Unit 11

English 203: Literature of the NonWestern World

Explication:
Reading: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 2931-94.

A list of Characters, Places, & Terms in Things Fall Apart:

Our text says that Achebe is "the best-known African writer" (2931).  You can confirm this for yourself by doing web searches for the author or the titles of his novels. You can also find him at Bard College (www.bard.edu).  Achebe & the novel you will read are so famous that they are often the only things Americans know about African literature. I guess we have to start somewhere.  You already know about Son-Jara & Nadine Gordimer. Achebe's motive for writing this novel is very interesting.  Our editor says:
2932      Things Fall Apart (1958) was a conscious attempt to counteract the distortions of [Joyce] Cary's
             Mister Johnson by describing the richness & complexity of traditional [Nigerian] African society
             before the colonial & missionary invasion.

This is somewhat vague.  Almost no culture is ever pure or unaffected by influences from other cultures.  This may have been true of very isolated places, like Australia before European contact.  Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is perhaps the most famous work on colonialism.  It is about English colonial activities in the Congo region of Africa.  My point in alluding to this work is that Conrad recognizes that colonization or at least cultural hegemony is not a recent, nor an exclusively an European invention.  Thus, one of Conrad's characters reflects that England itself was considered an undesirable & primitive outpost by the Romans who colonized it.  As you saw in The Epic of Son-Jara, by the 14th c. sub-Saharan Africa was greatly influenced by Islam, which was originally an Arab culture property.  Of course, none of this excuses the historical record of European colonialism, which Achebe illustrates in 19th c. Nigeria.

The novel illustrates colonialism by the effects the program has on three characters: Unoka, lazy & improvident, he lived before the arrival of the Europeans; Okonkwo, his son who is ashamed of his father & makes every effort to be successful; & Nwoye (Isaac) Okonkwo's son, who also rejects his father to culturally defect to the alien culture of the Christian missionaries.

Ch. 1

The main character is Okonkwo, whose name we are told in a footnote suggests stubborn male pride, which serves Okonkwo well to escape the influence of his no-account father, but which is disastrous in dealing with his son & the alien world of the missionaries & colonial authorities.  Initially Okonkwo is presented as a kind of atomic individual, as though his cultural context hardly matters.  Okonkwo's:
2936     fame rested on solid personal achievements.  As a young man of 18 he had
            brought honor to his village
by defeating a great wrestler, unbeaten for 7 years, called the Cat because his back never touched the ground.  We also have foreshadowing of Okonkwo's fatal flaw:
2937     He had a slight stammer & whenever he was angry & could not get his words
            out quickly enough, he would use his fists.

Part of what Achebe wants to illustrate with Okonkwo & his father, Unoka, is that native Nigerian culture was not as flat as the stereotypical comparison between it & European culture usually makes it.  Unoka is a failure in Nigerian culture:
He was poor & his wife & children had barely enough to eat.  People laughed at him
because he was a loafer.

This is not a judgment made by John Calvin or any other facet of European culture.  It is entirely a Nigerian judgment.  Illustrating the same theme (the richness or complexity of Nigerian culture), Achebe describes rituals & offers scores of aphorisms.  We see guests greeted with a kola nut ceremony:
2938     As he broke the kola, Unoka prayed to their ancestors for life & health & for
            protection against their enemies.
            Having spoken plainly so far, Okonkwo said the next half a dozen sentences in
            proverbs.  Among the Ibo the art of conversation [including displaying erudition
            by repeating memorized proverbs] are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Words & etiquette are not all there is to culture:
2929    When Unoka died he had taken no title [because he had accomplished nothing]
           & he was heavily in debt.  Any wonder then that his son Okonkwo was ashamed
           of him?

The second reason Achebe presents the conflict between Unoka & Okonkwo is to illustrate that Nigerian culture (like every other culture) can contain or tolerate such conflicts.  When Nwoye rejects his father, Okonkwo, he thereby rejects all of Nigerian culture, which Okonkwo comes to personify in his futile defense of his way of life.

In contrast to his father, Okonkwo:
was a wealthy farmer & had 2 barns full of yams, & had just married his 3rd wife.  To
crown it all he had taken 2 titles.

