A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Terri Ochiagha

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СКАЧАТЬ fact that Achebe’s indebtedness to mbari is more significant than appears at first sight. This is not only of historiographical importance, but “facilitates a new reading of the African writer’s efforts to synthesize a transitional culture.” In what follows, I will take up and extend this argument, discussing this singular art form and its documentations of colonialism while tracing an aesthetic and ideological continuum with Achebe’s work.

      The gestation of an mbari began when, through signs and dreams, the goddess Ala communicated to her worshippers, through a diviner, her desire to be honored and placated, normally after a disaster in the community. The period from conception to completion could be up to ten years. The creation of an mbari was a sustained, ritualized, and exacting process, kept from the prying eyes of the uninitiated, even though community members knew what was happening inside the mbari-concealing fence. Before it was unveiled to the public, a group of elders surveyed the result. Their criticism could, in some cases, lead to modifications. The completed mbari not only reflected its cosmological motivations and the spiritual regeneration experienced by its creators but was also a cornucopia of life—a veritable stage on which the divine, the sinister, and the mundane danced to a harmonic symphony, a place in which “all the real or latent evils [were] composed artfully within an ordered, compartmentalized, open environment in which they may be apprehended and thus, perhaps, controlled.”⁸ Imitative semblances of living people were typically not included on the mbari stage; it was believed that doing so amounted to offering the person up as a sacrifice to Ala, with deadly consequences. Still, in keeping with its serious origins, mbari was also meant to educate as well as to elicit mirth and laughter.

      Despite the socio-religious thrust and entertainment value of mbari, aesthetic excellence was not a subordinate concern. It is true that its formal merits are intricately entwined with “excellence in concept, purpose, and result,” but this was achieved, in great part, through the artists’ dedication to producing beautiful, yet visually and conceptually complex, tableaux. Neither were the art form’s historical-cum-regenerative qualities of secondary interest. For beyond the presentation of sculptures reflecting historical occurrences, which it did by documenting “a cultural history of conflict resolution particular to its specific location and period of construction,”⁹ mbari was “a reiteration of cosmic beginnings, a contemporary image of renewal and regeneration that links the real world with creation, tying man to his supernatural forebears, revitalizing the community by reactualizing sacred history.”¹⁰

      However, mbari did not idealize indigenous society. Achebe negates neither traditional religious beliefs nor the veracity of supernatural interventions in the life of his characters. Mbari’s didacticism was also connected to the insertion of “detailed symbols of traditional religion . . . brought in to remind the now Christian community of its spiritual roots. Everything here is hardened, figuratively and literally, to provide object lessons, a diorama of the past,”¹¹ an aim very close to Achebe’s proclaimed wish to teach his “readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”¹² In the ndioka and Achebe’s view, it was imperative to alleviate the psychic wounds of empire.

      As Cole explains, the “two strings to the inventive bow of mbari artists” included their transformation of existing imagery from “mythology, stories, proverbs, historical occurrences, and the observable life of the contemporary world”¹³ into clay models and “more infrequent, the invention of totally new images”—the heard about and hoped for.¹⁴ In many ways, what Achebe presents in Things Fall Apart is a kaleidoscopic yet intertextually traceable tableau of similar local and historical images, incorporating, in the opening lines, a reference to Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and at the end an allusion to the fictional work The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, respectively the new “sculptures” of the Western literary tradition and British colonial discourse.

      The novel also maintained, in many ways, a number of untranslatable mysteries—many of the Igbo words are not glossed, and the significance of certain episodes remains somewhat obscure to the non-Igbo reader. This approach is also beholden to the imagery of mbari houses, which, while telegraphing “Owerri Igbo culture in its breadth and depth, in both processes and forms,” delivers some of its messages “as if in a secret or private code.” Beyond instances of untranslatability, “whimsical surprises always lurked in the wings” of mbari, an observation that gives the memorable ending of Things Fall Apart yet more nuance.

      Representations of colonial whiteness, a recurrent feature in mbari, also provide another interesting nexus between the art form and the novel. There were a wide variety of images, some reflecting origin myths of the white man (such as a pith-helmet-clad European emerging from a hole in the ground; see figure 1), or the initial stages of colonial contact (Europeans being carried in a hammock, for instance, or historical characters, such as the renowned district commissioners Douglas and Cornell peering from second-floor windows; see figure 2), while others portrayed more recent manifestations of the colonial occupation. The first two types, based on rumor and hearsay—and here the reader of Things Fall Apart will be reminded of the first rumors of white presence in the novel—were gradually phased out by the latter images, reflecting innovation and transience. Most, if not all, these representations of colonial whiteness “had an element of caricature,” despite the violence they tended to encode. The humor of mbari’s colonial imagery, however, could very well borrow the title of Glenda Carpio’s book Laughing Fit to Kill (2008). It was not concerned with stereotypes and their subversion, but embodied “the power of humor as cathartic release and politically incisive mode of critique with deep pathos”¹⁵ that Carpio describes. It was also literally fit to kill, for, as Cole speculates,

      It is possible that the virtually mandatory inclusion of his image also reflects a desire for the psychological control, even the capture, of [the white man’s] awesome power. When it first appeared, the imagery may also have related to the analogous desire hypothesized earlier, namely, to rid the Owerri world of a formidable enemy by modeling his “portrait,” and thus expecting the angry god to kill him. Today such figures are no more than caricatures or historical and legendary recording, but there is no incompatibility between these meanings and the hope for control or even annihilation.¹⁶

      But let us focus on the question of the psychological control of the European’s “awesome colonial power” as it applies to Things Fall Apart. The power tapped into in this case is discursive—and this does not merely occur by appropriating and subverting the textual forms used to inflict and justify colonial violence, but by turning them on their head by using them to portray and convey the beauty of Igbo language, thought-systems, orature, and art. Kalu sees Things Fall Apart “as one of the art pieces displayed at Mbari.” But I am persuaded to see Things Fall Apart as a modern mbari by itself. Rather than rendering a wholesale translation of its principles and conventions, what Achebe effectively does is distill mbari’s secular essence, orienting its psychocultural weapons into effective historicizing and cultural nationalist tools and lessons, and infusing the novel—a Western cultural form—with Igbo orality and a distinctive artistic vision. That Achebe described Things Fall Apart as “an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son” (emphasis added), has been well rehearsed in the criticism of his work. But nowhere is the ritual component more evident than in the writer’s conceptual engagement with the art form mbari. Like the mbari artists of yore, Achebe stages rituals of psychological redress and taps into the circuits of colonial power, transforming and redefining language in the process of refiguring colonial violence and its legacy along with vignettes of everyday life, while preserving, even if obliquely, an ephemeral but powerful form of historical documentation.

      Figure 1: Legends of the origin of the white man—Beke ime ala (courtesy of Herbert Cole).

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