Chinua Achebe in his novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God gives us a unique picture of life in Africa before the arrival of Christianity ...
The Iranian EFL Journal April 2015 Volume 11 Issue 2
ISSN On-line: 1836-8751 ISSN Print: 1836-8743
The Iranian EFL Journal April 2015 Volume 11 Issue 2
Chief Editors: Dr. Paul Robertson Dr. Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh
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Title Colonial Subjects in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God Author Zahra Sadeghi (M.A) Semnan University, Semnan, Iran
Biodata Zahra Sadeghi, M.A in English Language and Literature from Semnan University, Iran. Her research interests include Postcolonial Literature and how colonized Subjects come to identify themselves especially in great works of literature by Achebe.
Abstract Chinua Achebe in his novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God gives us a unique picture of life in Africa before the arrival of Christianity and colonization and afterwards. He shows how African people lost their traditional culture and values, replacing them with foreign beliefs. In this article, the way black people lived before the arrival of white people, how they encountered and reacted to white colonizers, in addition to how they converted to Christianity and subsequently to White culture, as portrayed in these novels, will be analyzed. The purpose of this study is to trace the roots of this rapid pace of colonialism back to when colonial subjects lost their original culture to the newcoming people and to what extent those colonized people were affectively actualizing their inferiority and subordination to the white society. Keywords: Post-colonial Studies, Colonialism, Colonial Subjects, Self-inferiorizing, Mimicry, Feeling of Unhomeliness, Lost Identity
1. Introduction Postcolonial criticism defines formerly colonized people as any nation which has been subjugated to the political domination of another nation and colonialism or political, economic, and cultural subjugation of vulnerable nations would occur in any time and any part of the world at the hands of international corporations from world powers such as the United States, Germany, and Japan. Iranian EFL Journal
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Postcolonial critics use literary works of African Americans, aboriginal Australians and the formerly colonized Indians to compare and contrast this global issue among various peoples. This differentiation means that it is up to the nation of a specific colonized country to develop their own literature, criticism on history and traditions. Their literary texts are different from each other because their reaction to the colonization and colonizers domination was different. During the nineteenth century British was known as the most powerful imperial all over the world and it was by the turn of the twentieth century that the British Empire ruled over almost one quarter of the world, including countries such as India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and some parts of Africa, the West Indies, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Colonialism or the extension of civilization justified the racial and cultural superiority of the European Western World over the non-Western world which Joseph-Ernest Renan supported in La Reforme intellectual et morale (1871). Colonialism was an important factor in cultural production and many of the cultural constructs operating all over the world have been the products of colonial contexts. To understand how much the colonizer and the colonized were influential in the process of the colonization it is worth defining two types of colonization: military colonization and cultural colonization. In military colonization the colonizer uses military forces to subordinate the colonized and usurp their natural resources and manpower. But in cultural colonization there is no military force and the colonizer, through representation, acts in a way to convince the colonized people that it is for their benefit to imitate and follow White attitudes. In the late nineteenth century when the British assumed control of Nigeria they believed that they brought history, civilization, enlightenment and progress to a nation which had no civilization, social and political system and religious traditions of their own. It is obvious that there had been a religion among indigenous people but the British called those religious beliefs as superstitious or fetishism; and of course they had a political system because there wouldn’t exist any nation without social system, but the differences in political and social structure the colonizer called chaos. In 1900, the British chose a system of direct rule over the Ibos by dividing their region into areas governed by “District Commissioners” (Innes, 1979, p.3) and used the Ibos as “warrant chiefs” in order to help them. In 1918 Lord Lugard introduced “indirect rule” as a new policy to replace direct rule. Based on this new policy the District Commissioners were removed and the responsibility was on the warrant chiefs’ shoulder.
