The Odyssey in Things Fall Apart

When a man says yes, his chi says yes also? Does this proverb prove to be true? That is one of the questions that this essay focuses on. This essay Will be looking at Things Fall Apart and why the reader may find it significant for modern and old ideas. This essay will look at a text from Western literature, The Odyssey, and how this text shares remarkable similarities with Things Fall Apart despite the two texts being ladled as either African or Westering literature. This essay will look at orality and literacy in both the essay and by doing so try and disprove this notion that African and Western literature should be viewed as two different entities simply because they come from different parts of the world. This essay will also look at the common idea that oral tradition should be separated from literature and why this is not the case. This essay will also look at how the novel depicts the impact that colonialism could have on a local community and its culture.

 

Binaries are a nice simple thing for thinking about things. People like to allocate things to either one of two groups. Unfortunately, things often do not fit quite as neatly into these allocated groups as people would like them to. At first glance, orality and literacy are two interlay different things, but they are in fact linked in more ways than one might suspect. Let us use the Odyssey as an example. Seeing as it is one of the most famous oral stories ever written. This sentence is somewhat paradoxical: it contains both the words oral story and written in coalition with each other. This is paradoxical because surely an oral story is not written. The Odyssey was in fact an oral tradition long before it was written down. Literature is merely a reflection of the spoken word. The only practical difference between orality and literature is that one has to be selective in oral tradition whereas with literacy any old thing could be written down and preserved. There are a limited number of stories that a person could fit into his head, but a possibly infinite number of books could be put in a library. There are of course downsides and upsides to both these things. In oral tradition, only the best stories are often remembered. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This need to be selective would assure that the stories that are remembered will be of a good quality. Now what has this all got to do with Things Fall Apart. Okonkwa’s story starts in much the same way as one would expect a great legend to start. It describes Okunkwa’s defeat of a great champion in a wrestling match. The language used to describe the fight particularly focuses on the effect the fight had on Okonkwa and his opponent’s bodies: “Every nerve and every muscle stood out on their arms, on their backs and their thighs.” This rather physical description gives the reader of the raw power Okonkwa possesses and the strength he had to conjure to win the fight. His opponent is called The Cat. The fact that he is given an animal name and that we never learn his true name is significant. This makes him seem inhuman and much more ferocious. Cats are notorious for being difficult to kill and are able to get themselves out of nearly any situation unscathed. Hence the idea that they have nine lives. The old men of his village even go so far as to compare the fight with a local legend in which the village’s founder fought a battle against a spirit. Today anyone who reads this might also think of one or another epic battle from popular mythology. Such as Heracles’s battle with the nonmedian lion for example. One might say that Okunkwa is a good contestant to become a legend within his tribe, but as the story progresses the story becomes less mythical and more recognizable and realistic to the reader until at the end it seems to be nothing more than the ever so come tragedy. Not that I am criticizing the ending. This loss of the mythical ending does add quite an important aspect to the book as a whole. I will explore this aspect in the upcoming paragraphs.

 

The Odyssey is about a Greek hero called Odysseus who must leave his homeland to go and fight in a war in a faraway land. After ten years of fighting the war is over and Odysseus can return home, but on the way, there he gets lost and it takes him another three years to find his homeland. On the way, there he has all sorts of adventures on which he has encounters with terrible monsters and powerful gods and goddesses. Anyone who has read the Odyssey would agree the events in the Odyssey are far from the truth. One can however debate about whether there had been a man like Odysseus and whether his stories had only been highly exaggerated. Whether there was an Odysseus or not is not important. What is important though is that these heroes from the past form formed an important pillar for a society’s culture on which to stand. Although Okunkwa’s fight at the start of the book does have some mythical elements to it Okunakwa’s story seems to become more realistic as the story goes on. Okunakwa loses his mythical status both to the reader and to his tribe. If we look at his description on the very first page: “It was said, that when he slept, his wives and his children in their out-houses could hear him breath.” The words “It was said” does give a legendary feel to the description of Okunakwa. We see something entirely different in Obieika’s description of Okunakwa at the end of the novel: “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia.” The fact that he refers to Okunakwa as “that man instead” of using his name may indicate to us that Okunakwa has become nothing more than an ordinary nameless man at the end of the novel where he had once been a legend. Okunakwa also like Odysseus was forced to leave his home village, but under much less heroic circumstances. He accidentally kills one of the boys in his tribe and is exiled from his tribe for a number of years as a punishment. Instead of going on an adventure he goes to his mother’s village where he waits impatiently until he can return to his village all the time planning on how he would reclaim his name upon his return. Here we already see this loss of the legendary image. Okunakwa is forced to leave his village for seven years. He cannot intact any heroic deeds within his village until he returns. This is a major setback for Okunakwa, but he does have hope of rebuilding and increasing his legendary status upon his return. So he could still theoretically have died as a great legend within his tribe.

