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  • Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today were going to talk

  • about Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart is set in what is now Nigeria

  • during the late 19th century, but it was written in 1958, as the colonial system was falling

  • apart in Africa. And one of the reasons Things Fall Apart is

  • so important is that prior to it, most novels about Africa and Africans in English had been

  • written by Europeans. Achebe turned the traditional European notion of Africans as savages on

  • its head, and confronted the great failure of people to, quote, “see other human beings

  • as human beings.” With characters that you can feel with and

  • think with and breathe with, layer after layer of the reality of the colonial situation in

  • Igboland is exposed, and we see the vicious, cyclical realities that are produced by both

  • individual and institutional power when it’s based in fear and hatred and ignorance.

  • [INTRO] So things fall apart in Things Fall Apart

  • not only because of the outside pressures of colonialism, but also because of the interior

  • pressures of the main character, Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a man knownthroughout the nine

  • villages and even beyondwhosefame rested on solid personal achievements.”

  • He is known for his strength and his wrestling ability.

  • Like during his prime, in one of the community festivals, before a crowd of 10,000 or more

  • people, Okonkwo out-wrestled a man known as the Cat in a match. The Cat!

  • And were told of this match, “ the old men agreed it was one of the fiercest since

  • the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.”

  • We learn all of this, by the way, in the opening paragraph of the novel, so we are immediately

  • drawn into this world of order and belief, of competition and struggle, and of stories

  • that are kept and passed down by elders. And we know from the beginning that Okonkwo

  • is a man held in high esteem not only for his wrestling ability, but also because he

  • had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of his

  • clan.” But despite his status and his achievements,

  • Okonkwo is haunted. Now it’s not quite the ghost of the Hamlet’s

  • father walking around at midnight brooding about vengeance, but Okonkwo sees his father

  • everywhere he goes. His father, Unoka, owed debts all over town and spent like all of

  • his time playing the flute and drinking palm wine.

  • Mr. Green, Mr. Green, that sounds pretty good actually!

  • I’m sure it sounds lovely, Me from the Past, although we both know you can’t drink a

  • bottle of Strawberry Hill without vomiting. But the important thing here is that in 19th

  • century Igboland, you couldn’t get ahead in life if you weren’t willing to work.

  • Which, come to think of it, is also true today, Me From the Past.

  • So Okonkwo grew up knowing that the whole village thought his dad was a loser, and the

  • pain of it stuck with him. Like, Achebe writes, “his whole life was dominated by fear, the

  • fear of failure and of weakness.” And this isn’t like my fear of spiders or

  • my fear of heights or my fear of air travel or my fear of peanut butter sticking to the

  • roof of my mouth. This is serious fear. For Okonkwo, “It was deeper and more intimate

  • than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and

  • of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.”

  • Which quote allows me to mention something really important about Things Fall Apart.

  • Thatred in tooth and clawline is borrowed from a Tennyson poem.

  • And throughout the novel, Things Fall Apart is conscious both of African storytelling

  • forms and of European ones. This exploration of connections and differences

  • between two narrative traditions is really interesting and it’s not something you find

  • as much in, like, you know, Jane Eyre or Hamlet. Anyway, Okonkwo is always running from this

  • deep down fear of weakness and failure, and it gives him the drive to go from being a

  • sharecropper to power and status and wealth. It also makes him into kind of a jerk.

  • Okonkwo developsone passionto hate everything that Unoka had loved. One of these

  • things was gentleness and another was idleness.” There’s a great moment in the novel where

  • Achebe says Okonkwo, “seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody.”

  • And then notes, “And he did pounce on people quite often.”

  • This pouncing, and more generally just his rage, eventually drive him to three transgressions

  • he can’t undo. His punishment is seven years of exile.

  • And then, of course, his dreams of greater power within his clan dissolve. So let’s

  • look at Okonkwo’s first two big mistakes in the Thought Bubble.

  • Okonkwo’s world, much like the ancient Greek world in Oedipus, is one where mistakes are

  • always punished. and he does get punished for his three mistakes.

  • The first is his ferocious beating of one of his wives during the Week of Peace, a week

  • when all violence is forbidden, to honor the Earth goddess and make sure this year’s

  • harvest will be bountiful. Okonkwo doesn’t just break the Week of Peace,

  • he shatters it. Not only does he beat his wife for going to get her hair plaited rather

  • than cooking, he tries to shoot her. Luckily for all involved, he is a terrible shot, and

  • he misses. Side note, Okonkwo has a real problem with

  • women throughout the book. He’s consistently brutal and violent, and the description that

  • herules his household with a heavy handis an understatement.

  • His brutality is closely connected to his fear of anything that he perceives as gentle

  • or weak and his ignorant belief that those traits should be associated with the feminine,

  • which the book itself later dispels by showing one of his other wives and her courage and

  • strength when it comes to protecting her daughter. Okonkwo’s second transgression is the killing

  • of a boy with his machete, and it’s not just any young man. It’s Ikemefuna, who

  • Okonkwo raised in his house for three years, a young man who called him Father.