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Colonization was always defined by west colonizers in a way to accelerate their domination of subordinated nation. V.Y. Mundimbe in The Invention of Africa describes that colonial rule was established and used by the colonizers to dominate the physical space, reform nations’ minds, and integrate local economic histories into the western perspective. Western colonizer tried to make the colonized people feel inferior in front of the colonizers’ superiority and internalize their values into their life and by this made them accept the newcomers and their beliefs. It seems that they were successful because as we look at the formerly colonized people we find out that most of them speak and write in English, use this language in their political and educational environment and even at home. As the language brings the culture with it, so acceptance of a new language means acceptance of a new culture and lifestyle. Thus, colonialist ideology was extremely successful and resulted in the creation of colonial subjects, colonized persons who did not resist colonial subjugation because they were taught to believe in British superiority and , therefore, in their own inferiority (Tyson, 2006, p.421). Chinua Achebe in his novels gives a description of the life of African people in their actual life during colonization and how they come to identify themselves. One reason behind this sudden rush to accept Western civilization is that Igbo people find and understand the importance of Western education in the progress of their life, a hundred years ago, Igbo people could hardly read or write but today we can see Igbo professors, Igbo medical practitioner and lawyer etc. who occupy important positions in different parts of the globe. The second reason is that these indigenous people were willing to accept change because they knew that that change would bring benefit and material progress to their life. As the ties that bound the communities disintegrated, people found new values in Christianity and Western education and the result was a community of Christian and Western-educated Africans. To know to what extent Achebe blames Colonial Subjects for the realization of colonization different aspects of colonial subjects portrayed in Achebe’s works are going to be discussed.
2. Discussion Achebe’s novels can be seen as a tetralogy, recording documentary evidence of Nigerian history between 1890 and 1965. Achebe had in mind to write the story of Okonkwo and his grandson, Obi Okonkwo, in one novel, but the result was the emergence of two novels, Things Fall Apart (1985) and No Longer at Ease (1960). The first set at the turn of the century when the British colonizers came to the Ibo land and the second portrayed the events in the fifties when the British Iranian EFL Journal
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administration prepared to surrender the control of the bureaucratic institutions it had once established. Arrow of God (1964) returned back to the time when the Ibo and British cultures had first interacted. C.L. Innes in his Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe analyzed different approaches to and perspectives on various aspects of Achebe’s novels. Kalu Ogabaa’s God, Oracles and Divination; Folkways in Chinua Achebe’s Novels is another brilliant source of authentic materials on how Africans come to identify themselves with the focus on the traces of West colonizers’ influence on the change of culture of African colony. The other important work in postcolonial criticism is Victor Uchendu’s The Ego of Southeast Nigeria which is also a good source of information on the life of Achebe’s subjects in his works. Significance of this paper which makes it distinct from other works mentioned is to analyze different aspects of colonial subjects’ life and their personal and communal characteristics to come to this result that colonialism was not done merely by the colonizer but both the colonizer and the colonized were effective in the colonization process. This article is going to analyze colonized people in Achebe’s three novels to find out their faults in confronting colonizers which led to their subjugation to the Western power. 2.1.Communal Spirit One of the important aspects of the Igbo life is the communal spirit that in an Igbo community all the people are aware of their dependence on their kin group and community and contribute to the group to which they owe so much. It seldom happens that a person detaches form the group to which he belongs. They care for their community and everyone knows it his duty to be conformist to the rituals and customs of his community, otherwise he would confront the results. In the case of Things Fall Apart, we can claim that their communal spirit is a weak point which leads to the destruction of their tradition and figures like Okonkwo. If we consider the pre-colonial situation and compare it to the situation when West colonizers dominated this community and changed it to a new one, we would expect these Igbo people to follow their new community which is now in the hand of white people. Achebe portrays the same phenomenon and as we see in Things Fall Apart, little by little most of the people turned to new culture abjured their traditional customs in order to be conformist and act according to the taste if majority. Nonconformity had been considered illegal and those nonconformist figures, like Okonkwo, would be punished. If Igbo people had not been so dependant to their community, they would have confronted colonialism better but their simplemindedness and intolerance to differences made them destroy most of their traditional cultures as Iranian EFL Journal