Nigerian culture is certainly more democratic than British culture, where one's class (or title) is fixed by heredity.  No Englishman could agree with the Nigerian proverb:
If a child washed his hands [i.e., accomplish great things] he could eat with kings.

Chapter 1 ends with an ominous "honor."  Okonkwo is given the task of holding a hostage until the day that he is executed.  The boy becomes his surrogate son & a surrogate brother to Nwoye.  You can probably make a good guess about the crisis this will cause.  Right now, notice the point of origination.  Okonkwo gets involved in this relationship because he is accomplished & honored.

Ch. 2

We learn more about Nigerian life.  On moonlit nights:
2940    The happy voices of children playing in open fields would then be heard.
          As the Ibo say: "When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for
           a walk."

In almost every depiction of Nigerian culture, Achebe is careful to illustrate a range of behavior or that there are opposite instances to what he has just shown us.  Here, for example, after suggesting a kind of tropical moonlit sexy paradise, Achebe reports that Okonkwo:
In Umuofia's latest war he was the first to bring home a human head.  That was his
5th head . . .   On great occasions . . . he drank his palm-wine from his first human head.

How big is Umuofia, Okonkwo's "village"?
In the morning the market place was full.  There must have been about 10,000 men there.

If there are this many men, how many people live in Umuofia?  40,000 or more?  In this, as well as many other illustrations, Achebe's intent is to counter European illusions; in this case, that Nigeria is all undeveloped bush & tiny hamlets.  Whether 10,000 or 40,000 people, a city this large would require sophisticated politics & public administration -- all of which the Europeans would have ignored or dismissed as primitive.

We learn why Okonkwo keeps the hostage.  Someone in a neighboring village:
dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia.

The huge assembly of men is called in order to democratically make judicial policy.  What should be done?
Many . . . [men] spoke, & at the end it was decided to follow the normal course of action [tradition].

2941     An ultimatum was immediately dispatched . . . asking them to choose between war . . .
            [or] the offer a young man [to be executed as the criminal] & a virgin [to replace the
            victim] as compensation.

Are you objecting that the boy, Ikemefuna, sent to Umuofia is not likely to be the actual murderer?  I expect so; & Achebe expects so.  In addition to illustrating that Nigerians had sophisticated & democratic institutions dedicated to justice, he also lays some of the foundation for why Nigerian & European cultures could not meld or easily find compromises.  In most, if not all, tribal cultures, one's identity is less personal than it is tribal.  You are simply one of the team or the group.  Therefore it hardly matters who is selected to pay the debt of honor to Umuofia.  Ikemefuna is not personally guilty in our sense of construing guilt & innocence -- but this is exactly what Achebe wants to illustrate: that our way of doing things is not the only way of doing them; & that Nigerian culture had developed its own sense of justice.  Nigerians were not sitting around in the bush just waiting for Europeans to arrive & give them religion, government, & morality -- all of which they supposedly were lacking!

Achebe emphasizes psychological causes as well as sociological causes to explain plot developments.  For example, the narrator explains that Okonkwo ruled his family with a heavy hand, because:
It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.
& so Okonkwo was ruled by 1 passion -- to hate everything that his father
Unoka had loved.  One of those things was gentleness & another was idleness.

Okonkwo fears that his son's character is somehow a throwback to his grandfather:
2942    Nwoye, was then 12 years old but was already causing his father
           great anxiety for his incipient laziness.  At any rate, that was how
           it looked to his father.

If Nwoye is afraid of his father, think of Ikemefuna!
As for the boy himself [Ikemefuna], he was terribly afraid.  How could he
know that his father had taken a hand in killing a daughter of Umuofia?
or that he would have to stand in for his father & pay for his crime.  We are not privy to Nwoye's thoughts, but we can construe the irony.  Just as Okonkwo vowed not to be his (like) father, so too Nwoye must ironically be following his father's example in vowing not to be like Okonkwo.

Ch. 3

More unexpected complexity in Nigerian culture.  What do we expect from shamans?  That they are all frauds?  When Unoka consults Agbala, to complain about his poverty & how everything seems to be against him; that he has an evil fate -- she succinctly commands him:
2943    Go home & work like a man.
Instead of superstition or some dream like ritual illustrating unconscious associations, our priestess cuts through all of Unoka's whining & tells him the truth!

