Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 4

Still in terms of the Igbo social structure, the reader also learns that Umuofians are a very patriarchal society. Not only are men allowed and expected to marry multiples wives, but everything in the village is depicted in terms of gender. The uneven relationship between men and women is communicated in the language Achebe uses. The symbolism of male domination in Umuofia is reflected in all aspects of life, from agriculture where “yams” constitute the “king of crops” to the judicial system where a female “ochu” is considered less sinful and reprehensible, and consequently less severely punished than a male “ochu.” Okonkwo’s father, we also remember, was described using female characteristics. Unoka was a physically able man and did not look feminine by all external standards; but he took pleasure in activities traditionally reserved of women. Unoka liked to play instruments, especially the flute, an activity that is customarily reserved to women. Still on the subject of Achebe’s use of language in relation to gender problematics, the xenism “agabala” is used to address both women and weak men who hold no titles. This duality of meanings here is not random. With the Igbo, more often than not, weakness is infused with female attributes; “efulefus” (p. 124) are criticized not so much for failing to be manly enough, but mostly for embodying characteristics similar to ones expected in women. Throughout the novel, Achebe consistently and repetitively uses local xenisms and phrases in lieu of more common and readily understandable English words in a wish to bring more exposure to his native language and have the audience garner respect for the Igbo culture as he/she becomes an active reader. Achebe’s language for example, when talking about food and people’s daily lives, tends to be in verbatim Igbo. The Western audience thus achieves, through the novel, a greater awareness of Igbo’s customs. Achebe depicts the Igbo’s reaction to the British, not just by validating their pre-colonial structures, but also by immersing non-Igbo speakers into the community’s local language. Because Things Fall Apart is first and foremost a narrative about the Igbo traditions, Achebe did not hesitate to saturate his narrative with local lexicon, pidgin vocabularies, or even attributes of his oral culture. With his writing style, it is the whole narrative that comes alive with vivid descriptions that encapsulate the life in Africa, and of the Igbo in particular, prior to the arrival of the missionaries. Sometime into the narrative, with the arrival of the first missionaries in Umuofia, the narrator’s extensive descriptions of precolonial social structures subside in favour of a more overt linguistic parallelism. In fact, prior to the encounter between the Igbo and the British, Achebe never bothered to specify which language any of his characters spoke. While the reader might have known all along that Okonkwo and his peers did not express themselves in the English of the narration, he/she is given a confirmation only with the advent of the interpreters. It is in fact only with the interpreters, located in the “interlangue,” that Achebe namely addresses the linguistic competences of his characters. The interpreters as well as the “mixed” tongue they speak, by definition, signal the presence of at least two mutually unintelligible languages. Igbo and British were foreigners to each other despite the Europeans’ alleged knowledge of Africa and Africans. Achebe specifically uses the symbolism of language to address the lack of mutual understanding between the two people. The British did not just look different to the Igbo who associated the whiteness of their skin with leprosy; they spoke a different language and were unable to comprehend their culture (p. 151). Things Fall Apart , as argued earlier, is a novel in response to stereotypical, often negative representations of Africa and Africans. To supposedly self-proclaimed European specialists of Africa, Achebe responds with a much more realistic, though fictionalized, account of Igbo life. With a very detailed narrative, he offered an insight into the different social, political, judicial and even religious structures of his people. If need still be, Achebe reinforced to his public the worth of his Igbo culture. Many years after Things Fall Apart came out, in light of his memoirs published in 2012 entitled, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012), one cannot help but wonder if there was not a second level of resistance to Things Fall Apart ; a reading of the novel that presents the Igbos and Igboland as a potentially autonomous and a self-reliant entity altogether. The relationships between the Igbo and the other tribes in Nigeria, especially the Yorubas, have historically been through some rocky times, the worst of which being the Biafran War, a war Achebe qualified in his memoirs as a “genocide” against the Igbo. Back in his 1968 interview, talking about his newly seceded Igbo state, and his life in Lagos prior to the war, Achebe confessed he had been living in a “strange place,” a place he did not consider home (2012, p. 32). All through his interview, very consistently, Achebe put in direct opposition Nigeria and Nigerians with the Igbo and Biafrans, two entities he could only see as “two states living side by side” (p. 35). And looking back at Things Fall Apart , one notices that the name Nigeria is never specifically mentioned in the novel even when the narrator talked about the distant lands that have been visited and won over by the colonizers (1958, p.166). Without going as far as calling Achebe a tribalist or a nationalist (Kioga, 2012), Things Fall Apart, the reader remarks, is primarily a novel about all things Igbo. With the stories of Okonkwo and his fellow countrymen, it is the Igbo identity and culture that is presented. For these reasons, Achebe’s novel could be read, not just as a narrative of resistance to Europeans’ misrepresentation of Africans and Africa, but also as a reaffirmation of an Volume XXII Issue IV Version I 44 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A From Local Fabulation to Worldwide Celebration: Foregrounding Indigeneity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart