Things fall apart

Reading is one of my favorite pass times. I think that the ability to pass on knowledge from one person to another over hundreds of years is one of the crowning glory's of the human race. The ability to continually streamline the spread of information has fueled the increasing pace of its advancement since the first crude ledgers. If once humans worshiped the forest, or the earth, or the sun, we now worship the letter and this great store of knowledge we have amassed. If I don't know something I can tap into this store of knowledge and find out about it. I can find out about something that happened 20 minutes ago or 20,000 years ago. This reverence of words, ideas, and knowledge is the prejudice that Things Fall Apart must overcome before it can show us a conflict between orality and literature.


To this effect Chinua Achebe spends the first hundred and sixty seven pages of his book showing us the humans behind orality. He shows us a culture through the lens of Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a flawed man, but not in a inhuman way. He shares the same flaws that many of us see in our friends and ignore in ourselves. He lives in a rich and wonderful world utterly devoid of writing. I am hitting that point on the head now but it is utterly ignored in the book. We see him grow and prosper, over come trials, folly, and grieve all without lifting a pen or reading a letter. At times I found myself disgusted by some of the terrible things that happened everyday, and at other times I marveled at the laws and order that existed without writing. It is hard not to rally behind someone who works so hard for what they want in life.

After a hundred and sixty seven pages of normal life Achebe introduces a new force into our oral world. This new force is not evil or malevolent but is just there. In this new force, the church and government, we see all the things we left behind shortly after opening the book. We see a thirst for the spread of knowledge, a respect for new ideas, and a sure stubbornness in the idea that the written way is the only way. As the story carries on, you come to see the government and the church as cold and uncaring. They have laws to tell them what they should do so why bother feeling passion about something? The closest you come to seeing an emotion in the forces of literature is when Reverend James Smith is tempted to run in fear in the face of the village spirits.

All in all when I put the book down I marvel at a story, delivered through literature, that is able to non-aggressively question its own medium. As I sit here, communicating to all who read this, in a room by myself I think back to part of the book. At his departure fest from his motherland one of Okonkwo's kinsmen saws "When we gather in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man cans see the moon from his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so". I wonder if now as humans we spend to much time watching the moon alone? Did we give up our humanity for letters, and if so was it worth it?