Things Fall Apart after 50 Years: Tragedy and Existentialism in African Writing
Professor of English and Director, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Toronto
Could the condition of social alienation experienced throughout Africa (usually attributed
Things Fall Apart after 50 Years: Tragedy and Existentialism in African Writing
Professor of English and Director, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Toronto
Could the condition of social alienation experienced throughout Africa (usually attributed to transitions from the colonial to the post-colonial, and from the rural to the urban) be understood as constituting a widespread existential crisis? Ato Quayson explores Chinua Achebe's novels for historical ambiguity, contemporary ambivalence, the impossibility of authentic action, and transitive measures.
I: Transition and Ambiguity
Readers of Things Fall Apart will recall the moment in the penultimate chapter of the novel when the gathering of the people of Umuofia in the marketplace is rudely interrupted by messengers from the district commissioner. The messengers are confronted by Okonkwo, who happens to have taken a position at the very edge of the gathering. Okonkwo has been shown throughout the novel as a man of few words and a volatile disposition:
‘What do you want here?'
‘The white man whose power you know too well has ordered this meeting to stop.' In a flash Okokwo drew his matchet. The messenger crouched to avoid the blow. It was useless. Okonkwo's matchet descended twice and the man's head lay beside his uniformed body.
The waiting backcloth jumped into tumultuous life and the meeting stopped. Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in the tumult. He heard voices asking: ‘Why did he do it?'
He wiped his matchet on the sand and went away.
The salience of this momentous event is not so much in the evidence it provides of Okonkwo's final severance from his society, as in the peculiar contrast suggested in his "knowing" that the tribe will not go to war that is set against their bewildered question: ‘Why did he do it?' The question itself marks the distance that the tribe has travelled from the unshakeable certainties of its own belief system to a sense of confusion about what constitutes a heroic action. The descent of Okonkwo's matchet represents the uncanny moment when the affirmation of the warrior ethic for which he has clearly been rewarded throughout his life is counterpoised to the disclosure that his clan's morés have undergone a subtle yet significant change from what he had assumed them to have been before. He had been in exile for seven years, and in the interim many things had changed. The contrast between his knowledge and their bewilderment amounts in the final instance to the difference between what may be described in a Aristotelian terms as the tragic protagonist's moment of recognition (anagnorisis) and the unbearable collective impasse of understanding for a society that has suddenly been called upon to bear reluctant witness to their hero's error of judgment. If the hero's recognition is deeply personal it is equally and precisely balanced against the epistemological impasse and communal burden that his act announces for the people. The pregnant moment also serves to focalize in miniaturized form the entire process by which the community of Umoufia expresses ambiguity with regard to its own past. In the past conveyed in the novel the messenger's decapitation could have meant only one thing, namely, a call to arms against the disrespectful invading culture of the colonizer. Now, however, the military heroic ethic is subject to doubt at the very least if not disavowal. It is to Achebe's credit that he bifurcates the response to the decapitation, thus making it impossible even for us readers to settle on an easy conclusion.
The ambiguation of response to the past, whether collective or personal, is a key marker of modernity and is represented thematically in European literature particularly prominently from the late 19th century onwards. When Eliot Prufrock laments that he has ‘measured out his life in coffee spoons' the coffee spoons also serve as a symbol of the transitive measures by which the banal ritual accoutrements of bourgeois life are connected to his growing sense of inauthenticity. To describe the coffee spoons as transitive measures is to borrow something from the study of the grammatical features of language. Whereas the verbs to