Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch. 4 – ctd.)

Soon after Ikemefuna’s arrival, Okonkwo commits a great sin. His youngest wife goes to her friend to braid her hair and does not return in time to serve him his meal. When she returns, he beats her very badly. At other times this would be justified in his culture, but he does it during the Week of Peace, the time before planting, when it is a great offence to speak even a harsh word against one’s neighbour. He’s visited by the priest of the earth goddess Ezeani, who refuses to accept his cola nut and sternly tells him off, saying that he must not beat his wife at this time, even if he catches her in flagrante. His sin could bring a bad harvest to the whole community. Okonkwo has to pay a fine at the shrine of the goddess and is inwardly remorseful, but he is not the man to show it. As the Week of Peace is a time of rest, when people don’t work but visit their neighbours and drink palm wine, there is plenty of time for gossip. Some say Okonkwo got off too lightly and in the olden days he would have been dragged through the streets until he died. In some communities, says one young man, it is said to be a crime to die during the Week of Peace, so people who have the temerity to die then are left unburied in the Evil Forest. An older man confirms this, but says it’s a bad tradition because it causes the spirits of the unburied dead to take revenge on the living.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch. 4)

As a true self-made man, Okonkwo is rather harsh towards those less successful than him and when once at a meeting a lower-status man tries to contradict him, Okonkwo says coldly “this meeting is for men”. The eldest man present says sternly that those whose palm-nuts are cracked for them by benevolent spirits should not forget to be humble, and Okonkwo apologizes. But in truth, he has no benevolent spirits at his command, because he truly earned everything he’s got.

Okonkwo was the one who was sent to the other village with the message of war and brought Ikemefuna to his home. The boy was not meant to stay as long as three years, but it seems everybody forgot about him. At the beginning he is very afraid and he won’t eat, until Okonkwo comes to scare him with a big stick. He starts vomiting after that and is sick for three Igbo weeks (that is 12 days), but eventually gets over it. Okonkwo’s wife treats him as one of her own children and Okonkwo grows secretly quite fond of the boy, even if he doesn’t show it much. He also becomes very popular with his children, especially the eldest boy Nwoye, who is two years younger, and admires Ikemefuna for his ability to make flutes and fashion bird traps.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch. 3 – the end)

The men drink palm wine and shoot the breeze. One of them tells an anecdote about a neighbour who was once told by the oracle that his dead father wanted him to sacrifice a goat, and he replied: “Ask my dead father if he ever had a fowl when he was alive. Everyone laughs except Okonkwo, for whom this tale of an improvident father hits too close to home. When they reach the end of the bottle, they give the dregs to Igwelo, Nwakibie’s elder son, because he’s newly married and dregs of palm wine are believed to be good for potency. Then Okonkwo can get down to business: he asks Nwakibie to lend him some yam seeds (or tubers, to be precise). Nwakibie is unexpectedly generous and promises to lend Okonkwo eight hundred seeds, knowing that Okonkwo is a hard worker. Okonkwo goes home satisfied, for he had only counted on four hundred seeds, and he hopes to borrow another four hundred from a friend of his father’s from a neighbouring village.

But this does not mean success success. Under the traditional sharecropping system, Okonkwo is expected to give two-thirds of his harvest to the lender, as well as supporting his ailing father, mother and sisters. Although the women contribute by growing taro, cassava and beans, yam is the man’s crop. To make matters worse, the year Okonkwo borrowed the yam seeds was one of exceptionally bad weather. First comes a great drought, and all of Okonkwo’s newly planted yams die, even though he tried to protect them with sisal leaves. At least the yams he lost were his own seeds from last year’s harvest. The lazy farmers, who were late to plant, silently congratulated themselves, but then the disastrous rains came, washing away or rotting the yams planted later. The people are heartbroken, and one farmer hangs himself. When Okonkwo looks back on that terrible year, he is surprised that he survived. His father told him then: “Do not despair. I know you will not despair. You have a manly and proud heart. A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone. Okonkwo does not understand these words, and the narrator comments wryly: “[Unoka’s] love of talking had grown with age and sickness. It tried Okonkwo’s patience beyond words.” But I have a feeling that these words will later take on a new meaning.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch. 3)