 

In the Odyssey, Odysseus finds everything not to be in the way he left it upon his return. His house has been beset by a large band of suitors who want to marry his wife and steal his property. He then has a big fight in which he kills all the suitors with the aid of his son two servants who had remained faithful to him and the goddess Athena. Okunakwa faces a similar problem upon his return. A band of colonists had infiltrated his village. They had completely taken over his village. A lot of Okunakwa’s people had converted to their religion. Okunakwa tries to look for allies within his people, but he fails to find any. All his people are either too afraid to fight these people or they have converted to Christianity themselves. Even Okunakwa’s son Nwoye has converted to Christianity. In the Odyssey Odysseus’s son possesses all the good skills Odysseus does, but Okunakwa sees his son as being weak and feminine. In Odysseus Odysseus’s son is one of his greatest supporters, but in Things Fall Apart Nwoye leaves Okunakwa and joins what Okunakwa sees as the enemy. In the Odyssey, the gods particularly the goddess Athena continually intervene in Odysseus’s affairs to help him out of various situations, but Okunakwa’s gods and his ancestors seem to have deserted him. Not only this, but Okunakwa has lost his legendary status within his tribe. Okunakwa is left without a leg to stand on. Okunakwa’s attempt at riding the village of the invaders has failed and he realizes that these strange people had gotten such a strong grip on his people that he would not be able to loosen it. It is clear in the Odyssey that Odysseus would not have won the fight against the suitors if he did not have allies as well as divine help. Odysseus had to fight a total of 108 suitors. Okunko on the other hand has no allies and his ancestors and gods seem to have abandoned him and his people. He seems to realize that he is nothing without his people's support. He needs their help to drive the colonists out of his village. Because of this, he hangs himself.

 

The last paragraph is about the commissioner walking away from Okunakwa’s body thinking that he would put the story of Okunakwo in his book. At first, he considers making it a chapter, but then he decides to narrow it down to a paragraph. One might imagine that if Okunakwa’s village had never been colonised he might have become a great legend among his people. He might have become like an Odysseus to his people and they might have told stories about his deeds long after he was gone, but now instead of being a legendary figure in an oral tradition, he has been reduced to a small paragraph in a stranger’s book. The title of the book is incredibly ironic: “The pacification of the primitive tribes of the lower Niger.” The two words that immediately cache one’s attention. The first of which is “primitive”. It is incredibly revolting that Okunaka’s people should be viewed as being primitive, but this does show us what colonists generally think of the people whose land it is they colonize. The colonists not only colonized the land by putting their own people and culture on to it they also utterly destroyed its already local culture which they viewed as being primitive. We do of course know that Okunaka’s culture is every bit as rich as that of the colonists. The second word is “pacification”. Why would the British need to pacify the lower Niger? The lower Niger is thousands of miles away from Briton? Why should what goes on in the lower Niger be any of their concern? They clearly have ulterior motives. The Britons don’t want to bring the people piece. They merely want to extend their empire. The ironic thing is that they did not pacify the lower Niger at all. If anything, they had caused nothing, but violence, bloodshed, and the division of people.

 

When a man says yes, his chi says yes also? Does this proverb prove to be true? At the start of the novel Okonakwa most certainly thinks so. Okonakwa works incredibly hard to make a name for himself. His father has left him with nothing. He works his way from the ground up seemingly because he says yes. This seems to be the proverb that drives Okonakwa forward. At the end of the novel, he thinks that this proverb has proven to be a fall since he is saying yes yet everything around him still is falling to pieces. The proverb probably should be: When a man’s people say yes, his chi says yes also. Okonakwa has built his entire identity upon what is expected of him from his people. So much so that when they stop saying yes, he kills himself. Once he loses their respect he becomes useless in his own eyes and loses all hope. The Colonists have utterly destroyed Okunajwa’s own culture to the point that this phrase could be changed to: If the colonists say yes, we say yes. At the end of the novel Okunakwa seems to realize that he had actually lived by the second phrase and not the first and that his people all now live by the third.

 

Things Fall Apart is a rather interesting and intricate book with multiple interpretations. How this essay has looked at the book is far from the only way in which this book can be interpreted. This book works very well in coalition with other African and European literature. This essay has looked at what it has in common with the Odyssey, but there surely are several other books out there that could be used in just such a way as this essay did.

Reference list

Achebe, C 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Penguin

Rieu, V 1946. The Odyssey. London: Penguin

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