The Voice from Within: Achebe’s Reclamation of African Identity

 Things Fall Apart is faithful to the history and culture of its tribe; from the outset of the novel we are following the storyline of the plot, plain and unsophisticated, the narrative starts in the late 19th c before the arrival of the missionaries to invade the interior of West Africa. We are introduced to the African Nigerian world, very rich, valuable and authentic; indeed, Achebe remained faithful to the customs of his tribe, the novel represented itself as a manifestation of this tribal cosmology; a cosmology that is based on orality and storytelling, this culture struggled to maintain its social values and preserve its social hierarchies and stived to transmit them orally to the upcoming generation; we see for example the instance of Amalinze the cat who was beaten by Okonkwo in a wrestle. The story was transmitted from one generation to another and registered in the collective memory of the people. The novel is replete with such instances that put forward the African symbols; the grail, the bard, the vatic. In African culture, there is this tradition of the grid or the storyteller who takes people to historical landmarks, he tells them stories about their origins to construct the collective memory, and landmarks are key stages in the history of any nation because they orient them whenever they are disoriented or lost, it represents the threshold, or “point de repère”.

The oral dimension in the story is cultural and is important in our understanding of the act of writing of not only Achebe, but all the postcolonial African writers; in her book The Shock of Arrival, Meena Alexander exemplifies the act of writing as “[…] a shelter, [it] allows space to what could otherwise be hidden, crossed out, or mutilated.” We should point here to the process of writing, as a form of resistance or rebellion or response to the previous European works on Africa, we should keep in mind that Achebe was the first African to write on Africa from a native point of view, and this in itself is a watershed in the world of literature. Things Fall Apart is written with the voice of a native African and his perspective. He is voicing the heroism of defeat, through the act of writing he is arguing that not only the colonizer who can give himself the right to write from his perspective. Achebe is now the author and the agent in his book in that he took the initiative to write his story and the story of his ancestors, the “authorial agency” is the awareness and the form of self-consciousness of Anglophone writers and postcolonial authors in deconstructing the body of literature that was previously fabricated by the Europeans in very lurid and unpleasant terms; the representation is now featured from the eyes of the colonizer who is telling his story, and it is the writings from the margin that are going to affect the center.

The great significance of Things Fall Apart derives from the fact that it presents tribal life from the insights. It offers an authentic narrative about the horrors of the colonialist experience from the eyes of the colonized; it is not just about the African tribal system, it chiefly reflects on an ontology of a text that reflects on itself as a text contesting the western assumptions and depicted prejudices against African people. With this being said, postcolonial writers are revisiting the past and rewriting and “dismantling central margin binarism” of the imperialist discourse and to “deconstruct the centralized logo-centric master narratives of Western culture,”

Things change with the colonial intrusion and western exploration; they set power and hegemony. The Umofian people did not welcome the newcomers with hospitality, on the contrary, they killed the first white man who appeared in their clan; they were even warned by the oracle that this white man is going to bring destruction and spread chaos among them. Gradually, the colonial body was establishing itself in the clan; churches were built and a new colonial education is introduced, representing a new God, “the Creator of all the world and all the men and women,” the colonial projects attempts at eradicating any notion of belongingness to a specific culture. The colonizer’s religious and educational institutions represented a “shrine” of enlightenment that brought into visibility their identity, firmly established their sites that aimed at distorting and erasing the history of the aborigines, and glorified theirs.

This idea of collapse and chaos is suggested in the title with the notion of decentralization. The moment when things fall apart, the “birth” of the bewilderment state and total confusion between the material visibility of the colonizer and the culture erasure and mutilation of the colonized that led to dissolution and the fall of a tribe that bears the seeds of its collapse. The title per se is referring to this idea of collapse; the center of the tribe cannot hold, it is loosened, and once things are loosened, they did change from their initial state, they are reshaped, metamorphosed, and destructed and there is no way to bring them back to their initial state and this sense of chaos and collapse foretells the story of Okonkwo.