Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe pdf

Details of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Book

Book Name: Things Fall Apart
Authors: Chinua Achebe
Pages: 165
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publish Date: Oct 1, 1994
Language: English

Book Review:

Things fall apart by chinua achebe it's a book honestly I'd heard of chinhua cheby didn't know much about him and I hadn't never read this book and never heard of it so I know I'm supposed to be researching the great sioux war and all that but this was interesting and you know I try to have other interests going on

So I just uh recently finished reading it and it was interesting it was definitely worth reading so sometimes I review books that are what I call junk food uh I just did the three area 51 novels all in one video because they were junk food

I'll probably never read them again now this one is not junk food this one is definitely one I have thought about a lot since I read it

So the author again is chinwa achebe from nigeria he is actually an african author and it was published in 1959 he was born in nigeria and the book is the first in a trilogy that follows the the same nigerian community over three generations from

The first colonial contact to urban migration and finally the breakdown of the traditional cultures sorry

I thought I was gonna sneeze there occasionally on this channel I have referenced orson scott card's mice quotient I know ours or orson scott card can be a bit problematic but the mice quotient I thought was an interesting way of looking at books because what

It is it's mellow idea character and event you know what's the main focus of a story uh I would the meloo which is what I believe this is that's about places and I think we're really exploring a place a time and a place and a culture this takes place

Right as the colonials first begin arriving in africa and uh yeah we get to see suddenly the main character who who was a kind of a big man in his own culture suddenly feel that he's being pushed aside and irrelevant

Worse which we'll get into so yeah definitely uh I would say mellow uh one of the things when you look on orson scott the websites that I linked about orson scott card's interpretation often they are in they are put in an unfamiliar place and they explore it

Kind of like alice in wonderland and that's really what happens to the main character here is uh suddenly a very familiar village and home becomes very a very different place for him with all new rules that he doesn't understand

So the protagonist whose name is okonkwo is actually he's a sympathetic character but also a very difficult man to like uh he he was um the son of a what he considered a very lazy poor man a man who was in debt to everybody and had no hope of repaying it couldn't work hard enough to do

So okonkwo his whole life has pushed himself to be the exact opposite of his father as a result he also pushes his wives because he has three of them and his children to be much more than they are or they maybe want to be and he can be very cruel to do

So beatings of wives and kids insults threats you know whatever it takes like I said he does manage to be sympathetic he is as I said physically and emotionally abusive and it brings up a good point this book does not paint the pre-colonial era

As some kind of a lost golden age acknowledges the warts of the uh culture that existed before the cologne the colonists arrived um the difference it's it's about how were the people who lived there affected by the arrival of the colonists

So in in a way it's kind of kind of like kind of matches up with my different experience but at the same time the same as what I'm talking about my great sioux war project that I've been working on because it was a horrific time there was injustice

There was superstition there was brutality but it was theirs you know as far as the superstition goes I mean there's plenty of superstition right here in the united states

So why is this any different the book begins by sharing just various events in the local culture just things that happen throughout the year the celebrations the wrestling the dances you know beating his wife and all that stuff that went on um and it shares it warts and all

There are some real warts one wart that really springs to mind is a young boy who is sent to live with okonkwo's family the young boy is going to be the sacrifice because of a crime that his father committed young boy has nothing to do with this his father killed somebody

So the boy is going to be killed for that on a certain ritual day so he lives in okonkwo's house um okonkwo comes to like him he thinks the boy is ambitious and sees a lot of himself in the boy he wishes his own son was more like this boy but he knows that the boy is going to have to be killed

So when the day comes that the boy has to be killed his friend tells him no okonkwo you should not be part of this this this would be wrong it will bring bad luck upon you but okonkwo is worried about looking weak that's a big motivating factor in his life is looking weak

So he goes along with the men who are taking the boy out into the forest to be killed and in the end okonkwo strikes the killing blow hey just let that sink in for a minute that this is a kid that he is treated as a son that he killed so no this author does not shy away from some of the problems with the culture that was there and that's definitely a big one

