration of various subtexts, so that its relationship to the Real can not be taken for granted. In focusing on the novel's handling of patriarchy, women and the feminine, I have tried to suggest that reading “culture” out of a novel is valuable but inadequate, and that this needs to be supplemented with an awareness that Things Fall Apart, like African novels in general, possesses a richly ambivalent attitude to its culture that can only be discovered by paying attention both to the reality processed and to the larger discursive strategies employed. Every “ism,” to echo Soyinka in Kongi's Harvest, is an “absolutism,” and that is true of realism as well as criticism in all its disguises.

Notes

1. I focus attention mainly on the criticism of Achebe's novels set in the past, though the attitudes relating to them are pertinent to those relating to novels set in the post-Independence era. Indeed, James Olney and also Eustace Palmer see Achebe's novelistic career as paradigmatic of the development of the African novel in general. (See Olney and Palmer 63.)

2. In varying degrees this was the informing sentiment behind the general accounts of African critics in the sixties and seventies such as those of Obiechina, Gakwandi, Ogungbesan, and Palmer.

3. It is significant that romance seems to have dominated the discourse of Onitsha Market Literature. But romance is in fact rationalism of a different order because modern romance generally depicts victory over the tribulations of the “real” world. Indeed, the market literature was an expression of a “Mills and Boon” reading culture that has become very powerful in the whole

4. Bolekaja, which literally means “come down and fight,” was borrowed from a phrase used by the conductors of Nigerian passenger lorries in their fiercely competitive touting for passengers and was adopted as a description of the Chinweizu et al. type of critical stance.

5. Soyinka perceived this tendency towards the mythopoeic in African literature as early as in 1963 and tried to account for it in “From a Common Backcloth.” Richard Priebe also assessed the general attitudes towards this mythopoeic tendency and argued for the perception of a specific literary tradition deriving from Amos Tutuola and growing around the mythopoeic (Priebe 1973), but the insights these two suggested do not seem to have been taken up in later critical assessments of African literature. The mythopoeic tendency in writers like Awoonor and Armah were recognised but the critical assessments of their work were not integrated within an analysis of what relationships their efforts had with the discursive universes of Tutuola and even of Soyinka.

6. The terms in which Frederic Jameson defines narrative as a socially symbolic act are very useful in this context, except that I do not think it is necessary to always grasp the narrative text as an essentially strategic confrontation between classes. See The Political Unconscious.

7. Several studies have been devoted to uncovering the Igbo background behind Achebe's novel but perhaps the most wide-ranging and systematic is Wren's Achebe's World.

8. It is significant that in seeing her as a “son” Okonkwo attempts to erase his daughter's femininity. This then becomes a manifestation of his neurotic concern with “manliness” and his attitude towards his daughter opens up a further space for a criticism of his values.

9. Weinstock and Ramadan make the same point in relation to the symbolic structure of masculine and feminine patterns inscribed at the level of folktales and proverbs in the novel, suggesting that Christianity represents an apotheosis of the feminine values.

10. Other critics interpret the ambivalence in the novel's description of the colonial encounter as a function of the improper “targetting” of readership. The novel is then unfavorably contrasted with the more politically aggressive novels of Armah and Ngugi. For a careful statement of this position see Tayoba Tata Ngene's “Gesture in Modern African Narrative.”

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975. 42–45.

Amuta, Chidi. The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism. London: Zed, 1989.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

Bhabha, Homi K. “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism.” The Theory of Reading. Ed. Frank Gloversmith. Sussex: Harvester P, 1984. 93–120.

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980.

Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. 286–293.

Egudu, R. N. “Achebe and the Igbo Narrative Tradition.” Research in African Literatures 12.1 (1981): 43–54.

Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur. The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa. London: Heinemann, 1977.

Innes, C. L., and Bernth Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1979.

Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

———. “Language, Poetry and Doctrine in Things Fall Apart.” Innes and Lindfors 111–15.

Irele, Abiola. “The Tragic Conflict in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Innes and Lindfors 10–21.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Cornell: Cornell UP, 1985.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen; Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

JanMohamed, Abdul. “Sophisticated Primitivism: Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes in Achebe's Things Fall Apart.” Ariel 15.4 (1984): 19–39.

Jeyifo, Biodun. “For Chinua Achebe: The Resilience of Obierika.” Petersen and Rutherford 51–70.

Killam, G. D. The Writings of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1977.

Larson, Charles. The Emergence of African Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1978.

Lindfors, Bernth. “The Palm-Oil with which Achebe's Words Are Eaten.” Innes and Lindfors 47–66.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Literature. London: Routledge, 1977.

McCarthy, Eugene B. “Rhythm and Narrative Method in Achebe's Things Fall Apart.” Novel 18.3 (1985): 243–356.

Ngene, Tayoba Tata. “Gesture in Modern African Narrative.” Diss. University of Texas, 1987.

Obiechina, Emmanuel N. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975.

Ogungbesan, Kolawole, ed. New West African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1979.

Olney, James. “The African Novel in Transition: Chinua Achebe.” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1970): 299–316.

Palmer, Eustace. The Growth of the African Novel. London: Heinemann, 1979.

Petersen, Kirsten Holst, and Anna Rutherford, eds. Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Oxford and Plymouth, NH: Heinemann and Dangaroo, 1991.

Priebe, Richard. “Escaping the Nightmare of History: The Development of a Mythic Consciousness in West African Literature.” Ariel 4.2 (1973): 55–67.

Shelton, Austin. “The Palm-Oil of Language: Proverbs in Chinua Achebe's Novels.” Modern Language Quarterly 30.1 (1985): 86–111.

Soyinka, Wole. “From a Common Backcloth.” American Scholar 32.4 (1963): 387–97.

Weinstock, D. J., and Cathy Ramadan. “Symbolic Structure in Things Fall Apart.” Innes and Lindfors 126–34.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Wren, Robert. Achebe's World: The Historical and Cultural Context of the Novels of Chinua Achebe. Harlow: Longman, 1981.

Zabus, Chantal. “The Logos-Eaters: The Igbo Ethno-Text.” Petersen and Rutherford 19–30.