Chapter 3 is another flashback to Okenkwe’s past. It begins with the story of Unoka going to the oracle to ask why he always has bad harvests. The oracle is in a cave on the side of a hill, and the passage is so small you have to crawl through it. Unoka goes there and tells the priestess that he does everything right: he makes sacrifices to all the gods, he sows the yams after the first rain and stakes them up when the first tendrils appear… The priestess interrupts him and tells him off, saying that his bad harvests are not the result of a curse from the gods or his ancestors, but of his own laziness, because he prefers to till the exhausted soil instead of clearing new fields in the jungle. Then we move on to Unoka’s death, which was frankly horrifying because he had “swelling in his stomach and limbs”, and the Igbo believed that this makes you unclean both in life and after death, so they just carried these people out of the village and left them to die in the forest, then let their corpses rot. One stubborn man apparently staggered back home and had to be carried back into the forest and tied to a tree. Unoka caused no such problems, only taking his flute with him, which is a very sad detail.

So Okonkwe is something of a self-made man, having inherited nothing from his father: not a barn, not a title, not even a young wife. He got his start in life by working for a very rich man, Nwakibie, who had nine wives and thirty children. We are given a detailed ethnographic description of Okonkwe’s visit to Nwakibie. He brings him a pot of palm wine and a cock. The other guests at Nwakibie’s “obi” (house) are two elderly neighbours and two of Nwakibie’s eldest sons. They go through a kola nut ceremony in which a kola nut is brought and ceremonially broken by Okonkwo. The youngest man in the group, who is Nwakibie’s younger son, pours the wine, and Okonkwo drinks the first cup to show that it’s not poisoned. Everyone then takes a drink, and then Nwakibie sends for his wives. They can’t start drinking until Anasi, Nwakibie’s first wife, arrives. She comes in, projecting the confidence of the first wife of a very powerful man. She gets down on one knee, takes the drinking horn from her husband and drinks the wine. Then she goes back to her hut, and after her all the other wives present do the same.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch.2 – the end)

Okonkwo ruled his family, three wives and eight children, with a heavy hand. At this point the narrative moves more into the realm of the psychological novel and explains his behaviour by his deep-seated desire not to be like his father. One of his shameful memories of childhood is when a boy calls his father “agbala”, which as the narrator explains, can mean both a woman and a man who has taken no title. So Okonkwo hates everything that his father loved, that is gentleness and idleness. He was a hard worker and can’t accept that his wives and children can’t keep up with him in the fields. He was scared that his eldest son, Nwoye, who was then twelve, was going to take after his grandfather, so he tried to root out any germs of laziness with nagging and beating, and Nwoye was growing up into “a sad-faced youth”. Okonkwo’s compound is well-organized and prosperous. On the day when he brought Ikemefuna home, he handed it over to his senior wife, told her to take her of him and not ask any quetions. Ikemefuna has no idea why he was taken away from his village and brought a long way, with a girl he was not going to ever see again, to Umuofia.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch.2)

One night, as Okonkwo goes to sleep, he hears a town crier calling for all men to gather in the square tomorrow morning. Okonkwo wonders what the reason could be, and he thinks it’s probably an imminent war. That’s fine with him, he’s not afraid of war – he’s already brought home five heads of his enemies, and on celebratory occasions he drinks palm wine from the very first head he won. The next morning, the square fills with men from all the nine villages of Umuofia (Okenkwe’s clan) and the local leader, Ogbuefi Ezeugo, announces that a woman from their village has been killed while going to market in Mbaino. Now they will send messengers to demand retribution or they will go to war. Umuofia is feared in war because of its warriors and medicine men. It is believed to have a powerful war medicine personified in the form of an old woman with one leg. But it also does not go to war when the oracle forbids it, because it would surely lose. So the messenger goes to Mbaino and returns after a few days with the repayment in the form of a young virgin and a boy. The girl is given as a wife to the man whose wife was killed. The elders can’t decide what to do with the boy, Ikemefuna, so they give him to Okonkwe to look after in the meantime. And the meantime grew into three years.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch.1 – the end)

