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

College Literature, Spring 2008 by Snyder, Carey

A Voice from the Inside

Lauding Achebe's judicious and multifaceted representation of the Igbo in TFA, David Carroll writes, "It was an achievement of detachment, irony and fairness, demonstrating in the writing those qualities he admires in his own people" (1980, 29). But in what sense are the turn-of-the-century Igbo represented in the novel the author's "own people"? The formulation simplifies the writers subject position, while ignoring the heterogeneity of the Igbo, as of all cultures. Achebe's divided identity as a colonial subject is emblematized by his christened name, Albert Chinualumogu, a tribute on the one hand to Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, and on the other, to the writer's African heritage; at University, he dropped the former and cropped the latter name, refashioning his identity in a way that could be read as simultaneously indigenizing (by effacing the colonial marker) and modernizing (in his words, making the name "more businesslike") (Achebe 1975, 118).Achebe explains that he was born at the "crossroads of cultures": "On one arm of the cross, we sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. On the other, my father's brother and his family, blinded by heathenism, offered food to idols" (1975, 120). He attended a missionary school, not surprisingly, since his father was one of the first converts in the area (Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1997, 3), and, as a Christian, learned to look down on "heathens" and their pagan customs: Christians were regarded as "the people of the church," while heathens were "the people of nothing" (Achebe 1975, 115). Achebe has suggested that writing TFA was "an act of atonement" for this early repudiation of ancestral traditions, offered up by a "prodigal son" (120). At the same time, he recalls being fascinated by the traditional customs and rituals taking place in the village, and even "partaking of heathen festival meals" unbeknownst to his parents. Thus Achebe's relationship to traditional Igbo ways is rooted in ambivalence.

Like many African writers of his generation, Achebe received a colonial education-meaning one calibrated to an English frame of reference-at both the prestigious secondary school he attended at Umahia and at the University of Ibadan, where he became well acquainted with the English literary canon. In an oft-quoted passage, Achebe reflects on the psychological ramifications of studying colonial fiction, for a young, black African man:

When I had been younger, I had read these adventure books about the good white man, you know, wandering into the jungle or into danger, and the savages were after him. And I would instinctively be on the side of the white man. You see what fiction can do, it can put you on the wrong side if you are not developed enough. In the university I suddenly saw that these books had to be read in a different light. Reading Heart of Darkness, for instance, ... I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story. (Qtd. in Flowers 1989, 343)