LITMIR.BIZ

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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).

      Figure 2: District Commissioners Douglas and Cornell peering from second-floor windows (courtesy of Herbert Cole).

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       Encounters with the Colonial Library

      In December 1943, after the memorable literary and aesthetic encounters of his childhood, a thirteen-year-old Achebe went to Government College, Umuahia, to further his education. This elite boys’ boarding school, a colonial version of the distinguished public schools of England—which were anything but “public” in the popular sense—was widely regarded as the “Eton of the East,” and, like its British counterparts, was thus expected to instill the mores and attitudes of intellectual and political leaders. There was a caveat, however. The school’s idealization of Englishness and the ensuing attempts to shield its students from indigenous religions, cultures, languages, and anticolonial nationalist influences—which were finding fervid expression at the time—implicitly reinforced the colonial status quo, while leaving students to grapple with the arduous task of integrating their indigenous sense of self with the English gentleman ideal promoted at Umuahia.

      This type of upper-class British education may seem less than conducive to the kind of mental emancipation we have come to associate with Achebe, but the Umuahia Government College of the time was nothing short of special. Achebe was clearly in the right place at the right time. And the time was never as right as during the principalship of William Simpson, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, which began in December 1944 and lasted through Achebe’s school years. Simpson, as Achebe himself would affirm in 1993, would eventually prepare “the ground for the beginnings of modern African literature.”¹ I have examined this chapter of Achebe’s life in detail elsewhere,² but for the purposes of this book it will be pertinent to recall a few relevant facts. First, despite overarching colonial policies, the vocational motivations, pedagogical backgrounds, and political inclinations of European teachers varied widely, and so did the texts they used, the approaches they favored, and the ideological and historiographical ideas they disseminated in the classroom. This had the result of engendering a literary ambience at Umuahia that was largely absent from other schools of the same status in British Africa: Government College had a very complete library, a rule that encouraged literary pursuits, a magazine culture in which Achebe participated as student writer and editor, and an inclusive historical education that included the study of precolonial African kingdoms and oral history research in neighboring villages. The study of logic focused, to a large extent, on questions relating to discursive manipulation. However, despite these potentially liberating educational factors, Achebe’s reading of imperial adventures, such as John Buchan’s Prester John (1910) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), remained uncritical during his Umuahia school days: “I did not see myself as an African to begin with. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The

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