The following vignette is as much a description of Unoka’s improvidence as of Igbo’s social customs. One day his neighbour Okoye comes to visit him with a goat skin under his arm. The goat skin he later unrolls and sits on. Unoka goes with him through the kola nut ceremony, during which he breaks the kola nut and offers his guest a piece of chalk with which he paints his big toe and draws his symbol on the ground. Their small talk is about weather and about the impending war with another village, but Unoka is a coward who does not like blood shed, and so he changes the subject to music, which he loves. Then Okoye finally reveals the purpose of his visit, although according to Igbo etiquette he must not do it in a straightforward manner. He says that as Unoka may have heard, he is going to take a title, then speaks for a while in proverbs, until he finally reaches the conclusion: he wants Unoka to pay him back two hundred cowries (shells used as currency) he borrowed two years ago. The title ceremony is expensive and Okoye needs all his money. Unoka bursts out laughing and tells Okoye to look at the chalk marks on the wall of his hut, which mark his debts. The smallest group of chalk marks represents a debt of one thousand cowries and Unoka explains that he has to pay his big debts first. So Okoye leaves him with nothing. As the narrator comments, it’s understandable that Okonkwo was ashamed of such a father who, on dying, left him nothing but debts. But Okonkwo is the polar opposite of his father – great warrior, athlete, wealthy man and husband of three wives, had two honorific titles. And this is how he became the guardian of a boy hostage whose name was Ikemefuna.

Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart”

The latest edition of the NAEL has replaced Achebe’s debut novel (and probably his most famous) Things Fall Apart with a short story of his, so I will do both. The novel is set among the Igbo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is subtly aimed at the Western reader, as its title and epigraph from Yeats’ “The Second Coming” suggest. The references to cultural customs are also much more detailed than they would be for readers who simply knew them from their own lives. The novel’s protagonist is Okonkwo, a local Igbo leader who first became famous when, at the age of eighteen, he defeated a previously unbeaten wrestler. That was twenty years ago, and now Okonkwo is a tough man with a spring in his step who has no patience for unsuccessful men, including his own father. His father, Unoka, who died ten years ago, was a reckless loser whose main hobbies were playing the flute and getting drunk on palm wine bought with borrowed money.

Harold Pinter – “The Dumb Waiter” (the end)

Gus leaves the lavatory very perturbed and asks Ben a question in a low voice, but since Ben does not appear to hear him, he walks around the bed to speak into Ben’s better ear: who is it upstairs? Ben does not want to discuss it and hits Gus, as the latter keeps on asking: why is he playing these games with us? why are we being tested? The box falls down again, this time carrying an order for scampi. Gus yells into the tube “we’ve got nothing left”, and Ben pushes him away, hitting him in the chest. Then he goes back to his paper and to his routine of reading out to Gus the most shocking bits, except that now he doesn’t even say what the shocking thing actually was, and Gus does not seem to notice, just says dully “incredible”. The box goes up again and Gus goes to the room on the left to have a glass of water. When he’s gone, Ben receives the order from a speaking tube – the man to be executed is about to arrive, they must follow the usual mode. Ben calls out to Gus, but all that comes from the lavatory is the sound of delayed flushing. Then the door on the right opens and Gus stumbles in unexpectedly, in his shirtsleeves and without his revolver. The play ends with them staring at each other.

Harold Pinter – “The Dumb Waiter” (ctd.)

Ben makes Gus go through the whole checklist of how they do their job, even though it’s always the same: when they get the call, Gus should stand behind the door, close the door behind the guy who’s come in, Ben pulls out his gun, the guy turns around and sees Gus behind him. Gus points out to Ben that he skipped the part where Gus is supposed to take out his gun, which he has never done before. Ben gets to the moment when the guy looks at them wordlessly and they look at him. What if it’s a girl? Gus asks. Same thing, says Ben. Gus shudders, gets up and goes to the toilet, where after a moment there is the sound of the toilet chain being pulled, but no flushing.