Discovering the Heart of Darkness in Minnesota: Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In his well-known article “Novelist as Teacher,” Chinua Achebe writes, “I would be quite satisfied if my novels did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”   Although Achebe is referring to African readers, presumably teaching literature from another culture should also have positive effects, such as opening the minds of readers to new knowledge, exploring different ways of thinking, and increasing empathy for people of other backgrounds.  What happens, though, when some readers take quite the opposite meaning away from reading a book such as Things Fall Apart?   What if reading certain texts actually increases prejudice about the “Other”?

This question first occurred to me several years ago when I first taught a course in the African novel.  Most of the students in this particular class were white and Midwestern, with very little knowledge about Africa.   (I did have a few African-American students in this particular class, and their reactions were dramatically different from the white students’ reactions.)

Overall I believe this course was generally successful.  It introduced students to a body of literature—in fact, an entire part of the world—that was completely new to them.  In so doing, I believe it sparked interest in and empathy for struggles African nations are currently facing. I also believe (or at least I would like to believe) that it helped dispel some of the misconceptions about Africa.  However, while teaching the course, I also noticed some tensions that I have not noticed in courses about English or American literature.

I began the course by providing some historical background on the colonization of Africa.  We then read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness before proceeding to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.  My goal in pairing the texts was to highlight the differences in the way Achebe portrayed the Igbo culture; rather than menacing dark figures on the shore, they are complex human beings with their own traditions and social structures.  However, it was more difficult to get to this discussion than I had anticipated because students—particularly the white women, who were the majority of the course—were so focused on the sexism in the novel.   As one student wrote in the course’s e-mail discussion group,  “Even though I know this book takes place in a different time and place, I can’t help but to gasp with disgust when I read about the treatment of women.”  Certainly, they are not the first to comment on the portrayal of gender relations in the book; many readers do.  However, some of the students were so appalled by the sexism that had difficulty discussing anything else.

For the record, I, too, find the representation of gender relations in Things Fall Apart troubling.  But, obviously, it is just one part of one complex book and a complex culture.  My fear is that, for students who may only read the 8-10 or so texts assigned in the one World Literature course, that they may take away from the reading more prejudice than they came in with—that, for example, “Africans are savages” because of the way they treat women and children.  Certainly there are many pedagogical strategies for dealing with negative reactions.  In the case of Things Fall Apart, I tried to get students to realize that Okonkwo is not the moral norm of the novel—that he is portrayed as a deeply flawed character even by the standards of his own culture.  Other critics have suggested comparing Okonkwo’s depiction of Igbo culture to the realities suggested by historical and social scientific research, which asserts that women had significantly more power than Things Fall Apart suggests.  And since students were so obsessed with comparing Igbo culture with our own supposedly egalitarian society, I also tried to historicize the novel and compare it to the state of gender relations in England and the United States during the same period.  I’m not sure how well these strategies worked, though, in overcoming the initial revulsion some students had towards the novel; as we know, emotional reactions can be more powerful than rational discussions.

What I find most intriguing, though, is that these vociferous discussions arose from devoutly apolitical students who would not describe themselves as feminists.  When we (as instructors) try to discuss feminist issues in relationship to Anglo-American texts, usually they are not particularly interested.  They believe, for the most part, that gender equality has already been achieved; discussions about inequality have no relevance to their lives. Therefore, I was surprised at the vehemence of their reaction to Achebe.  These are students trained in “Minnesota Nice” culture; they are rarely vehement about anything.

The treatment of women in Things Fall Apart provoked the most tension in the course, but there were other trouble spots as well.  I asked students to read Achebe’s essay responding to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  I was (and still am) quite surprised to find that many students did not like the essay because they found Achebe’s “anger” threatening.

“If he considers part of his “duties” as a novelist to be to educate and inform his readers as he says he does, I think that he should rethink his methods.  In his essays, he is letting his emotions get the best of him.  I am not saying that Achebe should not be angry. Denial of emotion is wrong.  And he really does have something to be angry about.  But my problem comes with his sharing his anger with the entire literate world by having it printed in a journal.  I really feel that there are better ways of dealing with problems besides vocalizing your anger.”

While I am open to teaching tips dealing with the specific situations described above, I would like to focus more generally on the psychodynamics of the literary encounter between white Westerners and racial “Others.”  While the academy endlessly debates WHAT we should teach, I do not believe enough attention has been paid to what happens (psychologically, emotionally) when we teach it.  For example, in the MLA Approaches to Teaching Things Fall Apart nobody discussed possible negative emotional reactions or how to deal with them.  This lack of attention paid to the literary encounter is odd, since so much attention has been paid to the dynamics of the colonial encounter in other contexts.