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well as figures like Okonkwo. The same theme is presented in No Longer at Ease in which people believed in conformity because they thought that the strength of a society lies in its unity: “If all snakes lived together in one place, who would approach them?” (Achebe, 2010, p.61). In “Argument of Phalanx” (1933) by Steinbeck a broad description of relationship between the individual and the group is given. Steinbeck makes different between the individual on his own and as a part of a group. This group or the community which Steinbeck entitles “greater beasts” controls unit-men with a strict discipline. Steinbeck discusses man’s behavior both as an individual and as part of a group which is represented in characters of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. According to Steinbeck ideal group formation is one in which people act as individuals and at the same time as a member of an integrated community. But when it comes to No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God there was no such balance between personal and social life of Obi Okonkwo and Ezeulu and this matter led to the breakdown of the sense of solidarity in them. Obi Okonkwo expressed his individualistic attitude in his saying that “Ours is ours, but mine in mine” (Achebe, 2010, p.26) and differentiated personal matters from communal matters, but the community put great importance on kinship ties and used many proverbs about the obligations of individuals toward community and other kinsmen: “… a kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone” (Achebe, 2010, p.7). The community itself once helped Obi Okonkwo to study in England and now expects him to pay back and sacrifice his life to serve his clan, but Obi Okonkwo didn’t believe in this communal spirit and his personal interest was his priority. Unlike his clan’s plan for him to study law, he decided to study English. Opposed to their custom he became engaged with Clara and even refused to return home for his mother’s funeral. His individualistic has alienated him from his family and tribe and it reminds us of his grandfather Okonkwo who had been alienated from his fellow villages in Umuofia. But the differences between them is that Obi Okonkwo has been educated in Western milieu and hasn’t been in touch with his tradition and his rejection of these traditional customs made him alienated but his grandfather had been fed up with tribal customs and his commitment to traditional lifestyle made him alone and weak. Like Okonkwo and his grandson, Ezeulu in Arrow of God had the same social and personal conflict and could not reconcile his communal responsibilities with his personal lie. We can classify Ezeulu’s conflict into three kinds: on the first hand, there was a conflict between the local British administration and the native authority represented by the Chief Priest. On the second hand, there were internal politics of Umoaro and Iranian EFL Journal
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the conflict between the supporters of Ezeulu and those of his rival, Idemili. The last kind of conflict happened within this chief priest himself, an interior conflict, between personal power and the necessities of public responsibility. When he sent one of his sons to the school, he has been accused by others, even his best friend and kinsmen, of threatening the old social order. Akuebue could not accept the Chief Priest’s traditional role as protector of communal tradition when found that he sent his son to join the Christians: “when you spoke against the war with Okperi, you were not alone, I too was against it and so were many others. But if you send your son to join strangers in desecrating the land you will be alone”. (Achebe, 1974, p.134) 2.2.People’s Lack of Experience One of the important factors in the colonized people’s defeat in front of colonizers was their lack of experience. Before the arrival of colonizers indigenous people lived in ignorance and none of their belief systems, religious codes and practices had been challenged. Black people’s life and their maturity was measured by their adaptation to society_ the society of Negroes_ all of them black with the same culture and beliefs which have come to them from past. But the first encounter with the white men makes them out of ignorance and oppresses them with the whole weight of their blackness. Arrival of west colonizers along with colonized people’s disability to confront new beliefs led to the reversal of norms and falling apart of things they had honored for centuries. In Things Fall Apart in the first part of the novel at a betrothal ceremony people were discussing the strange habits of their neighbors, where West culture entered and changed everything. Obierika says, “It is like the story of the white men who, they say, are white like this piece of chalk and who have no toes” (Achebe, 2002, p.67). None of them at that time were aware of a day when they would act like those they were deriding. Their ignorance caused their weakness and inability in confrontation of new rules and led to the reversal of beliefs. Everything which had been norms and unchallenged for centuries now are challenged and things considered forbidden now become common. What happens for that sacred python proves that no one ever thought that their sacredness would ever be challenged; the evil forest is no longer evil and outcasts become no longer outcasts. This ignorance and lack of experience in Umuofian society is represented also in No Longer at Ease in which people have been ignorant of modern situation in cities and Achebe shows it in this passage which shows the differences between the urban life and the tribal and traditional life and that how people in villages were ignorant of new inventions which brought new rules.