In contrast to his ineffectual father, Okonkwo knows how to perform the right ceremony to obtain wealth:
2944     There was a wealthy man in Okonkwo's village . . .   His name was Nwakibie.
            He [Okonkwo] took a pot of palm-wine & a cock to Nwakibie.  2 elderly
            neighbors were sent for [both to make the occasion formal  & to be witnesses
            to the loan that Okonkwo hopes to negotiate].  He presented a kola nut.

After drinking & humorous small talk, studded with aphorisms ("A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing"), Okonkwo comes to the point:
2945     I have cleared a farm but have no yams to sow.
            The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said
            he would praise himself if no one else did.

The aphorism seeks to cancel or mitigate Okonkwo's forwardness in asking for the loan.  Compare this with his father's attitude that life owes him a living.  Sharecropping is hardly designed to make one rich in a hurry.  Nonetheless Okonkwo accepts the offer to take only 1/3 of the crop he grows on Nwakibie's land.  In addition to noticing all the polite etiquette that characterizes Nigerian society, notice also how Achebe deftly illustrates that Nigerians perfectly well understood  the implied personal property, including real estate.  One of the frequent European claims was that native people had no property rights, in part because they didn't use the land "properly" or the way the Europeans planned to use it.  You occasionally hear a variation of this argument today; e.g., that Arabs had no rights to the oil under their sand, because they didn't have the scientific & technological capability to develop the resource the way is should be developed, according to Western culture.

Ch. 4

2947    Looking at a king's mouth . . . one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.

What does this mean?  The next sentences make it fairly obvious.  Okonkwo becomes a big success & people quickly forget that he was Unoka's poor son.  Talking of boys,
2948     Okonkwo himself became very fond of the boy [Ikemefuna] -- inwardly
            of course.  Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be
            the emotion of anger.  To show affection was a sign of weakness; the
            only thing worth demonstrating was strength.

This offers more foreshadowing for the tragic climax in which Okonkwo only knows how to deal with the British in a confrontation over strength or dominance.  But Achebe does something else.  He illustrates that native culture is less than perfect.  This seems to be an obvious, even pedestrian notion.  But you can easily imagine that writers who get morally worked up about the crimes of colonialism, often tend to portray their native culture as without fault.  From Homer on, Western writers have consistently argued against an unconditional commitment to male aggression, because it so often ends in uncontrollable rage, & a greater respect for female (civil) values.  Achebe's Okonkwo bears more than a little resemblance to Achilles.  The incomparable Greek warrior does not kill his surrogate son, Patroclus, but he is complicit in getting him killed.

Okonkwo's rage is mostly visited on his youngest wife, even when:
2949    It was unheard of to beat somebody during the sacred week.

You may have been unconvinced by my earlier claim that the insistence on personal identity & responsibility (with the concomitant denial or minimization of cultural forces) is a European trait.  You already know that Confucian ethics in Asia invert the priority to suggest that everything is social & almost nothing is personal.  One vents or burns up personal desire through embracing or acting out social scripts & roles.  When Okonkwo beats his 3rd wife, the offense is not construed as having been against the woman, but against tribal custom, propriety or ritual.  Thus the priest Ezeani:
called on Okonkwo in his obi [i.e., it was a formal occasion].  Okonkwo
brought out kola nut & place it before the priest.
"Take away your kola nut.  I shall not eat in the house of a man who has no
respect for our gods & ancestors."

The priest goes on to explain:
The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan
by angering the ancestors & gods so that they will not help grow the crops.  As in Asia, one is a member of the family or the group 1st, & an individual 2nd. You have obligations rather than personal rights.

Ch. 5

As the story moves towards its climax, Achebe ratchets up the conflict between male & female.  Okonkwo owes his success to male aggression.  But as we saw in The Epic of Son-Jara, the major values in civilization are female.  Mothers must raise children before there can be any warriors.  In Umuofia:
2952     Ani, the earth goddess & the source of all fertility . . . played a greater
            part in the life of the people than any other deity.  She was the ultimate
            judge of morality & conduct

Just like American men today (or at least this one), Okonkwo
2953     was always uncomfortable sitting around for days waiting for a feast or
            getting over it.  He would be very much happier working on his farm.