Abdul JanMohamed, for example, writing of European colonization, asserts that “Motivated by his desire to conquer and dominate, the imperialist configures the colonial realm as a confrontation based on differences in race, language, social customs, cultural values, and modes of production” (18).  Certainly, reading a novel or poem is not the same as conquering and colonizing a culture.  But can we not see some of these same dynamics operating subconsciously in the literary encounter?  JanMohamed goes on to suggest that “such literature is essentially specular: instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him as a mirror that reflects the colonialist’s self-image” (18).  JanMohamed is referring here to colonialist literature. However, I think his insights can also be applied to the literary encounter between white Western reader and African text.

I’d like to suggest that the pedagogical tensions I mentioned earlier derive at least in part from specularity of the American-African literary encounter.    I think that—at least for some sheltered white students—Africa still serves as a heart of darkness.  Just as Conrad depicted the exploration of the Congo as a metaphor for journeying deeper into the human heart, my students experienced African literature as a mirror providing them with glimpses into their own culture’s heart of darkness.  The strong reaction against Achebe’s sexism, I believe, says more about the situation of the white Midwestern students than it does about the situation in Africa.  These are students who are raised to be nice, not to express anger, and to be believe that our society does not have problems of inequality.  My theory is that reading about problems faced by the Other struck a nerve that forced them to confront—albeit at a subconscious level—the inequality in our own culture.  Since they are not “allowed” to be angry, they are unsure what to do with this knowledge.  One outlet is to express disgust toward Things Fall Apart. That would account for the intensity of emotional reaction that seemed to me out of character and sometimes out of proportion.

As an example, let me quote an excerpt from another student’s electronic discussion posting.

“After all of the arguments about Achebe’s work last week I finally came to some of my own final conclusions. At first I was appalled at the way this society behaved and portrayed women in this novel. It disturbed me deeply and I had a very difficult time reading it. After a lot of thought and analysis, I realized that just because our society deems spousal and child abuse as wrong and cruel doesn’t mean that every other society should function in the same way. In going over the text to collect my thoughts I really tried to separate myself from my moral and value system to understand why these people did what they did within their clan. Even though I still don’t agree with the beating of the women, I can understand that this is just the way their people lived and functioned. This type of thing was a societal norm, and those norms are very difficult to change or see past.”

With all the attention paid in our media to the problems of battered women and abused children in our country, it is difficult for me to believe that this young woman actually thinks that she lives in a culture free from spousal and child abuse.  Perhaps she is just innocent.  What I think may be happening, though, is that reading Achebe forced her to confront her own culture’s conflicts-what it professes as opposed to what it actually practices.  This confrontation is deeply painful and can result in misdirected anger.

Another issue that the students found hard to confront was the overt and often violent racism Africans experienced at the hands of whites.  As one student wrote in her electronic journal: “I still find it hard to think that the people of Europe and America would think that a darker skin tone meant more than just a darker skin tone.  I find it hard to think that Europeans and Americans were that far behind in their logic.”  Were that far behind in their logic?  Again, I find it difficult to understand how Americans can NOT be aware of racism not only in Africa but in our own country, but it seems to be another blinder that reading African literature forces students to remove.

I am still working out my thoughts on this subject, but it seems to me at this point that in trying to teach students about African literature culture, I was simultaneously teaching students to confront their own culture.  This secondary course goal, however, was always beneath the surface of discussions, a quiet but powerful undercurrent that sometimes erupted violently.  On the one hand, this double current can work out productively.  In the best possible scenario, students can learn about both themselves and another culture.

The danger, though, is that if these complicated emotional reactions are not worked through productively, that the students may leave with their initial repugnance intact.  I’m not completely sure how to do this or even if it is within the power of an instructor to bring about this transformation.  Perhaps it is part of the maturation process or perhaps a degree in psychotherapy would be helpful.  I do think it would be productive for our profession if we could discuss the psychodynamics of the literary encounter with the Other in more depth.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Killing Them With “The Englishness”: “Nervous Conditions” by Tsitsi Dangarembga

We have a tendency in the West to think of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa as a “first world problem.”  Surely such disorders are confined to upper-middle class young white women from American suburbs, right?

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, a 1988 novel from Zimbabwe, suggests otherwise.  This perceptive novel, set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, dramatizes the coming-of-age stories of two main characters.  One of them is Tambu, a girl who is determined to get an education in order to pull herself and her family out of poverty.  The other girl is Tambu’s cousin Nyasha, who spent several childhood years in England, where her parents completed their graduate degrees.

At the beginning of their relationship, Tambu is in awe of Nyasha, who seems to have everything. She is pretty and smart.  Her parents, Babamukuru and Maiguru, are well-educated and relatively wealthy, at least compared to Tambu’s family.  Not only that, but their sojourn in England left them all with an aura of glamour and sophistication that Tambu finds intoxicating.  At the same time, Tambu also is somewhat disapproving of Nyasha because of her tendency to question everything, including the authority and benevolence of her father Babamukuru, whom everyone else adores.