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Mr. Ikedi had come to Umuofia from a township, and was able to tell the gathering how wedding feasts had been steadily declining in the towns since the invention of invitation cards. Many of his hearers whistled in unbelief when he told them that a man could not go to his neighbor’s wedding unless he was given one of those papers on which they wrote R.S.V.P_ Rice and Stew Very Plenty_ which was invariably an over-statement. (Achebe, 2010, p.10) Roderick Wilson in his essay Eliot and Achebe: An Analysis of some Formal and Philosophical Qualities of “No Longer at Ease” describes Umuofian society in the best way: All those around him are divided or fragmentary begins in one way or another: his friend Christopher, an economist, has his religion of sex… and a specious line of reasoning about corruption; Joseph, Obi’s “countryman”, is both urbanized in his employment and sufficiently to warn both Obi’s parents and the U.P.U. about Obi’s involvement with Clara; the divided commitment of Isaac, Obi’s father, has already been noticed; Mr. Green, Obi’s boss, is a man born out of his time, in power yet powerless, totally unable to see that it is the civilization of which he is a member that has been responsible, in large part, for the historical element on Obi’s fate; finally, Clara too is divided, an “osu” and a modern nurse, a “been-to” who is yet unable to escape from her traditional role, and divided in another way between a real relationship and cinema fantasies. (Innes, 1979, p.164-165) Achebe presents all these fragmentations in his novel and it is similar to Eliot’s The Waste Land in presentation of a society devoid of a unified and unreconciled traditions and commitment. Obi, when returned to his society, couldn’t find wholeness by which he could stand firm in a society which itself lacked a core. In his third novel, Achebe shows in the historical process the inadequacies and limitations with which man confronts the world he claims to rule. In this novel he uses the definitions and insights which the two earlier novels have provided and presents the theme of destruction of the tribal world in a more complex way than the previous novels. Ezeulu and his sons are all bound within the limitations of their vision. Ezeulu was unaware of the limitation of his power and the most important factor in his downfall was his failing to recognize his own limitations. Like Okonkwo, he was ignorant of his shortcomings and took some inappropriate actions to adjust to the changing times which later ked him go too far and plunged himself and his people into trouble. The title of the novel is drawn from Ezeulu’s situation after he returned to his village that he thought he was an “avenging arrow in the bow of his god” (Innes, 1979, p.57) and should punish his people in favour of his god, but his decision ended up in the destruction of himself, his place in the society and his religious beliefs. Iranian EFL Journal
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2.3.Lost Identity After the arrival of colonizers and the creation of Colonial Subjects many of these individuals tried to imitate their colonizers in dress, speech, behavior, and as a whole in their lifestyle. This phenomenon is called mimicry and reflects colonized people’s desire to be accepted by the colonizer and the shame they experienced concerning their own culture. Postcolonial theorists believe that colonial subjects have a double consciousness or double vision; a consciousness which is caught and divided between two antagonistic cultures: the indigenous one and that of the colonizer. Homi Bhabha refers to this feeling of being caught between two cultures and of belonging to neither rather than to both as unhomeliness. These black people felt to be unhomed even in their own home because they were not at home in themselves and this unhomeliness is interior, from their inside. In Things Fall Apart this unhomeliness is vivid in Okonkwo’s life who after his return to Umuofia decided to start a fight against the Christians to regain his last place and popularity in the village but he couldn’t because his closest ones, particularly his own son, were among those Christians and he felt to be unhomed because he was not at home even in his own home. He couldn’t endure this feeling and decided to take avenge and killed the messenger of the colonial administration but his final defeat is an indication of the utter futility of his action. His son Nwoye had the same feeling but unlike his father he decided to change his lifestyle and accept new foreign values. Like Nwoye, other villagers were convinced to their inferiority and searched for a way to get out of this inferiority and turned to the western education. That educated Negro would certainly feel that his people can no longer understand him as he can no longer understand them. Nwoye could not tolerate his father and all his strict discipline. Obi Okonkwo had the same feeling toward his people and this lack of understanding came from the differences between this educated Negro and his people. Such a person is pleased of his separation and congratulates himself of this, and rarely does he want to belong to his people. Nwoye “was happy to leave his father. He would return later to his mother and his brothers and sisters and convert them to the new faith” (Achebe, 2002, p.139). The Nigerian poet and playwright John Pepper Clark explains the tension between traditional and modern in the educated West African: The great complication, perhaps, for the West African elite brought up in a system not quite British is that he swims in a stream of double currents, one traditional, the other modern. Both currents do not completely run parallel; in fact, they are often in conflict. Accordingly, you are Iranian EFL Journal