Okonkwo cannot even look forward to a Cowboys game while the women prepare holiday meals & endless talk about kids!  What do you wear for the Nigerian thanksgiving celebration?  After decorating the house, Okonkwo's wives:
set about painting themselves with cam wood & drawing beautiful black patterns
on their stomachs & on their backs.  The children were also decorated, especially
their hair, which was shaved in beautiful patterns.  The 3 women talked excitedly
about the relations who had been invited, & the children reveled in the thought of
being spoiled by these visitors.

I think Achebe must have visited my house on some Thanksgiving or Christmas.  Unable to bear the shift of control from himself to his wives (& no doubt their relatives -- see 2954: "As the day wore on his in-laws arrived from 3 surrounding villages"), Okonkwo explodes over nothing:
Then the storm burst.  Okonkwo, who had been walking about aimlessly in his compound
in suppressed anger, suddenly found an outlet.
"Who killed this banana tree?"

You Texans may not know that banana "trees" die after producing their seeds in the banana stalk.  The banana is not really a tree, but a large plant whose "trunk" is not wood but green leaf material.  Moreover, in the tropics they are almost like weeds.  Then, the narrator explains:
the tree was was very much alive.  Okonkwo's 2nd wife had merely cut a few leaves off
it to wrap some food, & she said so.  Without further argument Okonkwo gave her a sound
beating & left her & her only daughter weeping.

Maybe if you have 3 wives you can get away with such behavior.  Not really.  Achebe is further illustrating why Okonkwo is tragically unable to deal with the equally arrogant British.  Oh, there is something like a Cowboys game:
2954     It was difficult to say which the people enjoyed more -- the feasting & fellowship
            of the 1st day or the wrestling contest of the 2nd.

The 1st day is for the women, the 2nd for the men.  Thus, Okonkwo:
2955     moved his feet to the beat of the drums.  It filled him with fire as it had always
            done from his youth.  He trembled with the desire to conquer & subdue.  It
            was like the desire for a woman.

Ch. 6

We finally have the wrestling matches, beneath an:
2957     ancient silk-cotton tree which was sacred.  Spirits of good children lived in that
            tree waiting to be born.

Not a Christmas tree, but I hope you someday have an opportunity to explain to Malaysians or Indians or people from some other non-European culture why Westerners feel compelled to cut down a fir trees & bring it in the house & decorate it with hundreds of dollars worth of trinkets.  Then in a few days day, discard it.  When you are explaining this, you will likely be struck with how strange the practice seems.  Most likely you cannot adequately explain what it means nor why we all do it.  So a tree whose branches shelters the spirits of infant children waiting to be born again is, perhaps, not so strange.

In many parts of the Third World or the premodern world, there were cultural restraints against the unconditional love of newborn babies, infants, & very young children -- because of the high rate of infant mortality.  If the mother was unrestrained in her love of her new child, she may very well die when the child dies.  We see a bit of this reflected in the strange-to-us talk between 2 women:
2958    "How is my daughter, Ezinma?"
            "She has been very well for some time now.  Perhaps she has come to stay."
            "I think she has.  How old is she now?"
            "She is about 10 year old."
            I think she will stay.  They usually stay if they do not die before the age of 6."

There are 2 other points in this conversation that should be explained.  The obvious one is that human spirits survive death.  The tragedy of early childhood death is reduced by the belief that the same spirit will be reincarnated again & be given the chance to live a full life.  Old people are not thought to be reincarnated in this life.  They are reborn as ancestral spirits who are still connected with their families in this world.

The less obvious point is that little children need to be spoiled & never punished, lest they decide to leave this inhospitable world.

Overall this short chapter illustrates that life is a struggle from beginning to end.  Moreover, this is not a tragic or depressing recognition.  Achebe's view of this echoes Homer, who believed that the gods trouble those whom they love.  If we never had any trouble in our lives, we would do nothing.  Remember Okonkwo's untroubled  father who dreamed his life away?  Only in wresting with our troubles to overcome do we perform acts that we are proud of; acts that we believe define who we are.  If life offers wrestling matches, this can be cause for celebration.  Recall Okonkwo's enthusiasm:
2955     It filled him with fire as it had always
            done from his youth.  He trembled with the desire to conquer & subdue.  It
            was like the desire for a woman.