He is he is truly broken up by it he takes a long time coming back to himself and it just happens to take place during a time when he's not as busy and so he has a lot of time to dwell on it uh various other events happen

You know he he ends up partly probably dealing with emotion from this ends up beating his wife during a time that's supposed to be peaceful in the village so he gets punished for that but later on during a celebration his gun goes off totally by accident and ends up killing somebody in the village so he is exiled from the village for seven years

Now it's different from the father of the boy because it was an unintentional killing so seven years out of the village and then he served his time and can come back and so you remember I said he's gone and then or the melo was about visiting a strange land

I promise nobody is knocking at my door that's a flap for the dryer vent and I don't have a dryer and the stuff I had stuffed in there to keep it from flapping when the wind blows is yeah so I gotta stuff some more stuff in there but anyway where was I oh yeah he

So I have not been home in several years thank you covet and various other things I'm hoping to next summer but one thing that I always notice when I come home even when I was just away for college home changes if you've ever heard the saying you can't go home again

It's true when you're there the changes are gradual and they just oh that was different and I just drove down a random street in my town today that I don't normally drive on but I you know

I forgot I was grocery shopping and forgot my wallet and uh noticed the house I used to rent is going to be torn down it's just oh that's a kind of a shock but uh no biggie

But somebody who comes back to this town after being away for a year or multiple years or in okonkwo's case seven years a lot can change people die people move away new people come in

The things and places that you knew are gone so yeah you can't go home again and that is exactly what a conqueror finds because during the time that he's gone missionaries move into his old village they build a chapel they start recruiting

They sneak their religion into the culture by first welcoming you know the least welcome of this culture the most powerless the lowest status and they're happy because they finally have a place that wants them

Then they start building up warming their way into the culture and uh getting more and more people including okonkwo's own son and the old ways just basically crumble with a whimper okonkwo tried to stand against it but he is just swept away by events

They really take him up he gets to see the leaders of the village humiliated by the white man that has come in and usurped control he has a solution to the colonizers he wants to fight them but he acts alone with horrific brutality

It's ultimately ineffectual his own end is equally brutal and the book ends by talking about the commissioner who's in the area who's writing a book and he reflects in the last paragraph that yeah this might be worth a paragraph in my book that

I'm writing the pacification of the primitive tribes of the lower niger so uh this book is definitely not junk food I when I say junk food you know it fills you up or in the case of a book that entertains you but nothing sticks with you except maybe a flabbier belly or something this is more like a real serious meal you

You really think about it afterward and I've caught myself thinking about it a lot and you know as I have time to research the great sioux war definitely some parallels there and because it was kind of a parallel situation and one of the things

I thought a lot about is the missionaries we always think of in our culture we think of missionaries as pretty selfless but let's not forget what missionaries are doing they're going in saying hey you know your local things you're doing not good enough

You got to do the white man's way and they use religion and we have always seen with colonizers religion is a tool used to control the people whose land is being taken whose culture is being usurped here in the united states herein or not here in canada

But up in canada we've seen the indian boarding schools most of them are religious in nature and one of the things they tried to do was knock that religion and culture right out of the kids that were in their charge religion is used to destroy societies from the inside out

It is a powerful tool you know and it works because you know religion, in general, is often used to control people as you can see in this book it's uh not just one religion that's used that way they're all used that way they are a tool used by the powerful to control the less powerful

It's just one more tool in the toolbox so I thought that was good that that was acknowledged I I think although it took me a while to figure out what the book was doing was just random events I'm like when does the colonization start I finally figured out that

It's a mellow book he's trying to show the culture as it was and then why it was such a shock to okonkwo when he came back and found his world totally turned upside down all of his accomplishments all the respect he had for the things

He had done meant nothing to these colonizers and suddenly he's not a big man anymore and you know to somebody like okonkwo that's hard and I think that also means that you could consider this a character book as well.

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