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likely to find him at church or mosque in the morning and in the evening taking a title at home that carries with it sacrifice of some sort to his ancestors and community gods. In the same manner, a man however ‘detribalized’ and successful in his city career and profession, will not outgrow the most backward member of his family. (Innes, 1979, p.151) His explanation fits completely Obi Okonkwo’s condition in his society in which he confronted with a stream of double currents and he was what Clark calls ‘a citizen of two worlds’. He was caught between two forces or better to say two worlds, the old Africa of his Umuofia village and the Westernized milieu of urban Africa. He could not identify himself with either traditional or the modern way of life and all his misfortunes originated from his lack of a sense of identity. His decision to take bribes was also a confirmation of his loss of a sense of identity of which he himself was aware. This feeling of lost identity in characters of Achebe’s novels leads to the destruction of the Negros’ unity; their personality would be scattered and they can no longer claim solidity.
3. Conclusion Considering how race is constructed and reproduced within colonialism under the shadow of Marxian concept of alienation, one may say that alienated colonial subjects and their productive abilities are organized by others and this matter makes them incapable of expressing their humanity. Frantz Fanon extends Marx’s concept of alienation in his social theory and asserts that race, like class, denies our species-being. According to him, human being existence depends on recognition of that by other being and man is human only after he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. When it comes to the colonized people, they are denied the opportunity to know themselves and instead, it is the colonizer who claims to know and define the colonized. We cannot ignore the role of white colonizers in the destruction of the solid identity of Black people. They define colonized people as lazy and unproductive, thereby justifying low wages and coercive system of labor. They define them as uncivilized, stupid, savage, and dangerous; thereby justifying the imposition of colonial culture and compelling forms of social control. This process leads to the death and burial of colonized people’s cultural originality and creation of their inferiority complex. This inferiority complex makes black schoolboys to identify themselves with explorers, in search of truth, which is an all-white truth and which can be gained only among white people who are the bringer of civilization. Such a young Negro will subjectively adopt everything brought by white men and one can see in the young Blacks the formation of an Iranian EFL Journal
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attitude and a way of thinking which are basically and totally white. What a Negro strives to do and the outcome he wished to gain is to conduct himself like a white man, but there will remain an everlasting feeling of fear or anxiety in him because the fact is that he is a Negro and will remain a Negro. It is a widespread notion that the Negro in made inferior meaning that the colonizer comes and by means of force makes them inferior. This is a wrong notion because this statement has two meanings; on the one hand, it means that Negroes, before the arrival of white men, were ranked in a higher place and had a very sophisticated life and by the arrival of white people and their interference in Black’s life they lost that splendid life. On the other hand, it ignores colonized people’s role in the process of colonization. On the contrary, as it is shown in this article, the Negroes play an important role in making themselves inferior. The evidences, theories and examples presented in this article about the role of colonized people in the progress of the process of colonization were used to explain to what extent colonial subjects are effective in their becoming inferior or the “Other”. It doesn’t mean that they have wished for their being colonized and now that they are colonized they are happy and pleased with the newly made condition. Of course they didn’t want to be under the control and domination of outsiders and certainly scared of their subordination, but the question comes here is that didn’t this fear of colonization itself cry for colonization?
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