Ch. 7

Ikemefuna lived in Okonkwo's house for 3 years &:
2960    Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son's development, & he knew it was due to Ikemefuna.

Even so, father & son are at odds.  Okonkwo wants his son to follow in his footsteps as an athlete & warrior with a very yang or aggressively male personality.  Nwoye is yin oriented:
That was the kind of story that Nwoye loved [children's stories].  But he now knew that they
were for foolish women & children, & he knew that his father wanted him to be a man.

Okonkwo has another son or a surrogate son.  When the long delayed execution of the ritually guilty person in the slaying of the Umuofia girl is finally scheduled, an elder visits Okonkwo to tell him to have nothing to do with it, because he knows that Okonkwo is emotionally involved, considering the boy to be a son.
2962    "That boy call you father.  Do not bear a hand in his death."
           "Yes, Umuofia has decided to kill him.   But I want you to have nothing to do with it.
           He call you his father."

Because he is determined to be a tough guy, Okonkwo disregards this advice & is involved.  Achebe's artistry makes this scene hard to endure.   Talking about Ikemefuna, he writes:
2963    Although he had felt uneasy at first, he was not afraid now.  Okonkwo walked behind him.
           He could hardly imagine that Okonkwo was not his real father.

 The executioner bungles his job & the maimed boy cries out to his father:
2964    "My father, they have killed me!"  as he ran towards him {Okonkwo].  Dazed with fear,
           Okonkwo drew his machete & cut him down.  He was afraid of being thought weak.

Such a horrific scene -- but Achebe is not finished with it.
Nwoye had heard that twins were put in earthenware pots & thrown away in the forest.

His brother butchered, Nwoye feels like he has been thrown away by both his father & the culture that his father champions.
Then something had given way inside him.  It descended on him again, this feeling,
when his father walked in, that night after killing Ikemefuna.

Why does Nwoye abandon his father & his culture to embrace whatever it is that the missionaries offer?  The answer is in this scene.  Nwoye feels that his culture has branded him as a weakling, as defective in some way.  How can one be loyal & dedicated to a culture that labels you as deviant or evil?  Secondly, how can Nwoye love his father or hope for his approval when the man has just butchered his brother without a tear, without even a word of explanation?  Who would want to live in such a culture?  We know that this only one rendering or one perspective on Nigerian culture.  But for Nwoye it is an inescapable vision.

Ch. 8

This chapter illustrates the beginning of how things are falling apart, even before the incursion of the Europeans.  Okonkwo upbraids himself:
2965     "When did you become a shivering old woman," Okonkwo asked himself, "you, who are
            known in all the 9 villages for your valor in war?  How can a man who has killed 5 men in
            battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number?  Okonkwo, you have
            become a woman indeed."

Women, love, & sensitivity to emotions all seem to be enemies for Okonkwo who is obviously "falling apart."  He discusses his disappointment in Nwoye in similar terms:
2966    I have done my best to make Nwoye grow into a man, but there is too much of his mother in him.

We see Okonkwo's male projection & know that he has a blind spot or an Achilles hell:
His mind went to his latest show of manliness.
"I cannot understand why you refused to come with us to kill that boy," he asked Obierika.

Obierika is prophetic, saying:
What you have done will not please the Earth.  It is the kind of action for which the goddess
wipes out whole families.

Even though the culture begins to fall apart, in so far as it follows the yang pattern personified by Okonkwo, there are many other people in the village or city.  We follow the intricate rituals & preparations for a marriage & understand the oblique point that in some other tribes:
2970     All their customs are upside-down.
            But what is good in one place is ban in another place.

The point is that what Okonkwo did was devastating to Nwoye, killing any trust or love that the boy had for his father.  Even so, even if Okonkwo's family disintegrates because of his rage or aggression, there are thousands of other families in the "village."  The pattern of Nigerian culture, that is woven from thousands of different personality types, remains intact.  But not for long.  The first mention of white men is taken as a joke, because the progress of leprosy in Africans apparently affects their skin color:
2970    It is like the story of white men [i.e., lepers] who, they say, are white like this piece of
           chalk . . .  & these white men, they say, have no toes.