Eventually, the two girls become close and the readers observe both of them as they grow up and learn more about the ways of the world.  Their relationship is complicated, though; Tambu and Nyasha do not always understand each other.  They do, though, learn about some harsh life lessons from each other’s experiences.  In particular, the girls struggle against two main forces:  the sexism of the men in their community, and the toxic effects of colonialism on their minds and bodies.

Tambu, for example, has to fight tooth and nail simply to get an elementary education because her family favors her brother and sends only him to school.  Nyasha, on the other hand, struggles against the sometimes violent authoritarianism of her father, who expects her to obey him unquestioningly.  She also resent his implication that she is on the road to becoming a “bad girl” in a sexual sense, even though she gives him no reason to doubt her.  Nyasha learns that simply having a female body is reason enough for men to think of her primarily as a sexual object.

Perhaps this is the reason—or, one of the reasons—Nyasha develops an eating disorder.  Dangarembga never explicitly states why Nyasha becomes anorexic, but she implies that it is the only way Nyasha knows how to rebel against her father and his expectations of what it means to be female. She does not want to be seen as primarily a sexualized body.  Nor does she want to become like her mother, who must be submissive to her husband’s will despite her own advanced education and professional job.  It is implied that by starving herself, Nyasha is attempting to remove all traces of her adult female body, and thus the fate of all the women she knows.

This explanation over-simplifies the themes of Nervous Conditions, however.  In addition to criticizing the effects of sexism in her community, Dangarembga is also illuminating the even more insidious effects of English colonialism on the minds of the Shona characters.  (In the late 1960s-early 1970s, Zimbabwe was still a British colony and was still called Rhodesia.)  The title Nervous Conditions was taken from Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a famous work detailing some of the pernicious psychological effects of colonialism on the colonized.

Sartre wrote that “The status of “native” is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.”  Sartre explains that colonized people carry huge rage against their oppressors.  However, they cannot express this rage against the colonizers unless they are willing to be killed or imprisoned for doing so.  Therefore, Sartre states that “if this suppressed fury fails to find at outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves.”

This is what happens in the novel Nervous Conditions. Nyasha is not the sort of person to accept the status quo unthinkingly and without question.  The more she reads about the world and observes the people around her, the more enraged she becomes at the way people exploit each other.  The English exploit the Shona people while rewarding a few “good natives” such as Babamukuru.  In turn, the Babamukurus become mini-colonizers themselves, lording over the rest of his community like a god.  The whole system drives Nyasha mad, quite literally. Eventually, she starves herself nearly to death and then explodes in a fit of rage.

“Why do they do it, Tambu,” she hissed bitterly, her face contorting with rage, “to me and to you and to him?”  Do you see what they’ve done?  They’ve taken us away.  Lucia.  Takesure.  All of us.  They’ve deprived you of you, him or him, ourselves of each other.  We’re groveling.  Lucia for a job, Jeremiah for money.  Daddy grovels to them.  We grovel to him.”  She began to rock, her body quivering tensely.  “I won’t grovel.  Oh no, I won’t.  I’m not a good girl.  I’m evil.  I’m not a good girl.”  I touched her to comfort her and that was the trigger.  “I won’t grovel, I won’t die,” she raged and crouched like a cat ready to spring.”  .. . . Nyasha was beside herself with fury.  She rampaged, shredding her history book between her teeth (‘Their history.  Fucking liars.  Their bloody lies.’), breaking mirrors her clay pots, anything she could lay her hands on and jabbing the fragments viciously into her flesh, stripping the bedclothes, tearing her clothes from the wardrobe and trampling them underfoot.  “They’ve trapped us.  They’ve trapped us.  But I won’t be trapped.  I’m not a good girl.  I won’t be trapped.”  (200-201)

Finally, Nyasha’s family realizes how troubled she is and they take her to a clinic to get some help.   Whether or not she will be able to survive, much less thrive, is unclear by the end of the novel.

For her part, Tambu was baffled by Nyasha’s illness. She did not understand why someone like Nyasha, who seemingly had it all, to “suffer so extremely.”  Perhaps Tambu did not understand, but her mother did, very clearly.

‘It’s the Englishness,’ she said.  ‘It’ll kill them all if they aren’t careful,” and she snorted.  ‘Look at them.  That boy Chido can hardly speak a word of his own mother’s tongue, and you’ll see, his children will be worse. . . You’ll see. . . . “About [Nyasha] we don’t even speak.  It’s speaking for itself.  Both of them, it’s the Englishness.  It’s a wonder it hasn’t affected the parents too.”  (203)

The “Englishness,” in other words, the colonializing process, is what drives Nyasha and other characters to the brink, especially when combined with the sexism of their own culture.   Tambu, her mother, and her aunt also experience their own “nervous conditions” of various sorts.    In the interests of space, however, I will not go into detail on their struggles.

Nervous Conditions  was Dangarembga’s debut novel, written when she was still a young woman.  It is a relatively short (200 page) novel, and one that is quite engaging.  More significant, however, this novel insightfully portrays the devastating effects of sexism and colonialism on the minds and bodies of African women.  I highly recommend it.