Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings: Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart, The

College Literature, Spring 2008 by Snyder, Carey

The District Commissioner changed instantaneously. The resolute administrator in him gave way to the student of primitive customs.... As he walked back to the court he thought about [the book he planned to write]. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could write almost a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the tide of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

These famous closing lines of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958, hereafter TFA) represent a dramatic shift of perspective, whereby the protagonist's life story, which has been the subject of the previous twenty four chapters, is unceremoniously condensed into a brief anecdote in a foreign text: we are thrust from what is figured as an intimate, insider's view of Igbo life to a jarringly alien one. The outsider's proposed ethnography of the region's purportedly primitive tribes exemplifies a tradition of colonial discourse that Achebe powerfully counters in TFA.1 Okonkwo's tragic death-prefiguring for the reader the demise of the clan's traditional waysserves the government anthropologist merely as raw material to appropriate and possibly turn to a profit.2 Not only is the prominent Okonkwo stripped of his individual identity as he is transformed into a nameless African in a Western text, but the particularities of the sophisticated Igbo culture, which the novel has taken pains to elaborate, are also erased as they are lumped together in the essentialist category of primitive tribes. Moreover, though the Commissioner has shown himself to be a poor reader of native customs and beliefs, lacking both the intellectual curiosity and the humility that are requisite to understanding another culture, he nonetheless passes as an African authority in the West. Achebe's narrative works to redress the reductive and distorted representation of traditional African cultures emblematized by the Commissioner's text.

The reference to the colonial text within the novel may be taken as an embedded reference to the extra-textual politics of representation in which the novel participates. Achebe reports that it was his anger at what he took to be the caricatures of Nigerians in Joyce Gary's novel Mr. Johnson that initially inspired him to write a counter-narrative, sympathetic to the indigenous perspective (Flowers 1989, 4). By the author's account, the novel is meant at once to "write back" to the Western canon,3 correcting erroneous representations of Africa and Africans, and to restore to his people an awareness of the dignity and humanity of precolonial Africa-reminding them "what they lost" through colonization (Achebe 1973, 8). Published two years before Nigeria gained independence from Great Britain, TFA aims to wrest from the colonial metropole control over the representation of African lives, staking a claim to the right to self-representation.

While raising issues of authority and authorship, at the same time, the District Commissioner's indisputably alien perspective at the novel's end functions to reinforce the impression of the foregoing narrative's ostensible authenticity: as Neil ten Kortenaar perceptively argues, Achebe's "appeal to an obviously false authority deploys irony to establish Achebe's own credentials as a historian of Igboland" (2003, 124). Against the egregiously misinformed interpretation of an outsider, the rest of the novel is fashioned as a view "from the inside," as the author himself has described it (Flowers 1989, 4). With such remarks, Achebe has contributed to the aura of authenticity that surrounds his book, positioning himself as a kind of native anthropologist, who represents from within the life of the fictionalized Eastern Nigerian village, Umuofia (based on the author's native Ogidi).

Selling millions of copies and taught not only in literature classrooms, but in anthropology, comparative religion, and African Studies courses as well, TFA is widely appreciated for its richly detailed, "inside-perspective" of a traditional West African culture.4 Indeed, the novel has frequently been deemed "ethnographic" for its vivid representation of the customs, ceremonies, and beliefs of the Igbo people. An early review captures this sense of confidence in the author's credentials as an ethnographic reporter: "No European ethnologist could so intimately present this medley of mores of the Ibo tribe, so detail the intricate formalities of the clan."5 In 1980, critic David Carroll presents what by then is a received view, when he writes, "With great skill Achebe ... combines the role of novelist and anthropologist, synthesizing a new kind of fiction.This is where his essential genius lies" (1980,183). In 1991, the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Achebe's Things Fall Apart, based on a survey of several hundred teachers of African literature in the U.S., Africa, and Europe, lists among the principal reasons for teaching this novel the perception that it offers "an unusual opportunity to discover the foreign from within": "Readers everywhere may enter Achebe's Igbo worldview and see past and present African experiences from an indigenous perspective" (Lindfors 1991,15,2).6 Finally, in another pedagogical volume, Understanding Things Fall Apart, Kalu Ogbaa informs teachers and students that Achebe's novel may be regarded as "an authentic information source on the nineteenth-century Igbo and their neighbors" (1999, xvii).