Ch. 9

Achebe limits the elements of the novel that cause the action of the plot to proceed.  There is Okonkwo's character, there is the baby tree, & soon there will be the European incursion offering inexplicably new patters of life.  This chapter lays more groundwork for the the tragedy that will occur in the clash between the 2 cultures on the issue of infanticide.
2972     This man told him that the child was an ogabje, one of those wicked children who, when
            they died, entered their mother's wombs to be born again.
            The medicine man then ordered that there should be no mourning for the dead child.  He
            brought out a sharp razor . . . &           began to mutilate the child [corpse].  Then he took
            it away to bury in the Evil Forest, holding it by the ankle & dragging it on the ground behind him.
            After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn
            ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation -- a missing finger or perhaps a dark
            line where the . . . razor had cut them.

We can imagine the tightrope that Nigerian women had to walk.  One one hand they were encouraged to spoil young children in order not to cause them to reject the terms of this life, of their present incarnations, in hopes of dying in order to return in a better situation.  On the other hand, young mothers dare not be unconditionally or unrestrainedly devoted to their children, because their deaths may very well kill their totally devoted mothers.  Instead of lecturing us on this, Achebe offers the bits & pieces for us to be able to infer this point.  For example:
2971     Ekwefi had suffered a good deal in her life.  She had borne 10 children & 9 of them had died in
            infancy, usually before the age of 3. As she buried 1 child after another her sorrow gave way to
            despair & then to grim resignation.
2973     Ekwefi believed deep inside her that Ezinma [remember she was 10 years old] had come to stay
            [in our world].  She believed because it was that faith alone that gave her own life any kind of meaning.

More Nigerian cultural complexity.  People conduct a kind of psycho-drama to heal Ekwefi & Ezinma.  Neighbors dig a pit so deep that the digger is below ground.  Finally a man finds Ezinma's "iyi-uwa":
2975    He raised it carefully with the hoe & threw it to the surface.  Some women ran away in fear when it was thrown.
            . . . He took up the rag with his left hand & began to untie it.  & then the smooth, shiny pebble fell out.

Apparently the iyi-uwa is a totem that connects the girl, Ezinma, with mother earth & the spirits of unborn children, including the ogbanje (the children who keep dying & of whom she may be one).
"Is this yours?"  he asked Ezinma.
"Yes," she replied.  All the women shouted with joy because Ekwefi's troubles were at least ended.

With the iyi-uwa extracted from the earth, Ezinma evidently cannot "decide" to die & look for a better chance at incarnation.  The psycho-drama continues with Ekwefi ritually giving birth to her daughter a second time:
2976     When the mat was at last removed she [Ezinma] was drenched in perspiration.  Ekwefi
            mopped her with a piece of cloth & she lay down on a dry mat & was soon asleep.

Ch. 10

Still more Nigerian cultural richness.  Beginning with the marriage negotiations the previous 2 chapters offered glimpses into cultural patterns for women.  This chapter illustrates cultural opportunities for men.  The egwugwu are comparable to kachinas in the Hopi cultures of New Mexico & Arizona.  They are accomplished & revered ancestors who come back to the earth when tribal leaders wear kachina masks in rituals that invite the ancestors to possess them for a time.  Such rituals are obviously powerful psycho-dramas for both the masked men & their audience (the rest of the village):
2977    When . . . 9 of the greatest masked spirits in the clan came out together it was a terrifying spectacle.

In our novel the kachina/egwugwu fulfill social roles as counselors or arbitrators or judges in a case of divorce.  A man who beats is wife is visited by her relatives:
2978    3 of them came to my house, beat me up & took my wife & children away.

After waiting months for his wife to get over her anger, he wants his money back!
At last I went to my in-laws & said to them, "You have taken back your sister.  I did not send her away.
You yourselves took her.  The law of the clan is that you should return her bride-price."

The other side responds:
My sister lived with him 9 years.  During those years no single day passed in the sky without his beating
the women.
. . . When she was pregnant, he beat her until she miscarried.

The egwugwu consult on a verdict & carp about being dragged into such a domestic affair.  The status of the ritual as psycho-drama is fairly obvious, when at the end of the chapter a character comments:
2980    Don't you know what kind of man Uzowulu is?  He will not listen to any other decision [or authority].