  • Ikemefuna had been turned over to the clan as a sacrifice by another village in order

  • to avoid war and he’d been sent to live in Okonkwo’s compound, where he became a

  • member of the family, and a great friend to Okonkwo’s son.

  • And were told, “Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son’s development, and he

  • knew it was due to Ikemefuna.” Of course he never shows it, forOkonkwo never showed

  • any emotion openly, unless it was the emotion of anger.”

  • So eventually, the clan decided that Ikemefuna should be killed to satisfy the Earth Goddess.

  • And Okonkwo is advised not to participate, due to his close relationship with the boy,

  • but he ultimately does the killing himself, becauseHe was afraid of being thought

  • weak.” Thanks Thought Bubble. Oh man, this is a sad

  • book. But it’s sad on, like, eighty-two different levels; that’s what makes it so

  • good. So Okonkwo is finally exiled, not for beating

  • his wife, not for killing Ikemefuna, but for an accident. His gun explodes during a funeral,

  • and a man is killed. This is called a “female ocho,” or female murder, because it was

  • not on purpose. I’ll just briefly point to the irony of

  • his avoidance of all things feminine and also the association of a gun exploding with femininity.

  • Although it was an accident, Okonkwo had killed a clan member and had offended the earth goddess,

  • and so he goes into exile. He and his family flee the village and their home compound is

  • burned to the ground. Now Okonkwo’s best friend, Obierka, who

  • helps Okonkwo during his exile, wonders, “Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offense

  • he had committed inadvertently?” As is often the case in the village, the answer

  • comes in the form of a proverb. “As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it

  • soiled the others.” Okonkwo had done wrong, and he must be exiled, or else the whole community

  • might be punished for what just he had done. This attitude preys on the community’s fear

  • of being entirely destroyed along with their communal memory of elders and ancestors.

  • And that desire to keep the community intact at all costs is why the community ultimately

  • doesn’t follow Okonkwo at the end of the novel.

  • But then of course even though they don’t follow him, the community can’t stay intact.

  • Why? Well, because missionaries. And the British Empire. Which are really branches of the same

  • tree. When the first missionaries appear before

  • Okonkwo and his family, during their exile, only one young person was truly captivated,

  • Okonkwo’s first son, Nwoye. And Okonkwo can sense his son slipping away,

  • and filled with his tragic rage, he tries to control him by pinning him down at the

  • throat and threatening him. And as you may know if youve ever tried

  • threatening a teenager, threats only drive them further away, and after this incident,

  • Nwoye joins the missionaries for good. What can I say, Okonkwo, you shouldve read

  • more young adult novels. And Okonkwo’s takeaway from this experience

  • is not that he’s a jerk, but instead that his son is weak. He sits, staring into a fire,

  • and reflects upon his son’s departure and remembers that people called himthe Roaring

  • Flame.” And as he considers this, “Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter

  • clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.”

  • So Okonkwo decides that he was the roaring flame and that his son is the cold, impotent

  • ash. Ooooh man, Okonkwo’s eyes get opened a lot

  • in Things Fall Apart, but his eyes never actually get opened!

  • By the time Okonkwo returns from exile, a Christian missionary church has arrived in

  • his own village, and many people have converted to Christianity.

  • The first converts are those outcasts from society, theyre not even allowed to cut

  • their hair. And that reminds us that it’s not only the

  • Europeans who at times have failed to see human beings as human beings.

  • So those outcasts are the initial converts and it eventually leads to the arrival of

  • the British Empire and radical change in Igbo society.

  • And in that we see how the community’s obsession with strength and stability ultimately leads

  • to weakness and instability. Just as it does in Okonkwo’s life.

  • So the British Empire follows on the heels of the church and sets up courts and police

  • and prisons and trading posts. And then finally, Okonkwo’s world completely

  • crumbles. Well talk more about that next week but

  • for today, I want to end with another author who wrote about power in colonial Africa,

  • Frantz Fanon, who talked about means of resistance. In one of his most famous works about how

  • power operates, his final invocation, his gesture of resistance is, 'O my body, make

  • of me always a man who questions!' And maybe that’s where Okonkwo fell down.

  • He isn’t able to question a system that discards individuals for the perceived greater

  • good. And he isn’t able to question his own narrow definition of strength.

  • But let me submit to you that these problems are not exclusive to 19th century Igboland.

  • Like Okonkwo and his community, we both as individuals and as communities also struggle

  • to see other human beings as human beings and just as in Things Fall Apart, the consequences

  • are often disastrous. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.

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  • we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.

Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today were going to talk

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一本の指が油を持ってきた場合 - 物事はバラバラになるパートI:クラッシュコース文学208 (If One Finger Brought Oil - Things Fall Apart part I: Crash Course Literature 208)

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    Ellen に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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