Ch. 11

Below the level of law (represented in the market assembly & the murder trial over the slain Umuofia girl) there are the psycho-dramas that do not appeal to discursive thinking, nor are they empty ritual performances.  They profoundly engage the emotions of the participants who feel that there is something life-threating or life-changing that is going on not quite in the normal world, nor exclusively in the world of dreams or spirits, but somehow in a very special blend of both -- at a point of contact between our mundane world & the Other world.  Fox Mulder & The X-Files illustrate a weak version of this in our world.

Below the world of psychodrama is the world of dreams, which is what this chapter illustrates.  The Nigerian village is surrounded by tropical forest, an uncharted world that graphically suggests how our normal consciousness is surrounded & engulfed by a much larger world of dreams.  Instead of playing Sigmund Freud to analyze a specific dream, Achebe relates folk stories that offer to do something similar.
2986    The world was now peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady
            gaze & then formed again in new shapes.
            . . . Chielo's voice rose again in her possessed chanting . . .   It was not the same Chielo
            who sat with her in the market . .  .  It was a different woman -- the priestess of Agbala . . .
            She could no longer think, not even about the terrors of night.  She just jogged along in
            a half-sleep, only waking to full life when Chielo sang.

Ch. 12

In the last 3 or 4 chapters we see the yin & yang dimensions of Nigerian culture.  We see yang or conscious cultural forms in the marriage negotiation, in law, reason & ceremony (with the egwugwu).  We see the yin or emotional dimension with the night life, music, sex, dreaming, chanting, & religion.  This chapter offers a kind of climax or moment when Nigerian culture seems to reach its best or highest moment, before it begins to disintegrate.  There is the marriage:
2987    . . . really a woman's ceremony & the central figures were the bride & her mother.

We entertain hopes that as Okonkwo grows older he will mellow.  We think this is possible because of his concern for his wife, Ekwefi, whom he earlier beat because she took a banana leaf:
2988     . . . he had not slept at all last night.  When Ekwefi had followed the priestess, he had
            allowed what he regarded as a reasonable & manly interval to pass & then gone with
            his machete to the shrine.
            It was only on his 4th trip that he had found Ekwefi, & be then he had become gravely worried.

Ch. 13

The last chapter of part one ominously begins with the sound of a canon that announces:
2992    Somebody was dad.

Though there is foreshadowing in the death, it also offers an opportunity to renew cultural solidarity:
Ezedu was a great man, & so all the clan was at his funeral.

Achebe sums up what he hopes he has illustrated in the first half of the novel:
2993    The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors [& therefore
            eternity].  There was coming & going between them, especially at festivals . . .  A man's
            life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer & nearer to
            his ancestors.

The rituals of Nigerian life seem to be both eternal & profoundly satisfying.  They offer a full life that does not terminate at death.  We learned that souls that initially fail in this life, e.g., by early childhood death, are given repeated chances to have a full & complete life.  When a fully developed person dies, his (less often her) personality is conserved.  Such a person is reborn in the spirit world as a kachina/egwugwu who will continue to be involved with his relatives as long as they remember him.

At this very high point of Nigerian cultural richness -- with the marriage & funeral ceremonies -- disaster occurs.  Okonkwo's gun explodes & accidentally kills a boy.
2994    The confusion that followed was without parallel.  . . . nothing like this had ever happened.

Nigerian life is regulated through rituals that demarcate & celebrate life transitions.  So when one's life profoundly changes, as in initiation to adulthood, marriage, or having children, rituals provide the consolation that these are not disruptive or threatening events, but the opposite.  They are expected & celebrated moments that offer entry into deeper & more satisfying opportunities in life.  You leave childhood to become a man or woman.  You gain a spouse.  You have children of your own.  Perhaps, like Okonkwo, you gain titles, recognition, respect, honor.  Rituals rise from embodied performance over years, over generations.  They can not be consciously designed.  So when Okonkwo's gun explodes & kills a boy literally no one knows what it means or what should be done. They do know that he has inadvertently killed a clan member, for which the punishment is 7 years exile.  During that time things will fall apart.
 

Go to the top & click on the next section: Questions.